On the exhibition: “L’Intimité, de la chambre aux réseaux sociaux” (Intimacy, from the bedroom to social networks), at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris
This exhibition, which ran from October 2024 to April 2025, is a fine opportunity to question the new relationships to intimacy in our lives, in the age of social networks where it seems to be distorted on all sides… after having been won at such a high price !
The word appeared in France in the 18th century. It comes from the Latin intimus, “what is innermost in us”, and by extension designates everything relating to private life. However, it was above all in the 19th century that the notion of intimacy took hold, with the emergence of a bourgeois class that separated professional life from family life, and male activities from female activities. Broadly speaking, the man was in business, while the woman reigned over domestic life. The interior layout of homes was gradually transformed. After the bedrooms of wives and their husbands were separated in the 18th century, the 19th century saw the emergence of the notion of the marital bedroom, and of the children’s bedroom. Today the bedroom has become a living space used just as much for sleeping as for working, entertaining oneself and relaxing, with ever wider beds and comfortable furnishings. The aspiration to have a space of one’s own, “a room of one’s own” as Virginia Woolf wrote, is gaining ground, prompting new architectural layouts for married and family life.
Private toilets also came late in history. In his recent book “Au fond du couloir à gauche”[i], Serge Tisseron tells us that in Roman times, men sometimes found themselves, dozens at a time, in latrines in which seats with a hole cut in them were placed side by side and allowed people to converse, trade or debate! The baths were abandoned and fell into ruin at the end of the 5th century. Everyone then relieved themselves where they lived, often in the open. In the 18th century, the threshold of modesty gradually rose, creating the need for toilets hidden from the public: urinating in public into a chamber pot, a privy or a commode would soon no longer be acceptable. But it was Alexander Cumming’s invention of the S-bend in 1775 that made possible the hygienic revolution of toilets and went hand in hand with the development of water closets (literally “water cupboards”).
Washing and beauty also gradually escaped the public gaze : while 18th-century women were surrounded by servants and visitors as they washed and dressed, the 19th-century bourgeois woman bathed unaided in a sheet-metal or zinc bathtub that could be moved around the home. The bathroom appeared after 1850, with the arrival of running water, but only became truly widespread after 1950.
The representation of sexualities, for its part, has been subject to multiple forms of censorship : images exist, and spread widely in particular in the 18th century, known as the libertine century, but they are entirely subject to the male gaze, that is, the man’s gaze on the woman. It was only in the 20th century that other representations developed, including all forms of sexuality, and a crossing of male and female gazes on eroticism and sexual practices : we think of the homosexual couples shown in bed by the English painter David Hockney from the late 1960s, or the series by the American photographer Nan Goldin in the early 2000s on couples among her friends making love. While these representations do not account for the situation experienced by each person in their difference according to their environment and social background, they nonetheless constitute major sociological developments in the acceptance of the diversity of choices in the intimate sphere.
But it is the appearance of new technologies that has considerably altered a whole society’s relationship to the question of intimacy. Mobile phones, from the 1990s, brought private conversation into public space. The first French reality TV programme, Loft Story, in the early 2000s, with a group of 12 young adults filmed live 24 hours a day, turned us into spectators of other people’s intimacy. Connected technologies no longer guarantee that everyone’s intimacy is preserved, at any moment. And finally social networks hit this question head-on : what to show, to whom and at what moment, in a frantic race towards ever greater sharing of intimacy. In 2023, nearly 80% of French people were subscribed to social networks, on which they spent an average of two hours a day. Showing oneself, not to one person or a few close people, but to the greatest number, is the concern. Showing oneself, yes, but not just any old way. For it is indeed – at least ideally – a constructed intimacy. This is how content creators put it :
“ Our social networks openly stage the intimate. Our relationship and our feelings are real, but the way of presenting them to the public is thought through. ” (Alice Barbier and Jean-Sébastien Roques / @jaimetoutcheztoi)
“ I explore the intimate with finesse. My Instagram is a diary in which private life and public life mingle. I open up to my community, revealing my intimacy and my daily life with depth, the part that I care about sharing. ” (Léna Mahfouf, known as Léna Situations / @lenamahfouf)
“There is a form of collective intimacy that I love. That wonderful moment when people look each other in the eye and say: I’m going through this too, and I understand you. It’s as if this exposure came to repair something in you.” (Amal Tahir / @amaltahir)
“ What to show ? Perhaps I say this because it suits me : intimacy is irreducible. People have often told me that I reveal mine, but I have rather noticed that the more you shine a light on yourself, the more a shadow follows you and grows. This shadow (…) is our intimacy. ” (Sophie Fontanel / @sophiefontanel)
“ Keeping part of one’s private life away from view is fundamental. It is a delicate balance to maintain, where each thing shared is thought out to enrich the bond with my community while protecting what should remain protected. ” (Carla Ginola / @Carla_ginola)
“I am mostly interested in the intimate used as a pronoun, because it carries the power of first-person narrative : as if to cry out I exist and you will not have my shame ! This I moves away from any vulnerability because it turns into we as soon as my words are made public. (…) So I wonder : what is the intimate when what happens there concerns us all ? ” (Camille Aumont Carnel / @jemenbatsleclito)
Among influencers, who make a profession of this sharing of intimacy, the matter is entirely controlled and skilfully orchestrated. For some it is a militant banner, for others a near-philosophical reflection on the private/public distinction; it can “repair”, “enrich” and create bonds. But what can be said of all the teenagers who do not so finely gauge all the stakes of these practices, and who get caught out in the great game of who will show the most ?
In 2001, Serge Tisseron[ii] proposed calling “extimacy” the movement that pushes everyone to put forward a part of their intimate life, both physical and psychological. But he also specifies that intimacy and extimacy are inseparable from a third term : self-esteem. And that this first needs a space of intimacy in order to be built.
Given the omnipresence of social networks in our lives, there is an important stake in reflecting on the conditions of their introduction and use among the youngest, and in running genuine education programmes in our schools and out-of-school settings on the question of intimacy and the limits that its sharing must meet. Intimacy that is shared with no one is not a happy one. But intimacy displayed without awareness is devastating. History has much to teach us in this respect, so as not to distort too quickly and too forcefully an intimacy so dearly won over the centuries.
[i] TISSERON S. (2025), Au fond du couloir à gauche, un musée populaire de la différence des sexes, Ed. Armand Colin
[ii] TISSERON S. (2001), L’intimité surexposée, Hachette Littérature
