Splendid Isolation

This silly situation got me thinking — it’s about a mother rifling through her 17-year-old daughter’s handbag, and finding the morning-after pill — all about the whole topic of privacy and personal space.

Am I the only man in the world who, if his wife asks hims to “get it out of my purse”, just hands her the bag to get whatever it is out for herself?

If ever there’s an article which exemplifies the concept of “private space”, it’s a woman’s handbag.  When I’m asked why I didn’t just look in the bag, I usually make a joke of it, saying things like:  “There’s things with teeth in there!”

It’s not that I’m afraid of what I’ll find in there — I doubt very much whether there’s anything in there that could upset me — but it really is a concern for my wife’s privacy.

Everyone needs a private space.  It’s not necessarily a space that might harbor something that the owner doesn’t want anyone else to see, although it very well might be;  but there’s a concept involved which I think should be respected at all costs.

There’s another old saying that covers this:  if you invade someone’s privacy, don’t be shocked or angered by what you may find.

My old friend Patterson once told me how his wife was always asking him, “What are you thinking about?”  and he, quite understandably, took umbrage at her impertinence.  “For fuck’s sake,” he expostulated to me, “are there no parts of my life that she doesn’t want to examine or look over?”  Anyway, the next time she asked him that intrusive question, his response was epic:  “I was just thinking about how I’d spend the insurance money if you died.”  And when she got upset, his response was equally cutting:  “Do you just want me to lie to you?”  End of discussion, and much later, end of marriage (his second or third, I don’t remember).

I remember once reading about a guy who got pissed off when he discovered his wife going over his workshop, opening cupboards and looking into his toolbox.  And when he confronted her — “What the fuck did you think you’d find?” — his wife couldn’t understand his anger, because she had no clue about how men want their privacy kept sacrosanct.

Here’s the thing.  We men are evil fuckers.  In every man, there’s a quiet, secret space which harbors impure thoughts, impure activities and pathological impulses.  Sometimes, to be sure, those secret spaces include nefarious activities:  infidelity, criminality, shameful behavior, whatever.  Whether it’s a phone, a hiding place or a secret credit card / bank account, it doesn’t matter;  they exist.

The point is that even if that secret space doesn’t involve something nefarious, it’s still private and we will guard it zealously.  Think of it as a personal manifestation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment:  the right to privacy being the ability of an individual to keep their personal information and private life out of the public domain.  And in this case, “public” doesn’t just mean “the public”;  it means everyone else in the fucking world, including wives, children and parents.

So yeah, our concerned mother in the above article was being snoopy — even though I think she had every right to be concerned about her not-yet-adult daughter — but it’s quite understandable that her daughter would feel utterly betrayed by the invasion of her privacy, nevertheless.