Setting Man Free From Men
30th August 2025
One of the most viral memes of recent months is the image of the Andy Byron, the CEO of the company Astronomer and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s head of HR, caught on film embracing each other at a Coldplay concert. As the illicit lovers scrambled to hide themselves, the announcer remarked that they seemed like people who were having an affair. Indeed, they were. After the footage was leaked online, their lives were thrown into turmoil. That this irrelevant affair generated such a frenzy shows, as Matthew Gasda recently wrote in Unherd, that “our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control” and has a “desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.”
In her new book Strangers and Intimates, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins provides a number of instances of people whose lives were similarly turned upside down by revelations of their private doings. She cites the example of British police officer James Watts, who in 2020 posted a series of racist memes to a WhatsApp chat group that included several of his former colleagues from his time serving as a prison guard. One meme showed an Islamic prayer mat printed with the face of George Floyd. Another featured a white dog in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Watts received a twenty-week prison sentence and a lifetime ban from holding any policing role.
What these cases have in common is the way they blur the distinction between the public and private realms. Can criminal prosecution be justified for sending messages, however odious, to specially invited members of a private chat group? Don’t we all utter things in private that we wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—utter in public? The treatment of retired police officer Julian Foulkes is another case in point. Foulkes received a visit from the police, who barged into his house and rummaged through his bookshelves searching for suspicious material after someone complained about a tweet he had posted. As someone whose personal library contains books by all sorts of figures, both Left and Right, who might be deemed extreme by some, the prospect of being shamed by the police for the books I privately read is chilling. Such encroachments on private life seem on track to become normal and thus banal. This is the urgent central message of the book Strangers and Intimates.
What is the basic difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime? The first leaves you along as long as you follow the rules, however onerous those rules might be; the second does not, and attempts to root out ThoughtCrime. Many hand-wringers would say that this is a distinction without a difference, but it’s not; it’s the difference between Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, and that difference is highly significant. (Hitler died in a bunker, Franco died in his bed.)
Many books that deal with the topic of privacy have the disadvantage of being boring. They often read like meandering legalistic treatises on how to protect your personal information in an online age. One of the immediate strengths of Jenkins’ study is it doesn’t focus on data and digital security, but on a much broader social conception of the distinction between private life and the public sphere—and it is anything but boring.
We live in a world of exteriority–people don’t deal with the world from themselves, but rather through an artificial self or persona that represents who they would like to be or who they want others to think they are. They are always worrying about what others think, and adjust their personalities accordingly.
I’m sure you’ve met people, as I have, who upon meeting you immediately start telling you all about themselves and their life story, whether you want them to or not. I suspect that the reason for this is that they want you to see them as the person they want you to see, which they can (to a degree) control, rather than the person they actually are (which they can’t control as much and which they may not really like). The best way to stop this process in its tracks is not to tolerate it: “Why are you telling me this?” is rude but sometimes that’s what you have to do. Such a person has no respect for their own privacy and I’m willing to bet no respect for your privacy as well.
One of the worst aspects of Wokeness is its totalitarian nature. William F. Buckley was fond of saying that a liberal is somebody who reaches into your shower to adjust the water temperature.