I thought I was too young to pine for the good old days. But in this era of tell-all chat rooms and the Geraldo Springer Nosy Hostility Hour, I find myself yearning for a time when privacy was something people cherished. Nowadays, it seems there's no detail so intimate that Americans won't ask about it -- whether it's a politician's sex habits, a co-worker's recent surgery or the neighbor's net worth. People seem infected with a kind of flaccid, dead-end curiosity about things they don't need to know.
Idle inquisitiveness bugs me most when it comes to that ultimate personal concern: family planning. My husband and I were married six years ago, in the waning moments of that Victorian era called the early '90s. Back then, the most probing query we got was, "You guys gonna have kids?" Any answer would satisfy, as it turned out. People for the most part didn't really want to know; it was just the dawning of the cultural shift that would replace the quaintly general "How are you?" with more intrusive inquiries about your innermost organs.
A few years later, either I crossed some invisible boundary or society did. Or both. Like an unspoken stage direction, the little pink plus sign on my home pregnancy test seemed to announce: bring on the inquisition! And so the questioning began. Was it planned? Were we going to have amnio? Was I vomiting? Was my husband pleased? Would the birth be natural, or would I use drugs?
I began to dream up scathing responses, though I didn't dare utter them. No, it wasn't planned -- we got carried away one night, and we don't even like babies! Yes, I vomit constantly -- move away if you care about your shoes! If you had an epidural right now, would you stop asking me these questions?
The phenomenon, I soon realized, has become widespread. My sister, whose first pregnancy came when she was well into both her marriage and her 30s, was asked by a remote acquaintance, "How long did it take?" "About five minutes," she replied. When a close friend of mine announced her third pregnancy at the age of 40, a fellow dinner guest actually asked, "How did you do it?" Blessed by one of those moments of grace we all wish for in such settings, her husband politely answered, "We used a pretty conventional method. Will you need more details? Because I think I can recall them."
I suppose in an age when medical miracles and fertility technology are daily fodder for the news, it's not surprising that people can ponder these questions. But who rewrote the fine print of the social contract that used to prevent near-strangers from asking them? And what do these clueless interrogators actually plan to do with the intimate information they're sniffing around for? Why do people in the bank line need information about my sex life?
In the meantime, there are harder questions we really ought to ask but don't -- such as where our tax dollars go, or why a perfectly good tomato would need genetic engineering, or why our doctor has ordered all that lab work. You won't see Geraldo probing this stuff: too complex, no sex. So we leave these issues, which truly affect us, unexamined. We make our purchases, cast our votes and elect our surgeries on the basis of what the reputed authorities tell us: "Look, I saw it on the news or my doctor said to do it; if there were anything else I needed to know, they'd have mentioned it."
Truly purposeful questioning means holding ourselves responsible for what happens to us, which is not one of the strengths of our culture. We like to have someone else to pin things on if they don't turn out well. Maybe it's time, though, to redirect our talent for interrogation. We could push beyond idle curiosity, challenge our experts and resolve a few of the questions that actually do matter.
If you see me in the bank, let's chat about it. I'll be happy to share my thoughts.
Janet Reich Elsbach, '89, lives a private but inquisitive life with her family in Western Massachusetts.
