Edited by author 05-20-2004 09:28 AM
What a popular topic! Mostly with me... oops. (No, wait. I only posted once before. It just feels like more.)

Everyone's tastes vary; perhaps if you were to vouchsafe something that /does/ turn you on, Guy...

As for me, "glamour" models snapped half-nude rarely move me, because usually they don't look like the same species as us, and I suspect they don't really exist. For me, real sex isn't about lace and make-up and high heels[*] and professional poses and the horizontal equivalent of the 100 metre sprint, it's about relaxed cosy comfortable intimacy and a leisurely jog to the paper shop and back. And on the scale of cosy intimacy, seeing up the fair sex's skirt, a privilege which the fair sex usually works very hard to restrict to very close friends, does score fairly high, compared to 95% of the rest of the average day. And we live for the 5%, don't we? ;-)

(Leaving aside the sitcom-style couples whose most intimate shared life-element is the light on the nightstand between the beds...)

Low-level, ordinary-human eroticism is how Ukraine won this year's Eurovision Song Contest by putting on The Louise Jameson Tardis-ettes, and why I'm cheered up whenever the ostensibly ordinary Dove Firmness Soap girls' advertisement is on TV - http://www.dovefirmfriends.co.uk/ , hello girls - even though I don't think it works, or that they're ordinary.

Since I have got fairly clear in my mind the distinction between actual familiarity and inadvertent exposure to voyeurism, and probably since I suffered repeated outrages to my own modesty at boarding school - although my own attitudes during adolescence are embarrassing to look back on, but I have grown up - I don't spend my days trying to look up the skirts or down the shirts of female colleagues, friends, or complete strangers. But it's not so much that I can't understand people who do - as I say, I was a teenager - but that if I imagine it too vividly, maybe the wind will change at that moment and my own psyche will freeze up with that bend there permanently, and I myself will have to buy a mini-camera and a photo album that locks.

As for looking at other people's voyeur photos - well, I suppose you don't risk getting caught.

[*] Heels: this is something else I don't get, but if it amuses other guys, fine. The Joy Of Sex told readers, if your partner has a fetish that you think you can stand, then don't worry, just buy the equipment and have fun. But why on earth do those models wear high-heel shoes /in bed??/ Are there countries where it's illegal to show naked feet, but anything else is fine?? Like in Japan, and fifty years ago in Britain, you could show everything, anything, anywhere, except body hair, anywhere. Shave it off and you're legal. That's probably why, subsequently, some people want to watch the women doing the shaving. Aren't we strange?

But we /are/ strange, and all the weird stuff wouldn't be out there for sale on the Internet if there weren't enough people buying it to turn a profit.

By the way, it now turns out that the mounting-plate of a professional camera tripod is called a shoe, leading to some confusion, and exaggerated search results.

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