Catch a Tiger by the Tail

Well, Tiger Woods is having a crappy Christmas, don't you think?

While he waits for the divorce proceedings and while we wait for the next alleged mistress to pop up on Extra, his whole embarrassing episode made me realize that our technology age has put a big dent into our ability to carry on sexual episodes - adulterous or not - with privacy.

When Tiger first crashed his car, who was first on the scene? The ambulance? Cops? Firefighters? Nope - TMZ. The gossip site's picture that brought Jazmine Sullivan's song "Bust the Windows Out Your Car" to life began the whole speculation about what went on.

Then we had the voice mail heard around the world. One of his mistresses saved a voice mail with Tiger pleading her to change her phone voice mail so his ever suspicious wife wouldn't put two and two together if she pulled up the number. And then that was released and played for everyone to hear.

I'm now waiting for the sex tape.

Yes, Tiger is famous and would be more vulnerable to being trapped in the cross hairs of a public relations nightmare than an average Joe. But our world is now set up to where privacy is receding and something we do, despite our best efforts, can come back to haunt us sooner or later.

Who's to say your next trick or dalliance isn't being secretly recorded by a Web cam or a Blackberry and will be posted on YouTube? Who's to say someone you dated won't post something embarrassing about your intimate life - or even just something personal - on Facebook or Twitter out of spite? What would you do if you couldn't help yourself and looked at your lover's cell and found friendly texts from someone you didn't know?

I have a few friends who used an online profile to find a hook-up and a third party somehow found out about their dalliances and pointed it out to other people and in one case, a friend's boyfriend.

And I've had many an occasion when I've had friends or acquaintances tell me some personal information - including HIV status - about someone with a recognizable online profile and then I've seen hat person out and about. And I'm sure he has no clue his life story is being circulated even more than his username.

We try to be careful - maybe never using names or real names, making sure people come to your place to ensure there's no funny business, setting up e-mail accounts solely for sexcapades - but something can always catch us. And all it takes is one misstep for something to be extremely public.

I wonder if that will make a lot of us just figure out more clever ways to be duplicitous or if that would make us second guess our actions the next time we cheat or do something else we feel deep down is wrong.

What is true for sure is that our technological advances have made us more communal but more vulnerable to gossip and lack of privacy. We can be so easily found out now. And we're going to have to be able to stand by our actions come what may.