An option, not an audit

In no small amount of irony, I’m about to write a post about a “perfect crime” that I would appear to have gotten away with – until I decided to write this post about it. But what can I say, my dear viewers? You deserve my innermost thoughts, even when they implicate me.

So my wife was away in Sydney for a couple nights last week, and on the second night, I belatedly remembered that I usually use her trips out of town as an opportunity to watch a thing that I wouldn’t feel comfortable watching while she was there, or that would just invite too many questions. I don’t necessarily mean something titillating, although sometimes I do, and in this case, you will see that I do. Sometimes it’s just watching a movie where if my wife were here, and she walked through the room, she’d say (or at least think) “Why the hell are you watching this?” Sometimes easiest just never to have that question come up at all.

I didn’t have a specific choice in mind that fit this description Friday night, so I went digging for one. I typed the word “erotic” into the search area in Stan, our Australian streaming service, and indeed, it came back with a bunch of choices that seemed to kind of plunge beneath the surface of what they usually promote on the site. I felt like I’d unlocked a secret door.

Now, I didn’t want to watch just any tawdry, sleazy movie. There’s porn if that’s really the type of thing I’m looking for. But it’s interesting sometimes to watch classic instances of tawdry sleaze, ones that may have actually had some level of artistic credibility at the time they were released, or have developed that in the years since. As an example, one time she was out of town last year, I watched the notorious Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses, which is, for all intents and purposes, pornography. And which I really hated.

There was a good candidate on Stan: The Story of O. I had heard this whispered about when people talk about well-known smut, and I was thinking about queueing it up when I called an audible at the last minute. Maybe it was the memory of In the Realm of the Senses, which was also made in the early 1970s, but at the last minute I changed horses.

“Just any tawdry, sleazy movie” it is.

The choice I pivoted to was The Receptionist from 2016, as you will see from the poster above. I won’t go into why I selected it, but this poster certainly had something to do with it.

It’s not a very good movie, but neither is it as bad as you might think. It was directed by a woman, Jenny Lu, and in the end, that could certainly explain why I didn’t get the titillation I admit I was seeking. I knew it was about the receptionist in an illegal massage parlor, but I didn’t guess that it would be more of an exposé of illegal massage parlors and the women who feel like they are forced to work there because life didn’t go their way. And it has some nice moments, some honest moments, examining this subject matter.

In the end, though, it was a total bait and switch. I ended up watching a reputable movie which actually had nary a moment of female nudity in it. A reputable movie with a disreputable poster.

A disreputable poster that was now in my Stan viewing history.

It was a problem I anticipated before I even started, which is why I first looked on iTunes (though didn’t know what I was looking for) and Kanopy before settling on Stan. I don’t share a watch history with my wife on those other platforms, but do on Stan. However, we watch Stan a lot less, so I thought it was a better option than Netflix, anyway.

Now, I should remind you that I was not really trying to “get away with something.” More than anything, I was trying to avoid an immediate moment of embarrassment or an implied question by my wife walking through the room. I don’t actually have a problem with her discovering that I watched The Receptionist while she was out of town, and I think the very existence of this post should be proof of that.

But if I could avoid it …

I thought about doing some artificial viewing on Stan in order to push The Receptionist down in the watch history. Maybe I couldn’t purge it, but I could push it off the first page of most recent viewings, if she ever landed on that page. In fact, I had a fairly easy way of doing it. My younger son watches a show called Henry Danger, and there are about 30 episodes of Henry Danger after the most recent few things we watched, each of which assumes its own distinct slot in the viewing history. I could have just gone in and pressed play on those episodes consecutively until enough of them had pushed The Receptionist into the nether regions (pun intended) of the viewing history.

It turns out, it was much easier than that.

I don’t know why this only occurred to me belatedly, but Stan makes it very easy for you to delete something from your viewing history, kind of a streaming service equivalent of deleting your browsing history. But you don’t even have to delete the whole history. You can just go into the history, choose the movie you want to remove, and remove it. There’s a button that says REMOVE right there.

Fifteen seconds later, it was done.

“And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling blog post writers.”

So why did I write about this?

Because it occurred to me that a viewing history on a streaming service is an option, not an audit. And now you finally understand the title of this post.

I had always assumed that a viewing history was intended as some kind of irrefutable record of what has been watched on the service, something that would hold up in a court of law. You could see the value of that type of thing if you wanted to know what your kids had been watching, and I’m sure you can actually set it so that titles cannot be removed, just for that purpose.

But for normal adults who just want to get away with watching a softcore skin flick while their partner is out of town, it’s only an option to have an unmolested viewing history. You can tweak it how you see fit. I don’t suppose you can add movies to it, not without pressing play, but subtracting? Sure, why not?

And if my wife does learn about my viewing of The Receptionist by reading this post, well, more power to her. She’s not a frequent reader of my blog so I doubt she will. But better she finds out about it this way, through a transparent dialogue open to the whole world, than by wondering why a viewing of a softcore skin flick – that’s actually really not a softcore skin flick – is buried deep behind 30 episodes of my younger son’s favorite TV show.