The Voyeur's Motel
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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He maintained that most men are natural voyeurs. “But most women prefer being watched to watching others,” he said, “which may partly explain why men spend fortunes on porn and women on cosmetics.”
The article is really a brilliant example of how we should not view the organizations/institutions we interact with as impersonal abstractions, but should always consider the human beings - and human flaws/motives - behind them.
It is pretty crazy - only two people returned that 'suitcase full of money'.
There is an argument that laboratory psychology testing is prone to bias. Any study which relies on self-reporting is liable to people under or overestimating. Any study which requires consent inevitably attracts people who would be interested in being experimented on. Morality aside, performing experiments and studies on people who have absolutely no idea what's going on is the ultimate way to remove bias.
The sort of 'results' that come out of Foos' 'study' are fascinating because they simply cannot be obtained by any legal means. People behave differently when they know they're being observed. However fascination doesn't necessarily imply scientific utility...
The sex is actually the least fascinating thing about the journals - even Foos was continually disappointed by how dull his subjects were sexually. What's interesting are his observations on the minutiae in people's lives, the mundane things people do when they know they're not being watched (even something as 'weird' as sitting on a toilet backwards).
How violated would I feel if I found out that a creep motel owner was watching? How would I feel about that compared to the government surveillance that is happening.
I can confidently say that I am far more worried about big brother than the motel clerk. Although neither are welcome.
I suspect there are many gems in his journals that mirror societal norms and deviations of the time. The inter-racial sex trends. The 70 orgys. I never knew you could sit on a toilet sideways or backwards. Why would you do this? Maybe I'll convert, who knows!
The fact that he explained it all away in his mind is especially curious. It is easy to judge but are we as a society of major consumers of pornography and reality tv really that far away from this guy? There are some obvious legal distinctions in his actions but the compulsion seems alive and well in most people.
The whole story just brought up so many questions and curiosities.
EDIT: Spelling
Moreover, if an equivalent sort of thing happened via computer - say, a voyeur silently using a million webcams for a similar purpose, it seems like it would lose the particularity of such a "glimpse" and it's nature as a crime would especially visible.
Journalism is one thing. This is enabling a predator, just as much as Foos' two wives.
Meanwhile, the local police have no record of the murder, unsolved or otherwise.
It's possible those discrepancies could be explained, but the author left them in there to likely indicate he believes the voyeur's account is a mix of fantasy and reality. Which gives it dubious value as a research document, ignoring the ethics of how it was collected. Which in turn makes it difficult to rationalize the way in which the data was collected, if the data is of no value.
If I took one thing from this article, it's that you never know what other people do or don't do. It's the thing you know, but it's jarring when you are reminded of it.
When the "victims" have to be informed, decades later, that they even are victims, it makes you wonder.
Crimes against an infant, a comatose patient, etc. don't cease to be crimes.
If it were encryption keys he was snooping on and not sex, would your response be different?
[0]edit - I used the wrong pronoun (you) here in my initial post.
> My voyeurism has contributed immensely to my becoming a futilitarian, and I hate this conditioning of my soul. . . . What is so distasteful is that the majority of subjects are in concert with these individuals in both design and plan. Many different approaches to life would be immediately implemented, if our society would have the opportunity to be Voyeur for a Day.
Also this:
> These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.
> Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.
The second of your quotes I found to be just a secularized and romanticized restating of basic Christian doctrine (or just the 'Golden Rule'), which makes me further disturbed that someone would have to wade through years of voyeurism to reach that conclusion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
(Antiquity section)
Interest is nothing more than a human behavioral response to a stimulus, it typically has little to do with what people think is "moral" (which itself is usually vague and hard to define). Just think of how many people find watching documentaries about serial killers, crimes, or atrocities like the holocaust or the jonestown massacre, entertaining. Not to mention your typical news channels in the US, which tend to disproportionately showcase negative events as opposed to positive/neutral ones. Does having an interest in that kind of media somehow imply a moral approval of it?
If the documentation is there, people are going to read it, and the more out of the ordinary it is, the more likely it will be that people find it interesting. Uniformly condemning people for having interest in deviant topics is a slippery slope to justifying censorship or thought policing. Accepting that it's natural does have the consequence of possibly giving some people the idea that it's "OK" to do questionable things on the basis that it will grant them some kind of fame/notoriety, but that would arguably only happen with a small minority of people (since the barrier to entry to conduct these sort of depraved acts isn't exactly low), and thus would probably have a smaller negative impact on society than just flat-out condemning everybody for having questionable interests.
That is also why I asked what was meant... I didn't want to jump to conclusions in case it was just a miscommunication due to wording.
But more often Foos found observing his guests depressing. They argued.
They watched too much television. (This was especially irksome when the
guests were attractive and could have spent their time having sex instead.)The Hollywood version of this is "Sliver", from 1993, starring Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger.[1] This Gay Talese story is sort of a low-rent version of that movie. It's so close that I suspect it was written after seeing the movie.
Also, I wonder if Foos' choice of name for his second notebook was a reference, at least in part, to the John Fowles novel? [1]
I think it quite likely he was aware of the novel, given that he was a reader and given John Fowles' high level of fame in that time period.
https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g29144-d119972-R...
The author of the piece, Gay Talese, is well known for the very famous article Frank Sinatra Has a Cold:
However, there is something slightly off about the story, most fully exhibited by the lack of verification of the murder that Foss claimed to at least partially witness.
Also, there are some convenient events that sustain the narrative, such as the fact that he was able to follow one of the guests home and see her crying through the window.
One wonders if what Foss was telling him, however train-wreck compelling, was only about half true.
No doubt that's why Talese included all of those inconsistencies in his story.
Do children today still feel "invisible, beneath the radar" given today's general lack of "so much unsupervised freedom?" Or was Foos invisibility/curiosity dynamic just a product of his disorder?
In college, I was career given advice along the lines of, "you're a student, you're still under the radar and get access to so many things normally off limits to the public. use this. go to different types of companies, ask for special tours, ask questions you don't think they'll answer--learn how things really work. you're not competition to them, yet." Though now days, I'm pretty sure students are on the radar, and would just be routed to the official corporate intern/co-op/recruiter/etc program.
If you're wavering between reading it or not, read it.
I immediately bought one of Talese's books after reading this article. He's a fantastic writer.
no one wants their name uttered for a last time.
to me it sounds like their ways of ensuring remembrance.
the end goal being to become some kind of communal deity, foras an ancestral deity is much more at risk of being forgotten.
If it's true, it's an interesting peek into his mind, and confirmation of some public vs private social mores, but all the pontification on society and morality and futility is just so much old man yelling at clouds.
I do find your comment quite judgemental and vengeful. I'm not condoning his actions, but simply saying that I think we benefit as a society more from learning from this man, including learning from his behaviour rather than spending our energy and resources hating on and wanting to punish someone for essentially an act (excluding the death) of which had no effect on the people being watched.
To punish him in my mind is to say that we should keep these things in the closet (or attic in this case), and the lesson from that is only to hide what really goes on in the world instead of sharing what really goes on. I'd rather know about this and encourage others to share their stories.
In fact it kind of reminds me of articles from dating companies where they release the 'best openers' and other interesting data about their users.
I can't pretend to speak on others' behalf.
Or using your email example, what if somebody used that information against you in your next interview?
I'm sorry, but privacy is a black and white issue. We can either have a surveillance state or not have one at all. Compromising on any surveillance, carried out by humans, is frankly dangerous and naive.
none of the information he released was used directly against people.
at times he seems to have crossed the line of not acting on his knowledge, eg to flush drugs down the toilet.
Now, whether or not you choose to cede that right is entirely your prerogative (as in the case of Gmail, where the TOS specifically outlines how your data might be used). However, there should be no doubt that privacy is a fundamental human right, much like property.
Very interested to see if there is any fallout from this. As interesting as this story is, the author facilitated a crime for decades. I can't see any other way of looking at it.
As well as committing at least one himself.
> Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view.
Given that my comments are 'idiotic at best', I think you've proven the point that you are quick to judge.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434103 and marked it off-topic.
Had to go into reader mode to pull Firefox down from 50% CPU.
Safari on iPhone is one of the few implementations that actually works well, playing round with it a bit now it looks like it has quite a few heuristics to determine when to expand again. I guess most people don't care enough to actually spend the time adding more than just "show on drag down".