“A Melbourne man who filmed young girls naked at a suburban swimming pool was today sentenced to five months imprisonment… Gilbert edited his 10 minutes of footage into a five-minute tape he played for his own sexual gratification, the court was told… However Gilbert’s voyeurism was unlikely to develop into criminal paedophilia, Dr Orchard said.” — The Age (Australia)

The peculiar thing about this case is that the tape the voyeur made and edited from his peeping footage was utilized solely for his own enjoyment. While no doubt this is probably a common practice — video voyeurs making their own personal porno movies — it is peculiar in the following sense.

Men ogle women. They stare and peep and peer and store up the luscious sights in memory, where they play them back as the urge arises. This is not illegal. It may be invasive, imprudent, or even in a case such as this, where the victims were minors, immoral. But it’s not illegal. So why, if you do it with a video camera, does it become illegal? The only difference is that the things seen are preserved on tape rather than in the faculty of memory. And yet, if the tape is genuinely reserved for personal use, then how significant a difference is this? Set aside the fact that the victims were minors and that some peeping situations are just plain illegal regardless of whether or not you have a camera. If a person undresses at a pool, what is the difference between storing the sight in your brain and storing the sight on a videotape? After all, a tape seen by no one but yourself doesn’t have much more reality than your own personal recollections anyway. It’s like Bishop Berkeley said: to be is to be perceived. If the tape is not seen by anyone but yourself, it has little more existence than a memory. So how can something with such a negligible quotient of reality entail such real punishment?

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