So we, as a society, have “peeping tom” laws to protect people who might unknowingly expose themselves to the creepy peepers of, well, creepy peepers who get their thrills from seeing and sometimes photographing strangers revealing more than they meant to.
It would seem reasonable enough to consider surreptitiously taken “upskirt” photographs as violations of peeping tom laws. But not in Massachusetts: On Wednesday, the Supreme Judicial Court in that state ruled that upskirt photographs are legally ok, as the laws there are written to apply only to protect victims who are “partially nude,” not those who are merely wearing short skirts.
In the wake of the ruling, legislators and women’s rights advocates are saying that the laws — written before cell phone camera were ubiquitous — need an update.
Naturally, this has some of the dedicated Human Rights activists in the Men’s Rights subreddit in an uproar. How dare anyone challenge their sacred right to take pictures of women’s panties on public transportation without their consent!
![Demonspawn [-1] 6 points 7 hours ago (26|20) Wearing a skirt has consequences. If we use state violence to protect women from the consequences of her choice to wear a skirt, we remove her agency. This man didn't assault her, didn't touch her... all he did was take a picture of what her choice in clothing exposed to the public. How is that criminal to the point of deserving of state violence upon him? This is saying that protecting women from the consequences of their choices in clothing is more important than men's freedom. permalink save source save give gold hide child comments [–]nigglereddit 5 points 6 hours ago (13|8) You're absolutely correct. If you wear clothing which exposes parts of your body from some angles, you have to expect that someone at that angle will see those parts of your body. You can't tell everyone not to see you from those angles because you're not comfortable with that part of your body being seen; that's ridiculous. If you're uncomfortable it is your job to cover that part of your body. permalink save source save parent give gold [–]DaNiceguy [-2] 4 points 4 hours ago (11|7) Ah but you see the wrong man saw it. That makes him a criminal, right?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/demonskirt.png?resize=575%2C448&ssl=1)
“Wearing a skirt has consequences!” What a perfect slogan for a “movement” that is about little more than tearing down half of humanity in the name of, what, a man’s right to be a peeping tom? Put it on a t-shirt, Demonspawn, and show the world the kind of creep you are.
NOTE: Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this.
UPDATE: The Massachusetts State Legislature, moving surprisingly quickly, has passed a new law explicitly banning upskirt photos; it could be signed into law by tomorrow.
@trans_commie: Yeah, I’ve noticed a general correlation between fringe-rightist Randian “libertarians” and misogyny as well…..not to mention with racism and all sorts of bigotries as well(btw, Ron Paul’s been particularly guilty of buddying up with racists himself).
Um…0_o Wow, that is an interesting article. I feel like looking up a skirt is not really on public view, though. It’s like saying that people in public bathrooms can be recorded taking a dump, in a way. You have to go out of your way to record up skirts.
Technically, if we wanted to, a lot of women could assess the ball size of the men around us if they’re wearing fitted enough pants. We could even photograph the outline of their balls through their pants and post those pics on the internet. Do women generally do that? No, because this is a gendered phenomenon that has nothing to do with what people choose to wear.
And the creepshot apologists surely would defend women’s hypothetical right to do so to the death!
…unless some women were *actually* doing that. Then it would be all evil women out to get their precious bodily fluids, or something like that.
Ally – you were very clear indeed. I’ve been trying to put the idea into words and not managing it. Women as people, our bodies an integral part of ourselves – nope, our humanity is denied and we’re just sexthings that have somehow been denied to the rightful owners, the actual living human beings, ie. men.
MRAs have no trouble identifying their bodies as themselves, but with women, no, they deny there’s a person there at all. Just some malfunctioning software at best.
It’s creepy as hell, of course, but it’s also kind of sad. What a miserable life that must be, being unable to be attracted to someone and think of them as a person at the same time.
vaiyt:
So no, they don’t think free speech is an absolute right. That’s a red herring.
If you’re talking about your typical MRA, yes. But the comment from me that you quoted was me talking about normally-not-terrible people I knew. They are not MRAs or right-wing libertarians. (Two of the three almost always vote for Democrats or Independents; with the third one, I don’t know his politics as well.)
Ally:
If they weren’t so misogynistic, they would apply property rights to mean “if it’s my body, it’s my property” (not some man’s property). Libertarianism used to be more associated with support for abortion rights, but not any more. I mean, those types of libertarians still exist, but they’ve gotten to be rare and are not “the face of the movement” in the US at least–probably in part because Libertarians have hitched their wagon to the Republican party, and a pro-choice Republican won’t make it past the primary.
I still stand by my comment. I think it applies to just about every defender of Freeze Peach I’ve met. Most of them act out of thoughtlessness rather than malice, but the net effect is the same.
vaiyt:
But you haven’t met them. With the two I know well, I’ve known them for more than a decade each. They’ve yet to make a fuss over the ability of others to criticize them, or say anything that embraces the Preferred First Speaker doctrine. By now, if they had any substantial hypocrisy on this, I think they would have shown it. No, I think their problem is not a lack of sincerity in their commitment to free speech, but a failure to truly consider the violation of rights going on in upskirt photos and realize its importance.
Concerning libertarians, I think the main problem is what people identify as “libertarian” these days. From across the Atlantic, I get the impression that these days, most US-Americans self-identifying as “libertarians” are actually just conservatives (and that also means social conservative) who especially hate paying taxes.
@Octo, pretty much. About ten years ago, the “libertarians” I knew were big on individual freedoms, and their big causes were legalizing marijuana, access to abortion, and either allowing same-sex marriage or, preferably, removing government from marriage entirely (but still supporting LGBT rights). They tended to ID as libertarian rather than liberal because they would have preferred that government-issued welfare be replaced by people caring for each other. But now, as someone said upthread, libertarianism has hitched its wagon to the far Right, whose wealthy leadership have linked the ideas of “individual freedom” and the “free market”, and used it to promote unfettered, unregulated capitalism. They’ve embraced a really Randian “selfishness is noble” way of thinking, and unfortunately convinced a certain subset of the working classes to go along with it.
Over here, the casual definition of “libertarian” is “fascist who likes to smoke pot”.
closetpuritan – I can’t get my head around how anyone could consider vouyerism a free speech matter at all. What has violating a woman’s bodily privacy by angling a device to photograph her genitals, without her consent, got to do with freedom to express ideas? Would they say groping is a freedom of speech matter? Or flashing? What about the creep on the trains here a few years back who was targeting women with long hair and cutting it off? This is about the continuum of sexual assault, not some supposed violation of a dude’s right to open his trap and talk shit without the gummint locking him up for it.
@kittehserf:
Thanks for weighing in on the Aussie laws!
Basically, they think that we might accidentally ban public photography. OK, I’m making fun of them a bit, but the two I know well and know offline are worried that certain types of public photography might be made illegal. Vague stuff about “what if we need to film police who are doing something bad?” (I’m struggling to think of a case where you’d need to film police where their underwear would be exposed and you’d be filming “under or around the person’s clothing”, as the Massachusetts law puts it.)
The other one, who I don’t know as well and don’t know offline but have read a fair amount of his comments online since he’s a regular on Alas!, has comment #104 here. He actually doesn’t seem to be coming from a free-speech perspective so much as a “make as few things illegal as possible” perspective. He came up with one hypothetical that featured an unsympathetic victim of photography/sympathetic perpetrator, but honestly, that just convinces me even more that these guys see upskirt photos as kind of a trivial thing, since no one’s arguing, “Some victims of vandalism had it coming to them because their ex did it out of revenge for abuse!”
Funny, for a bunch of guys who are so “I, me, mine” in every way, the concept of personal space somehow doesn’t apply if the person is a woman or girl. I guess the “logical” corollary of that notion would be that female persons…are not persons at all. Therefore, they should have no personal space, and therefore there is no such thing as respect or violation where the space they happen to occupy is concerned. They’re just objects. Playthings. Things to be covertly photographed and giggled over on creep-shot fora.
Damn, this flibbertigibbertarian man-logic comes up short in so many, many ways…
Yeah, filming the police doing bad things is already illegal in some places (I’m thinking Chicago, but don’t have the energy to check. (Tab, type, type… God, it’s exhausting!)
It sounds suspiciously like all the “But what if…” arguments that are trotted out in protest of anti-harassment rules at cons. “But what if she really wants to have sex with me, and just can’t verbally consent because of secret control of by the illuminati / ancient alien / masons? Then, you know, I might not get laid!”
PS: Here in Canada, women did not legally become persons until…1929. (Yes, really.)
Personally, concerning public photography, I think that in general, going beyond just creepshots and issues of lacking respect for women, people’s personality rights should weigh more than people’s right to take and publish those photographs. That is, if a person’s face is clearly visible on your photo, you contact that person if you can and ask for permission to publish the photo, or at least take the photo down if that person then complains. But then, for my Central European tastes, personality rights are a bit underweighed in the Anglo-Saxon world in general…
I have a solution! People can take as many photos of others in public spaces as they want, as long as they get the subject to sign a release form. That way we’re not killing photography and free speech, oh noes! We’re just giving regular people the same rights that professional models already have.
I mean, if you believe that women are consenting to upskirt photos by wearing a skirt, you should be confident enough to tell them so to their faces and ask them to sign the form for you, right? What are you, some sort of a coward?
Speaking of models and overstepped boundaries, this is somewhat germane. (Warning: also extremely gross.)
Exactly. They implicitly deny that we’re living individuals all the time.
Yet, with the usual scrotosphere logic, they’re acknowledging it, because they get off on causing distress and fear, on imposing their will on women, preferably in a sexual way. We’re real enough to fuck and torment, but not real enough to have any rights in the matter.
This case is actually a pretty good example of Libertarian-style theoretical liberty versus actual freedom. Without a law against upskirt photos, there are fewer actions restricted; people are both free to wear skirts and free to take upskirt photos. In practice, it leads to many women “voluntarily” losing their freedom to wear skirts because if they do wear skirts they have a relatively high risk of being targeted for upskirt photos.
Bina:
Ugh, that guy. Didn’t he do the same to an underaged model?
And why is he still getting work? (Sadly, this is a rhetorical question).
I love how sexually objectifying women is treated as something new and “edgy.”
Personally, concerning public photography, I think that in general, going beyond just creepshots and issues of lacking respect for women, people’s personality rights should weigh more than people’s right to take and publish those photographs. That is, if a person’s face is clearly visible on your photo, you contact that person if you can and ask for permission to publish the photo, or at least take the photo down if that person then complains. But then, for my Central European tastes, personality rights are a bit underweighed in the Anglo-Saxon world in general…
In a way, I agree with you, Octo. It seems wrong that you can photograph someone without their permission, if you’re trying to photograph that specific person, and then profit from the photo or put it up on People Of Walmart to mock. But I also feel like you should be able to take pictures of friends, etc. who’ve given their consent to be photographed even if a bunch of other people are milling around in the spot where you want to photograph them. And I think it would hurt journalism (both the traditional kind and the citizen-journalist kind) if you had to get permission from all members of, say, a protest and a counter-protest and the cops around it and the people just walking by. (Law enforcement officers pretty much never want their images published, in part because some people target them simply because they’re LEOs.) And it also wouldn’t stop people from taking ‘headless fatty’ photos, since the faces aren’t visible in those.
(I have had one stranger that I know of take a photo of me, I suspect in order to mock what I was wearing but possibly for his fetish collection, though I wasn’t in a Walmart. I wasn’t exactly happy about it. I tried to give him a glare, but he was studiously avoiding eye contact. I kind of wish I’d said something, but I guess I wasn’t sure how to react.)
Ah yes, libertarianism: men’s freedom to harm women is much more important than women’s freedom from being harmed.