by MIA FREEDMAN
My dog was the first to go. After decades of quarantining my private life, last year I cautiously started posting the occasional photo of him online. I know this sounds absurd. He’s a dog. Who cares. Some people have entire websites devoted to their children or post thousands of family photos on Facebook.
So by relinquishing some of my dog’s privacy (I cannot believe I just wrote ‘my dog’s privacy’), what exactly was I worried about? That he was going to end up on some puppy porn site? Wait, I never thought of that… No, I think I just feared the slippery slope that leads from posting a photo of your pet to live-tweeting your pap smear. The collapse of all boundaries. Because isn’t that how it begins?
Until recently, only famous people had to make decisions about which parts of their lives were public and private. Will you be photographed with your kids, Nicole and Keith? Does your daughter have a boyfriend, President Obama? How about a snap of your adopted baby son, Charlize?
Now we all have to make the public/private call every time we share something online. Collectively, our privacy is leaking. And we’re the leakers. As someone who published a deeply personal memoir, writes this newspaper column, is on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest and runs a website it may shock you to learn I have boundaries. Here they are: (1) I never publish photos of my family. (2) I don’t allow my kids to be photographed for any media.(3) I don’t write about anyone close to me in a way that could embarrass, offend or identify them.
And yet…..my boundaries are becoming porous. First, the dog. Then last year, I agreed to let The Australian Women’s Weekly photograph me at home with my kids. My husband was bemused. “Why would do you that?” he asked, genuinely puzzled after hearing me refuse similar requests for more than a decade. “They’re so much a part of who I am,” I shrugged. “To portray myself without them wouldn’t be the full picture. It’s time.”