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purely psychological motivation, in the first place.
    The drive to monitor the behaviors of others is built into the human psyche, but its strength varies with local conditions. Features of human societies determine who sees, hears, and eavesdrops upon whom, how often they do so, what they get out of it, and what happens to the victims. As we saw earlier, Mrs. Browne’s housing arrangement provided her with a treasure trove of data. But there are other factors, from religion and morality to government, politics, the law, internal competition, and external threat. All these things affect the degree to which people exercise their desire to invade the private space of others. After 9/11 many Americans began to look at strangers more suspiciously.
Fig leaf on her face
    One of the more influential factors in social monitoring is interpersonal spacing. In urban centers, people are just close enough to eavesdrop, and just separated enough that they can do so without detection. But everyone with a stake in knowing about a particular individual can only be in sensory range part of the time. We would surely benefit if we could pool our images with others, and this is one of the more important benefits of language.
    When there is no spacing, people have away of creating their own psychological distance. In close quarters, one may be spared unwanted attention by erecting psychological boundaries. The philosopher John Silber once noted that strip teasers, by virtue of their calling, seem to relinquish to others the right to examine their body. “But in the blank, dead expression on the face of the dancer,” Silber wrote, “one sees the closed door, the wall, behind which she hides an intense, if limited, privacy. She wears her fig leaf on her face.” 30

    Exhibit 7
The Maybe
: woman sleeping in a glass case
    Some amount of perceptual freedom may also be conferred by others. Erving Goffman called this “civil inattention.” 31 Years ago, social psychologists discovered that people tend to look into the eyes of others less when in very close proximity than they do at greater distances. Most of us assiduously avoid looking into the eyes of our fellow passengers in a crowded elevator, and we usually grant each other more space when in cramped quarters, such as an ATM area. 32
    There is a fascination with the boundaries between public and private. In 1995, an English actress spent a week sleeping in a glass case in an art gallery in London. “It was very unsettling looking at her,” wrote art historian Lisa Tickner after she had viewed the actress, Tilda Swinton. “You couldn’t look at her as an exhibit: shewas a human being. But you couldn’t look at her as a human being without feeling guilty. This was an art gallery. We were licensed to look. But she couldn’t look back and sleeping is private: the simplest involuntary movements cast us as uneasy voyeurs.” 33 Five years later another actress, Daniela Tobar, spent two weeks in a small glass house. Like Tilda, Daniela was an exhibit at a museum in Santiago, Chile. The purpose was to stimulate debate about public and private space in Chilean life. The crowd could not get enough of Daniela—a human specimen under glass—even though she simply read, slept, cooked, and engaged in other ordinary household activities.
    We modern humans take our privacy very seriously, but once, when the ability to domicile oneself was still new, eavesdropping was amusing, and not as wrong as it seems today. In the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, there were at least ten bouts of eavesdropping per play. They added little or nothing to the dramaturgical action, suggesting that eavesdropping was inherently entertaining. 34
    These comedies make it clear that eavesdropping was ‘in” over two thousand years ago, and it has surely stayed in. In a French novel by Marivaux, published in about 1714, a young man eavesdrops on a conversation between his lover and a rival on four different occasions.