In 2006, a 16-year-old girl was looking at greetings cards in a branch of Target in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a male stranger took out a camera, crouched down and took a photograph up her skirt. The incident was caught on CCTV and witnessed by a security guard who notified police. But when the case came to court, the judge ordered that the charges be dismissed since the victim was “not in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy”.
For the journalist Sarah Ditum, the Tulsa incident typifies the uniquely disturbing misogyny of the early 21st century. The act of “upskirting” hadn’t been possible before the mid-00s when ownership of small digital cameras became commonplace. But press photographers had been shooting famous women this way for some time; the actor Emma Watson described how, during her 18th birthday celebrations, a photographer lay down on the floor to get a shot of her crotch.
