Now, in pursuing my research on your behalf into the question of peeping Tom postcards (there’s no end to the trouble I go to for your reading enjoyment, but that’s just the kind of blogger I am), I thought I would consider the question of what is NOT a peeping Tom postcard.
For example the gentlemen in these two cards are doing what you might call “gawking”, or, in a more elegant age, “ogling”. But they are certainly not peeping Peeping implies that the person involved is doing something surreptitiously, and these blokes are pretty obvious about it. Nor are they looking at someone who thinks they are in private.
Now, here we have someone who at least apparently believes they are undressing in private. But I’M not sure we can stigmatize the witness as a peeping Tom. He didn’t sneak up on the windows; he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. For all we know, a moment afterward, he thought “Oh, gosh, they don’t mean for me to see this” and looked away.
I checked around the Interwebs for a concrete definition of “peeping Tom”, by the way, and, as usual when I do this kind of simple request, I found about a dozen different answers. Some stress the perverse sexual gratification felt when looking at something the witness is not supposed to see while others instead go into detail on what the witness is trying to see (“people in private or intimate situations” “sex acts or sex organs of others” “naked people”).
Most insist the act of peeping is voluntary, which I think leaves out these people who are seeing what they shouldn’t by accident. Special credit to Merriam Webster for its alliteration (“a prudently prying person”), to those who insist a peeping Tom MUST be male (logical, I suppose, since Tom is a boy’s name, but we HAVE seen postcard peepers who are female), to those who claim the victim MUST be “a woman undressing”, to the one who specified that a peeping Tom is one who looks through windows at night to see naked women. Others…but you get the general idea.
In any case, as one of the lengthier definitions told us, some “violation of privacy” is involved. I am not particularly sure how to rank people who may do a bit of peeping that is job-related. Window washers, for example, have a long reputation along these lines. (I suppose I may give in to temptation and blog about George Formby one day. If anyone really helped immortalize the opportunities of cleaning windows….)
And if you add wartime necessity, should we really include such working men on the job among our peeping Toms?
Nudists present another question. Is Tom really peeping if he’s sneaking a look at people who are naked on purpose?
I think we need to say that he is. Given the safeguards nudists put around their colonies to shut out idle oglers and other opportunists, these gents are definitely peeping. I hope, but doubt, that this little study clarifies matters. When we chat again on this subject, I will disclose some interesting facts about the original Peeping Tom of Coventry which I recently discovered (i.e., “made up”. This ARE the Interwebs, after all.)
Blogsy Babbles 