Your bag is empty.
You’re scrolling through Zillow on a Tuesday morning, when you start thinking about a woman from 2019. As you check out houses and condos out of spite, you remember you kept your sex tape with her.
You only have one video. But should you have? When you hit play, the answer, at least in that moment, is yes.
You’re taken back to that hotel room, with sunlight peaking through curtains that cost more than your Audi, and her black Agent Provocateur underwear on the nightstand. It was her birthday. You had never filmed anything in your life—not a concert, not your rescue dog eating a bee, nothing. But your iPhone was leaning against the room-service ice bucket, and she was on her knees on the king bed looking back at you over her shoulder. About four minutes in, she looks straight into the lens and you can watch her decide to let you keep it.
You’ve rewound that look more than anything she does with her mouth, all while Pink Floyd played in the background. You have watched this thing maybe 40 times, and 30 of those were for David Gilmour’s guitar. The other 10 were for the camera work. You covered the bases here.
Her on top with her hands flat on your chest and her hair falling forward until there’s no face anymore; just hair and the sound she makes.
You are behind her, the phone getting the whole long curve of her spine, the headboard matching up with the bass from the song.
You were inside another human being and you still got the framing right, which is more than most men manage at their kid’s birthday party. At one point, you mutter something into her ear—some late-night trash—and the iPhone mic caught it. You have zero memory of saying it and would deny it under oath to a federal judge, but she still laughs. Near the end, she pulls the phone off the ice bucket and holds it over the two of you, as she stares down at you for the last 30 seconds. You didn’t ask for that, and you sure as hell have not recovered from it.
That’s what you keep. Not her. God, she’d hate that. You keep it the way you’d keep a Polaroid of a wave you caught at El Matador in Malibu by dumb luck.
Every guy I know has one of these, and every guy I know goes dead silent about it this time of year, when there’s a woman asleep next to him who would make him delete it in a heartbeat. He knows she’d try, too.
There is nothing wrong with keeping those videos. You’ve already done it. You’ve been there. You fucked that person. That was before. Deleting the MP4 doesn’t un-fuck her. It just means you threw something out because somebody asked you to, and you’ll do it again.
What’s on your phone is nobody’s business—not your girlfriend’s or your wife’s or mine (unless you want to slide into my DMs for me to judge your color grading). You had the videos when she met you. She thought you were hot anyway. If she wants them scrubbed, it has zero to do with the woman in the video, who is a stranger now and probably sells luxury real estate in Studio City. It’s about getting in there and moving the mid-century modern furniture around, and you know how you feel when somebody moves your furniture.
Nobody has ever been talked out of what’s on their phone. The phone just becomes the thing you fight about at 1 a.m. instead of what you’re actually fighting about, which is that one of you wanted a slightly different person.
If you think you’re doing something bad, get rid of it. You already know. If you don’t feel guilty about having it, keep it and keep it for whatever reason you want. It might even be good for the woman you’re with now. There’s room for both in one phone.
