When I read “My Gucci Addiction,” Buzz Bissinger’s unexpected shopaholic leather-daddy confession in GQ, the first thing I thought of was a smiling, spritely man on a computer screen, masturbating with a pair of spotless white tennis shoes. I was at a college party, huddled drinks in hand with a bunch of friends around a laptop open to the Chat Roulette. We talked to an on-duty German military officer about the Red Army Faction and watched an insistent 14-year-old prove his joint-rolling skills before we hit upon the shoe masturbator. His mic was off, but he communicated nonverbally that he wanted us to watch him jerk off using a pair of sneakers on his hands. Requests like these were blamed for the swift death of Chat Roulette, but in the obituaries we rarely heard about the exhibitionists who were successful, who found curious and willing audiences. We told him to go for it, and boy did he.
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Not that writerly exhibitionism — or a paraphilic attachment to leather gloves, for that matter — is as new as online shopping. Long after all his writing was lost to history, the Greek cynic Diogenes remained famous in philosophy classes for masturbating in public. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in addition to his work on the social contract, published stories about masturbating, had a habit of exposing himself to maidens in alleys, and enjoyed a good spanking. Indecent exposure is a fetish older than leather pants or the printed word, but its modes of expression have changed: The ability to reach millions of potential viewers with the click of a mouse have made this the golden age of showing your junk to other people.
It would be virtually impossible to prove exhibitionists are using the Internet to find willing viewers instead of exposing themselves to unwilling passers-by. There’s some suggestive evidence — a Czech study drew a correlation between the legalization of online sexually explicit material and a decrease in indecent-exposure incidents, and a Google ngram search shows a significant drop in the use of the word flasher in English-language books from the mid-1980s onward — but it is tenuous and circumstantial.
