Man Boobs: They’re Gross, But Legal
You know what I like about the internet? You can get news from all over the world. Well that and the whole “nekid pictures” thing, but I digress.
Being able to read news from all over at least reassures me that the U.S. is not the only country that’s going crazy these days. It would seem that judges are making crazy decisions all over the world, but the U.S. and England seem to take the cake for the craziest judges.
For instance, according to the Daily Mail, recently Lord Justice Hughes, Mr Justice Treacy and Sir Paul Cresswell of the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of Kevin Bassett aged 44. Mr. Bassett had been convicted by a lower court of using a video camera hidden in a plastic bag to take shots of a swimmer.
“At the original trial at St Albans Crown Court, a bather told how he spotted Mr Bassett as he swam at the Grange Paddock Complex in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire. ‘I noticed a middle-aged male on a bench holding a plastic bag,’ he said. ‘I noticed a hole at an angle pointing towards myself and my daughter.’”
Needless to say the bather was incensed that his daughter might be being video taped, so he approached the man who at first denied having a camera. He later admitted to the pool manager: “I did have a video. It wasn’t the little girl. It was the man I was interested in.”
Mr. Bassett was convicted of voyeurism, put on the sex offenders’ register for five years, and banned from using a camera or recording equipment in public unless it was clearly on display. He was also told by the judge, “It is by good grace and good luck that you were not lynched that day.”
In overturning the conviction the Justices found that, “The 2003 Sexual Offences Act specifies that ‘private parts’ must be exposed for voyeurism to have taken place. Only women, it seems, have breasts that can be seen in a sexual light.”
Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but Mr. Bassett, who admitted he is a homosexual, was filming this guy for some reason. Is it too hard to believe that reason was sexual? It would seem to me that at least as far as Mr. Bassett is concerned women’s breasts may not be sexual but men’s might be.
If you are secretly filming topless women you are a voyeur and subject to punishment. If you are filming children, clothed or not, you are assumed to be a pervert and subject to punishment. But if you are aroused by men and secretly filming them then no crime has been committed??
If you are secretly video taping anyone, shouldn’t that be wrong? On the other hand, if you are openly using a camera on a public beach, should it be a crime if you film women or children? If, as in this case, there seems to be a sexual aspect to the filming shouldn’t it be a crime regardless of the sex of the victim? If you are secretly filming someone for sexual reasons do they need to be exposing “private parts” for you to consider it voyeurism?