‘Upskirting’

I drove past my local secondary school as the pupils were leaving last Wednesday. I was horrified at the "skirts" the girls were wearing - boob tubes for bums - very tight stretchy looking material which barely covered their bum cheeks. Many of the girls were walking along continuously tugging them down as they rode up with each step!

Yep the girl should definitely slap the face of any boy that dares. For goodness sake that is awful that it is considered fun to lift a girls skirt. I never wear trousers...love me long linen dresses. When young I wore both mini skirts and long flowing skirts. A girl/woman should not have to feel that it is safer to wear trousers.

I'm sorry but I have never understood why schools allow mobile phones into classrooms, it seems crazy to me.

The film "Wonder" included some sequences giving the impression of pictures being snapped and swiftly shared. Quite unsettling.

I went to a girls' school so all we had to put up with were snide remarks from other girls. When I went to college tights hadn't quite come in so we were wearing very short skirts with stockings and suspenders, which were just about decent as long as you didn't move. Fortunately we were all 18+ and the boys were seeing more than enough totally naked women in the life classes so we weren't very interesting.

I hope that schools which insist on girls wearing skirts are now a thing of the past.

With all the fuss about pupils feeling comfortable in their identity etc, surely comfortable in their choice of clothes should also be usual.

So either/any gender able to choose skirt or trousers.

Caocao that’s just it I m not sure what boys are having to lie on the floor to look up girls skirts the girls round here and in the city wear them so short they wouldn’t have to lie down ?
It sounds as if there are a group of schoolgirls in long full skirts perhaps they re in private schools they are round my way

At the Convent school when I was a child ,70+ years ago we were not allowed to wear patent shoes in case our knickers could be reflected in them , actually I am not sure if that was true or just one of the stories kids made up ?

Suggest as a punishment for any boy caught is that he has to wear a skirt to school for a week. The trend would die a death

No an 11 year old boy can’t be a pervert, however, he needs to be told that looking up girls or women’s skirts is wrong and he will be punished for doing it.

FarNorth apparently it's because the actual offence is causing a disturbance in a public place or breach of the peace or something similar which is tied to it being in public, and it doesn't come under sexual offences.

My neighbour, a woman in her 40’s, was desperately upset when she found a camera poked under the side partition of a shop mixed changing room, taking pictures while she was trying something on. By the time she was dressed, the culprit had left the shop - the manager wasn’t interested, though the police were sympathetic if impotent. An extension of ‘upskirting’?

We had a maths teacher who was known to drop an exercise book so he could look up the skirts if girls who were heading for puberty. This was first year high school, we were 11 but it was common knowledge he did this to age 15/or 16/ when we left. Yes, some of us told our parents, who gave advice on avoiding being targeted. Nope, none of the parents complained to the head, so neither did we. This would have been 1960

When I was younger I was told that if you left possessions that you didn't want stolen in places where they were easy to steal then you were "ennabling" theft and you were at fault for doing that. It was a minor fault compared with stealing but it was a fault.

What if the same principle were to be applied to "ennabling" so-called up-skirting and down-blousing?

If women and teenage girls were to take small measures to prevent up-skirting or down-blousing, they would avoid the victim status some of them are currently complaining about.

That said, I remember being surprised to see rather more than I expected of my teacher's boobs when I was seven years old and she bent over my desk from in front while wearing a summer dress which, other than gaping a bit when she bent forward, I daresay was perfectly respectable.

I suppose I'm saying that if you don't want people to look down your top or up your skirt then don't let them.

I seem to remember in childhood , little boys daring each other to run up to a girl to lift her skirt and show her knickers.

Even as a small girl this struck me as very silly and I treated it with the contempt it deserved. It certainly didn't occur to me that it was my 'fault'. I saw it for what it was an attempt by little boys to annoy little girls. I doubt if the boys saw it as sexual, just that little girls thought showing their knickers was shocking , I don't think we knew why, therefore little boys knew that lifting a skirt to show them was annoying.

I think sometimes in our determination to stop sexualised behaviour, we sometimes end up sexualising, actions that had no sexual intent.

When I started Secondary School in the mid 60s stockings were still part of our uniform, tights had only just become more commonplace. When we had to walk up to our Science Labs the staircases were open, boys used to stand at the bottom to see if they could see up our skirts, we used to stop & shout down to them, they soon got bored. Trousers for girls were not part of the uniform in those days.

I wore mini skirts & hot pants (not at School), inappropriate behaviour was dealt with usually by a "look" or even a slap, are girls/women more sensitive these days or has sexual harassment got worse?

Baggs, the point about upskirting is the individual using a camera of some kind to do it, doesn’t ask permission, or do it openly. That’s how they get their kicks, by sneaking about behaving like creeps.

I don't think girls and women have got more sensitive these days - rather many have developed a stronger sense of their own worth and aren’t prepared to put up with the sexist behaviour that was commonplace when we were younger.

I agree maryeliza.

Nasty, but not new, when I was at secondary school many moons ago the Divinity teacher was sacked for this!!!

I recall at school when I was talking in class being told to stand on my chair.The two boys either Sid of me Upskirted me. I was appalled and told them to stop but the teacher still made me stand on my chair.Not all the boys in class would have done this but I was unlucky to be sat between these cave boys.
I was about 13 and would if it had been allowed worn trousers.
I agree boys and men should stop behaving in this way.
And I have grandsons who I hope will not behave in this way

Well If more schools allowed girls to wear skirts this would not happen so often but that is not exactly a solution.

However I feel trousers are just more convenient for girls to wear anytime and particularly at school etc.

Is this really happening to this exrent?

Stealing is usually done sneakily too, iam. I don't question the sneakiness and the prurience of upskirting and downblousing. What I'm suggesting is that there are plenty of things women and girls can do to prevent most of it with regard to those two problems. Then there is the apparently increased sensitiveness to such sneaky and prurient behaviour that some people have already mentioned.

We are back to the argument of whether it is reasonable for women and girls (and men too for that matter) to expect to be able to wear whatever they like with no consequences at all. When sexuality is not involved nobody seems to think wearing "what you like" is automatically appropriate so it seems a bit weird to me to think that when boobs, which are sexualised objects whether we like it or not, and undercarriages ditto (also penises), are involved the sexual aspect should just be ignored or we should pretend it doesn't exist.

This is not to argue that men and boys should not behave properly. It is to argue that, realistically, 100% of them never will. 100% of women won't either.

The problem of upskirting was brought up about a news or discussion programme on TV recently. I forget who the woman was who complained. One of the cameras was pointed at the group at about waist level. Because the people being filmed were sitting on couches without a desk in front of them, a good deal of the thigh of a woman was visible in certain shots. She was wearing a short dress and was sitting with her legs crossed. She must have known that this would expose a good amount of thigh. It's not unreasonable, in my view, for people to assume that she doesn't mind showing a lot of thigh. Why else would she dress in a way that showed it? The tone of her complaint was that she was a victim of the cameraman's prurience. The cameraman was a woman and probably filming the woman (and the other participants) in exactly the same way as she films men.

The victimhood status that some women seem to revel in (c/f the increased sensitivity mentioned by others) in such situations seems to me to be like someone deciding to climb a mountain in totally unsuitable clothing and then complaining (they don't usually, but mountain rescue teams sometimes do, with some justification!) when they become victims of reality—the reality of mountain weather conditions. It's stupid behaviour parading as freedom to do what the hell I like that's the problem.