A Peephole Made of Pages

In the course of reading "The Right to Oblivion" which I referred to in my previous blog post, I came across a reference to a non-fiction book that sounded almost too outlandish to be real. "The Right to Oblivion" dedicates a major part of it's second chapter to dealing with the moral and ethical issues that the actions in this book raise.

The book is called "The Voyeur's Motel" and it's by a fairly famous journalist named Gay Talese. A short synopsis of the book is that a man decides with his wife to by a motel in the 1960's in Colorado for the express purpose of peering into the rooms of his guests without their knowledge or consent. He ran the motel for decades and not once was he caught. The only person who knew about his voyeurism were his wife until about 15 years later he feels the need to admit, if not confess to, what he is doing to the author of this book.

The books tells the whole story of how the proprietor of the motel, a man named Gerald Foos, came into contact with Talese and how he gave him a tour of the "viewing platform" above a selection of rooms in the motel. It then goes into Foos' childhood, how he became obsessed with voyeurism, and how he allowed it to define his life. After some sordid tales of what different guests had done in their rooms, most of them highly sexual, the books talks about Foos' later life and his retirement along with some half-hearted musing on Foos' part on how government surveillance programs are way worse than anything he ever did.

It's a short book and what I described in the previous couple of paragraph probably gives you a pretty good idea of why I decided to read this book, being a book on one of the most extreme cases of violation of privacy by a single individual ever reported. I won't go into some of the deeper considerations the author goes into, such as how much Foos is admitting to actually happened and how much is it just elaborate exaggeration or fantasy, but the reason I'm writing this post is because I feel I committed a morally questionable act in seeking out and reading this book. If you made it this far and haven't already ordered the book, I'll lay out my reasoning here for why even reading this book is morally wrong.

This book is about extreme transgressive acts. Before reading this book, I had heard it won a de Sade award, which is given out to books that break boundaries in exceptional ways. A book winning this kind of honor instantly drives me to want to track down and read it, naturally. What makes this book different from other transgressive and shocking works is that it reports itself as being non-fiction, outlining in disturbing detail the nature and extent of the crimes the the protagonist committed.

As I read the first few chapters, I quickly began to notice the bizarrely intimate relationship the author has with Foos, how Foos opens up to him immediately after meeting him and how Foos gave the author a tour of his peepholes he personally built into various rooms. To give you a quick timeline, the motel began operation under Foos in the mid 1960s and Foos invited the author to the motel in 1980. Despite personally seeing the peepholes and the gross violation of every guest's privacy, Gay Talese told no one of what Foos was up to for almost 40 years, instead receiving regular letters from Foos where you spelt out his "Voyeur's Journal". He only reveals what Foos had done when he wrote this book, which was published in 2017.

In my mind, this makes the author Gay Talese a willing, if not eager, accomplice to Foos crimes. Talese writes in the book that he would absent-mindedly read Foos letters over the course of the years, sometimes forgetting to even check his mail for them, which to me seems like a face-saving explanation as to why he did nothing for so long. Let's face it, Talese has become a voyeur-by-proxy at this point, being able to enjoy and partake in the voyeurism Foos engaged in without having to worry all that much about what he was doing. After all, he's just reading letters right?

Taking this same reasoning further, you can see that this same charge can be levied at anyone who decides to pick up and read this book. After all, isn't anyone who skims these pages allowing themselves to become a voyeur, two people removed from the act itself? Having read this book, I can admit to being drawn toward and fascinated by the lurid and highly graphic depictions of sexual activity within its pages, despite knowing how deeply wrong it be doing so. I for one wouldn't want my private life described like that, even behind the cloak of anonymity, to strangers halfway across the globe. A sick chain of events, driven by a disastrously myopic view of personal responsibility and agency, led to the creation of this book. It is the poisonous fruit of a poisonous tree, and I feel if anyone who reads this work without seriously considering their own role in this sorry state of affairs, risks allowing themselves to become a weaker, listless person. I do not mean this with any sense of hyperbole either.

Large swathes of this book are dedicated to looking into Foos' mindset and motivations and the tone of how he describes the people and acts he see. Early one, Foos takes on the persona of "the Voyeur" and talks about himself in his writings in the third person. He begins calling his pathetic voyeurism "scientific inquiry" and in his warped thinking imagines the notes he is taking as being valuable insights into human psychology, a gift to humanity. Foos claims his peeping has caused no harm, as no one he looked at ever found out their privacy had been violated and shared what he saw with the particulars anonymized.

I couldn't help but find the wording and tone of Foos' mental gymnastics grimly familiar. As I mentioned on Mastodon, this reminded me a lot of how different groups of people try to use "reason" or "objectivity" to disguise their motivations for doing whatever they want.

The epiphany that I had after reading this book was the concept of being an "observer" is purely a mental fiction. I think everyone at some time or another has an experience that allows them to run along the edges of this idea on some level. It's the paralysis that creeps in when you feel you ought to do something. There's a vanishingly small window of opportunity to speak up, or to cry out, or to do anything in reaction to another act, and it's easier to just give into the warm embrace of helplessness that being an observer allows. Deciding to be an observer is simply a moral call where you outright refuse to engage with what you see and hear because you don't want to handle the hassle. It's the stone-cold heart of apathy that allows terrible things to happen in the world.

You can't just "read" this book and put it neatly away afterward. You can't abstract yourself out of your own life and pretend that some experiences in your life can be glided through with a glassy indifference. The pitiful excuses Foos made for being just an observer shook me awake and had me reflect on what kinds of tacit beliefs I'm holding onto that made me feel it was alright to read a book like this.

If you read this book, you're re-enforcing and breathing life into these miserable acts. I am sure some people would read this kind of warning and feel like it's a challenge to go about and read this book, hell I would if someone else was writing a review like this. I just needed to get this out in writing. It's rare that I read a book, or anything for that matter, where it feels like the very act of reading it was wrong of me to do.