Peeping Toms

It’s 12:30am on a Saturday night.  I am telling you that for two reasons.  First, I am not at my best late at night, blog writing included.  And second, like every other weekend for the past 3 years and for the foreseeable future, I worked all day today and tomorrow I have another full day of tending to my adoring public. Therefore, Saturday is generally a pretty low key night for me.  Being tired and/or hungover at work generally makes for a less than enjoyable bartending shift.  So why, you might ask, am I awake right now?  Why am I sitting on my sofa typing this rather than lying in bed, staring at the inside of my eyeballs? Well, I’ll tell you.  Are you sitting down because this might seem a bit of a shock.  It’s because I am stewing.  Surprise!

Here’s what happened.  After working all day I came home to have a nice relaxing evening involving a bit of ice cream (AKA a stomachache waiting to happen) and watch some mindless television, enter Law and Order SVU.  I achieved all of those things, stomachache included, and decided to cap off my raucous evening with a game of suduko on my cell phone.  I changed into my pajamas.  I sat down on my bed.  My bed, as it happens, is against a wall with a window.  The window is right next to my pillows.  So there I am, on my bed, minding my own business when I hear, yelled from across the way,

You’re really sexy, baby!

I look over at the window in disbelief.  That couldn’t have been directed at me.  Fuck, I didn’t put down the blinds.  Fuck, that dickwad who always plays his shitty ass music at ridiculous volumes is home, entertaining friends and playing his shitty ass music at ridiculous volumes.  And his blinds are up.  And my bedside lamp is on.  And it’s dark outside.  Fantastic.  There is nothing quite like having someone harass you when you are in your own bedroom and on your own bed.  I mean, really?  I don’t know.  Maybe I should thank him.  Thank him for reminding me that people are gross and that I should be more militant about closing my blinds when I am in my bedroom at night lest someone creep me or, worse yet, take a photo of me and post it on the internet along with all those other photos of unsuspecting girls that are popping up in Photobucket and Reddit subthreads.  It’s a real problem, you know.  I mean, really, it’s gotten to the point where I am actually nervous about wearing skirts and dresses in this city because some perv might be walking behind me up the stairs and sneak an up-the-skirt shot and post it online for all his pervy buddies to look at.  And the thing is, it’s not like if that happened I would even know about it.*  What am I going to do, spend all my time online, image searching for photos of my underwear that may or may not exist?  By the way I have totally done that before.

There was this one time a few years ago when I was in the shower and I swear to you I saw a camera flash go off in the window across the way.  Out of the corner of my eye.  I thought about the height of my breasts relative to the height of the window and, while frantically trying to cover myself up, analyzed whether or not it was possible for the photographer to (a) get an angle of anything other than my face and neck, which, by the way, would be creepy enough and (b) to make anything out through the very steamed-up window.  And then, after I hastily jumped out of the shower and measured for a curtain (we ended up covering the window with a ratty t-shirt for quite some time) I looked online to see if photos of me had surfaced.  I don’t really want to go into what my search terms delivered to my computer screen.  I gave up after the first set of hits came back.  So there may or may not legitimately be photos of me showering on the internet which intermittently gives me the heebie-jeebies and also bursts of intense anger on a semi-regular basis.

I know that both these incidents have the common denominator of me forgetting to close my blinds.  I get it.  I will take full responsibility for my carelessness on that front.  But the thing is that in my house is the one time when I really let my guard down.  I come home from runs during which people whistle at me and catcall me.  I walk past construction sites.  I get hit on or threatened when I am at work.  I get spit on.  I choose my wardrobe based off what will make me feel the least victimized while I am going to the bank and getting my morning coffee.  And I actually worry, every time I walk up the stairs, feel my shirt go up in the back when I sit on a chair, notice the wind from the subway slightly moving the bottom of my skirt, that someone is looking and maybe snapping a photo.  My house, and specifically my bedroom, is the one place where I stop worrying.  But that’s silly.  It’s not safe here either.

*Let it be known that if I ever catch someone taking an up-the-skirt shot of me I will push that person down the stairs.

Tags: harassment, peeping Toms, Photobucket, privacy, Reddit, safety, women's issues