Unfortunately for the victim, not only did she receive unwanted attention from her creepy neighbor, she now has her picture plastered beside his in British tabloids. A picture of her house and even her bedroom — with holes in the ceiling — is featured in The Sun. It is as though the press comes to complete an invasion of privacy that her voyeuristic neighbor initiated. To the perp’s voyeurism is now added the lower-intensity voyeurism of every newspaper reader who sees her pictures and asks himself, “Would I crawl through an attic and risk arrest for a glimpse of this girl in her nightgown?”

Clearly the perp thought she was worth it. He’s not the least bit repentant. The grinning face he’s painted in his backyard — which stares up at the girl’s window — vaunts his own voyeurism. Probably the girl and her family are right to worry about this guy. It’s astonishing that such an unrepentant perp has been allowed to return to the very scene of his crime. The girl’s mother has managed to schedule a hearing in the hopes of getting him evicted, but bureaucracy is bureacracy. It’s not so simple to eject a person from his property, even if its proximity to his victim practically prolongs his original crime.

What can they do? To move away further victimizes the entire family. To remain next to the creep leaves them vulnerable to further violence. To have the guy forcibly evicted may work but will take time — and it may well trigger some sort of retaliation. It’s tempting to think that perhaps the girl and her family should turn the tables on the guy — set up cameras monitoring him, for example — but given his aggressiveness, he’d probably escalate the battle in some unfortunate way. Maybe this is one case where it really is just as well to turn the other cheek — and run.

Admit it. How many of you presumed when reading the title that this was going to be yet another case of heterosexual voyeurism? It has become so common for guys to commit acts of video voyeurism against women that the word voyeur practically implies straight guy. But of course everybody — hetero, homo, male, female, black, white, whatever — has a streak of voyeurism. And it is particularly easy to involve yourself in it when you lust for someone or something unavailable, as Mr. Weinmeier’s presumably straight coworkers were.

While nobody likes to be subject to sexual harrassment of whatever sort in the workplace, it is almost difficult to understand why this became a legal matter. Firing the employee is a logical response. But calling the police? Given the setup — i.e. a man taking pictures of urinals, which are usually situated across from toilets, through a stall door — it would have been clear that the guy couldn’t have gotten very good shots of genitalia. And even if he did, so what? A dick, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, is a dick is a dick. Who cares if some guy ogles a blurry half-blocked picture of your dick? You should worry more about your face, which is photographed twenty times daily by security cameras.

The creepy thing about Mr. Weinmeier’s voyeurism is not that he took pictures. Rather, it’s more disturbing that his voyeurism extended into the collection of personal information: names, birth dates, addresses, account numbers. He was building up identikits of people he was fantasizing about. Did this personal information merely give more reality to his fantasies? Or were they the locus of sexual energies unique unto themselves? It would be fascinating if he were pleasuring himself with his blurry images and, in the stead of whispering the usual things (”I’m gonna fuck your ass hard”), recited account numbers instead. 006418879, yes, 006418879, yes, yes, 0-0-6-4-1-8, yes, oh my God, 8-7-9, oh! yes!

(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

When you see a picture of Mr. Houghton, you’re not surprised to learn that he happened to be skateboarding when the police collared him. He looks more like a skater than a perv. And initially the police arrested him on a suspected drug charge. When they approached him, they saw him try to ditch a pipe.

Not that authorities didn’t have ample evidence of Mr. Houghton’s crime. The young man left semen. He left pictures of himself on a victim’s cellphone. He left part of his email address in a web browser. Using that, detectives were able to find his MySpace page. (It’s out there somewhere, though in half an hour of searching PervScan was unable to locate it.) It’s pretty clear that he did want to get caught. Sometimes criminals want to be captured because they want to be stopped or punished. For example, pedophiles tend to share society’s contempt for their perversion. They may want to be punished precisely as much as society wants to punish them.

However, you don’t get the sense that this was true of Mr. Houghton. Did he want to be punished? Did he want to atone for his crime? Or did he really just want the opportunity to make this proclamation about his sexual depravity? “Why’d I do it? Hey world, I’m a pervert.” You can almost hear him say “so there!” or “take that!” afterward. One victim said “at least he’s telling the truth,” and yet you half wonder if it wasn’t the truth at all. If he’s really a perv, would he be so anxious to prove it to everybody? After all, what was so perverse about this incident? He jerked off to some porn that he viewed in somebody else’s house. When you think about it, the incident isn’t even a sex crime. It’s just breaking and entering.

If you take anything away from this story, it should be that perversity has acquired a new standing in society. It used to be that doctors, businessmen, and other white-collar types occupied the top slot in the social hierarchy. Nowadays it’s different. Perversion has acquired a bizarre repute. It’s cool to be kinky. Fetishes are like tattoos to be flaunted. And Mr. Houghton sounds like a young man whose ambition was to secure his standing in the upper crust of depravity.

Mr. Saunders looks rather like a pharmacist who, when handing you your prescription, lets his hand linger too long on yours. When you walk away, you feel stained by the touch. Probably his victims felt the same way when they realized he’d been secretly taping them. He has eyes that could give a girl cooties.

But even if he is a creep, there is no legal reason for the city of San Rafael to impound his porn. Evidently he had about $10,000 invested in legally acquired visual stimulation. If authorities are refusing to return it, the likely reason is that they have “lost” the stuff. They’ll blame databases or warehouse facilities when really there is free porn drifting back to the homes of bailiffs, transcribers, and legal clerks. The city will end up having to buy him a new porn collection. That will make the taxpayers happy.

Meanwhile you have to wonder about the argument made by Mr. Saunders’ lawyer. If the guy’s watching his porn, the lawyer argued, he won’t be out there peeping in windows. On one hand, that’s ridiculous. The guy had all that porn in his possession when he committed his crimes, so obviously the porn did not distract him from his voyeurism. On the other hand, it has a sensible ring to it. If you deprive the guy of all his porn, he’ll probably be more desperate for stimulation and thus more inclined to reoffend. Give him back his porn and maybe he’ll be satisfied, at least for a while.

Of course, this line of thinking also opens up a more general question: can pornography work as a surrogate to drain the danger from deviant impulses? If so, should sex criminals be furnished with free porn in order to keep them from reoffending? After all, heroin addicts are sent to methadone clinics. Should sex criminals be sent to porn clinics?

Is an animal, PervScan asked recently, incapable of perversion? An animal would seem to lack not just the consciousness necessary for a perverse decision, but the odd quality that can make consciousness turn around on itself. It is not surprising, then, that if any animal should be capable of a larval form of perversion, it should be the intelligent dolphin. You may know of John Lilly’s controversial efforts in the 1950s to establish “interspecies communication” with the dolphin. Evidently these efforts should not be considered a failure, because now it’s clear that dolphins don’t particularly want to communicate. They just want to watch.

This revelation of dolphin voyeurism appeared as a toss-off comment in an article about luxury submarines owned by the super-rich. That phenomenon is strange enough — imagine billionaires creeping around the ocean floors, probably looking for places to bury their hoards of gold. Evidently these submarines also make for the perfect pied-à-terre or fuck pad, since the owners can be sure no paparazzi wait outside to take embarrassing snapshots. In a great example of British humor, the Times spoke of the wealthy “sinking to new depths in the mile below club.”

Who knew there was a mile below club? As is the case with so many innovations, however, it’s the unexpected that springs a leak in the best laid plans. (Er, the best plans for getting laid.) You can well imagine why it would be hard to keep hard when dolphins are pounding on your portholes. Sure, in your head you know that you’ve spent a small fortune on your sub. Sure, it should be impervious to snooping dolphins. But what if they’re not interested in sex per se but in your penis? What if they think it’s food?

Video voyeurism is a common crime nowadays. People like to look at other people, and now that there are so many nifty types of video technology, people like to record people too. It’s that simple. And that is also to say that the voyeurism in this case is not particularly noteworthy. It’s vaguely funny that the guy chose a shampoo bottle to conceal his camera. How could he have ensured that no one would try to use it? Did he play the psychotic roommate and threaten them? “Touch my shampoo and you’ll regret it!” It was a bottle of Pantene, if anyone cares. Pretty much it’s a ho-hum tale.

The remarkable thing, though, is that the guy confessed after a polygraph examination. What’s with these pervs? If these guys were going to go buy a laser printer, they’d spend a month researching it on the internet. But when they do something for which they can go to jail, they just blunder into it like pervy little Candides. Wake up, creeps! If you want to dabble in illegal activities — which of course you shouldn’t — then at least you ought to have some idea what to expect if you get caught. The polygraph, for example, is not a genuine lie detector. It is a machine to intimidate you into confessing. You cannot be forced into taking a “lie detector” test, often its results are inadmissable in court, and there’s always the possibility the thing can be tricked out.

So while you’re cruising the net trying to figure out how to build a waterproof spycam, pause a while on some pages that explain your civil rights, police interrogation techniques, and the like. It could be the only thing separating the shower you want to tape from the shower in the prison — and you certainly don’t want to end up there.

(Thanks to Cian for the link.)

The basic outline of this incident — man commits video voyeurism using camera concealed in shoe (or elsewhere) — has become so common that it hardly seems noteworthy to an aficionado of the perverse. When submitting the link, Cian didn’t indicate that it was an outrageous or crazy story, only that it contained a picture of the shoecam. Ok, that turns the tables, the device used to take pictures is itself the subject of a picture. But still, is that a big deal?

Perhaps it is, once you consider the strange disparity between the plethora of stories about video voyeurism and the paucity of images of “shoecams” and the like. On any day of the week you can go to Google News and find a dozen new stories of guys being arrested for taking illicit pictures. But to find images of the devices they use is actually very difficult. Here is another newspaper’s image of the same shoecam featured in this story. But how many more images of shoecams can you find? Try searching on Google Images for “shoecam” and you end up with some amateur porn. Try “shoe camera” and you get (legitimate) camera equipment. Google “How to install camera in shoe” and there are zero results. It’s shocking. You’d expect some pervy blog out there to have step-by-step illustrated instructions.

It’s ironic that all these hidden cameras remain, even when they’re exposed to the police and the press, hidden. What do they look like? What sorts of cameras work best? What sorts of shoes do voyeurs use? Are some shoes better than others at concealing cameras? And how do these concealed cameras affect your feet? Do they give you blisters?

If anybody knows any pictures of shoe cameras, please post the URLs here to this page. It would be interesting to build an archive of imagery that turns these hidden devices into a revelation.

Mr. Swyer may well be a lowlife creep who gets his rocks off watching women pee. He attended public events with his camcorder but recorded only desperate acts of urination. He more or less admitted to this but sought clemency from the court, claiming that his business had been ruined — not that his company, Information Empire, looked particularly valuable. He also claimed that his life had been pretty much destroyed. After all, how much more humiliating can it get than being captured by a man wearing a banana suit? (What a headline that should have been: Banana Man Captures Pee Perv.)

All that may well be true, Mr. Swyer may well be guilty as charged, but you have to admit that his legal defense was not without merit. If somebody urinates on public property, do she have a right to privacy? PervScan was unable to track down the law covering public peeing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but in most places it’s illegal to let loose on public property. Even if you seek privacy in the bushes, it’s still public property — which means that anybody else, pervs included, have as much right to be loitering in those bushes as you. Furthermore, if it is illegal to pee in a public place, then aren’t these runners commiting crimes too? Perhaps Mr. Swyer’s best defense might have been to claim that he is a rabid environmentalist shocked and appalled by the way these athletes maltreat the local flora.

The interesting thing about this case is that, like another recent incident in which a stalker hid beneath a woman’s bed for two days, it defies easy categorization. Is it stalking? But the guy didn’t appear to know his victims. Is it rape? Well, the guy didn’t physically molest his victims. Is it indecent exposure? The guy exposed himself to strangers, but he did it in a private place. Is it voyeurism? It may come closest to that, and yet it leaves you with an oddity. Usually a voyeur remains on the other side of a window or camera lens. But in this case the guy pierced the veil, stepped through the looking glass, progressed from staring to sharing a bed. Even the official charge against the man indicates some difficulty in deciding what the crime was. What the hell is “burglary with sexual motivation?” It’s as senseless as “sex with the intent to rob.” Or is it?

Even more ironically, this act — whatever it is — may be ballsy but it also seems pretty natural. It’s rare because it takes gumption, but at the same time you can easily imagine this being a tempting thing to do (for a sex criminal, anyway). So how can something so natural defy categorization? Is it because the categories we use to consider perversion are too rigid or ill-defined? After all, many of them date from the late 19th century and were formed under other pressures, moral and historical. Do they remain appropriate for our pervy internet age?

Perhaps this case requires a new category, then. If voyeurism describes the kick you get when ogling somebody, then we need a new word to describe what happens when you cross the line, break into her house, climb into her bed, soak up the orgones from her sheets. Intruderism — breaking and entering “with sexual motivation.”

On a completely random note, if you happen to visit this story at the NY Daily News, you’ll see that it’s credited to a total of five reporters. It took five people to compose eleven short paragraphs consisting of a mere sentence or two? Gosh, the NY Daily News really has this one covered!

Anyway, here’s a picture of the perp, Michael Conte. He’s not a particularly creepy looking guy, though there’s something disturbing about that pursed mouth. It looks like he wants to spit out a gobstopper.

Mr. Conte was originally apprehended for peeping on a female acquaintance. Subsequently he ‘fessed up to peeping at the schools where he worked as a janitor. This gave cops the rationale to search his home, where they found a mother lode of bestiality porn alongside his voyeurism videos. However, they did not find any child pornography — which sounds rather improbable, given that the guy obviously collected internet porn and taped teenage girls. It’s just been discovered that Mr. Conte also owned a “hideway” in the Poconos, so maybe the kiddie porn was there.

The bestiality element in the case is somewhat negligible. Although it’s technically a misdemeanor in New York to engage in it, the legal status of bestiality porn is less clear. It’s illegal to distribute bestiality but, according to Wikipedia, it appears to be legal to own it. All of which means that, while this evidence helps to paint a general portrait of Mr. Conte as a creep, he probably won’t be charged with anything as a result of his big collection of weird porn.

Video voyeurism, however, is another matter. Thanks to Stephanie’s Law, which was enacted in New York in 2003, Mr. Conte’s actions count as a form of “unlawful surveillance.” This is a felony that can be punished by up to seven years of jail — which sounds like a lot, until you consider that that’s apparently less than half the seventeen years that Mr. Conte has, by his own admission, been peeping on people.