Couldn’t Be Me: So you’ve accidentally streamed yourself having sex

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

Sooner or later, we’ll all do something stupid and regrettable on social media. It’s the nature of the platforms. They demand you express yourself, all the time, whether through tweets or five-second photos and videos, and when combined with conditions like drunkenness or emotional fragility, odds are eventually you will post something embarrassing.

These stupid things will vary, of course. Some can be as minor as a bad tweet you have to apologize for. In more serious situations, ones athletes seem to find themselves in with surprising frequency, you might accidentally send out a nude, or stream yourself having sex.

In this week’s Couldn’t Be Me, we look at how to recover from the worst of these moments.

Clinton:

I’m a soccer player who is in trouble because of a sex scandal. The story I’m sticking with is after signing a contract with my new team, I was so excited for the move, which is the reward for all of my hard work and sacrifice, that in trying to read the news of the event on social media in my hotel room, I pressed the wrong button on the phone and accidentally broadcasted me having sex with a woman in that moment.

CBM:

This must be the most common form of social media fuck-up for athletes. Or rather, the one people tend to care about the most. There’s nothing more sensational, now and historically, than celebrity sex scandals. I’m guessing here that the story you’re sticking with isn’t the truth, and in reality you were trying to record the encounter or show it to a specific group of people, and completely messed that up.

Fortunately for you, we live in an age over-saturated with pictures, images, and information. Your scandal won’t register for more than a day or two before people have moved on. It wasn’t long ago Draymond Green accidentally uploaded pictures of his penis on Snapchat, and within the week it was forgotten. And it’s happened for many other athletes. Even as I type this, people have probably forgotten what you did. The nature of our world now is everything is exposable, since privacy barely exists within the world of social media. But because people are seeing so much of everything all the time, information is much more ephemeral than it has ever been.

In general, however, it’s best to stay away from your phone while you’re doing things like that. Not just because you might accidentally stream your sexual liaisons, but also it’s probably illegal if you’re recording or streaming without the woman’s permission.

Debbie:

My oldest sister’s husband is an enormous prick — no one in the family, minus my sister, likes him. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding and upset she didn’t see what we all saw, that she could do so much better than this guy. So a few weeks before the wedding, I tweeted out, “Does anybody want to fuck my sister so I don’t have to go to this wedding?” Which probably would’ve been fine if my other sister didn’t follow me at the time. She saw it and completely chewed me out for it. I stopped tweeting about my family after that, until I blocked all of my siblings.

CBM:

It’s my belief you should avoid all family members and close friends on Twitter, and I would have suggested Instagram as well if Instagram hadn’t recently implemented the option to share certain things with only people in the “close friends” group. Twitter and IG are both theater — as is life, since we all change our behavior depending on our surrounding conditions, but social networks are theater within theater — but no matter the level of careful curation, there’s so much space for disaster, especially in moments of emotional turmoil. I know most people have private accounts for those types of really personal posts, but widely broadcasting something you don’t want to be public is just one mis-click away.

“Does anybody want to fuck my sister so I don’t have to go to this wedding?” is a thought for a diary, or for followers who have no immediate effect on your life, so they can laugh at it as you do. It’s cathartic, a ways to vent your frustration into the abyss. But when family members follow you, it takes away the only true magic effect of social media, and being anonymous on the internet, which is the ability to create a self.

Who you want to be on the internet is not usually the person folks who are involved in your actual life know about, since they encounter you in a specific and personal way. A frustrated joke that should have only lived for a few seconds can then have real life consequences because of the disconnect between your dream-life online and the one you’ve built up over your lifetime.

Real life is much messier, and much more tangible. Online life can be messy, but there’s a distance in being online that is central to the experience. You know people without really knowing them. Online, you say things you ordinarily wouldn’t, because as real as your audience is, the distance gives them a feeling of non-existence. After all, they disappear once you log off or close the app.

There’s a world online, and you enter it when you want, behave as the character you’ve built yourself up to be, and express thoughts and yourself in ways the real you wouldn’t, even if those thoughts come from valid feelings. I’ve seen many relationships end from this problem.

I strongly feel people should make sure to create that boundary between their online and real life worlds. My brother follows me on Twitter, and I often wonder how he feels about things I tweet, and whether he gets annoyed by some of the personal things I post about. And I sometimes feel he’s being false in some of his tweets, or revealing too much, but that’s the problem that comes from knowing someone so well.

Connecting with family and friends online doesn’t have to lead to disaster, but as with your thoughts about your sister and her husband, there remains the possibility you could slip and say what would ordinarily be a harmless and funny thing online. Better to block them all in advance.