All in the Eye of God: Sex and Cameras

I believe it was William Penn who believed that you shouldn’t do in private what you wouldn’t want to be seen doing in public.Whether you have your hand in the till or up your neighbour’s skirt it’s even more likely you’ll be seen in the digital age. The ubiquitous camera whether attached to your phone or not — I carry my camera constantly, so I should know — will be recording many events of which you may have no memory, so fast they flashed by you. Some cameras direct traffic; some solve crimes. I’m not anti-camera.

            Cameras, in some cases, reflect in a sense the eye of God, sometimes understood to see all things, sometimes even to understand all things, and sometimes to condemn some things including misuse of one’s neighbour. From barrack-room ribaldry to serial rapes of teens rendered helpless by drink, to murder itself, anything can be photographed and filmed. Surely the transcendent God has seen everything; I feel it’s quite certain there’s nothing new in the lines of sin or folly under the sun, any more than there was when the Preacher was telling us all is vanity.

            So what is private, and who owns what’s public? Excepting those legitimately making a living from the sex trade, I find a number of questions around amateur cameras and possibly private activities. The past and current military scandals involving filming of sex acts between adults of controversial consent brings up the question: who owns the copyright in your sex life?  If only one person is filming, who has the distribution rights? If someone is going to make money out on the internet somewhere, who gets a cut? Did she really agree to world-wide viewing rights?  Does he actually want the facts about his manhood revealed? How drunk or drugged was anyone?

            And what is libel? I seem to think it’s loosely covered in the term ‘false witness’. Is photographing someone having sex with you and then distributing the image on the internet with demeaning text ‘false witness’? That’s actually one of the more serious sins in the Decalogue, right up there with coveting your neighbour’s ox.

            The idea of God’s all-seeing eye has been used to keep people in fear of their bodies, their desires, and their relationships. Yet God’s eye would appear to be more forgiving than the eyes of a vast impersonal viewing public, or even the eyes of the friends of your friends. “You are the God who sees me,” said Hagar the slave-girl, someone who was in a tangle of relationships in an unconsenting role. God sees all: maybe only God has the need to see everything.