After a man was arrested on the National Mall for voyeurism after filming up women's skirts on July 4th, some people were like, hey now—that's illegal? It is in D.C.: Voyeurism was made a criminal offense by the Omnibus Public Safety Emergency Act of 2006 [PDF].
Below, the District's rules on putting your "electronic devices" in other people's "private areas":

So: "Electronic device" is defined as "any electronic, mechanical, or digital equipment that captures visual or oral images, including cameras, computers, tape recorders, video recorders, and cellular telephones."

And a "Private area" is defined as "the naked or undergarment-clad genitals, pubic area,
anus, or buttocks, or female breast below the top of the areola."

Here's how not to put those two things together:

It is unlawful for a person to electronically record, without the express and informed consent of the individual being recorded, an individual who is: using a bathroom or rest room; totally or partially undressed or changing clothes; or engaging in sexual activity.

Also, don't do this:

It is unlawful for a person to intentionally capture an image of a private area of an individual, under circumstances in which the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, without the individual’s express and informed consent.

Breaking those laws is a misdemeanor that can draw up to $1,000 in fines and up to 1 year in jail. If you then go on to distribute or disseminate those images or videotapes, that's a felony that can draw up to $5,000 in fines and up to 5 years in jail.

But what if a person's "private are" is exposed in public—and you use an electronic device to snap a picture for your garden-variety Huffington Post nipple-slip feature? Are you looking at jail time? According to D.C. law, "Express and informed consent is only required when the individual engaged in these activities has a reasonable expectation of privacy."

And what's "reasonable" is up for debate. Does Tara Reid have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when she appears on the red carpet and her breast escapes from her dress? How about a man who deliberately changes his clothes in the middle of the street? How about a woman in the park in a skirt—does she have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when there's a big old hole in the bottom of that traditionally feminine body-covering? What if she wears that skirt, and then raises her leg at too high an angle as she exits a car? With the July 4th arrest, D.C. police are asserting that filming "up-skirts" is illegal in the District. But questions over consent, privacy—and angles—remain.

Photo by Mr. T in DC, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

When Lena Chen was a sophomore at Harvard, she started "Sex and the Ivy," a blog devoted to something that most college students do, but few are willing to talk about. On her sex blog, Chen unapologetically aired every taboo of a college student's sex life, from recovering from an eating disorder to recovering a condom from her vagina. And for that, several thousand people decided that Chen must be punished.

In 2007, when she was 19 years old, private sexual photos of Chen were planted in the comments section of Ivy League gossip blog IvyGate. From there, Chen's ex-boyfriend, her classmates at Harvard, and the greater Internet gossip world took delight in forwarding, downloading, and re-posting the images—a full-scale campaign waged to shame Chen for talking about sex. "I was never ashamed of my body or of people seeing it," Chen later wrote about the experience. "I felt victimized because I had been exposed without consent and doubly victimized by those who wrote salaciously about the incident."

Chen's legion of downloaders are on the cutting edge of public sexual harassment. The technology has changed, but the idea is the same: Find a woman who dares to have a sex life. Feel the need to exert sexual power over her. Police her by sexualizing against her will, and under your terms. On the Sexist, we've called out the inherent misogyny of publicizing something as seemingly innocent as an inadvertent "nipple slip"; at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has suggested that the dissemination of private sexual images (like the Carrie Prejean masturbation video) ought to be considered a form of sexual assault; around the country, similar incidents of harassment have moved girls to suicide.

Chen, now 22 and writing at the Ch!cktionary, didn't  "deserve" this because she happens to be a sex writer. But her pro-sex philosophy does help to articulate why disseminating sexualized images of women without their consent is wrong.

—

SEXIST: Could you talk a little bit about how the dissemination of photos like these can be so damaging?

LENA CHEN: People don’t really understand when there’s a line being crossed. People will say to me, “But how can you object to this when you post very provocative photos of yourself?” When I was 18, I posed nude for a friend of mine, for an art class. The photos went up in a student art gallery. Classmates saw the photos. They were taken completely with my permission, and I knew exactly the context in which they were going to be used. The leaked photos were taken in private by someone I was dating at the time. I didn’t expect them to be publicly disseminated. They were never meant for public consumption. It felt like a major violation. . . . But the part that I think is really exploitative is that these photos were obviously being spread in a manner in which the goal was to shame me. I’m not ashamed of my body or of people seeing my body. But the people distributing these photos didn't do it as an empowering, ‘rah, rah’ thing. These people took private photos of me and knowingly distributed them in order to try to make me feel ashamed of myself. I want to clarify the difference.

LC: In some ways, I was better prepared for this situation because I was already writing about sex. I know that slut-shaming is wrong and I'm not ashamed of being sexual. If this were to happen to someone else—a completely private individual—it would be extremely, extremely damaging to that person’s self worth. As for me, I went from being somewhat unhappy with my campus reputation to actually having panic attacks for the first time my life. I was placed under a considerable amount of scrutiny. These are real-world consequences. When slut-shaming works—and even when it doesn’t work—you end up losing a considerable amount of trust in people. And not just the person who posted them in the first place—you can’t even count all the people who helped to spread them. . . . Maybe you can predict the crazies, but you just can’t imagine the masses of people who will step up to help them. That’s what’s disheartening. And at Harvard, it wasn’t even that bad.  I think the difference is at Harvard—it’s not so possible to be a social conservative at Harvard. So everyone would be very politically correct about it to my face.

LC: I don’t think people forget that they also have sex. I think there’s a sense of false modesty about it. You’re not supposed to talk about it; that's the real crime. Even if you do it, you’re still less of a slut than a person who talks about it. People like to maintain the façade of sexual propriety. Think about the most embarrassing things that could happen to someone, and a lot of them will involve sexual performance. There is a great deal of anxiety about sex in our culture, and no one wants to talk about it openly and honestly. Because we’re neurotic about sex. We’re curious in a morbid way. That makes for some very ripe material for controversies like mine coming up. It’s a lurid, sensational story. Who isn’t going to be drawn into that? People project their own anxieties onto me. They want to shame me for letting someone take naked photos of me, but these people are going and downloading those images from a torrent. What does that say?

LC: Harvard has 6,400 undergrads. I don't think close friends of mine Googled the photos. Casual acquaintances, maybe we were close enough to be Facebook friends—they probably did. The people who are a few social networks removed from me. It’s bizarre to me, because obviously I’m a real person, even if I don’t talk to them. They see me in the dining hall, see me around school. It’s not like I was MIA. I really didn’t remove myself from Harvard campus life until after the fact [Chen took a leave of absence from school following the incident], but at the time, I was more or less a fully engaged student there. That’s why I found it really, really disheartening—the people behind it were my peers at Harvard. And maybe they didn’t think of it as some sort of huge betrayal of my trust, but it felt like a witch-hunt and felt like mass bullying.

LC: The person with the photos—my ex, presumably—left a bunch of comments on IvyGate with links to the photographs. Someone contacted me from IvyGate and said, "Do you want to comment on this? We’re going to write a story on it." I was so completely shocked that I didn’t even question what I was being told. You have to understand how quickly this all happened. Now I think I would like to go back and say," Do you really need to have a story on this? I’m 19 years old. I don’t think I fall into the category of a public figure. Exes go crazy. Where is the news?" People who are deemed “web celebrities” are just considered fair game for attack. Why would Gawker [porn blog Fleshbot] be posting anything about me? . . . The whole system is under the impression that if something happens to you, you "asked for it." And it’s applied more often to women bloggers. For example: I hate Michelle Malkin. But if she were a dude, would anyone want to find out where she lived? Conservatives and liberals alike—if you’re a woman you’re going to have to put up with a lot more vitriol. Certainly when it comes to matters of sexual shame. The best thing for everyone to do would have been to just ignore it. . . . I heard it was one of the highest-trafficked stories IvyGate ever published.

—

Previously in Sexist interviews:

* Jaclyn Friedman on Fucking While Feminist

* Thomas MacAullay Millar on men in the feminist movement

Today, Tucker Carlson launched The Daily Caller, a Web site that has been hailed as the conservative answer to the Huffington Post. Given my peculiar obsessions with Arianna Huffington's left-leaning political tabloid, I had but one question for Carlson: Will there be nipples?

Last June, I noted the Huffington Post's regular publication of "nipple slips," or the accidentally bared nipples of major and minor celebrities. I argued that the promotion of these red-carpet snafus encourages readers to objectify women's bodies, while denying those women the agency to control their own nipple exposure—and that these non-consensual erotic displays compromised the Huffington Post's ostensibly progressive bent. (Recall this intensely zoomed-in image of the outer reaches of Beyonce's areola to reveal the depths of HuffPo's obsession with accidental nipples).

When pressed on what it all means, editor Arianna Huffington insisted that a nipple slip is divorced from political ideology: "As Freud said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'—and a nipple slip is just a nipple slip." (Translation: Sometimes a cigar does not mean a "penis," but sometimes a "woman's nipple" does mean a "woman's nipple," and that means lot of page-views).

Huffington's armchair psychoanalysis failed to shed any light on the matter: How is the objectification of women justified by political progressives? With the launch of Carlson's Caller, I was presented with a rare opportunity to see how a right-leaning Web site might deal with women's boobs peeking out of their dresses. Would it lean toward the side of abstinence-informed modesty? Would it tend toward boy's-club objectification? Or would it just publish, like, real news?

I e-mailed Carlson to ask him about his site's political ideology, and whether it would embrace nipples. Carlson's response: "I can't promise the site will be areola-free—in my experience these things are hard to predict—but even at this late stage we haven't settled on a firm nipple policy," he wrote.

So far, the Daily Caller has yet to promote images of any accidentally naked celebrities on the Web. A perusal of the Daily Caller's "Entertainment" page reveals some tabloid fare ("Lohan in paparazzi incident...again"), and some sexy news ("Avatar was supposed to have a sex scene"), but, alas, no nipples:

Yet.

But as a consumer of nipple shots, such versatility can become confusing. It's often difficult to know the socially acceptable reaction to every stray projection of skin that catches your eye. Should you high-five your buddy or vomit discreetly into your hands? I'm here to help.

Taking a page from our friends at the Huffington Post, I've compiled some photos of famously exposed nipples—complete with "NSFW Zoom" (Not Janet Jackson, she's too obvious). First, review the Guidelines For Socially Acceptable Reactions to Nipples. Then, check out some Famously Exposed Nipples (NSFW-Zoomed into focus) and see if your gut response to each biological structure is in line with society's nipple norms.

Guidelines For Socially Acceptable Reactions to Nipples:

* All of a woman's breast revealed except for the nipple, which may be obscured by clothing, hair, or paint: sexy.

* All of a woman's breast revealed including the nipple: sexy; obscene.

* Renaissance-era artistic rendering of a woman's breast including the nipple: art.

* All of a man's chest revealed including the nipple: null. Unlike female nipples, which are either HOT or TOTALLY GROSS, male nipples are just there.

* All of a woman's breast revealed including the nipple while breastfeeding: not sexy; not obscene; to some, however, still totally fucking gross, far more disgusting than a normal female nipple, whose only reproductive function ought to be arousing you on-sight (Note: it is not yet socially acceptable to take photos of women breastfeeding in public in order to engineer "gotcha" nipple slip headlines).

* All of a woman's breast including the nipple, which the woman inadvertently flashes for the camera (also known as a "nipple slip"): sexy; obscene; still, manages to maintain the relative innocence of the woman who has inadvertently revealed the nipple, making the it that much sexier; unless of course it is Pamela Anderson's nipple, in which case the nipple slip is simply very obscene and not sexy at all, because Pam Anderson is agreed to be too slutty to pull off the treasured nipple slip dynamic.

—

Famously Exposed Nipples:

A. B.

C. D.

E. F.

G. H.

—

Socially Acceptable Reactions to These Nipples, Revealed:

A. Natalie Portman's nipple slip: sexier. SUITABLE REACTION: High-five.

B. Pamela Anderson's nipple slip: obscene; not sexy. SUITABLE REACTION: Vomit discreetly into hands.

C. Lindsay Lohan's nipple, obscured by hair: sexy. SUITABLE REACTION: Retweet.

D. Ian McKellen's nipple (male): null. SUITABLE REACTION: Curse your "celebrity nipple" google search for leading you astray.

E. Lady Gaga's nipple: sexy; obscene. SUITABLE REACTION: High-five.

F. Beyonce's nipple slip: sexier. SUITABLE REACTION: High-five.

G. A Real Housewife's nipple slip, obscured by clothing: sexy. SUITABLE REACTION: High-five.

H. Mona Lisa's nipple (rumored): art. SUITABLE REACTION: Scratch chin.

Last week, I suggested that the Huffington Post was sexist for devoting much of its Entertainment page to obsessively posting accidental female nipple slips caught on camera. Arianna Huffington responded via a Howard Kurtz column by saying:

"As Freud said, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’—and a nipple slip is just a nipple slip."

Well, I've been mulling over Huffington's retort for about 24 hours now, and I've finally figured out what is so fucking strange about this response. Let's start with Freud.

Sigmund probably never actually said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but theories abound as to the source of the attributed phrasing.

Here's the best guess of any: "Sigmund Freud was once asked about the psychoanalytic significance of his smoking a cigar, to which he replied that a good cigar was merely a smoke." So, Freud is sitting around having a cigar, and some student thinks it would be clever to ask Freud why he likes to put phallic objects in his mouth all the time. And Freud is like, ha, ha, you got me, but seriously, I am not gay. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Nipples, meanwhile are not stand-ins for sexualized female body parts—they are actually sexualized female body parts. It's true, I'm not kidding. HuffPo confirms its peculiar interest in the female nipple by regularly posting intensely zoomed-in "nipple slips" on its Web site, while sparing male nipples—regularly exposed on beaches everywhere, even by smokin' hot American presidents—the same "NSFW zoom" treatment and "check out these nipples, we found more somehow" headlines.

What might be a more apt comparison here? How about this: So, Freud is sitting around with a man's penis in his mouth, and some student thinks it would be clever to ask Freud why he likes to put men's penises in his mouth all the time. And Freud is like, ha, ha, you got me, but seriously, I am not gay. Sometimes, a man's penis in my mouth is just a man's penis in my mouth.

In other words, an Internet "newspaper" can feature sexist entertainment all it wants without actually being sexist, as long as it insists that its actions are meaningless, and can source that meaninglessness back to an unsourceable quote from Sigmund Freud, of all people. You're good, Huffington Post. You're really good.

Photo by RyAwesome

My beef with HuffPo's nipple slip coverage, Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment, inspired a range of responses this week. One commenter was peeved that I appear to "take no joy" in my work—an assertion that I roundly deny. Another sees rogue nipples throughout HuffPo's political coverage, as well: "They couldn’t find Hillary’s nipple, but they got as close as they could." And the Huffington Post chimed in, too—though not about the nipple thing.

The best of the rest are after the jump.

Theo Goodwin:

Having been on campus since the 1960’s and having shared my life with all those on the Left, let me tell you that the Left’s objectification of women is no secret, not even on the Left. Self aware members of the Left have said for decades that if abuse of women were to become a serious topic of conversation then all the leading men on the Left would have to line up and take their medicine.

tim33ny:

i read huffpost everyday at work, lots of good reads. judging from your article, it would appear as if you are a conservative. try this, stop focusing your energy on trashing liberal entertainment media and propaganda, and start to focus on how to take back the lost dignity of the right wing. if you try that you may actually get something done. also thanks for letting me kno that huffpost has nipple shots, i never knew that, ill be sure to check them out. btw dont bother replying to this comment because i will not be back to this website to check it. peace.

a liberal democrat from new york named tim

ps. dont forget to hail to the chief!!!

jason:

hahahaha. tim33ny is a prime example of huffpoop’s readership.

-libby mcliburul

It's no secret that The Huffington Post fancies itself a left-leaning Web rag. Wikipedia describes Arianna Huffington's aggregatorial monster as "an American liberal news website." Conservapedia's definition, however, might be more helpful: "The site is an extreme mouthpiece for liberals," it reads. "The Huffington Post calls itself an internet newspaper of blogs, news and video but often is referred to as a hate site where its one-sided news cannot be trusted."

But even HuffPo's liberal readership gets tired of hating on conservatives sometimes, guys. Sometimes, they just want to sit back, relax, and look at accidentally bare nipples—just like the rest of America. This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness—boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

* Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.

* Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."

* Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).

* Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).

* Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here—though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

So, what do nipple slips and boob jobs have to do with liberal politics?

The obvious answer, of course, would be nothing. People—even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people—will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that's a big part of the Huffington Post's model.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With 'Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence." Even "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants" was inspired by a progressive premise: the Carrie Prejean controversy, which the Huffington Post began following as a homophobia-shaming story, before turning around and covering it as a topless-photograph-shaming story.

Here's the lib logic on that one: How dare this professional spokesmodel both hate gay people and take revealing modeling photographs? Our only choice is to shame her by posting them on our Web site. It is the only thing that will finally reveal her hypocrisy (and reel in the pageviews)!

This same Prejean logic is used by the Huffington Post to justify its other women-as-object pieces, as well. Though Senior Features editor Katherine Thomson didn't immediately return my request for comment yesterday, HuffPo has, in the past, addressed stray nipples directly. Cenk Uygur, host of "The Young Turks," took this position on the Janet Jackson flap:

CBS was fined $550,000 for showing Janet Jackson's right nipple on live television. Coal mines that endanger the lives of their workers are commonly fined $60 per violation. . . . How do you like those priorities?

Uygur has a point—who cares? It's just a nipple! Only a religious conservative would bother to make a stink out of a body part which most men, women, and children have in sets of two. It's almost enough to make fetishizing nipples on your Web site sound like a liberal position. If it pisses off the religious conservatives, that means it's a good thing, right? After all, this is just "entertainment," anyway—who cares if it's progressive or not when we're all just staring at nipples and having a good time? As Harry Shearer points out on HuffPo, everybody's doing it!

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

The Prejean logic, while tenuous, is at least accompanied by her blatant homophobia; how items like "Rihanna's Battered Face (PHOTO)" and "Valerie Bertinelli Gets Back In Her Bikini" key into HuffPo's liberal identity remains a mystery to me. But I'm confident that any item that reaps a lot of pageviews can some way, somehow, be justified as "liberal."