Folks sure do some funny things to make other folks think they're hip.

"Toothing" seems to have been a hoax. At least, that's what everybody's stumbling over their shoelaces to declaim. ("Dogging", though -- which differs from toothing in kind only insofar as it doesn't have a "fake" name -- is apparently real. Unless Ste Curran and Simon Byron are going to claim credit for that, too. "Yes, you see, all hedonism is a great hoax. Nobody actually has anonymous or exhibitionist sex. We made that up and you're all rubbish for thinking otherwise.")

What interests me is not the feeding-frenzy around the original "hoax" so much as the feeding-frenzy around its exposure, as people and institutions race to minimize the damage to their egos.

I use scare-quotes on "hoax" because, while I don't doubt the story about how the term came to be, I also don't doubt that people do it. Because, of course, the fact that somebody made it up has more or less nothing to do with whether people actually did it -- after, or even before. But it's officially a hoax, now; ergo, anyone who "believes" it ever happened is a fool. (And, apparently, anyone who dares notice that the ironists behind are prancing about naked is twice the fool. C'est la vie.)

There are some interesting things that often (if not usually) happen during the coarse of a big hoax:

• The hoaxers have a clever idea that they think is sufficiently outrageous that people ought not believe it. Anyone who did, would be a fool, and therefore would merit ridicule.
• In a successful hoax, the pranksters then expend no small effort actively duping at least a few people into going along. Documentation of this will later be used to beef up their credentials as Clever Blokes©.
• People start actually doing the hoaxed thing -- or treat the hoax as sufficiently real that they start re-enacting it. (Making it, like, not fake, eh?)
• The hoaxer claims credit, usually implying that all the buzz after the fact was entirely totally his doing, and therefore totally fake. (This is done, of course, to make the hoaxer feel important.)
• The media outlets and members of the public who got taken in on the original hoax stumble all over themselves in the rush to discredit any reports of the hoax-activity. (This is done, of course, to alleviate the sense of foolishness that comes of being "taken in.")

I personally never "bit" on toothing in the sense of blogging about it or expressing moral outrage, etc. That's not becuase I immediately recognized how improbable it was -- quite the opposite. It was because I personally never found it that implausible. Aside from the fact that bluetooth messaging has had well-documented and unexpected use in ad hoc social networking [pdf], I've seen enough amateur hedonists casting about aimlessly in the "culture of death" that toothing doesn't seem that improbable to me -- certainly not in the realm of "throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you."

I always reckoned the success rates for toothing to be in territory that a party-bar wingman (among the most troublesome of amateur hedonists) could wrap his sodden cognition around: "One in thirty, those are pretty good odds, bra!" Toothing would have poorer odds than one in thirty, to be sure; but the effort involved is less, too. Technology decreases the marginal cost. And as toothing became more "popular" (i.e., the "hoax" spread more widely), a greater proportion of amateur hedonists would leave their bluetooth open, and there'd be a substantial likelihood that toothing would actually work.

And in certain settings, it would most likely work really well. Think bathhouses....

So for me, what's really interesting is that in buying into the "toothing is a hoax" meme -- in accepting that the idea of anonymous sex mediated by text messaging was only ever always merely a hoax cooked up by a couple of bored wankers -- we miss the opportunity to learn whether the activities described as "toothing" ever actually happened. That would be kind of fascinating: Where? How frequently? What were its etiquettes? What did it do to the spread of STDs?

I expect that we would find it's done in dark places with loud music and lots of intoxicants, by people who don't then go home and blog about it. Making it part of that world outside that hip young blogospherians like Byron and Curran often seem ill-acquainted with.