Voyeurism

Voyeurism

It’s a shame this word has been perverted, so to speak, by the more salacious, tawdry definition most people know it by. Peeping Toms have stolen from us a potentially delicious word. It derives from the French, “voir” which means “to see”, but the O.E.D. defines it specifically as an act of perversion, or even one rooted in schadenfreude.

I’d like to think it could also be applied to rubbernecking a car accident; people-watching from a park bench; or even just being hyper-aware of other people’s behavior and patterns. Clearly, I probably need to find another word to describe my more benign activities.

I think when there is a perceived or real invasion of privacy such as peeking through a window, using binoculars to see into the front room of the folks across the street, or simply extending one’s interest in others beyond the public domain, that the word gets its more deleterious interpretation.

Or maybe the French are simply more perverted than the rest of us.

For me, being a writer is like a mirror walking down the street. Or a sponge. You can reflect and absorb all you see. At least that has been my approach and I often wonder, as I look out the second floor window of the house I live in in central London, and notice across the street that on the bottom floor, at 6:00am, there appears to be two men moving about in what looks like a kitchen, and my first thought is, ‘gay partners’.

Is that voyeurism?