“The crime rate in central Johannesburg has dropped by 80% since surveillance cameras were installed in 2000… The cameras are equipped with 300mm lenses that can bring objects 3km away into sharp focus — such as the man attempting to have sex with a guard dog. Dressed in smart cream pants and a collared yellow T-shirt, the man saunters up to the sleeping dog and nudges it with his foot. He then bends down to stroke the dog’s penis. When the dog finally stands up, the man unzips his pants and tries to mount the bull mastiff by lifting its hind legs. The dog snaps at him and the man sulkily walks away. ‘It’s amazing what people will do when they think no one is watching… We’ve seen men dig holes in the ground to have sex with them,’ says Kordom. The surveillance cameras also caught out a bank employee who spent his lunch break paying a homeless child for sex in Eloff Street Extension.” — Mail & Guardian Online (South Africa)

It’s true enough that people act much weirder when they think they’re alone than when they have the least suspicion that they may be observed. You can practically make a formula out of it: to be is to be perceived, as Bishop Berkeley said, but to be unperceived is to be free, cut loose from the constraints of identity to wander around in the kinky wilds of non-being. (Sartre once spoke of the “lakes and pools of non-being.” Evidently the pervert approaches these pools only to skinny-dip in them.)

Then again, in today’s surveillance society, it’s amazing that anyone ever thinks he is free from the ubiquitous eyes of technology. There are cameras everywhere — on street corners and in the pocket of every cellphone user. We are all of us “incident analysts” surprising the human animal in the wilderness of its own desires. The odds of witnessing a man digging a love-hole in the ground (WTF?) are probably slim, but the chances for stumbling onto some aberrant fuckery or other are relatively good. Have you never surprised someone in the bushes? Most of the bestiality stories here on the site feature regular old unsuspecting “normal” people stumbling on “abnormal” people humping mammals.

The incident analysts quoted in the news speak of the psychological difficulties of their job. Dog fuckers may be appalling to them, but the thing that really induces stress is to witness a horrific crime without being able to do anything about it until afterward. For example, one analyst mentions seeing a cab driver deliberately mow down a pedestrian. That’s a sight that must be hard to leave at the workplace at end of day. But then it’s hard not to wonder why analysts don’t compensate themselves for their daily doses of post-traumatic stress by copying these bits of video and selling them to the websites that specialize in such gore.

Or perhaps they do? If you’re cruising around the net one day and you stumble on a video of a man fucking a hole in the ground, you’ll know where it came from.

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.