The Peep Diaries

Okay, so here’s my report on dinner with Igor, purveyor of the RedClouds and VoyeurWeb amateur sex exhibitionist websites. The dinner happened in Toronto last weekend. Igor invited five couples – one from Toronto, one from Buffalo, two from Michigan and one from Windsor. Some of the couples posed mainly for the soft porn VoyeurWeb, but the couples from Michigan were into the more explicit and hardcore action on RedClouds. Those are the wild ones, Igor told me in his impish German accent. We had a semi-private room in an Italian restaurant which, as it turns out, was a good thing.

First off we had drinks and got to know each other. The couples were all older than me. I was probably the youngest person in the room, everyone else was in their Fifties. They were suburban empty-nesters with time to kill. They all had decent jobs and most of them had adult or near adult age kids. None of them were ‘out’ about their hobby to their families and friends and communities.

We sat at a single long table. I sat near the Michigan couples (best friends since they met each other online) and next to the Windsor couple. Igor – who has the air and appearance of an amateur sex Alfred E. Neuman – held court down at the other end of the table. The mood was jovial. We talked about how often the women are recognized going about their daily lives and what that feels like. Apparently, it happens occasionally, just enough to make it an event. It feels good, when it happens, though it can be a bit weird if the guy doing the recognizing gets a bit too excited. We talked about RedClouds parties at which the attendees wear different color wristbands so that the camera toting hordes know who they are allowed to photograph and post online and who doesn’t want to be publically identified.

Wine flowed freely and the jokes got increasingly ribald. At the same time, there was just a bit of awkwardness to the proceedings. The women on VoyeurWeb were quieter, insisting that they only posed because their husbands wanted them to. They wanted me to know that they did other things too – they golfed, worked, volunteered. Their men talked about camera lenses and photography courses. In contrast, The Michigan couples had pretty much engulfed themselves in the lifestyle. They no longer spent much time with their other friends. They traveled to parties and group holidays. It was clear that those who embraced the more social element had a totally different take on it than those who just privately snapped pictures and posted them. The posters were more into the voting and the comments. The socialites were more into the discussion boards and the gatherings.

Still, some commonalities: the women liked the attention and the men liked the adventure and sense of transgression. With the main courses cleared and new bottles of wine opened, body parts began to be flashed. The Windsor husband pretended to drop something under the table. He crawled around under there with his camera. When he emerged, the camera was passed around so we could see his up-skirt, no panties conquest. Everyone oohhed and ahhed about the picture. I looked over at the woman whose genitalia had just been photographed. She was, surprisingly, one of the more reserved VoyeurWeb posers. She was flushed, a little shocked at her behavior maybe. I wondered what was going on in her head. Everyone else kept looking at the picture, an object of fascination, a kind of totem around which to order their collective presence at the night’s festivities.

Tonight I’m having dinner with 15 or so amateur exhibitionists all of whom regularly post pictures of themselves naked and/or having sex on the websites Voyeurweb and RedClouds. [in case you haven’t figured it out yet, these are both explicit sex sites so be cool with that if you click on the links.] Voyeurweb is one of the longest running and probably the most visited amateur sex site online. Anyway Igor, the founder and owner of these sites, who I met up with last night, has organized a gathering in Toronto for my benefit. So I’m going to go meet everyone and, uh, see what happens….It’ll be really interesting to talk to the couple and get a better sense of not only why they chose to peep themselves in this way, but how they interact with each other — is a common interest in online nude exhibitionism enough to create friendship and community? More early next week!

Not really. In fact Padme, the primary author of the blog Journey to the Darkside is sweet as can be. Even over the phone with her I thought she was going to offer me milk and cookies. And blog posts with titles like Victoria Anniversary Night and Happy 7th Birthday Skywalker! don’t exactly come across as dangerous.

But innocuous fare about trips and birthday parties quickly gives way to posts like “The First Time I Sucked Two Cocks in One Night” and “Darth Vader is My Daddy”. What gives? I ended up on the phone with the very kind Padme (not, obviously, her real name) and found out the following:

Padme’s husband is also her master. He makes all the decisions and regularly spanks or whips her with a riding crop. This is part of Padme’s life and she blogs about it almost as matter of factly as she blogs about recovering from surgery and celebrating her wedding anniversary. One suspects, though, that it is the details of her sex life that have caused the site to get over a million-and-a-half visits since its inception three years ago.

Part of Padme wants to get exposed. In her emails to me she refers to the blog as private even though she knows as well as I do that the blog is a public document open to all. When I ask her about this she says: “It’s a public blog and there’s always a risk with that. I have heard stories of other bloggers being found out by their families, but we’ve been pretty lucky, so far no one has come across it. I’ve been kind of worried from the beginning about that. You almost half expect that someone will come up to you and say ‘I know who you are.’ “

Well Padme doesn’t just half expect it, I get the feeling she half wants it to happen. After all, this blog is very detailed and anyone who knows this couple even casually would probably be able to put two and two together.

So why take the risk? It’s pretty clear that Padme has come to rely heavily on the blog as a source of community, friendship, creativity and attention. As she tells me: “I don’t drive, I don’t work, I’m a stay-at-home mom and I’m alone all day. It’s been a great way to connect to people.”

Somehow, Padme is able to ignore the fact that she knows very little about the 3000 people a day who read her blog. She talks to me about overcoming embarrassment and writing as if it was just Master who would be reading. When I ask her if she thinks it’s odd that thousands of strangers know more about her life than neighbours, friends and family she seems momentarily flustered. Finally she tells me that, at the end of the day, the pros outweigh the cons and she simply “tries not to think about the lurkers.”

Okay so last week I met with the producers of the Peep documentary and we went through an initial sketch of the “script” which is more like a broad strokes idea of what we think will happen when I am put in certain situations and when I talk to certain people. I left feeling good about the project, it’s nice to have a road map to work on, something to follow while you’re trying to get to a destination.

That said, there was a lot of work still to be done on the sketch. Not the least of which is getting in touch with various people we’d like to be part of the doc. So today I spent a bunch of time doing research and also tracking down people we want to speak with.

Among other things I did today: joined RedClouds, a massive amateur porn compendium. It cost me $27.99 but I am now a full fledged member for the year. Do you think the producers will reimburse me? We’ll see. I joined in order to have access to their chat areas so that I could ask if any of the people who are putting their pics up might like to meet up with me and talk about why they pose nude online and how it fits into their lives. I posted in one chat area – Sexuality – and have so far gotten one response.

Naturally I’d be a pretty sad researcher if I didn’t also look around. So I randomly clicked on various pics. Most were women, many in the 40 plus range, some posing nude, some actually engaged in sex acts. A lot of them didn’t show their faces, but some did. I didn’t get all that excited if you must know. The effect was more like being at a nudist colony or nude beach. Very quickly, you stop thinking — s/he’s naked! — every time someone walks by.

At the same time, it’s clear that the million plus members of RedClouds do get excited, particularly when they post pics of themselves. A lot of the pictures come with invitations like – “first time poster, can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks.” I got the sense that it was the response that was more important than actually putting up the photos. Like if no one rates the pics or attaches a few lewd comments, it never really happened.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.