I've noticed a lot in the news lately about oversharing.  It started with Alex Beam's column about Somerville's premiere professional neurotic (watch your back, babe) Lauren Slater's latest revelations about her frigidity in the New York Times Modern Love column, where she also laments that this time out  "the real issue for me is that I’m not sure I have a dysfunction."  What's worse than the certainty of sickness?  The nagging suspicion.

She shares a typical night at home with her long-suffering hubbie: 

On the one hand, I am miserable about our lack of a sex life because it makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy, living this way.

“Have sex with someone else,” I tell him.

“The problem with that,” my husband says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just might fall in love with them.”

“I’d kill you,” I say.

Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.

Now, should we order the Kung Pao Chicken for carry-out or did you want General Tso? 

I especially liked Slater's fond reminiscence of her first time.  She was 19, seeing "a broody bad boy who had a muscular chest and a head roiling with glossy curls," who never pressured her into sex.  Still, "the very absence of his question underscored its implicit presence."  Instead of letting the "implicit presence" simply dissipate (and it does fairly quickly for 19 year old boys — implicit is not their strong suit), she recalls: "I made up an elaborate lie. I was raped. Too traumatized to have sex. I needed more time."

Miraculously, she got it.  This must have been about the sweetest nineteen year-old broody bad boy that ever was.  When finally she decided she was ready for him to make his presence more explicit, he was, she recounts, perfectly lovely about the whole thing, which led her to the logical conclusion: "I hated him."  Mm. Surprise, surprise.

No worries, though.  She assures her readers "I do not judge myself."  Well, that's a relief.  "I consider it a great deal to ask of a relatively newly minted woman that she offer her intact body up for this frankly difficult deed."  Except that, by her own admission, no one had asked.  Details.

Personally, I think Slater's brand of oversharing is actually pretty useful.  Particularly for men.  You know those Worst Case Scenario books?  Slater has written the one on women.

A couple days after Beam's column appeared in the Globe a big report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy came out entitled "Sex and Tech," which found that "one-fifth of teenagers surveyed have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves, usually to a boyfriend or girlfriend, and almost a third have received such images." 

The Globe reports: "Among young adults (ages 20-26), the numbers are higher: One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them."  If my research is any indication, even the geriatric set is getting in on the trend.  I get at least three or four cock shots a week from men old enough to be my granddad. 

If it's a nice one I don't much mind.  I think of my DIY porn collection as something akin to Darwin's barnacles.  Cocks as curios.  But this kind of oversharing scares some people.  "This sort of online behavior contributes to a casual hookup culture," the Globe quotes Bill Albert, a spokesman for the National Campaign, a nonprofit group that advocates for sex education and access to contraceptives, as saying. "When you get numbers like 20 percent and higher [reporting this behavior], that passes the threshhold of concern."

I find this debate about the expression of their sexuality at the height of it that adults are having over the heads of their children fascinating.  There are, of course, cultures in which people run around naked, and no one seems the wiser.  That the threshold of propriety shifts back and forth over time is not news.  Even what constitutes sex and sexuality can change radically from one generation to the next. 

There is an interesting gray area here when it comes to agency and self-expression.  Kids are warned of the damage to their reputation a racy snapshot can do (although such pics have done wonders for the careers of the Britneys and Mileys of the world), but as of this posting it's still not illegal to take pictures of your tits.  The crime is not the showing, it's the seeing.  As the Globe story reports, "Under New Hampshire law students disseminating an inappropriate photo of someone under 16 can be considered to be distributing child pornography. Come January, the threshhold in New Hampshire goes to 18."

A Salem high school principal quoted in the story recently held a seminar for students on the peril of posting their private parts on the internet.  "We educated the kids about the long-term and short-term consequences.  Once they're posted electronically, they're out there forever. They're available to colleges and universities. They're available to employers. We talked to them about values. Is this the right type of behavior you want for yourself?"

I guess the flipside of this question is: do you really want to go to a college or university where admissions is scouring the web for kiddie porn?  Ditto for a prospective employer (unless it's law enforcement, of course).

Oversharing goes both ways.

Hysteria about "hooking up" has been heating up for a while now, but this latest report on the nation's gone wild girls and boys seems to have stoked the flames a bit.  Charles Blow, the Times' "visual Op-Ed columnist," who likes to natter on about graphs and things, fretted in his last column that among the nation's youth dating is dead.  Could be this declaration is a wee bit premature, and that what we're calling "hooking up" these days was once "just one of those things." 

Hooking up can be the ultimate TMI, of course.  But if you strip away the hysteria about a life of meaningless sex, rampant STDs, drugs, alcohol, the inevitable downward spiral of a life of loose morals, it's still probably better than married life with Lauren Slater.  Sometimes even a date's way more than too much.  Personally I'm glad I've got a range of options.  And as for pics, it never hurts to see the goods first.

Yvonne Abraham explored another kind of oversharing in her column this morning about the comment threads that nowadays accompany online versions of many newspapers' articles.  Abraham laments: "sometimes our site, like every other, becomes a venue for incivility - for angry, cruel people who, emboldened by an e-pseudonym, spew forth the kind of venom that sane and decent people would never dare let loose."   

This sort of anonymous oversharing is short on personal details but I think it belongs in the TMI category nonetheless.  I have always thought of the internet as the real-life collective unconscious, a sort of sprawling collective id.  That used to seem fascinating somehow, but frankly, it's gotten old, and I'm with Yvonne a hundred percent on this issue now. 

See, the kind of spew you get from some of these people (and as an op-ed columnist and a long-time blogger I've been spewed a few times myself) has no value to the public dialogue, because it's not really a part of the public dialogue, any more than someone having a Tourette's attack in the balcony of the theater is part of the show. 

No, these outbursts are part of a private monologue.  It's starkly, painfully obvious that no one listens to these people, and they desparately want to be heard, even if all they have to offer is the poison shriek of malice.  For the record, Andy Warhol was wrong.  Not everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame.  But the internet offers some small consolation to those robbed of theirs by the naked indifference of the world.  A balcony seat.  

I have been known to overshare, myself.  You have likely already seen my abs.  Sometimes you just have more than you know what to do with. 

The truth is, we are made to share.  That's what we do.  That's how we propogate and survive, how we love, learn and thrive.  The limits of that sharing are sometimes harder to suss out.  It's like William H. Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie Smith says in Magnolia: "I really do have love to give; I just don't know where to put it." 

Well, why not on the internet?