Herein is an effort to provide consideration of behaviour and people that have variously been referred to as voyeurism (Karpman, 1954), scopophilia (Hirschfield, 1948; Rosen, 1979), inspectionalism (Colman, 1964), peepers (Gebhard, Gagnon, Pomeroy, & Christenson, 1965), and voyeurs (Smith, 1976). That there are so many names to describe the activity and the actors might suggest that there is a wealth of fact and theory which, given the correct amount of effort, would provide psychological insight into the origins, development, and treatment of the behaviour once it becomes harmful to the actor or to others. Unfortunately, this is untrue as voyeurism has not attracted the same level of attention as other kinds of sexual behaviour, whether they be benign or offending in nature. As McAnulty, Adams, and Dillon (2001) have written, “Overall, voyeurism remains one of the least studied sexual deviations” (p. 775). It is also the case that some authors have questioned whether it is appropriate to consider voyeurism as a distinct issue given that, according to them, there are so few cases that are not accompanied by other paraphilias such as exhibitionism and frotteurism (see Langevin, Paitich, & Russon, 1985). So, partly because the space of voyeurism remains uncharted and partly because understanding this area of behaviour is important and fascinating, this project has been undertaken.
Any attempt to understand sexual behaviour is fraught with difficulties. To begin with, a large portion of sexual behaviour happens in our minds and we may have little access to the details of it and may decide that we don’t wish to share it accurately, if at all. It is highly unlikely that sexual behaviour is not influenced by both biology and society; both play an important role in determining our individual psychology: what we attend to, what we value, what we are attracted to, what we are allowed to be attracted to, what is legitimate, and what is unholy. In the latter case, religion has had something to say about voyeurism, as it has about many behaviours. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus is reported to have said during the Sermon on the Mount, “but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart” (King James Version). If we consider that at least one role of religion was to exert an element of social control (Raven, 1999), then it appears that voyeurism has been considered problematic for a lengthy period of time (if something is not an issue then why develop a set of rules in order to control it?). The same rule could also be applied to pornography, strip shows, and celebrity sex tapes.
Our past experiences and the opportunities we will take advantage of in the future are intimately linked to how we understand, think, and behave. This is complicated enough without the addition of genders and sexualities. Having discussed sexual behaviour with colleagues, trainees, and clients over a number of years, I am well aware of the ease with which people can be upset by a view, or a question, or a bias. As upset as you may get, it is unintended. Ultimately, writing within an area that is, academically speaking, relatively unpopulated means that this is something of a journey of exploration, guided by what I think is interesting and important, with the aim of sharing some of the understanding that I have reached, although I will never know if that final goal has been achieved. If it is I hope it provokes people to go further and if it isn’t I hope it provokes people to achieve what I haven’t.
Another important issue to raise is how we are defining voyeurism for this journey. As with many terms, “voyeurism” has escaped its formal psychiatric definition, which is useful in some ways as it allows us to recognise the continuum of human behaviour rather than categories of normal and abnormal. The negative is that it can be used to describe a range of activities that are considered by someone to be unusual or negative. For example, in South Korea there is a phenomenon that in the UK we refer to as “gastronomic voyeurism”, they call it “broadcast eating”; you can view, typically a young, slim woman, eating a huge meal. It is not obvious that there is any kind of sexual element and some commentators have suggested that it fulfils an important social role for single people who would otherwise dine alone, as people can interact with the eater. Viewers can also make financial donations. Voyeur is also used to describe people who spend time watching reality television, reading celebrity magazines, and focussing on other people’s lives. As Levy (2015) has written, “If there was ever any doubt that we are a voyeuristic species, the fact that people want to watch these stories puts closure on this question” (p. 154). The photographer Edo Zollo has referred to his pictures as voyeuristic (www.edlondonphotography.co.uk), and as a final example, some writers have referred to “intellectual voyeurism”—“superficial and ill-informed treatment of serious ideas, apparently done for intellectual ‘titillation’ or to advertise, in a pretentious way, the ‘sophistication’ of the writer” (Leiter, 1992, p. 80).
For our purposes, what makes a behaviour or group of behaviours fit within the range of voyeurism is that it involves observation of someone or something, it is intended to be secret, and that there is some form of sexual element linked to it. In this way, behaviours that are not observational and not sexual are not included (thus, intellectual writing and watching reality television) and neither are behaviours that involve sexualised observation but are not fully secret, for example, watching strip shows or sexual live-feed videos. The latter will also disallow pornography, whether professional or amateur (e.g. celebrity sex tapes or revenge pornography where the subject(s) know that they are being filmed, even if they do not know how it might be used later), but secret pictures or recordings by a person that may be used later do fit the category of voyeurism (for example, Client A, as described by Mann, Ainsworth, Al-Attar, & Davies, 2008, who filmed women in a massage parlour and used these films for masturbation at a later date). For an early typography of digital images, it would be useful to read the work of Holmes, Tewksbury, and Holmes (1998). It is noteworthy that some authors have suggested that it is important to differentiate between those who actively seek out opportunities to watch and those who are more opportunistic (Gebhard et al., 1965) but this is not an approach that will be taken here in part because it may be difficult to differentiate between the two because victims are unlikely to know and perpetrators may lie.
References
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- Gebhard, P. H., Gagnon, J. H., Pomeroy, W. B., & Christenson, C. V. (1965). Sex offenders. New York: Harper & Row.
- Hirschfield, M. (1948). Sexual anomalies and perversions. London: Francis Alder.
- Holmes, R. M., Tewksbury, R., & Holmes, S. T. (1998). Hidden JPGs: A functional alternative to voyeurism. Journal of Popular Culture, 32(3), 17–29.Crossref
- Karpman, B. (1954). The sexual offender and his offences. New York, NY: Julian Press.
- Langevin, R., Paitich, D., & Russon, A. E. (1985). Voyeurism: Does it predict sexual aggression or violence in general? In R. Langevin (Ed.), Erotic preference, gender identity, and aggression in men: New research studies (pp. 77–98). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Leiter, B. (1992). Intellectual voyeurism in legal scholarship. Yale Journal of the Law and Humanities, 4, 79–104.
- Levy, M. S. (2015). Celebrity and entertainment obsession: Understanding our addiction. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Mann, R. E., Ainsworth, F., Al-Attar, Z., & Davies, M. (2008). Voyeurism: Assessment and treatment. In D. R. Laws & W. T. O’Donohue (Eds.), Sexual Deviance (2nd ed., pp. 320–335). New York: Guilford Press.
- McAnulty, R. D., Adams, H. E., & Dillon, J. (2001). Sexual deviation: Paraphilias. In P. B. Sutker & H. E. Adams (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of psychopathology (3rd ed., pp. 749–773). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic.
- Raven, B. H. (1999). Kurt Lewin address: Influence, power, religion, and the mechanisms of social control. Journal of Social Issues, 55(1), 161–186.Crossref
- Rosen, I. (1979). Exhibitionism, scopophilia and voyeurism. In I. Rosen (Ed.), Sexual deviation. Oxford: Oxford University P...