Down With The Upskirt

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts court ruled that the state had no laws barring someone from taking a photo up a woman’s skirt. Meghan DeMaria notes the court’s judgment that those women were not “completely or partially undressed”:

If you’re wearing Spanx, a thong, or other undergarments that could constitute being “partially nude” beneath your skirt, you’re entitled to legal protection, but women who favor granny panties are out of luck. Good to know.

Doug Mataconis defends the court’s reasoning:

I agree generally with the principle that something like this should be against the law, but it seems to me that the Court was correct on the law here. As a general principle, people can only be convicted of a crime when they’ve actually committed an illegal act that is specifically defined in the law and, in this case, what Robinson was accused and convicted of did not comport with the statute under which he was charged. If the legislators in Massachusetts want to prevent this from happening again, they simply need to rewrite the law to cover the activities that Robinson was accused of committing.

In response to the case, the legislature quickly passed a bill to ban such behavior. The governor signed it this morning. Nichi Hodgson wonders if it will have any effect:

[S]omething tells me we won’t be seeing a wave of prosecutions any time soon – at least not if the backlog of domestic violence, rape and restraining order cases are anything to go by. California, the only US state to institute a revenge porn law, did make two major prosecutions since it passed a law in October, but only time will tell as to whether that was merely a PR flurry.

Hanna Rosin follows through on the revenge porn comparison:

Upskirting is like an anonymous version of “revenge porn,” the practice of posting your girlfriend’s naked pictures online if you’re pissed at her. Upskirting, by contrast, is more passive and generally not directed at any one woman in particular. Air marshals do it. Commuters do it. Players do it, like this one who posted on an upskirting site:

I’ve been upskirting chicks, mostly at clubs, for almost two years. The club I go to is a great spot, real crowded, strobe lights going, loud music, so no one notices me sitting near the edge of the dance floor and if a woman in a skirt ends up by me I stick the cam under and snap.

Now even if this douche moved to a state where upskirting was illegal, it would still be perfectly legal in most states for him to post online all the pictures he already has on his cellphone, according to Danielle Citron, a law professor who supports the effort to make revenge porn illegal. In her forthcoming book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Citron documents the way women’s lives can be ruined when someone posts a nude picture of them online that co-workers or employers or anyone else can easily look up. (One of the women she profiles had to change her name.)