The Voyeur's Motel

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/gay-talese-the-voyeurs-motel

by MrJagil • 10 years ago

287 95 10 years ago

newyorker.com

talles2• 10 years ago

[removed]

talles2• 10 years ago

[removed]

masklinn• 10 years ago

It's a link to The New Yorker, not penthouse. And Gay Talese is the article's author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Talese

mgbmtl• 10 years ago

tl;dr: it's an article about a couple who bought a motel to spy on their guests, and did pseudo-documentation about their guests habits. There are no photos or anything inappropriate. Says a lot about sexual taboos in the US.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

No, it's not NSFW. It's long, though, so probably not a great use of work time.

metabrew• 10 years ago

Wow

prawn• 10 years ago

No surprise to find that the TripAdvisor page for the motel in question is unable to find any current pricing...

https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g29144-d119972-R...

The author of the piece, Gay Talese, is well known for the very famous article Frank Sinatra Has a Cold:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sinatra_Has_a_Cold

300bps• 10 years ago

The end of he article details how the motel was sold in the 90s and subsequently completely razed.

oska• 10 years ago

Nice last line.

Also, I wonder if Foos' choice of name for his second notebook was a reference, at least in part, to the John Fowles novel? [1]

I think it quite likely he was aware of the novel, given that he was a reader and given John Fowles' high level of fame in that time period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collector

rememberlenny• 10 years ago

If you haven't noticed, the New Yorker also redesigned their top navigation. It's a brilliant design from https://twitter.com/mimicdecipher and implemented by https://twitter.com/erik_erikson

ableal• 10 years ago

My laptop noticed, and started its fan singing in praise.

Had to go into reader mode to pull Firefox down from 50% CPU.

biot• 10 years ago

Maybe that's a Firefox bug? Not having to redraw a section of the screen should consume less CPU, not more.

Strilanc• 10 years ago

That "brilliant design" is permanently wasting 15% of the screen real-estate on showing buttons irrelevant to reading the article. (Why is it pinned??)

yoodenvranx2• 10 years ago

I HATE those navigation bars (especially when I read in landscape mode on my mobile) and I wish there would be some kind of "ad-blocker" to get rid of them.

conorh• 10 years ago

I find these sticky top navs extremely annoying. I like to have the entire screen for reading, rather than partially obscured by an unnecessary header, I'm quite capable of going back to the top of the page if I need the nav thank you.

bazzargh• 10 years ago

I'm with the others in that I don't like fixed content (particularly in landscape mode on phones), but I have seen a variation that works better; hide the nav when the user scrolls down, show it when the user scrolls back up. Safari on iphone does a similar thing with the back/forward buttons.

Nemo157• 10 years ago

I hate most implementations of those more than fixed bars, I regularly scroll slightly too far when I take a second longer to read a line than I was expecting and need to scroll back to see what I missed; then out of nowhere a massive header pops down and covers both what I was trying to read and the next 3 lines so I have to scroll back even further and any flow state is completely interrupted.

Safari on iPhone is one of the few implementations that actually works well, playing round with it a bit now it looks like it has quite a few heuristics to determine when to expand again. I guess most people don't care enough to actually spend the time adding more than just "show on drag down".

russnewcomer4• 10 years ago

This is a pretty disturbing article, and I feel like Talese should have reported Foos to the local authorities. Foos is clearly a serial sexual offender, and should have been reported or at the very least put into treatment. Talese admits that Foos is an unreliable narrator and is pretty clearly a voyeur for sexual purposes, mentally shielding himself by saying, "oh, I'm just a researcher."

Journalism is one thing. This is enabling a predator, just as much as Foos' two wives.

ghshephard• 10 years ago

What are the odds that the entire story is pure (and well written) fiction, and that Gerald Foos never existed?

jzwinck• 10 years ago

I would expect the purchase and sale of the hotel is a matter of public record, so it should be straightforward to check if the guy really ran the place.

qq663• 10 years ago

Gay Talese doesn't really write fiction. He may have never written a fiction piece in his life, it would be an odd time in his career to start.

cwhipasapa4• 10 years ago

There's an item about it in the Denver Post: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_29727885/aurora-motel-owne... If the story checks out, I expect (or hope) the fallout will be a lot bigger in the coming weeks - that is assuming ISIS doesn't blow up the White house or Donald Trump commit suicide or something

pivo• 10 years ago

I actually suspected that this was fiction when I read the part about Mr. Talese's tie accidentally hanging down through the vent above the couple having sex. How could that possibly happen without him or the couple noticing it?

pvg• 10 years ago

Zero. The New Yorker labels its fiction as fiction.

mbrutsch• 10 years ago

Foos is clearly a serial sexual offender

When the "victims" have to be informed, decades later, that they even are victims, it makes you wonder.

ceejayoz2• 10 years ago

You can be victimized without being aware of it.

Crimes against an infant, a comatose patient, etc. don't cease to be crimes.

someone7x• 10 years ago

To be fair, one of the victims was murdered because of the what he knew and did with that knowledge.

russnewcomer4• 10 years ago

Sorry, it doesn't make me[0] wonder. It's still at the very least a moral failing.

If it were encryption keys he was snooping on and not sex, would your response be different?

[0]edit - I used the wrong pronoun (you) here in my initial post.

knowaveragejoe• 10 years ago

Did you read the entire article? It's certainly illegal and distasteful, but the writings contain a lot of poignant commentary on modern life in general, not just sex; about war, eating habits, racial issues, and so on. I found this particularly interesting:

My voyeurism has contributed immensely to my becoming a futilitarian, and I hate this conditioning of my soul. . . . What is so distasteful is that the majority of subjects are in concert with these individuals in both design and plan. Many different approaches to life would be immediately implemented, if our society would have the opportunity to be Voyeur for a Day.

Also this:

These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.
Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.

russnewcomer4• 10 years ago

I did read the entire article. I was very disturbed. The first of your quotes is actually part of what clearly disturbed me and made me think even more that Foos is clearly a sexual offender.

The second of your quotes I found to be just a secularized and romanticized restating of basic Christian doctrine (or just the 'Golden Rule'), which makes me further disturbed that someone would have to wade through years of voyeurism to reach that conclusion.

codingdave2• 10 years ago

I just want to make sure I understand your comment... are you saying that illegal and distasteful acts are OK as long as they have interesting / poignant documentation?

rootlocus• 10 years ago

I think this sums up pretty well how important sex was for Mr. Foos:

  But more often Foos found observing his guests depressing. They argued. 
  They watched too much television. (This was especially irksome when the 
  guests were attractive and could have spent their time having sex instead.)

uptownfunk2• 10 years ago

I saw "German-American" and started reading Foos's speech in the voice of Hannibal Lechter (from the TV show..)

feintruled• 10 years ago

I was momentarily confused how this article was dated in the future - I guess it takes the date of the print edition?

Very interested to see if there is any fallout from this. As interesting as this story is, the author facilitated a crime for decades. I can't see any other way of looking at it.

ceejayoz2• 10 years ago

As interesting as this story is, the author facilitated a crime for decades.

As well as committing at least one himself.

Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view.

joshontheweb2• 10 years ago

All morality aside, this is a pretty fascinating glimpse into american/human personal culture. Adding morality back in and it is hard not to consider this a serious breach of trust and worthy of countless criminal charges.

cwhipasapa4• 10 years ago

What did you find fascinating about it? (I assume you're referring to the content of the journals not the story about it)

joshvm• 10 years ago

There is a certain morbid curiosity about it, for the same reason that people watch Big Brother obsessively. Worth watching "The Lives of Others" if you haven't already, though that deals with other problems.

There is an argument that laboratory psychology testing is prone to bias. Any study which relies on self-reporting is liable to people under or overestimating. Any study which requires consent inevitably attracts people who would be interested in being experimented on. Morality aside, performing experiments and studies on people who have absolutely no idea what's going on is the ultimate way to remove bias.

The sort of 'results' that come out of Foos' 'study' are fascinating because they simply cannot be obtained by any legal means. People behave differently when they know they're being observed. However fascination doesn't necessarily imply scientific utility...

The sex is actually the least fascinating thing about the journals - even Foos was continually disappointed by how dull his subjects were sexually. What's interesting are his observations on the minutiae in people's lives, the mundane things people do when they know they're not being watched (even something as 'weird' as sitting on a toilet backwards).

joshontheweb2• 10 years ago

The story and the journal. I actually just got back from an overnight getaway with my wife last night where we stayed in a small privately owned motel. I couldn't help but find myself wondering who could have been watching. This sort of thing would be much easier to pull off with todays technology and I'm sure that it does happen more.

How violated would I feel if I found out that a creep motel owner was watching? How would I feel about that compared to the government surveillance that is happening.

I can confidently say that I am far more worried about big brother than the motel clerk. Although neither are welcome.

I suspect there are many gems in his journals that mirror societal norms and deviations of the time. The inter-racial sex trends. The 70 orgys. I never knew you could sit on a toilet sideways or backwards. Why would you do this? Maybe I'll convert, who knows!

The fact that he explained it all away in his mind is especially curious. It is easy to judge but are we as a society of major consumers of pornography and reality tv really that far away from this guy? There are some obvious legal distinctions in his actions but the compulsion seems alive and well in most people.

The whole story just brought up so many questions and curiosities.

EDIT: Spelling

joe_the_user• 10 years ago

The story has a dual nature - "fascinating glimpse" and "distasteful action".

Moreover, if an equivalent sort of thing happened via computer - say, a voyeur silently using a million webcams for a similar purpose, it seems like it would lose the particularity of such a "glimpse" and it's nature as a crime would especially visible.

uptownfunk2• 10 years ago

He also made note of guests whose behavior he found weird or upsetting: the guy who secretly urinated in his date’s bourbon; the obese fellow who checked in with a much younger man and then dressed him up in a furry costume with horns, saying, “You are heavenly; I have never seen a more beautiful sheep-boy."

sridca• 10 years ago

He had come to believe that the arrival of the birth-control pill, in the early sixties, which he’d originally celebrated, encouraged many men to expect sex on demand: “Women had won the legal right to choose but had lost the right to choose the right moment.” He felt that the war between the sexes had escalated and that sexual relations were getting worse, not better.

He maintained that most men are natural voyeurs. “But most women prefer being watched to watching others,” he said, “which may partly explain why men spend fortunes on porn and women on cosmetics.”

Overtonwindow• 10 years ago

I must confess this was a fascinating article. Voyeurism is one of those weird things that I think most people deride, but wouldn't hesitate to participate should the opportunity arise.

nathan_f77• 10 years ago

This was a great read. Probably the longest article I've read in a long time. I need more long-form content in my life.

dcre• 10 years ago

https://longreads.com/

qq663• 10 years ago

Make sure it's good long-form content, not just articles that are long. Gay Talese's other articles are a good place to start.

basch3• 10 years ago

http://redef.com/channel/media/feed

http://readability.com/topreads

https://longreads.com/

http://longform.org/

longform has a great app

ggggtez• 10 years ago

The author takes a long time but eventually compares this guy to the unibomber. Why? Who the heck knows. I really don't think that's a justified comparison.

klodolph5• 10 years ago

I think there's a common motive here (motive for publication). People who are disgusted by modern society, believe they have some kind of privileged moral viewpoint (see wrongs that others don't), and want to share it with the world but need to remain anonymous because of connected criminal acts.

basch3• 10 years ago

everyone wants a page in a history book

no one wants their name uttered for a last time.

to me it sounds like their ways of ensuring remembrance.

the end goal being to become some kind of communal deity, foras an ancestral deity is much more at risk of being forgotten.

cwhipasapa4• 10 years ago

This is so monstrously evil I'm speechless, even discounting the alleged murder that may or may not have taken place. I can't believe the author knowingly took part in this and even enabled it. All men are voyeurs just like all men are born murderers - who hasn't at some point felt like taking a life in anger even if only for a brief moment. Most men just don't do it. There is no justification, scientific or otherwise for this (and those claims are extremely dubious anyway). I really hope, if this is true, there is some legal way for Foos to suffer some serious consequences, however short the rest of his life is.

LouisSayers4• 10 years ago

I find it interesting to see how people react to this article. I try my best to see what can be learnt from this - he is offering insights into a private world that we don't 'get to see', and yes the alleged murder is a caveat to the whole thing - which should be treated (and is) treated differently to the rest of the story.

I do find your comment quite judgemental and vengeful. I'm not condoning his actions, but simply saying that I think we benefit as a society more from learning from this man, including learning from his behaviour rather than spending our energy and resources hating on and wanting to punish someone for essentially an act (excluding the death) of which had no effect on the people being watched.

To punish him in my mind is to say that we should keep these things in the closet (or attic in this case), and the lesson from that is only to hide what really goes on in the world instead of sharing what really goes on. I'd rather know about this and encourage others to share their stories.

russnewcomer4• 10 years ago

Would your reaction be different if he were a sysadmin snooping on emails, didn't ever do anything from the snooping, just snooped?

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

This is a private, sex-oriented implementation of the surveillance state and commercial analytics. If analytics can tell if your daughter is pregnant before you know it, it can tell how much and what kind of sex you are getting. There's probably some John Yoo of voyeurism writing a memo about how knowing all about your sex life is perfectly legal if terrorists.

MzHN• 10 years ago

Reading this I am constantly reminded of the story "GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312212

nosuchthing• 10 years ago

IP cameras are generally publicly accessible from the internet by a massive amount of users due to them simply not knowing their camera system broadcasts in such a way. Most cameras will show up with a google search for the camera model's webpage viewer.

http://www.opentopia.com/hiddencam.php

Animats• 10 years ago

Voyeurism, before low cost cameras.

The Hollywood version of this is "Sliver", from 1993, starring Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger.[1] This Gay Talese story is sort of a low-rent version of that movie. It's so close that I suspect it was written after seeing the movie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliver_%28film%29

cwhipasapa4• 10 years ago

I find your comment to be idiotic at best. Sorry to go off like that, but by your logic people who condemned Dr Mengele are being judgemental (sure I know the crimes are not nearly at the same scale). The fact that you find this interesting or fascinating (and it is a moot point whether the observations are really contributing anything at all to human knowledge) is completely besides the point. I don't understand how some HN readers wouldn't think 2wice about condemning what the NSA does (which has some justification and would be really fascinating if we could all see it) and think of giving this a pass (presumably since it did not involve your own privacy).

klodolph5• 10 years ago

Hanging a lampshade on your comparison to Nazi experimentation by Dr. Mengele does not make up for the fact that the comparison is not apt at all. Let's keep our fingers off the launch buttons, please?

LouisSayers4• 10 years ago

To condemn one's actions, and to judge a person are two separate things and are not mutually exclusive.

Given that my comments are 'idiotic at best', I think you've proven the point that you are quick to judge.

dang2• 10 years ago

Violating the site guidelines (by calling names) then heading straight for Mengele is definitely not what makes for a good comment here. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11434103 and marked it off-topic.

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

Oh man, I just now used "John Yoo" as a pejorative. Did I go Mengele on the law there?

ryankupyn• 10 years ago

The most concerning thing about this article is the implications if someone like Foos has access to the levers of modern technology. Imagine if, instead of owning a motel, he worked on Dropcam at Nest (I certainly hope they have the ability to monitor and audit their own personnel, for their own sake).

The article is really a brilliant example of how we should not view the organizations/institutions we interact with as impersonal abstractions, but should always consider the human beings - and human flaws/motives - behind them.

LouisSayers4• 10 years ago

* turns head to look out for seedy looking ops / db admin guys in the room

It is pretty crazy - only two people returned that 'suitcase full of money'.

tryitnow• 10 years ago

This is some of the best longform I've read in a while.

If you're wavering between reading it or not, read it.

I immediately bought one of Talese's books after reading this article. He's a fantastic writer.

mrexroad• 10 years ago

I am very curious about everything and everyone I see . . . and so I have felt invisible also, as a child feels himself invisible, beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously independent.

Do children today still feel "invisible, beneath the radar" given today's general lack of "so much unsupervised freedom?" Or was Foos invisibility/curiosity dynamic just a product of his disorder?

In college, I was career given advice along the lines of, "you're a student, you're still under the radar and get access to so many things normally off limits to the public. use this. go to different types of companies, ask for special tours, ask questions you don't think they'll answer--learn how things really work. you're not competition to them, yet." Though now days, I'm pretty sure students are on the radar, and would just be routed to the official corporate intern/co-op/recruiter/etc program.

wglb• 10 years ago

Gay Talese is a great storyteller.

However, there is something slightly off about the story, most fully exhibited by the lack of verification of the murder that Foss claimed to at least partially witness.

Also, there are some convenient events that sustain the narrative, such as the fact that he was able to follow one of the guests home and see her crying through the window.

One wonders if what Foss was telling him, however train-wreck compelling, was only about half true.

mcphage• 10 years ago

One wonders if what Foss was telling him, however train-wreck compelling, was only about half true.

No doubt that's why Talese included all of those inconsistencies in his story.

ableereelba2• 10 years ago

I agree. There is something off: the neck tie, the SOB comment, so careful yet no fear of animals, the complicit wife, loner/sports star, a murder...

ableereelba2• 10 years ago

Gerald foos: April fools?

silverbacknet• 10 years ago

So many of the quotes feel like pure projection. The guy makes up little fantasies about everyone he spied on, even assuming his tales are true, he certainly doesn't interview them afterward to see if he guessed right or was way off. For every fact there's a lot more deep ruminating that would be more at home in LiveJournal than a sociology study, but it was his journal, so I can't really fault him for that.

If it's true, it's an interesting peek into his mind, and confirmation of some public vs private social mores, but all the pontification on society and morality and futility is just so much old man yelling at clouds.

The Voyeur's Motel

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