He also made note of guests whose behavior he found weird or upsetting: the guy who secretly urinated in his date’s bourbon; the obese fellow who checked in with a much younger man and then dressed him up in a furry costume with horns, saying, “You are heavenly; I have never seen a more beautiful sheep-boy."
He had come to believe that the arrival of the birth-control pill, in the early sixties, which he’d originally celebrated, encouraged many men to expect sex on demand: “Women had won the legal right to choose but had lost the right to choose the right moment.” He felt that the war between the sexes had escalated and that sexual relations were getting worse, not better.
*
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 most concerning thing about this article is the implications if someone like Foos has access to the levers of modern technology. Imagine if, instead of owning a motel, he worked on Dropcam at Nest (I certainly hope they have the ability to monitor and audit their own personnel, for their own sake).
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.
All morality aside, this is a pretty fascinating glimpse into american/human personal culture. Adding morality back in and it is hard not to consider this a serious breach of trust and worthy of countless criminal charges.
The story has a dual nature - "fascinating glimpse" and "distasteful action".
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.
The story and the journal. I actually just got back from an overnight getaway with my wife last night where we stayed in a small privately owned motel. I couldn't help but find myself wondering who could have been watching. This sort of thing would be much easier to pull off with todays technology and I'm sure that it does happen more.
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.
There is a certain morbid curiosity about it, for the same reason that people watch Big Brother obsessively. Worth watching "The Lives of Others" if you haven't already, though that deals with other problems.
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).
This is a pretty disturbing article, and I feel like Talese should have reported Foos to the local authorities. Foos is clearly a serial sexual offender, and should have been reported or at the very least put into treatment. Talese admits that Foos is an unreliable narrator and is pretty clearly a voyeur for sexual purposes, mentally shielding himself by saying, "oh, I'm just a researcher."
Journalism is one thing. This is enabling a predator, just as much as Foos' two wives.
Did you read the entire article? It's certainly illegal and distasteful, but the writings contain a lot of poignant commentary on modern life in general, not just sex; about war, eating habits, racial issues, and so on. I found this particularly interesting:
> 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.
I did read the entire article. I was very disturbed. The first of your quotes is actually part of what clearly disturbed me and made me think even more that Foos is clearly a sexual offender.
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.
I think this sums up pretty well how important sex was for Mr. Foos:
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.)
I just want to make sure I understand your comment... are you saying that illegal and distasteful acts are OK as long as they have interesting / poignant documentation?
How or why does something being "interesting" automatically imply that it's "OK"?
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.
The fact that it was interesting is not the part of the comment that implied it was OK. It was the question asked of "Did your read the entire article?", which normally implies disagreement, and the word "but", which sounds to me like a justification.
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.
Arguably, anyone living in the tax systems of those exposed in the Panama Papers are victims of the accused' possibly illegal, likely unethical tax avoidance.
Yes, it's still morally wrong, but only on the level of a white-hat hacker who hacks into a system, snoops around a bit, but doesn't alter anything. I'm sure a lot of us here have done that...
There's an item about it in the Denver Post: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_29727885/aurora-motel-owne...
If the story checks out, I expect (or hope) the fallout will be a lot bigger in the coming weeks - that is assuming ISIS doesn't blow up the White house or Donald Trump commit suicide or something
I actually suspected that this was fiction when I read the part about Mr. Talese's tie accidentally hanging down through the vent above the couple having sex. How could that possibly happen without him or the couple noticing it?
Were you in the vent above him watching the whole time? Maybe he writes fictional pieces and then quietly flushes them down the toilet. Maybe there's a whole stack of fictional stories sitting on his desk waiting to be printed based on the popularity of this story.
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.
Sure, but we have this nifty thing called Occam's Razor to immediately prune far fetched explanations, like someone secretly being a space lizard from Nibiru.
I would expect the purchase and sale of the hotel is a matter of public record, so it should be straightforward to check if the guy really ran the place.
In the article, it mentions the sale of the hotel was recorded in '69, while the journal starts in '66.
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.
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.
I must confess this was a fascinating article. Voyeurism is one of those weird things that I think most people deride, but wouldn't hesitate to participate should the opportunity arise.
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.
IP cameras are generally publicly accessible from the internet by a massive amount of users due to them simply not knowing their camera system broadcasts in such a way. Most cameras will show up with a google search for the camera model's webpage viewer.
I am very curious about everything and everyone I see . . . and so I have felt invisible also, as a child feels himself invisible, beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously independent.
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.
The author takes a long time but eventually compares this guy to the unibomber. Why? Who the heck knows. I really don't think that's a justified comparison.
I think there's a common motive here (motive for publication). People who are disgusted by modern society, believe they have some kind of privileged moral viewpoint (see wrongs that others don't), and want to share it with the world but need to remain anonymous because of connected criminal acts.
So many of the quotes feel like pure projection. The guy makes up little fantasies about everyone he spied on, even assuming his tales are true, he certainly doesn't interview them afterward to see if he guessed right or was way off. For every fact there's a lot more deep ruminating that would be more at home in LiveJournal than a sociology study, but it was his journal, so I can't really fault him for that.
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.
This is so monstrously evil I'm speechless, even discounting the alleged murder that may or may not have taken place. I can't believe the author knowingly took part in this and even enabled it. All men are voyeurs just like all men are born murderers - who hasn't at some point felt like taking a life in anger even if only for a brief moment. Most men just don't do it. There is no justification, scientific or otherwise for this (and those claims are extremely dubious anyway). I really hope, if this is true, there is some legal way for Foos to suffer some serious consequences, however short the rest of his life is.
I find it interesting to see how people react to this article. I try my best to see what can be learnt from this - he is offering insights into a private world that we don't 'get to see', and yes the alleged murder is a caveat to the whole thing - which should be treated (and is) treated differently to the rest of the story.
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.
To be perfectly honest with you, as someone who worked in IT and knew how easy it was to snoop on emails if I wanted, I have decided that I am okay with a few strangers reading my emails. I decided that the alternative--being upset about something I cannot change and which impacts me little--is worse.
Are you okay with someone reading your biometrics? How about using that data to determine if you're eligible for medical coverage or not?
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.
I'm sorry, but privacy is not a black and white issue. It's never that simple, and it's a disservice to try and simplify it until you can understand it in black and white terms. There's public information, and there's private information, but there's a whole spectrum of information (semi-public, semi-private) inbetween. I consider emails to be akin to leaving papers on my desk at work. J. Q. Public can't read them, but I know that janitors come through my office every night.
To be clear, I'm fine with data mining my emails to find certain features for analytics or data science purposes. But my point is that you, as an individual, should be the gatekeeper to all of your information, private or public.
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.
If his intentions were solely for his own personal satisfaction, it affected no-one, and he anonymised all information then no, I have no problem with that.
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.
This is a private, sex-oriented implementation of the surveillance state and commercial analytics. If analytics can tell if your daughter is pregnant before you know it, it can tell how much and what kind of sex you are getting. There's probably some John Yoo of voyeurism writing a memo about how knowing all about your sex life is perfectly legal if terrorists.
I was momentarily confused how this article was dated in the future - I guess it takes the date of the print edition?
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.
I find your comment to be idiotic at best. Sorry to go off like that, but by your logic people who condemned Dr Mengele are being judgemental (sure I know the crimes are not nearly at the same scale). The fact that you find this interesting or fascinating (and it is a moot point whether the observations are really contributing anything at all to human knowledge) is completely besides the point. I don't understand how some HN readers wouldn't think 2wice about condemning what the NSA does (which has some justification and would be really fascinating if we could all see it) and think of giving this a pass (presumably since it did not involve your own privacy).
Violating the site guidelines (by calling names) then heading straight for Mengele is definitely not what makes for a good comment here. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Hanging a lampshade on your comparison to Nazi experimentation by Dr. Mengele does not make up for the fact that the comparison is not apt at all. Let's keep our fingers off the launch buttons, please?
tl;dr: it's an article about a couple who bought a motel to spy on their guests, and did pseudo-documentation about their guests habits. There are no photos or anything inappropriate. Says a lot about sexual taboos in the US.
That "brilliant design" is permanently wasting 15% of the screen real-estate on showing buttons irrelevant to reading the article. (Why is it pinned??)
I HATE those navigation bars (especially when I read in landscape mode on my mobile) and I wish there would be some kind of "ad-blocker" to get rid of them.
I find these sticky top navs extremely annoying. I like to have the entire screen for reading, rather than partially obscured by an unnecessary header, I'm quite capable of going back to the top of the page if I need the nav thank you.
I'm with the others in that I don't like fixed content (particularly in landscape mode on phones), but I have seen a variation that works better; hide the nav when the user scrolls down, show it when the user scrolls back up. Safari on iphone does a similar thing with the back/forward buttons.
I hate most implementations of those more than fixed bars, I regularly scroll slightly too far when I take a second longer to read a line than I was expecting and need to scroll back to see what I missed; then out of nowhere a massive header pops down and covers both what I was trying to read and the next 3 lines so I have to scroll back even further and any flow state is completely interrupted.
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".
Do you not see the vast number of connections that can be drawn to today's dragnet surveillance discussions? I think this article adds some really intriguing and thought-provoking context to our current debate.
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