The keyhole became a pasta strainer

By Ilir Demalia

For two days Albania has been shut inside a bedroom.
A story that in a normal society would be material for the pink tabloids has become the national top story, a television debate, public moralizing, a collective trial.
A composer has been filmed — or has filmed himself — in intimate relations with several women from music and showbiz.
And Albania has suddenly discovered morality.
That is the funniest part of the story.
Because, if the relationship was between adults and consensual, what the hell does it have to do with us?

It is their life.
Their body.
Their bedroom.
Their choices.

If someone is married, let them sort it out with their own husband or wife. There is no need for Facebook’s moral court.

Who has not done the Kama Sutra in their own bed?

The difference is that once the door closed.
Today the door closes, but the phone opens.
And the keyhole has become a pasta strainer.

Personally, apart from the two singers who are mentioned, I do not even know who the others are.
I do not listen to their music.
I do not watch Big Brother.
I do not watch Përputhen, Për’Puthen, Përthithen or all that television industry where Albanians shut themselves at home to watch other people living, loving, quarrelling, kissing, cheating and breaking up. That is where our social perversity lies.

We feed on voyeurism and then turn into puritans.
We lock people inside cameras for 24 hours and watch them like peeping toms through the keyhole. Then, when someone’s privacy spins out of control, the same peeping toms turn into moral judges.

The crowd looks for prey.
When it finds it, it starts tearing it apart.
Sex is as old as the world.

The first “sin”, according to the Bible, was committed by Adam and Eve.
It is not an invention of TikTok.
It is not an invention of Big Brother.
It is not an invention of showbiz.
What has changed is the technology of spying.
Once you had to climb up a wall to see.

Today all it takes is a phone.
A camera.
A stolen password.
A hacked cloud.
A screenshot.
A WhatsApp group.

And within a few minutes, a person’s intimate life can become the property of a crowd.
Here we no longer have mere curiosity.
We have an industry of shame.

And public shame is a weapon.
It can produce anxiety, isolation, the destruction of relationships, loss of work, humiliation, psychological trauma.
A video can last two minutes.
But its consequences can last years.
It can be deleted from one page.
But it cannot be deleted from the thousands of phones that have copied it.

That is the brutal paradox of technology: privacy can be destroyed in a second, while rebuilding a life can take years.

And we, instead of understanding this, click.
Share.
Comment.
Mock.
Judge.
And then we wonder why society has become so merciless.
But there is also a much bigger problem here.
The media.
Not everything that can be published is news.
Not everything that produces clicks is journalism.
And not everything people want to see should be given to them.
The fourth estate is not the power to open every closed door.
Journalism must protect the public interest, not the public’s lust.
There is a colossal difference between the public interest and the public’s curiosity.
The public can be curious about everything.
That does not mean that everything is in the public interest.
Today it is a composer and a few showbiz women.
Tomorrow it may be a politician.
The day after, a businessman.
Later, a person who has never been a public figure.
And then the question will no longer be:
“What did he do in the bedroom?”
The question will be:

“Who gave us the right to enter it?”

Because if we accept the principle that anything private can be published simply because people are curious to see it, then tomorrow no one has privacy any more.
Not you.
Not I.
Not your family.
Not your children.
Not your opponent.
Not your enemy.
Not the person you cannot stand.
That is what we do not understand.
Privacy is not a privilege of the people we like.
It is also the right of the one we do not like.
Indeed, that is precisely where a society is measured.
Protecting the privacy of someone you love is easy.
Protecting the privacy of someone you do not like — that is civilization.
So the problem is not what they did in bed.

The problem is what we are doing outside it.

Because by drooling over someone else’s intimate life, by filming it, hacking it, distributing it, publishing it and then judging it, we are not protecting morality.

We are feeding a collective perversity.
We are turning shame into entertainment.
Privacy into spectacle.
And an individual’s pain into clicks.

Once you looked through the keyhole.

Today you have the camera in your hand.
But the problem is not technology.
The problem is the person who uses it to enter where the door is closed.
And perhaps the most important question we should ask ourselves is not:

“What did they do in the bedroom?”

But:

“What is happening to us as a society that we have such a great need to enter someone else’s bedroom?”