In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

In the interests of the community.

piny

I conducted an impromptu interview with one of those men who visit the Dyke March to take candid photographs of topless and lightly clad women who may or may not be kissing. His photographs are for historical purposes. They are definitely not for him to jerk off to–in fact, that suggestion made him rather indignant. They will be transferred to his own private archive and will not be uploaded to a website of any kind (whew!). Perhaps someday they will become a book. His goal is to record the community and its transformations over time. He has no prurient interest whatsoever. His documentary eye seems especially attracted to the bare skin of nubile lesbians only because he has a scholarly interest in tattoos and their symbology.

41 thoughts on In the interests of the community.

  3. He seems like an honest, decent fellow. Maybe we should send him a card or some flowers to let him know how much we appreciate all of his hard work within the lesbian community.

  5. In the year 2,817 b.o.m., when lesbians are long extinct, future archaeologists will thank this diligent laborer for providing proof that these mythical beasts did, in fact, have boobs. (With tattoos.) (And nipple rings.)

  6. I always found legal frameworks that allow non-consensual photography broken. (It’s illegal in some countries, usually with certain exceptions for “public figures” and such.)

    That said, I guess my expectation would be, You can look, but you can’t touch. I mean, I’m not sure what the expectation is here, for someone to bare their breasts without anybody noticing? But then — being from Europe and stupidly commenting before coffee — I acknowledge that I’m probably missing the point entirely. My intuitive approach would probably be to emphasize sameness rather than difference, you know, turn up, be visible as a certain percentage of the population, but be otherwise really really unremarkable, so people will think, “What, so that’s all? These guys are as boring as we are. Lesbians on mainstreet. Film at eleven.” You know, make it hard for them to other the group you represent, whereas some of the CSD displays seem to project “These people are just too gaudy, it’s just not lagom, I wonder what other social mores they’ve rejected”. Whether that’s an “evolution rather than revolution” approach, or just really hypocritical: your call. Or maybe, it’s just lagomhet.

  7. I’m not sure what the expectation is here, for someone to bare their breasts without anybody noticing?

    Well, there’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s just say noticing it != taking pictures of it. That much should be obvious, I hope.

  8. His documentary eye seems especially attracted to the bare skin of nubile lesbians only because he has a scholarly interest in tattoos and their symbology.

    Well, that squicks me right out.

  9. I always found legal frameworks that allow non-consensual photography broken. (It’s illegal in some countries, usually with certain exceptions for “public figures” and such.)

    Well, skeezy characters like that photographer aside, I would see a big problem with that. I find the idea that you can’t take pictures of people in a parade to be exceedingly odd.

    Not only that, it would make outdoor photography rather hard to do. If you have to get everybody in front of a landmark you are trying to photograph to either give you permission or step out of the way, you’ll never shoot another picture. My father was actually assaulted by a street sweeper in Paris in front of his 3 then sub eight year old children because the guy objected to being in the frame of some pictures he was shooting. I think to give everyone that guy’s expectations re: picture taking would be rather chilling to photography and journalism.

    That said, there has to be a dividing line of where it is or isn’t OK. A parade/march, however, is not anywhere close to that dividing line.

  10. An “impromptu interview”? Congratulations on one of the best euphemisms I’ve read in a long time.

  11. Is this is reference to some post I don’t remember, or just something that happened today?

    Technically, for the most part, it is legal to take picures of anything in public (ie: not peaking in windows). However, it is not necessarily legal to publish them, especially if you are making money off it and the person could be recognized (so I THINK its legal to just get a generic tattoo or a pair of hands or a breast, but I am not entirely clear on that). On the other hand, its legal to publish them as news in a newspaper or on a news program. I think it is always legal to jerk off to them, but not to publish them for others to jerk off too, though I am not sure that’s really a law.

  13. Actually, Jennifer, this is one of those rare instances in which either/neither “to” and/or “too” would be correct. I think even both would work. Sorry, the inner grammarian’s fascinated by that sentence.

  14. Legality is a red herring. It’s the way he used his legal right to take photographs only of hawt lesbians making out. That, my friends, is perfectly legal and perfectly skeevy. Let me guess – he had a point and shoot number (the camera, that is) that could operated with one hand (still the camera)?

  15. What a helpful fellow! I wish we had more like him a bit north. Why, I forget what my partner looks like naked, day to day! If only I had a coffee-table book of archived photos of nude lesbians, it might jog my memory. That sounds perfectly legitimate to me.

    What a brave scholar, doing such risky field research.

  16. Bruce from Missouri–since you seem to be missing the point so spectacularly: the issue is not about whether it’s ok to take pictures of people at a public event. The issue is male photographers who take photos of lesbians (either unclad or scantily clad) for their own prurient interests, but who justify it by saying they’re doing it for “research” or some other noble, disinterested purpose.

    Now can we get past the red herring of taking photos of people in public to the real point of the post?

  17. His documentary eye seems especially attracted to the bare skin of nubile lesbians only because he has a scholarly interest in tattoos and their symbology.

    Does he happen to photograph men with tattoos also?

  18. That would be a dissipation of his talents. I’m sure he generously allows other photographers to chronicle that segment of the community.

  19. Bruce,
    That’s in fact how those laws tend to work; you can shoot large groups of people, or landmarks where a person passing may be a minor detail; you can not take a picture of an individual (unless they’re a “public figure”), or edit a group picture to show only that person and then publish that. That said, I simply don’t get that “But I bought this expensive camera” whine. So how is that my problem? Getting your hands on a camera is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement for taking pictures of people. Just because you have a car doesn’t mean you may drive (much less anywhere you please), and just because you have a gun doesn’t mean you may carry (much less shoot random people), either. What sort of funky entitlement is that? Getting the camera, the car, the gun is the beginning of your responsibility, not the end.

    Jack,
    I think we agree on the taking pictures bit. What’s a good summary for the rest, “People will masturbate to whatever they damn well please, and that’s OK, as long as they aren’t so unpleasantly obvious about it”?

    kactus
    I’ll admit that I too first latched onto the “how were the pictures obtained” bit. I’m generally more bothered by lack of consent than by the fact that yes, people will masturbate. Assuming they don’t do it right there and then, or tell me all about it later.

  20. Wow, what a couple of spectacular missings of my point there, Kactus and Azundris….

    Kactus: I believe I said in the first line of my post that it was skeevy behavior. I was just answering Azundris’s first comment about the legalities and whatnot, and why you couldn’t really ban the TAKING of the pictures without a chilling effect. PUBLISHING them is a whole different story.

    Azundris: All I was really saying was that there is obviously a line to be drawn about when it’s OK to take pictures of people. We may disagree on where that line is, it seems to me to be obvious that parades and marches are easily on the legal side of that, even if the photographer is a skeevy perv.

    Quite simply, whether your Irish-American, GLBT, African-American, a Shriner, Italian-American, or whatever, you probably shouldn’t do stuff that you would be embarassed to have immortalized when you are at a march or parade. They are public events, and there are plenty of people with cameras, and I would think that many marchers/paraders are happy to have the cameras there. Amongst all the cameras that are there for journalistic purposes, there may be some there for pervy purposes. As long as they don’t publish, and don’t get right up close to you, there isn’t much to be done. I’m sure that the organisers of the Dyke March would rather have a few pervs in the croud than ban cameras (and publicity) completely. Most people don’t do marches to be ignored.

    That doesn’t make what they are doing right, but it doesn’t make it illegal either.

  21. Uh, again, piny’s point wasn’t about the legalities, but about an idiot taking pictures for his own jack-off pleasure who felt the need to pretend (perhaps even to himself) that he was simply Recording Important Events, like a journalist and stuff.

    And I rather doubt anyone in the Dyke March would be “embarassed to have immortalized” their being in the Dyke March, topless or otherwise.

  23. “My intuitive approach would probably be to emphasize sameness rather than difference, you know, turn up, be visible as a certain percentage of the population, but be otherwise really really unremarkable, so people will think, “What, so that’s all? These guys are as boring as we are. Lesbians on mainstreet. Film at eleven.” You know, make it hard for them to other the group you represent,”

    Doesn’t work.

    You can be sitting at a bus stop, as boring as a brick, and men are still furtively looking for somewhere to run to so they can masturbate. If you’re lucky they don’t just start right there. If you’re really lucky they also don’t have to run up and ask “Are you two LESBIANS?”.

    God forbid they wank while thinking about straight women. Oh lord, no, the humanity!

  24. And I rather doubt anyone in the Dyke March would be “embarassed to have immortalized” their being in the Dyke March, topless or otherwise.

    i don’t know about that. i mean, i wouldn’t be embarrassed to have my presence “immortalized” so to speak, but i would feel incredibly uncomfortable with someone taking a photograph of me specifically (as opposed to just being in the background or part of a crowd), nude, scantily clad or fully dressed, without my permission. granted, if you decide to take off your clothes in public it’s a risk you take, but that doesn’t make it in any way appropriate or not invasive.

    i actually dealt with an instance of this yesterday at the dyke march– a friend of mine was topless and approached by a guy who started to go on about how beautiful she was and how great it was that she was so open with her body and could he take her picture? she was thoroughly sketched out. i think it comes back to that idea of a person thinking that the way you look/are dressed or undressed is in some way for them, and that they are entitled to stare, make comments or in this case, photograph you without your consent.

  25. I post regularly at a photography site, and it’s supposed to be a serious and really technical-centered photography site, but it is teeming with sexist perverts. They really just ruin it for me. I can’t tell you how many times I have come across photographs of women in bikinis at the beach, being photographed without their knowing it. When I called out one guy for photographing a woman’s behind without her knowing it he replied that the woman obviously deserves to be photographed in such a way because “she is flaunting it.” Figures :/

  26. Quite simply, whether your Irish-American, GLBT, African-American, a Shriner, Italian-American, or whatever, you probably shouldn’t do stuff that you would be embarassed to have immortalized when you are at a march or parade. They are public events, and there are plenty of people with cameras, and I would think that many marchers/paraders are happy to have the cameras there. Amongst all the cameras that are there for journalistic purposes, there may be some there for pervy purposes. As long as they don’t publish, and don’t get right up close to you, there isn’t much to be done. I’m sure that the organisers of the Dyke March would rather have a few pervs in the croud than ban cameras (and publicity) completely. Most people don’t do marches to be ignored.

    Quite simply, what mythago said. I’m pretty sure that most if not all of the women at the march–as well as the ones on this thread–are well aware of the consequences of having visibly female bodies within shooting distance of random and not-so-random perverts. Yes, clearly, the sensible short-term solution is to not be topless in public–just as the solution in other, related contexts is to not leave one’s drink unattended or go off with a stranger without notifying a friend. This does not mean that this man is not an absolute asshole, or that he bears no responsibility for contributing to the culture of shame that makes women feel like big ol’ sluts for wearing camisoles to a summer picnic. In a society with fucked-up mores, behavior is not excusable merely because it is expected.

    Moreover, “don’t publish” is a complicated concept in this era of flickr accounts.

    And no, kactus. I’m being tongue-in-cheek, but this is exactly what happened. I noticed a guy taking shots of any woman showing skin, especially the topless ones (with or without tattoos). He was obviously there by himself, and didn’t know or speak to any of the women he photographed. I figured what the hell, and I went up to him and asked him what his purpose in taking them was. I might have been a little peremptory, but I wasn’t abusive. And these were the reasons he gave; “historical purposes” is verbatim.

  29. Perv is as Perv does… fuck it. Can’t stop them. Look- Photgraph-Jerk- Whatever- but noooo touchy.

    Piny and Mythago have it right. Who cares what assholes do? If a woman likes her body or doesn’t is HER business only!

  30. Bruce,

    He wasn’t immortalizing the parade. He was collecting wank material. It’s not about being embarrassed by one’s actions in public. It’s about creepy wanker guys who hide behind lame-o excuses about historical purposes. The solution is not “Don’t do anything you’ll be embarrassed to have seen later.” The solution is “Don’t be a creepy wank collector.”

  31. Piny and Frumious,,,, I agree with most if not all of what you say on a moral level. I just don’t see how it is preventable in public places or events.

  32. When jut about everyone has a camera phone and can take photos whenever they want, it’s not at all preventable. It can (and is) happening anywhere- at parades, at the beach, at the mall, at the park or playground…there is no such thing as privacy anymore.

    Personally, I’d laugh at how pathetically desperate an act it was.

  33. His documentary eye seems especially attracted to the bare skin of nubile lesbians only because he has a scholarly interest in tattoos and their symbology.

    To paraphrase Paul Smecker: I believe the word he was looking for was “symbolism.”

  34. I agree with most if not all of what you say on a moral level. I just don’t see how it is preventable in public places or events.

    It’s probably not completely preventable, but I would imagine that being called on shitty behavior is probably a strong strart. It won’t stop everyone from doing it, but I bet that a decent number of these jerks would get embarassed and back off if someone did like piny did and just confronts them about it.

    *shrug*
    Maybe I’m wrong.

  35. You’d be hard-pressed to find a public event in New York City where there aren’t 10 self-styled photojournalists for every participant. It always frustrated me to no end that at antiwar demonstrations there’d be more people taking pictures of each other than actually, you know, protesting. In the context of the Dyke March it may come off as creepy-voyeuristic, but don’t be surprised if you see the same dudes with their SLRs at the Mermaid Parade, Celebrate Brooklyn concerts, faux-spontaneous pillow fights in Union Square, bike races, the Idiotarod, and every other vaguely alternative NYC cultural event. They observe other people’s events because they’re afraid to participate in anything of their own.

  36. Especially from occam’s last comment, this all reminds me of a photography piece that the magazine I used to work for published… oh it must have been almost ten years ago now. It was basically a set of photographs of the guys (and it’s pretty much all guys, from what I’ve heard and seen) who go around taking pictures of other people, especially young women. The photographer just decided to turn the lens of the camera 90 degrees, so to speak, and capture the weirdness of all of these self-styled photojournalists and art photographers; his best stuff was at some kind of amateur modeling competition / expo where there were a lot of skeevy “amateur fashion photographers.” According to the photographer, these guys were very unhappy about being the subject of photographs themselves, challenged his right to be doing exactly what they were doing, in some cases got belligerent, etc. I was reminded again of this stuff while watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Pictures of Assholes where he records a somewhat hostile interview with a couple paparazzi who photographed him on the street.

  37. I just don’t see how it is preventable in public places or events.

    It’s not. That won’t stop us from making fun of people who do it.

  38. To paraphrase Paul Smecker: I believe the word he was looking for was “symbolism.”

    Doh! You beat me to it! “sssssyyyymbolism”

  39. I just like that you called the women “nubile,” since that word originally meant “marriageable”! Yay!

  40. I salute your investigative journalism, piny! I am anxiously awaiting further in-depth interviews with the men who express solidarity with their dyke sisters by marching in Dyke March, naked.

  41. It’s not. That won’t stop us from making fun of people who do it.

    I totally agree. Ridicule is probably the best way to get them to dissappear from an event. Let them know they aren’t fooling anyone.

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