Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory has a really interesting piece up this week: ”Porn in a Flash.” It’s about “upskirting,” the unsuspecting women who star in it, and how there’s not always a lot the law can do to stop it. What’s upskirting? Basically, it’s an “up the skirt” photo or video, taken by a digital Peeping Tom, who shoots surreptitiously. Cellphones enabled the genre, and websites are dedicated to upskirt shots. For the women, it’s like starring in a soft-core shoot—without their knowledge. In the past, women turned to state “Peeping Tom laws,” but, in a unique twist, because the act takes place in public, women don’t have a “right to a reasonable expectation of privacy,” spawning “a frontier of rogue pornographers from all over the world.” Clark-Flory writes: “It’s such a craze in Japan that cellphone cameras now come with a shutter sound that alerts bystanders that a photo is being taken; in that country, even the iPhone 3G features an extra-loud anti-upskirt alarm.” While Britney helped popularized the upskirt phenomenon when she flashed her, um, Britney for the paps, for other women, upskirting is digital overexposure. [Salon]
Ben2501
[report]wrote on November 27 2008 @ 07:31 pm:
I am too lazy to do the research myself, but assuming you did your homework and what you say is true and that in at least one or possibly several states a crazy judge ruled that a woman does not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” that people will not go around photographing her from a ground-level vantage point for the sole purpose of using her image to satisfy their lust without her consent, it is my humble opinion that that ruling is insane. The right to photograph in public is not substantially impaired by making an exception for upskirt photography.
Anyways, if that currently is the law, I feel it should be revisited. It should be taken all the way to the supreme court! Am I right?
bookgrrrl
[report]wrote on November 29 2008 @ 03:30 am:
this is sexy to men? invading a woman’s privacy unknowingly to get a shot of a tiny glimpse of her panties? i try really really hard, but i will never understand how (some?) men think. i’m not against porn, but stuff like this just freaks me out. ugh.
robf
[report]wrote on November 30 2008 @ 08:05 pm:
Count me as one of the men who find this not only appalling but not in the least bit titillating.