alexpappas: couldn’t have put it better myself….

I’m sure the men on the Shiga Prefectural BoE are fully, absolutely, without-a-doubt, completely, totally aware that some of their students are wearing short skirts.

I disagree fundamentally. Women wear short skirts all around the world. Of course that will attract a roving male eye. Which, yes, they can’t really complain about.
But a guy sticking a camera up their skirt?! No, they did not invite that, no matter how short the skirt. That isn’t a passing glance or the action of a man in thrall to his hormones. It is a cynical and calculated act of physical assault.
This argument seems just a short step away from saying that rape victims bear some responsibility for being assaulted by their deportment, their dress, or where and when they choose to walk.

Here’s an interesting experiment for those who think “they bring it on themselves”.

Tell your wife/girlfriend that if she goes out in a short skirt and attracts the attention of men all day that when she comes home you will say “Well, what do you expect?”

Then (and this is the fun part) tell her that if she goes out in a short skirt and a guy sticks a camera up it, and she comes home angry, perhaps in tears, that, again, you’re going to say “Well, what do you expect?”

Then, if you are still physically able, post your wife’s/girlfriend’s reaction here. Have fun now, and good luck reaching your next anniversary.

Overton - when you use the term ‘physical assault’ in re: to men snapping up skirts, is that *your* interpretation or is it an actual legal term?

I’m just a bit confused because the only instance I’ve found where an actual charge is mentioned is an article from Japantoday.com (http://www.japantoday.com/jp/kuchikomi/339) that tells of someone being charged under Tokyo’s Nuisance Prevention Law… .

I found another US case where the guy was charged under state voyerism laws.

While these cases are starting to become mid-culture knowledge on this side of the ocean, the laws the men are charged with aren’t often mentioned so I can’t figure out if Japan (or the local judiciary) considers the action a legally-defined ‘assault’ - much less a ‘physical’ one.

Can someone help me figure this one out a bit?

I’ll take the wife wearing skimpy cloths as an example.

If my wife wore a 4 inch skirt in Shinjuku, I would tell her that she’d be drawing attention and not always in a good way. I would also voice my disaproval. But its her choice. And I respect that.

If she continued to wear it and was physically assulted, I’d be very very upset but I gotta tell yeah… I’d be pretty damn mad at myself because I didn’t stop her in the first place. I’d put the blame almost 100% on me.

Society has rules and there’s no excuse for girls to flaunt their bodies in such extream ways and then turn and cry foul if some nut-job takes a picture (or worse) of her underwear…

This is the same thing as leave the door to your store open when you leave at night, then crying when someone breaks in.

To summarize your arguments:
No one is saying that these girls are whores, they just happen to be wearing a whore’s uniform and complaining about all the johns that approach them.

I am on the girls’ side for the most part, no girl should have to worry about some desperate, sick guy looking at their kooch in public, unless they want to show it (as I suspect some do). The only part that disgusts me is alexpappas assertion that some keep special underwear for occasions like this, WTF. That’s like going around with a gift you plan to give to rapists just in case, to let them know you were thinking of them while they’re pulling off your panties.

That being said, I think there is a solution to the problem. All you need are some police officer’s disguised as girls, when the perverts come to take shots of the panties, all they have to wait for is the startled groan or scream and give chase to the perverts tackling them in preferably a public place. This will put some hentai and chikan in jail, and scare the rest of them so bad they never think of looking up a schoolgirl’s skirt again.

I just wanted to clarify something about my analogy: I’m not saying that wearing short skirts or flashing around money is equivalent to giving permission for upskirt photos or muggings. I’m not saying that this absolves the photographer/mugger of any guilt.

All I’m saying is that there were very easy ways to reduce the risks of becoming the victim, such as wearing longer skirts or keeping your money in your pocket. If the victim TRULY wanted to avoid getting photographed/mugged, then all they need to do is wear longer skirts or keep their money in their pockets.

If they continue to wear short skirts or flash around their money, I can only assume they weren’t really serious about avoiding becoming the victim.

No worries at all. I would hate it if I wife dressed like that. And the fact that even these girls buy undergarnments incase they expose accidentally pisses me off.

So thus begs the question here though. WHY doesn’t the school board here DO something about this??

I’d like to get a girls perspective on this topic.

Ahem,tlxtrtrf?..is that undergrad or post-grad materiel..

(I’m keen to know this - seeing that you are on inside track)

If anyone’s handle necessitated copying and pasting, it’s tlxtftrf’s.

I was merely answering Alex’s question about the school board’s inaction with a snide comment. If you want my real opinion on the subject, it is simply this, the school board’s inaction on the subject is a result of three things:
1) The scope of the problem, at least as it is reported, mainly lies out of the schools’ immediate vicinity and therefore most likely falls out of their jurisdiction to deal with it.
2) In conjunction with the previous problem there is the additional facet of the law enforcement problem along with the tolerance of sexual perversion in Japan. There is nothing wrong with these schoolgirls wearing whatever they wish to school and moreover the public education system has no business telling anybody whether they find their clothing acceptable or not. As long as the major parts are covered it is none of the school’s concern. Private schools being a somewhat different matter do reserve such a power to control their students’ apparel, however it is their choice to exercise that power.
The reason for this problem is that there are perverts who believe that they can get away with sexual voyeurism with no consequences on an unaware or unwilling victim.
The root of this problem is that you have nearly useless police officers who can’t be bothered to leave their police boxes until a serious crime has been committed. The pathetic nature of this problem is augmented by the surveillance society of Japan where virtually every place listed in this article (train stations, road intersections, areas in and surrounding junior and senior high schools, as well as universities and tech schools) are undoubtedly peppered with high resolution video cameras that probably record many of these hentai in action (and identify them using facial recognition; and yet still nothing is done about the majority of these cases. This in an age where I can receive a ticket because a camera 200 yards away got my license number and took a picture with a high enough resolution that I could my stubble.
It shouldn’t take a newspaper article or a generation of girls so used to buying special underwear for the predators for the police to do their job and lay down the law.
3)Finally there is the added problem of the apathy of the girls themselves to the problem of these perverts. If anyone I know attempted this behavior, they would get the shit slapped out of them. You can hardly go three weeks in Tokyo without hearing a story about some chikan getting punched in the balls for grabbing a girl from behind, (decreased recently due to the new women only cars). If these women don’t want to be the victims of perverts, then they shouldn’t wait six months to tell their story when they are asked by a reporter about the problem. They should act immediately, slap the bastard and report him to the nearest police box. If this happened enough, I’m sure the police would get off their ass and do something. To me these girls who complain about the problem come off as disingenuous when they complain about repeated situations when they never report the offender. To do so is like being robbed repeatedly by the same same guy and never filing a police report, only to complain when the thug is still on the loose.

As for your comment, remora, I was attempting to do my best written impression of Woody Allen. Apparently it wasn’t written well enough to be recognizable. And by the way, before you criticize me for the sophomore-ish intellectual immaturity in my jokes, you might want to learn how to spell “material.” This is, unless you wish to infer that my joke is somehow related to army rations, weapons, and supplies. You remind me of those people on the terrorism news comment sections who wish to give me a history of Middle East while spelling Arab “A-rib,” Muslim as “Mooslem,” and refer to AL Ghazali and Muhummad as “the towel heads.” .

If my jokes are getting that bad, however, I will write them no more and instead focus on the deadly seriousness of a child wearing a shirt he can’t read, a monkey dying, Will Smith unhinging his jaw like a snake, and cell phones (just joking). Here’s a link for you, remora . Not that someone of your post graduate education and superior intellect would need it, but just in case

Alight, the link function isn’t working

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

“Society has rules and there’s no excuse for girls to flaunt their bodies in such extream ways and then turn and cry foul if some nut-job takes a picture (or worse) of her underwear…”

“If the victim TRULY wanted to avoid getting photographed/mugged, then all they need to do is wear longer skirts or keep their money in their pockets.”

These statements sound like bullshit to me and here’s why:

Firstly, people who blame the victim are totally missing the point. It is the perpetrator who is to blame in any crime or misdemeanor. Period. Those who blame victims are usually cowards who are scared of criminals so they find it easier to blame the victims. Also, it is my observation that people who blame victims do so in order to assuage their own guilt about something they’ve done.

Secondly, it doesn’t matter what a person wears or doesn’t wear, wether they flash cash or panties– if any crime or misdemeanor is committed it is always the fault of the perpetrator. The criminal made the choice to commit the crime. Victims never “ask for it” and they don’t “make” perpetrators do anything. It is the criminals who decide their own actions; no one makes them do anything. It is up to the individual to practice restraint, self-control, and be honorable and respectful in their actions. If a person can’t manage these things and commits a crime of any sort, it is completely his or her own fault. We are all responsible for our own actions. Victims are not responsible for the actions of a criminal; criminals are responsible for their own actions.

Furthermore, wearing long skirts or keeping your money in your pocket is no guarantee that perverts and thieves won’t assault you. Women covered from head to toe in burkas have been the victims of heinous assaults. People without a coin in sight have been mugged. It is the criminal’s decision to commit the crime and criminals will commit crimes regardless of how a victim is dressed or how he or she acts.

Women should wear whatever length of skirt they want. It is up to men to practice self-control. After all, women have to practice self-control when they see a man with his shirt off. And don’t tell me it’s different for men, because that’s bullshit. Men should practice self-control and personal responsibility. And if they can’t, then it’s their own damn fault and no one else’s.

DelPiombo - perhaps some of the women were not so much upset about the pictures of shapely babes in bikinis as much as the fact that ‘every now and again’ was, for a short time, seeming to become ‘now’, ‘now’, ‘now’.

And waddya we femmes (and guys who don’t really care about babes in bikinis) get?

We get cross-generational mens in loinclothes, from the side, carrying some shrine thing while wading in water. Not even *wet* loinclothes (not, you know, like I was looking too closely to confirm this as ‘fact’ rather than ‘hope’).

But, hey… it’s a start

To clarify: by “sentiments expressed by the previous commentator”, I was referring to comment 28.

But not one single guy complained about the bikini pics.

I am reliably informed that most women don’t mind men they find cute admiring their body but men they don’t find cute, well that’s a no-no.

Sadly I fear it doesn’t work like that. Avert your eyes, boys (unless you’ve prior consent, of course).

I’m cold-hearted and analytical.

It seems to me that a big component of crime prevention is simply trying to reduce the *potential* of crime to an extent that is generally socially acceptible and not an undue burden to *potential* victims.

When I was working with seniors, I brought in crime prevention officers from the local police station and there was a discussion on how to become more aware of and minimize behaviours that make a senior more vulnerable to certain crimes.

One of the standard suggestions was for the senior women *not* to put her purse strap over the opposite shoulder to sling across her middle since a thief intent on getting that purse will likely grab it and run, taking the senior woman down and probably causing injury - so you have a crime + an injury. Now, yes… I believe a senior woman should be able to do whatever the hell she wants to with a purse… she should be able to swing it around her head if she wants. It’s her right to feel free to wear whatever she wants without a crime occuring.

But the *reality* and the *statistics* say that, actually, that isn’t always a good idea.

And yet, I’ve never had someone have a discussion with me about senior women’s trampled freedoms and rights and why-should-she-have-to-suffers and blaming-the-victims.

Because, I suspect, it’s devoid of the sexual component (aside from victim gender) and people intuitively know that a rather simple action that doesn’t impede a woman’s day-to-day living is an acceptible compromise to prevent *potential* crime.

All I do is extend this same logic to girls in short skirts. If wearing them longer doesn’t impede their day-to-day living and it lessens the chance of *potential* crime and if it falls within a ‘comfort’ realm (at least for me, personally, in this case) of not being unduely socially or morally restrictive, then I’m fine saying “add another dozen centimetres to that skirt.”

You know, way back when Japundit first got started and we really did not know what we were doing (not that we do now), we had a photo feature called “Skirt of the Week”.

After a number of weeks, one of our female readers (who is no longer around) called us perverts and raised a fuss, so the feature was discontinued and we took down all of the offending photos. Right after that, we got a number of complaints from guys asking why we stopped the feature.

:oops::oops::oops::oops::oops::oops:
Anyway whats wrong with people doing that,
so long as they don’t touch you and your wearing proper pants