Peeping Tom ala Pattaya

Voyeurism is the ageless fascination for an unseen spectator to view a person performing a natural act, usually sexual. This predilection has ruined some people's lives when they've been caught by the authorities and several years ago in Pattaya an Estonian tourist was discovered taking snapshots of two Chinese women in the toilet.

One of them was fifty.

The 20 year-old screamed and the Estonian broke for freedom. 

Thais took up pursuit and he destroyed his camera, thinking the evidence would be erased, only to have the police process the pictures from the memory chip.

At the police station he confessed to his lewd behavior. The strangest part of this story is that Pattaya is a city in which you can find scores if not hundreds of women willing to pose naked for a price. Like Luis Buunel said, "Without sin there is no pleasure."

Thankfully for the Slavic farang the matter was settled with a cash payment to the offended women and the police warned the Estonian to be a better boy in the future.

The first time I ever saw something I shouldn't was my next door neighbor changing out of her bathing suit. I was ten. It didn't feel like a sin, yet I knew this covert observation wasn't something you were supposed to pursue as a career, unless you were in the CIA and they rejected my application for employemtn in 1980.

Too many red marks for drug use and anti-American sentiment.

Personally I thought I would have been perfect for an undercover operative.

Spying on people is almost second nature.

My apartment on east 10th Street backed onto a schoolyard and across the alley was a performance space for dance. My window looked right into the changing room. Slim girls slipped out of frocks. I even saw my ex-girlfriend Ann in the dressing room. Her I showed some discretion. After all we are friends. Strangers are another thing entirely.

I do like Robbes-Grillet's 1955 novel THE VOYEUR and when I first moved to Pattaya my window overlooked a western woman's bedroom. She masturbated religiously every night. My girlfriend and I watched from our darkened room until we had seen the show too often.

Even sex gets boring unless you change the channel.