In a time long past in Americana, television relied on fiction. TV shows had actual writers that wrote actual scripts. The comedy and tragedy of the human drama was played out in a theatrical style, as actors, not real people, would plot and plunder, and yes, occasionally engage in romantic behavior, if not in hot raunchy sex.
               
“But then we got all wired up and started exchanging our own real life stories, pictures and movies,” writes Hal Niedzviecki for Playboy Magazine. “That’s when we realized we like peep culture more than pop culture. So, now we spend our time watching ourselves and one another.”
              
And what a show we got. What a show, indeed. Just ask the Elgy family.
               
Back in 2004, John Elgy received a phone call that would forever change the life of him and his family. The call was from someone who worked with the show Trading Spouses on The Country Music Channel. CMT had been referred to the Maryland family by their 15-year-old daughter who had sent in an application to the network. CMT decided the family profile was just realistic enough to make it on reality TV. After all, the “fun-loving liberal Jewish couple” have four children and seven horses. The Elgys never wanted to be on television. In fact, they never knew what Trading Spouses was in the first place.
            
“I picked up the phone,” Mr. Elgy explained, “and they said ‘This is Trading Spouses calling. And I said ‘Thank you very much, but we’re not really into that.’”
              
The $50,000 in prize money that the show gives away was enough to change their minds. Imagine, more than a year’s salary for most people just to be yourself. Well, be yourself, and have a television network take away one of your family members, in this case your wife, substitute her for another family’s wife, and film the whole thing for the world to see. As if the mere concept of a show like Trading Spouses is not kinky enough, what with the rather obvious homage to swinger culture that it portrays ever so subtly, the fact that it was presented in such a mainstream way made it a sexy wife-sharing show for the whole family! It’s very easy to see how America got hooked on peep.
               
“Fifty years ago,” says David Lyle, President of cable TV’s Fox Reality Channel, “the only confession people made was ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’”
               
Fast forward to 2009. Confession, or at least revelation, has become big business. For whatever reason, watching “real” people interact with other “real” people, and then having said “real” people get broken down and dragged through the mud has become America’s new national pastime. Like America’s old national pastime baseball, though, peep has had to juice itself up significantly to stay interesting.  Big Brother and Survivor are no loner enough to satisfy the public’s insatiable apatite for voyeurism. Those two shows might have worked just fine in 2000 when they began, but these days every single channel has some sort of show where a camera crew follows around and records just about everything someone, or group of someones, does. Gone, also, are the days when its (supposedly) regular people on reality TV.
               
Remember a show called The Simple Life? It shot all-American girl Paris Hilton straight to stardom! Well that, and a 2000 amateur sex tape featuring her and Shannen Doherty’s husband, Rick Solomon, who is about 10 years Hilton’s elder. Americans ate up the celebrity gossip news like candy, with social conservatives arguably enjoying it the most.
               
The Hilton sex tape proved two things: 1) Hilton was wise not to try for a career in porn but more importantly, 2) that we are addicted voyeurs. If Americans were not rushing out to get the DVD itself, they were constantly watching the news for the latest steamy details on it and Hilton’s liquor-fueled, sans underwear antics. People will watch anything, whether for the purposes of killing time or genuine interest or for sheer distraction, people will plant themselves in front of the high-definition panorama and vegetate whenever they get the opportunity.  Was the fact that a millionaire hotel heiress that no one had ever heard of before had had sex with the 90210 chick’s husband somehow essential to our daily lives?
              
Actually, sadly, for many people it may well have been. People used to watch sitcoms. Now, they watch scantily clad women made of plastic get drunk and tear each other’s hair out to win Bret Michaels’ undying affection. Michaels, the former lead singer of the glam band Poison, who hasn’t been interesting since he nearly killed himself in a car accident in 1994, is now famed for a reality TV series on VH-1, Rock of Love, which hasn’t been interesting since…ever.
               
All parties get what they want, though. VH-1 gets a popular reality show to add to its already fun-filled line-up, sending ratings soaring. The women on Rock of Love get their 15 minutes of fame stretched out, along with their bust lines, far as it can go, getting all the exposure a channel like VH-l can afford them. So, what if a washed-up rocker is apparently the best they can do? They’re buying a ticket for that gravy train! Finally, Bret Michaels gets both the joy that comes with a hoard of drunk women fighting over him (and what guy doesn’t want that?) and the satisfaction of knowing that, with a new generation of adoring fans, he’s no longer irrelevant to the entertainment industry.  Things are really looking up. Why just last week he nearly killed himself again, this time at the 2009 Tony Awards.
               
Peep culture can work wonders for people looking to start a career in infamy and fortune. Before she met former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, aka “Client 9”, Ashley Dupre was just a plain Jane Jersey Shore girl with big dreams of New York City spotlight. These days, thanks to Spitzer’s love of call girls, Dupre has countless fans and supporters on MySpace and Facebook rooting for her and defending her civil rights! Dupre owes the entirety of her good fortune to peep culture. It’s done more for her career than Girls Gone Wild ever has.
               
Even seemingly insignificant and innocuous events on TV can spread like an STI on a college campus. Shockwaves were sent through the world of competitive cooking when Top Chef contestants Hosea Rosenberg and Leah Cohen kissed during one episode midway through the season. Yes, that’s all. They kissed. Nothing else happened. They were each involved with other people outside the show, but that’s all. One kiss.
               
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the blog-o-sphere just exploded. Repeatedly in interviews after the show, Cohen and Rosenberg have had to answer questions not about what they’ve been doing since the show, but who they’ve been doing, as in, have they started dating. The answer is no, but never let the truth get in the way of good gossip.  Even when Cohen was featured in a piece for The New York Times this past May about the restaurant she‘s now working in, she admitted that the well wishers she meets all say pretty much the same thing: “We love you, your food’s great, how’s Hosea?”
               
Wherever there is a market, you can rest assured that mass media will be right there to feed the beast, just as it always has. The aforementioned David Lyle and his Fox Reality Channel know exactly what viewers want. Go to their website; they’ve got about 160 different reality shows to choose from. Among them is the surefire hit My Bare Lady.  On this show, American adult film starlets get sent to London’s most prestigious acting school to show that they really can act. Like act, for real, in serious feature-length films. Just like Jenna Jameson is doing now with Zombie Strippers. Porn vets Nautica Thorn, Kirsten Price, Sasha Knox and Chanel St. James all stared on My Bare Lady‘s first season. Who knows? With any luck, the young women on this show can use its positive portrayal of them to make the transition to more respectable, non-pornographic films like My Bloody Valentine 3D or Prom Night, where instead of having sex with men, they‘re just getting brutally slaughtered by them.
               
That is, essentially, what peep culture is really all about: porn that the whole family can enjoy! Actual pornography? Pfft! Only people who are comfortable with their sexuality would ever watch that kind of filth. Peep is so much cleaner, yet ooooooooh so dirtier. You’ve heard of indecent exposure? Well, this is decent exposure. Or maybe, decent enough over-exposure. Mainstream America has watered down its sexual stimuli and come to terms with its voyeuristic preoccupations, at long last, through the miracle of technology.
               
And who wants real life, anyway? The world is a sad lonely place. Life is miserable, tedious and very often boring. When it is not boring, it is usually only because we are so consumed with not having it completely fall apart. Real life has jobs and monetary worries and suffering. So why not take comfort in the great instant gratification mass media machine?  Reality TV is so appealing because it is hardly reality at all.
               
Of course, it wasn’t just sexiness that brought about the rise of peep culture. It was human need for exposure. Comedian Bill Maher even said about the right to privacy: “Oh, please, Americans don't want privacy. They want attention! They'll put a camera in their shower and show it on the Internet! To get on television, they'll marry strangers and eat a cow's rectum and ice dance with Todd Bridges. They're trying to get on a show called Big Brother!”
               
“We are a nation of exhibitionists from ‘me’ to shining ‘me,’” Maher went on to say. “And what we really fear isn't that someone's listening; it's that no one's listening. This whole country is one big desperate cry for somebody to ‘listen to me, photograph me, Google me, read my blog! Read my diary; read my memoir. It's not interesting enough? I'll make shit up!’”

So go ahead and indulge!  It’s not like you’d be the only one. “Don’t be embarrassed about exposing your private life,” Niedzviecki says. “Everyone’s doing it.”