Me and Garry Trudeau

and probably the rest of the world.

Ads for meds for "erectile dysfunction" are inescapable ("Mama, what's ED?" "Well, dear..."). But the ones that have puzzled the Spouse and me for several years now are the ones for Cialis, in which at some point the about-to-be-happy couple are shown sitting out in a meadow somewhere soaking in separate claw-foot bathtubs, maybe holding hands, as they watch the sunset or the birds chirp or some damned thing.

The commercials always beg some questions, like 1) how did the bathtubs get in the middle of a meadow? 2) are the plumbed, or do invisible servants come and fill them with hot water or ass's milk or whatever? 3) don't they get chilly, out there in the evening breeze? But the big question is, of course, Separate Bathtubs? If it were one big clawfoot tub it would make more sense (but might move perilously close to depicting sexual behavior). But I know nothing makes me feel more intimate than lying in a big cast-iron tub next to another cast-iron tub with the object of my affection encased therein. In rapidly cooling ass's milk.

And in today's Doonesbury Garry Trudeau demonstrates that I'm not the only one puzzled by this imagery.

Oh, Walter Kirn, I hope you're kidding...

In the New York Times Magazine today, Walter Kirn has a piece on the extent to which we have as a culture given away our privacy to the internet--aiming straight for the Tyler Clementi story. "As the Internet proves every day, it isn’t some stern and monolithic Big Brother that we have to reckon with as we go about our daily lives, it’s a vast cohort of prankish Little Brothers equipped with devices that Orwell, writing 60 years ago, never dreamed of and who are loyal to no organized authority. "

Okay, I see his point. But he lost me by the end of the article. Perhaps there's no solution to the problem of Little Brother--or perhaps it's a long-range one of teaching the upcoming generation of net-citizens the virtue of privacy for themselves as well as others. But this is where he lost me:

In the new, chaotic regime of networked lenses and microphones that point every which way and rest in every hand, permitting us to train them on ourselves as easily as we aim them at one another, the private and public realms are so confused that it’s best to treat them as identical. With nowhere to hide, you might as well perform, dispensing with old-fashioned notions of discretion and personal dignity. If Tyler Clementi had remembered to do this — to yield his personal life to the machine and acknowledge, with Shakespeare, that the world’s a soundstage — he might have shrugged off the embarrassment he suffered and made a reality show of his existence. He might have asked Little Brother into his room instead of choosing, fatally, to keep him out in the only manner he must have thought possible.

What? The solution is to assume that everything, every sexual encounter, every unconscious moment of freedom, will be seen by millions? The solution is to live every moment of every day as a performance? Jesus, that's the scariest piece of science-fictional worldbuilding I've ever heard of.