The big story over on Gawker today is headlined, “‘F*ck Bitches Get Leid,’ the Sleazy Frat Emails of Snapchat’s CEO.” The post features emails obtained by Gawker written by Evan Spiegel when he was in college at Stanford, where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. They feature such scandalous things as this sentence found in an email to some of his fellow frat bros: “Hope at least six girls sucked your dicks last night.” In other words, the whole thing’s pretty tame in my opinion. Typical frat boy stuff. You can read all of the post here.
To his credit, Spiegel has vehemently apologized for the things he wrote in the emails.
I’m obviously mortified and embarrassed that my idiotic emails during my fraternity days were made public. I have no excuse. I’m sorry I wrote them at the time and I was jerk to have written them. They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women.
My point is writing this post is to highlight how happy I am to have not had the internet around as a thing when I was a teenager and in college in the mid-90s. Most people are idiots at that point in their lives — I was an especially huge one — and to have multiple means of documenting thoughts and feelings digitally forever for anyone to see is just something I’m glad I didn’t have at my disposal. Yes, it sucked to have to go to the library to do research, but at least I don’t have to worry about an email in which I shared details of a sexual encounter with my friends — and I most certainly would have done such things — popping up years later to embarrass the hell out of me.
Passing notes in class was so much more fun anyway.