The ‘peeping Tom’ for generations has described aptly what I am about to deal with here: the secretly watching male, who’s too dumb for a vivid imagination and too cheap for spending money on the ‘real thing’:
the male (and female?) person who watches others using any kind of device, in the analogue days telescopes to catch at least glimpses of those others in ‘private states’:
any stage of undress, close encounters of the private and loving kind they miss out on themselves so sadly…
It is sometimes sad, sometimes frustrating, when you feel them about – and often just plain ridiculous and proof of very small minds.
They are not using the – especially these days – ample means and opportunities that often are even sold cheap online; not using the human imagination based perhaps on tales or books or even movies to make their own ‘reality’…
Woody Allen let one of his characters put it nicely in his comedy “Bullets over Broadway”: ‘reality is for those who cannot make their own.’
These days I presume, with so-called – in this respect – equality of the sexes around – women might be ‘peeping’ too; but that is a guess.
Just as in former centuries (married) men used to boast about their ‘adventures’, the nice term ‘swaggering’ makes it even clearer; while women were the ‘true gentlemen’, who relished in silence, even though from necessity rather than want…
To this day, the statistics in these matters especially are hard to determine and not easily published. Not all that is loudest is the most of any kind – or right….
The right to privacy is a human right and apart from an invasion into the privacy of those that are watched, it’s a punishable offence…
Still, all those who read this and start thinking: perhaps new ways can be found, anyway: there are those that seem to be the natural counterpart of peeping Toms or Marys: the exhibitionists…
So, inhibited masses, unite!