About a year ago it was quite the fad. For several months you couldn't go anywhere on the internet without running into the image of someone's rigid body, face down arms with arms their sides, in an incongruous location. The craze was completely global, and for a while people were planking everywhere, from the Pyramids of Egypt to the floor of the NY public library. The more dexterous among them could be found perilously positioned in overhead luggage bins, on top of towering billboards and high in the branches of trees. Golf courses presented creative plankers with numerous options, as well.
However like most internet memes, planking's popularity was short lived, and after spawning some interesting off-shoots, ( teapotting - owling - Tebowing) it's settled into internet oblivion where it will languish while other fads step up to enjoy their fifteen minutes. So along comes... Dogging.
In fact, dogging's been around for quite a while, but it now seems poised to reach planking-like levels of popularity. With dogging, the supposedly staid and solicitous Brits have taken things to a naughty new level, and they've got one golf course doing some emergency reputation management.
Dogging... in a nutshell... is a variation on planking that incorporates sex, nudity and some very social networking. Also included are elements of swinging and voyeurism... all in the great outdoors. As with planking, the object is to produce a photograph... or video... that will ultimately be posted to the internet. But an effective "dogging post" must illustrate a sexual situation, either with nudity or with something
By the way, in case you're wondering how this fad came to be known as dogging (I certainly was), it seems "walking the dog" was often used with unsuspecting spouses as pretext for clandestine encounters that resulted in cyber-exhibitionism. As the practice became more popular it came to be known as dogging... and the rest, as they say, is history.
