It’s Not Your Story To Tell

Her Oversharing

An anonymous college girl wrote down the names, penis size, and sexual ability of the men she slept with, including pictures. Then she put it all in a power-point presentation which whipped around the internet until Jezebel picked it up and published it, in full (the easily identifiable pictures did have blurred faces, and the names were censored).

The document contains humiliating information, such as:

• Wait… Was that his dick? No, I couldn’t possibly be… But yes. Yes it was. That gorgeous, perfect body of his was supporting a penile structure so disproportionately small that I had to take several deep breaths… Also, he came pretty damn quickly.
• He was terrible, did not even bother to kiss me for more than a few seconds, and finished in about five minutes.
• I would have loved a morning hook-up, but he was actually incapable of functioning in the morning.
• While he had girth on this side, the Subject was severely lacking in length.
  
• He is really not very big, and is unfortunately not a grower. Also, he had severe initial difficulties keeping it up.

After her account, the men were listed beside their name and rank:

The (still anonymous) author of this presentation swears that it was only intended for her small group of friends, and that she had no intention for it to go viral. Unfortunately there is no anonymity for the 13 men she slept with.

His Oversharing

“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry,” Tyler Clementi wrote on his Facebook wall before he apparently committed suicide.

Days earlier, his dorm-mate, Dharun Ravi, wrote this on his own wall: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Police are charging him, along with Molly Wei, for invading Clementi’s privacy that night by using “the camera to view and transmit a live image.”

Three days later Ravi followed it up with: “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

He has also been charged with two accounts of invasion of privacy for a live feed he transmitted on that night, September 21.

Was this the reason the 18 year old freshman decided to take his life?

We’ll never know, but we can easily guess.

My Oversharing

Apparently we are the sharing generation and we can’t take a dump without writing about it on our Facebook wall, but not all of us are like that.

Personally, my life is not an open book so much as a window pane. I have no internal censor and if something happens everyone is guaranteed to know about it.

My best friend, on the other hand, is much more reserved. If she is bothered by something we’ll have a conversation about it, but otherwise she’s silent. The biggest gossip I’m likely to get from her is that she got a haircut.

It look me a while to figure her out. When I was younger I was annoyed that she wasn’t sharing as much as I was. Surely if I told her a sordid tale about the night before I deserved one in return?

But her kept it to herself, as was her right.

Sex is personal, and it makes us vulnerable in a very real way. We show sides of ourselves to our partners that our dearest friends and family don’t know about.

It is up to us to decide how much of that we want to share with the people in our lives. We can give them a peek into our vulnerable moments and we have the power to shut the door.

But sometimes it is not our story to tell.

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UPDATE: Deadspin, Jezebel’s brother publication from Gawker, has posted the PowerPoint presentation in its entirety, including the full names and pictures of the men. Good to know that they’re comfortable with trashing innocent people to up their hit count.

They have also published the name of the author, Karen F. Owen, and a purported picture of her is included in the comments section.