Are you one of those people who comments ‘why is this news?’ under every article you don’t like on the internet? Many find you irritating, but I am here to give you a task for which the world will – eventually – thank you. I’d like you to bring your rage, your keyboards, and your frustration to a specific type of article: exposés of people who get caught fucking on CCTV.
I have a bunch of news searches active – most of them relating to sex, wanking or sex toys. I like to keep abreast (pun intended) of what’s happening in the world of sex, so I can either celebrate the good stuff (like this week’s Woman’s Hour discussion on the updates to obscenity/porn laws) or scorn the terrible stuff (like the Daily Mail’s piece this week on how women shouldn’t own cacti because cacti repel men). In these searches, I often see a lot of one particular type of article, the ‘caught fucking on CCTV/camera phone’ article.
People have sex, Karen
The first thing that fucks me off about these articles is the performative horror displayed by whoever is writing the copy. There is always ‘shock’, sometimes ‘disgust’ and almost always an exhortation to ‘think of the children!’ So let’s put this to bed quickly, shall we? Sex – consensual sex – is not shocking or disgusting, it’s a thing that humans have done ever since the dawn of time, and something we’ll continue to do long after the last tabloid printing press gets shuttered. If it weren’t for sex, there’d be no children for us to think of in the first place.
Considering how large a percentage of the UK population enjoys watching porn (or listening to audio porn, reading sex blogs, sharing saucy photos of themselves, etc etc), and the relatively vanilla nature of public sex (for practical reasons, most it involves missionary or doggy-style sex without any sex toys, kinks or other accoutrements because that shit’s much harder to access when you’re fucking outdoors in the bushes or round the back of your local Dominos) it’s not unreasonable to assume that the person writing this article isn’t actually shocked by this particular sexual act.
So what exactly is so shocking about this couple who were caught fucking on CCTV/smartphone/charcoal drawing lovingly sketched by an incensed passer-by? It’s probably the ethics of public sex generally, and the idea of shagging where you might potentially be seen.
The ethics of public sex
The moral issue, when you’re looking at public sex, isn’t whether it’s OK to fuck in a field, it’s whether you might be seen by people who haven’t consented to watch. After all, if you owned the field, and all the surrounding fields, and there was absolutely no chance whatsoever of anyone else seeing you fuck, there wouldn’t be an ethical question to answer before you whipped off your clothes and started humping like a pair of bonobos. The thing you are risking when you fuck in public isn’t ‘someone catching a glimpse of my bum’, it’s ‘someone catching a glimpse of my bum when they have not consented to see it.‘
It’s why – in my opinion – public sex is one of those things that can’t really be explained with a blanket answer. Is it OK to fuck in public? Depends on where, when, and how. If you’re shagging in the middle of McDonalds on a Saturday afternoon, obviously the answer is ‘no, there are children here you fucking monster.’ But if you’re shagging in the middle of a field that’s a good two hours hike from the nearest pub, where the chances of anyone but sheep stumbling across you is almost vanishingly remote? I’m going to struggle to tell you that you shouldn’t.
This stuff is further complicated by the fact that ‘public sex’ – the kind of sex that others might accidentally witness – becomes more common as time goes on. The population increases, so there are fewer opportunities for isolation. Public land gets sold off or covered in CCTV cameras. People own drones and are not afraid to use them. Most of us have smartphones, so while you might have made sure your humping won’t traumatise someone monitoring CCTV, you can’t really account for a nosy fucker with an iPhone seeing fit to record your actions with one hand, while they flag down the nearest tabloid journalist with the other.
Whatever the scenario, and however genuine (or manufactured) the ‘shock’ of the person who discovered the public sex act, it seems like everything is pointing towards using consent as a guideline for what kinds of sex we find appropriate. Consent, as ever, is key. And the ‘shock’ we feel when people get caught fucking on CCTV is likely down to the fact that they’ve shown a disregard for the consent of those around them.
Given that consent is at the heart of bystander concerns, I have one question:
What about the consent of those ‘caught fucking on CCTV’?
When newspapers publish articles about people getting caught fucking, often they include stills or clips from the actual CCTV/smartphone footage within the article itself. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s not ‘often’ – it’s ‘always’. I have never seen one of these articles in a tabloid without stills from the footage or an actual video, for good reason: the publisher is relying on prurience for web traffic. They want people’s clicks, and they believe (correctly) that if they don’t include images in the articles people will quickly click away.
Incidentally, many of these sites are ones which refuse to link to sex blogs, adult websites, and other ‘NSFW’ content within their articles because they don’t want to send their readers to porn. OH THE IRONY.
On one memorable occasion, the article included stills from the footage as well as a casual mention that one of the participants was a fifteen year old girl. If it had been porn, they’d have been prosecuted for publishing it, but because it was a still from a video accidentally captured on a webcam stream? Totally fine, apparently. It was posted in 2016, and it is still online.
I’m not going to argue that these articles aren’t of interest to people – clearly they are, or they wouldn’t get published. I’m also not going to try and claim that people have the right to shag anywhere they see fit. But posting pictures/videos of people shagging without those people’s consent is not OK, regardless of how ‘shocked’ you are by the idea that two people fucked in a public park. We recognise consent in other areas where sexual photos are published – we have laws in the UK against revenge porn, for example, and porn websites are supposed to remove content if the people in the videos recognise themselves and request a takedown. So why is it OK if the website claims that content is ‘news’?
Trick question: it isn’t.
It’s a pathetic kind of hypocrisy – one which whips readers into a frenzy of horror over the consent issues involved in public sex, while ignoring the consent of the subjects in order to show readers a glimpse of humping that’s been caught on CCTV.
7 Comments
Thank you. Personally I’m sick of the puritan sexually repressed society I live in here in these United States.
Here in the USA we give the offending couple (or three or foursome) five to fifteen in a Supermax prison. Separate cells of coarse.
It’s a very different world, now, from when my future wife and I had a couple of goes ‘en plein air.’ This was in the early 1970s and in those days there were no mobile phones or CCTV cameras, so the risk of finding a photo of yourself banging away in the local press was relatively rare.
My girlfriend was quite enthusiastic about the idea of having it off in a park quite close to my flat, and even more so about doing it up a mountain (or hill) in the Lake District. I think she got the idea from Robert Knight’s single, ‘Love on a mountain top’ which was a hit in the UK in 1974. I was a bit warier about it, worrying that some apoplectic little old man or lady might call the police because of our exhibition of public indecency and we’d be hauled up in front of the beak. Anyway, a shag is a shag, and I was a constantly randy 20-year-old and couldn’t get my leg over often enough. Realistically, by the time the fuzz arrived we’d probably have satisfied our lust and gone. If we HAD made it into the press I’ve no doubt that the level of public outrage would have been higher than today.
We were seen by some young teen guys one summer evening when we were making out in a public field close by the River Mersey. At the time I had fashionably long hair down to my shoulders, and I was amused to hear a voice piping up, ‘Hey look, there’s a couple of lezzers.’ He obviously thought we were both girls, but when I told him to bugger off he realised his error and just said, ‘Sorry, mate,’ as clearly, we were a perfectly acceptable straight couple.
A few weeks later we were on our way to my flat on yet another pleasant summer evening, my gf said that she wanted a fuck ‘right here, right now, in the park,’ and I couldn’t refuse. She was wearing an ankle length hippy dress, and after I quick look around to see if there was anyone around, I pulled the hem up, yanked her knickers down and off in readiness, and put them in my pocket. We then looked for a reasonably secluded place where we were unlikely to be seen, and decided on a spot just off a curve in the path, hidden from view by bushes. I’d come prepared, with a packet-of-three condoms and as was the case in those days, got a stiffy with the mere thought of a quickie. This wasn’t going to be a very romantic act, it was just lust. She pulled up her dress and lay on the grass while I whipped out my hard-on and rolled on a rubber, then quickly getting down between her legs to discover she was already as wet as I was hard. Standard missionary seemed to be the best position for keeping a low profile, and I was just getting into my stride when we heard adult voices from the path and our unspoken thought was that we’d better abandon this attempt for now. The biggest worry was that if someone recognised us, the story would no doubt get back to her parents, who ran a local pub and the fallout from that would have been horrendous. We got up quickly, her dress naturally dropped back to ankle length and I tucked myself back into my jeans, leaving the condom in place in my hurry. It only took five minutes to get to my flat and we had a quickie on the couch to get rid of all that pent up energy.
The Lake District experience was much more satisfactory. I had an aunt who lived there and we often spent the week-end with her, as she had open house for friends and family, as long as you called first to make sure she could accommodate you. There was a wonderful hill walk behind her house, rising a couple of thousand feet to a small tarn, but it wasn’t one of the really popular paths and we tended to see only a few ramblers. We’d gone up for a week-end and had decided to walk up to the tarn, but there were plenty of hollows easily accessible away from the path, and only visible to the Tornado pilots as they screamed through the valley on low level training flights, and the chances of them getting a good view at that speed was pretty remote. So, there were very few people about on that Saturday afternoon, and once again she said she really fancied a shag on this ‘mountain top.’ We’d taken a blanket and a picnic with us, and walked a couple of hundred yards off the path into a hollow where only the sky was visible when we laid out the blanket and sat down. I still had this nagging doubt that a local ramblers club would decide to make that day the one to wander off the path, but she was very persuasive and I was as randy as ever. We were soon undressed from the waist down and stroking each other to hardness/wetness and playing tonsil-tennis. Had I remembered condoms? Yes, fortunately, so we were able to enjoy a less fraught, more romantic and leisurely fuck in the warmth of the afternoon, followed by some sunbathing and refreshments. And yes, we did take ALL our litter home.
And that was it, one item off our bucket list and the last time we had a bit of open air rumpy-pumpy, and no nasty surprise photo and story in the local press in the coming days.
To get back to your original question, I don’t think these stories are really newsworthy, but they provide a bit of light relief from the usual unpleasantness and certainly don’t offend me. I did once see a couple fucking in a car on the top of a multi-story car park, overlooked from my office window. I alerted my colleagues to the event, and when they’d finished and the bloke got out of the car to adjust his dress, we banged on the window to get his attention and then gave a rousing round of applause. He jumped back in the car and drove off while his partner was still straightening her clothing. None of us were offended, just pretty amused.
You have lived life!
Thank you for sharing your stories! I love it when people share their own shenanigans in the comments and you have a particular way with them =) You’re definitely right that today’s world makes things much more difficult. Even just remembering when I was younger in the late 90s/early 00s, the idea that you might be being filmed/photographed everywhere would have seemed really weird to me, but I guess these days we have just got used to it more, which is kinda weird and creepy and sort of makes it much harder to ever feel truly alone/private, even when you might be in remote places – because others might walk by and not just *see* but film.
I am so glad you said this as well – “I don’t think these stories are really newsworthy, but they provide a bit of light relief from the usual unpleasantness and certainly don’t offend me.” – because I sort of want to get into it a bit, and it gives me the chance to expand a bit further on why I get so frustrated by these news stories.
First thing’s first, I definitely wouldn’t say I’m ‘offended’ by them – I don’t really think the word ‘offended’ is very useful in a lot of these discussions, because usually what I’m saying when I get annoyed by something isn’t ‘it’s bad because it offends me’, what I’m saying is ‘I think this causes harm’ or ‘I think saying XYZ terrible thing makes this person look like a nob’ (bit more on that here https://www.girlonthenet.com/2017/05/31/offence-is-not-taken-assigned/ but I’m getting sidetracked).
So it’s not that they’re offensive, these news stories. My issue with them is twofold, I think.
1. The hypocrisy, which was the main focus of the blog post above, so I won’t go into detail here. It’s just hypocritical for journalists to go ‘SHOCK!’ at a thing that is patently not that shocking, and is being posted in order to actively draw in readers who want to have a voyeuristic shock-wank.
2. The consent thing. So it’s not really just that the people in the pics/vids haven’t consented to those being published. I’m guessing most people realise that there’s a risk of this happening, especially these days when so many things can be filmed for publication/posterity, where that just wasn’t a consideration 20+ years ago. It’s more that wherever we accept someone publishing something without gaining express consent, we make assumptions about the situation of the people engaged in it in the first place.
So, in the example of people getting caught fucking on CCTV, I’m not offended just because they haven’t consented to the pics/vid being published, I’m concerned that one or other of them may actively be harmed by the publication of them. Losing their jobs, being publicly shamed, potentially being kicked out of home (if they’re from conservative families), or even arrested/deported/worse if they happen to be in a country where things like adultery and homosexuality carry terrifying carceral or capital punishment. I wrote a bit more on this here when I was arguing against sharing unsolicited dick pics: https://www.girlonthenet.com/2018/01/10/dont-share-dick-pic/ This might sound like a stretch, but there can potentially be huge and terrifying consequences for people. Some might argue ‘well if they are facing those risks they shouldn’t have sex in public in the first place’ and, yeah, it’s hard to argue with that, but it’s also not really an argument I hold much truck with. Yes, people should be aware of risks, but the fact that someone ‘knew the risks’ isn’t – in my opinion – necessarily a justification for them being given a harsh punishment. And to me, while I can see why people might want to levy fines for public indecency, I think ‘public shaming in the pages of a tabloid’ should be reserved for people who have consciously and willfully done things that are deeply immoral, and for which there’s a public interest defence in exposing them. Like Piers Morgan’s phone hacking, or similar.
The final thing, I think, and why I’m so fucked off with these stories (I’ll go with ‘fucked off’ rather than ‘offended’ =) is that without publishers asking consent of those in the pics, they don’t actually always know if consent applied in the original sexual scenario to start with. There’s often a lot of alcohol involved in these public sex stories – and there are many situations where we say that if someone is completely wasted, they can’t fully consent. What’s more there are potentially issues of coercion – was one of the people being coerced by the other into a ‘sexy’ public scenario that they really didn’t want to do? We can’t ever really know.
Phew, sorry. I’ve rambled on loads here and I realise I’ve also used your comment a little as a springboard to get a few more of my thoughts down onto paper, hijacking somewhat your thread reminiscing about fun experiences. I hope you can forgive me, as I very much enjoyed reading them, and I just wanted to clarify a few more of the reasons why I’m so against these stories in a public paper. In my dream world all this stuff would be shared only with consent, which I think would mean we’d have a lot more fun stories like yours about people reminiscing about taking knickers off under a long skirt, and far less of the tabloid ‘SHOCK’ and dubious-consent blurry CCTV footage! =)
I once saw a couple (possibly) having sex by the side of the Thames (the nice bit that flows through Oxford, not on the South Bank or something, but I’m fairly certain that happens too) – I even wrote a blog post about it back in ’09.
This was being done with very little attempt at concealment, although there aren’t really any secluded bits along that stretch (people walk their dogs around the area too, as well as horny couples going on romantic strolls) – the difference being that, although all the signs were there, it wasn’t exactly something that one could prove. They could have just been sitting in the right position without him being inside her at all – and, if questioned, he could have denied it.
Probably not, since I thought they were clearly having sex, but there you go.
You make an interesting point about smartphones and CCTV in your post, GOTN: with regard to what I mentioned above, this was ten years ago and I genuinely don’t remember any cameras within eyeshot of this cute shagging couple (our smartphones don’t count – I didn’t even own one myself until later; I was using a Nokia E51 at the time). I haven’t thought, particularly, to check since then, but since there’s a railway bridge and the banks being in view of suburban homes (dependent on how well-tamed their gardens are), I’d be wiling to wager that there are, in fact, some now.
A quick look on Google Maps confirms that, while a dirt track by a riverside isn’t ideal for Street View, there’s an incredibly clear satellite picture you can look at… which brings a new question to my mind: with satellite mapping, can people watch you having sex outside from above?
Ooh yeah good question – I know there are people who have been caught doing some *ahem* sexier things on Google Street view etc, and I suspect that there may be some satellite imaging in which it’s possible to make out a couple of naked bodies in a field somewhere. Drones and other things like that can cause problems too, I think. I once went to revisit a place I’d had surreptitious sex with someone when I was dating him, and when I went back I noted all the new CCTV, and the slight change to the building design when it had been refurbed, which meant the place we’d done our thing was no longer even vaguely private. Will we eventually just see the end of people doing anything outside their own homes/hotels etc? I think it’s more than possible (except, obviously, for people who are extremely drunk and don’t realise they can be seen), especially in big cities.