Now if there’s a gay code of ethics I didn’t get my handbook, but I’m still pretty sure that it exists and this completely oversteps its bounds, by about a mile. What am I talking about you ask? I’m talking about two of the newest ways to perv on (un)suspecting (possibly) straight men: Tap That Guy & TubeCrush.
Look, I know many guys still work on the assumption that looking but not touching is perfectly ok.. but this just takes that concept to a new extreme. The fact that people are super creeping on (questionably) attractive men is one thing, but to take a picture is a whole other. Then to up the ante you want to immortalize them on a website? Ok, yeah that’s perfectly normal stalker human behavior. How much further does this go before you start realizing that this may be the creepiest thing online, with the exception of Courtney Stodden (which both suffer from “it’s wrong to be hot” syndrome).
If Facebook has taught the world anything about anything it’s brought to light how insane our childhood friends are, and that no one likes to be tagged in a picture that’s not completely posed, and if you’ve got a diva on your hands they better be photoshopped to perfection. So what really makes us think that it’s ok to super perv (I’m going to maintain that phrase throughout so get ready) on strangers and collect their pics like the trophies of a really horny serial killer?
So here is where the two sites really differentiate, the pics on Tap are in varying situations, Tube isolates its strangers to subway systems (aka, don’t get caught). Another interesting thing about Tap is the sometimes in an extremely close proximity of the victims, so they must be taken by a friend, or at least an acquaintance. (Doesn’t that make it worse?) Of course neither is anything like the godfather of this genre of Hot or Not, GuyswithIphones. You know, the one where the pics are self-submitted, self-taken and for your viewing self-pleasure (they’ve got an app too).
This brings us to our first real issue, is there an “app for that?”. The answer is no, it’s something that Tap is looking into, along with what their users are wearing, because that’s totally relevant. So it would stand to reason that there are a bunch of guys just running around like the penis paparazzi taking pictures of randos in their spare time, awesome.
So let’s say you are one of the thousands of men who apparently enjoy capturing the beauty of the finer things in life, or at least in the subways, what do you do when you get caught? This in fact happened to a friend of mine, who faced an angry guy demanding his phone when he wasn’t subtle enough taking a pic- from which the guy then deleted the photo and handed it back, silently staring at said friend for the rest of the awkward journey. Somehow I think he got off easy!
So maybe my (sexual) Orientation didn’t come with a guidebook, (if it did I’m sure it’s fabulous and all, but I still didn’t get a fucking copy) so I really only have my gut feeling to go by, and that says that this is a little bit too much. Though if I’ve got some spare time I may browse Tap and try to live vicariously through the shorts of some of the unsuspecting pieces of perfections, I still can’t get over how creeped out I am by the whole thing.
I guess it comes down to how you would personally react if you found yourself on one of these sites?
