Courtesy of Ann Althouse, comes a link to a rather odd story about a woman named Kristina Ross in Idaho who told other women she met in bars that she was a plastic surgeon who does breast augmentations. This became the opening for her to touch their breasts while pretending to evaluate them for possible surgery.
Turns out she isn't a plastic surgeon. And she has been charged with, are you sitting down, practicing medicine without a license. As Althouse notes, what she actually did was lie to women in a bar. She also asks, "How it is a crime to lie to a woman to get her consent to touch her breasts?"
Well, I'd like to think it counts as sexual assault but I'm no law professor.
Reading it, I remembered an incident from back in the early 1980s. A bunch of us were in a bar talking. We weren't close friends; we were in the same class and went out for drinks after class sometimes. One evening a guy in the group turned to one of the women and bet her twenty dollars he could touch her bare nipples without touching her shirt or her bra. She was incredulous but didn't say "no" outright and they did some back and forth in which he kept chiding her and she kept insisting it was physically impossible and him saying, "If you really believe that then ...."
So she finally called what she thought was a bluff and he grabbed both her breasts, gave them a few good squeezes, said "You win," and handed her a twenty.
She was clearly humiliated by the incident and left the bar almost immediately. She did not call the police.
That's classic flim flam, of course, which is to say that part of the con is to leave the conned person so embarrassed at their own stupidity that they don't take any action.
Morally speaking, motive really matters here. Did the guy think this was a harmless party trick? Or did he want to touch her breasts so much he was willing to trick her? Or did he think she was stuck up and wanted to publicly humiliate her?
I look at cases like this and I have two perhaps contradictory thoughts. part of me thinks that this is small stuff. This sort of stuff goes on all the time. But I also think that we are in danger of robbing the act of touching a woman's breasts of it's power and mystery by taking this so casually. Sometimes legislating morality makes a lot of sense to me.
Oh yeah, there is more. There are some rather salacious details aboput Kristina Ross that may or may not want to know about below the fold.
Some would say that Ross was concealing something else. Here is how the Daily mail rather salaciously puts it:
Turns out she isn't a plastic surgeon. And she has been charged with, are you sitting down, practicing medicine without a license. As Althouse notes, what she actually did was lie to women in a bar. She also asks, "How it is a crime to lie to a woman to get her consent to touch her breasts?"
Well, I'd like to think it counts as sexual assault but I'm no law professor.
Reading it, I remembered an incident from back in the early 1980s. A bunch of us were in a bar talking. We weren't close friends; we were in the same class and went out for drinks after class sometimes. One evening a guy in the group turned to one of the women and bet her twenty dollars he could touch her bare nipples without touching her shirt or her bra. She was incredulous but didn't say "no" outright and they did some back and forth in which he kept chiding her and she kept insisting it was physically impossible and him saying, "If you really believe that then ...."
So she finally called what she thought was a bluff and he grabbed both her breasts, gave them a few good squeezes, said "You win," and handed her a twenty.
She was clearly humiliated by the incident and left the bar almost immediately. She did not call the police.
That's classic flim flam, of course, which is to say that part of the con is to leave the conned person so embarrassed at their own stupidity that they don't take any action.
Morally speaking, motive really matters here. Did the guy think this was a harmless party trick? Or did he want to touch her breasts so much he was willing to trick her? Or did he think she was stuck up and wanted to publicly humiliate her?
I look at cases like this and I have two perhaps contradictory thoughts. part of me thinks that this is small stuff. This sort of stuff goes on all the time. But I also think that we are in danger of robbing the act of touching a woman's breasts of it's power and mystery by taking this so casually. Sometimes legislating morality makes a lot of sense to me.
Oh yeah, there is more. There are some rather salacious details aboput Kristina Ross that may or may not want to know about below the fold.
Some would say that Ross was concealing something else. Here is how the Daily mail rather salaciously puts it:
I agree with you, I think it does rise to the level of sexual assault. If a man had done the same thing he probably would have been charged with that and maybe practicing medicine without a license too. Yes, there is a double standard where sex crimes are concerned. It also depends on the jurisdiction, some aggressively prosecute everyone--including kids--while others are more rational about it. But lying to obtain consent to touch a woman's breast, that's at least a misdemeanor sexual assault.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you're familiar with what's been going on here recently with the new TSA (Transportation Security Administration) regs about airport security, which include full body scans and "pat downs." People are going nuts about the invasion of privacy, but mostly about how people who get off on this can get a job as an airport security guard and indulge this fetish in a perfectly legal way and where people are forced to consent to being touched before they can board the plane. There's been such an outcry here that the TSA is considering abandoning the idea.
ReplyDelete