ONLINE EXHIBITIONISTS

The thrill of putting it
all out there
For exhibitionists, the Internet is an ideal fantasy playground
By Brian Alexander

Not long into my instant message conversation with "Don," it's obvious there is no way to know if he is who he says he is, if he's answering my questions honestly or if he's playing me for a chump. All I know for sure is that Don placed an image on his IM profile that appeared on my monitor when we began chatting. At first the image he used to represent himself was that of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. But he's just replaced that one with another, so now I'm looking at a shot of a torso complete with an erect penis. I assume that's him, but then again, you never know.

Don, an American, says he is on a business trip to Europe and doing what he often does during downtime - firing up his Web cam and exposing himself to the world. The body parts look to be about the right age, 49, and his conversation seems mature enough. Plus, I have managed to contact Don through other online exhibitionists I have met in person. Still, it's possible Don is actually a lonely retiree in Yellowknife, Canada who's surfing the Internet between glances at "Wheel of Fortune."

This is exactly the point of online exhibitionism, and why so many people have started doing it. You can be as free as you want to expose as much of yourself as you want without looking over your shoulder for the county sheriff. This makes the Internet an ideal fantasy playground where anybody can launch naked signal flares into the digital sky to announce: "I'm here, and I'm hot."

Homemade erotica has been around forever. When Polaroid introduced its Model 95 camera in 1948, average people were given the power to produce personal porn on a mass scale because nobody had to develop the pictures. But digital culture has broadened the possibilities. There are dozens of ways to use digital media to expose yourself, ranging from the mild to the X-rated.

Bikini retailers host online "customer galleries" featuring women (and sometimes men) wearing thongs and see-through tops, or no tops at all. On some sites, Web surfers can send e-mails to their favorite bikini-clad woman stating just how much they appreciate the view.

Popular exhibitionist Web sites such as Red Clouds, Watcher's Web, Voyeurweb and True Voyeur offer the same service, allowing every man and woman the chance to let the world see what they look like naked on a rubber float in the backyard pool or spread-eagle in the Barcalounger, and to read how excited (or not) that makes others. The sites appear to have a strong following. Among users of the Alexa Web search Toolbar, for instance, Voyeurweb ranks as the 398th most popular Web site over the past three months. In other words, out of every million users, 1,075 go to Voyeurweb and average 17.7 page views.

There also are sex blogs everywhere now, and MySpace and Flickr are populated by people posing like porn stars.

Of course, "online exhibitionism" sounds creepily similar to "online predator" and "kiddie porn," and the potential for that kind of abuse is great.

But the exhibitionists I contacted all stress that not only are they concerned parents themselves who closely monitor the Internet use of their kids, they also regard such use of the technology as a scourge.

The mom next door
For Susan, Internet exhibitionism has uses of a very interactive kind. I visited Susan in her Maryland home with "Michael" (who asked I not use his real first name), a man Susan met online. Susan uses the Net to trade images of herself with individuals and couples she meets through computer chats and online ads. Sometimes she is naked, sometimes she's performing a sex act.

Susan describes herself "as very much an exhibitionist," but she's nothing like the grizzled guy in the trench coat. She is a middle-aged medical professional, a church-goer and a mother. She is studying for an advanced degree. She calls herself "Rubenesque" and though she is attractive, she does not look like a centerfold model.

"Something I am not interested in is losing my sexuality," she says. "For a woman that is more of a fight." Taking digital pictures of herself, trading them with others and knowing they appreciate them helps her reclaim her feminine sexual identity.

Michael and Susan met when she answered an ad he placed on Craigslist (where ads for sex partners often display the advertiser's genitals). They exchanged nude pictures, met in person and have now struck up what Michael, also a middle-aged professional who works as an executive at a high-tech company and is a father, calls "an intimate friendship." Sometimes they include other people they meet online in their lovemaking, in threesomes or foursomes.

For Michael and Susan, the digital realm is liberating. "I can be free to think the things I want to think and not only think them but act upon them," he says. "How cool is that? You can dream the dream and then go make it real. This is a portal into a parallel universe. I mean, it's a wild world."

That world has been further fueled by technology. Thanks to broadband connections, Web cams and instant messaging, anybody can carve out a space in which they can act in ways they might not outside the virtual world.

"At church ... or wherever your community is, you cannot be real open and talk about your sexuality," Susan says. "But you sure can online. And you can very easily find somebody who is interested in the same things you are."

Many online exhibitionists have no idea who is on the other end of a Web cam and don't really want to know. But some, like Susan and Michael, eventually drop the anonymity because their ultimate goal is to make online fantasies real. "My goal is skin to skin," Susan says.

Don, Susan and Michael do not generally put their pictures up on public Web sites, preferring instead to trade and communicate - often using instant messaging - with a more select audience of their own choosing. Susan, for example, has occasionally viewed Don's camming sessions. She says finding an audience is not difficult.

"I do have ads up on a couple of different Web sites but I think there are networks of people," Susan says. "If you meet somebody and they know 20 people who know 20 people who know 20 people, it is pretty easy to get an expanded community."

That is just what Don has created. At first, he surfed the Web looking for still images of naked female exhibitionists. Then around the year 2000, "when I learned that computers could broadcast cams, I watched a few ladies, usually only topless, perform for me on the Web... Eventually I met a [woman] from Florida who showed me everything and begged me to get a cam. I did, and soon found myself stripping for her. I looked for others who liked it too, and didn't have to look far."

For Don, "camming" usually means displaying himself masturbating, often with one or more women, and sometimes a man, as his audience. Often the camming is mutual, with Don and a woman, using her Web cam to display herself to Don, instant messaging dirty talk back and forth.

'Avenue of escape'
Now, Don tells me, he has about 120 regulars with whom he frequently chats and "cams." He has had virtual sex over the cam with many more people than that, and he does it most nights when he is on the road.

"The digital world," he says, "gives me an avenue of escape to secret desires where I can find fulfillment." He is able to satisfy " private hard-core lover hidden inside of me" that he can express online in anonymity.

That anonymity is important because Don, who tells me he is a conservative Republican Catholic and somewhat shy in real life, is married with children. His wife knows nothing about his online sex life.

"I am basically a moral person but flawed major league when it comes to sex," he says. "And yet there is this secret side to me that must be satisfied … I have always had a streak of exhibitionism in me and felt guilty about that."

He is torn. On the one hand, he worries there might be something wrong with him. On the other, he feels release when he's "camming."

"I think of [online exhibitionism] as pure erotic expression of human desire," he says. "We seek escape from our difficulties, from our routine or pressures, and this gives it to us."

So far, it's tough to say whether Don's form of escape will continue to grow, or if the novelty of digitally mediated exhibitionism will wear off. But it's clear that, for now at least, many Americans are thrilled by the prospect of being their own porn star.

Brian Alexander, a California-based freelance writer and MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist, is traveling around the country to find out how Americans get sexual satisfaction. Alexander, also a Glamour contributing editor, is chronicling his work in the MSNBC.com special report "America Unzipped" and in an upcoming book for Harmony, an imprint of Crown Publishing.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOUND HERE

We have listed at least 4 predators at EOPC who are voyeurs and exhibitionists.

WARNING SOME ADULT CONTENT!! MUST BE 18 TO CLICK!
ONE, TWO , and THREE

Chatroulette

Disturbing: A girl tries out Chatroulette and is linked to a man
who immediately starts unzipping his trousers

Is new website the most disturbing internet craze yet?

By Olivia Lichtenstein

When this writer's daughter told her about a 'cool' new teen website, she decided to investigate. What she found was the most worrying internet craze to date.
~~~~~

Late on a weekday afternoon and I'm sitting at my computer. On the screen in front of me are two small boxes - little video streams - one above the other. My face is in the bottom box. The face and bare torso of a man is in the one on top. Let's call him Gerry.

Beside Gerry's face is a box into which we can type, so that we can chat to one another. So he types hello and then asks where I come from. I say hello back and tell him I am from London.

Our exchange has lasted barely seconds, but suddenly another message pops up. He's asking me if I will remove my top so he can see my breasts.

He is a complete stranger, and one of the many crude and deviant men I have encountered in the past 30 minutes.

I quickly click a button to have him removed from my screen.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world of Chatroulette - an internet site that is turning into something of a phenomenon.

It was my 16-year- old daughter who told me about Chatroulette, a 'cool' new site she and her friends recently started using.

It's the fast-growing, latest fad among teenagers - a quick and easy way to communicate online with people from all over the world.

It works literally like roulette. Users log on, press a big button labelled 'Next' and it then randomly connects you to any one of a number of people across the world currently logged on. The gimmick is the fact that all of the users have webcams - so they can 'meet' the random strangers.

It was the idea of 17-year-old Russian schoolboy Andrey Ternovskiy. He launched it in November last year and his business quickly grew virally from 50 users to 50,000 in its first month.

One million people now visit it each day. However, what may have started as the innocent game of a Moscow schoolboy has quickly become a potential tailor-made portal for perverts and paedophiles - proving once again that the internet is putting the lives of our vulnerable teenagers (and adults) in jeopardy.

And believe me, after you've seen it, you'll never complain about your teen's obsession with texting their friends again.

For this, the latest Frankenstein monster spawned by the internet is, as with so much web-based activity, impossible to monitor, restrict or control.

After my daughter first told me about it a few weeks ago, I decided to investigate the site for myself - and, even for a technophobe like me, the ease with which I was able to access it was terrifying.

It doesn't require you to log in or register (despite the fact that the site states it is for over-16s only) and all you need is a computer with a webcam. It's entirely free and once you've clicked a button to allow the site to access your webcam, your face appears in one of two boxes.

In fact, it's so disturbingly easy that even primary school children, with basic computer skills, could access it.

Once you're plugged in, the site immediately starts searching for a 'partner' and within seconds you find yourself jettisoned into a stranger's bedroom, living room, or, all too often, trousers.

The webpage is unsophisticated and states only the following rules: '16+, clothes, report button.' More often than not, though, as I discovered, 'unclothed' was the order of the day.

And the button which allows you to report unseemly behaviour is all very well, but the perpetrator's punishment is a tame warning and 40 minutes suspension from the site. Hardly a deterrent. During my time on Chatroulette, the users I encountered were men and women from Germany, Holland, Turkey, Spain, America and Britain. To begin, you click a button marked 'New game'.

If you don't like the look of the person you have been connected to, you click a button marked 'Next' and somebody else instantly pops up at random. They can be any age, any sex and hail from Manchester to Moscow - although the site's lingua franca is English.

Many of the people on this site are exhibitionists who are free to display themselves to total strangers. Mostly, the people I chatted to were men. Some of them showed their faces - others angled the computer in such a way as to mask their identities and, all too often, to reveal their genitals.

At least one out of every five of the strangers I was connected to was a man with the camera pointed directly at his private parts. Within the first few seconds of using the site, I was asked: 'Do you show boobs?'

This was a man from Ibiza, who had angled the computer in such a way that all I could see was his clothed lap. He could have been anything from 17 to 70.

A man from Germany whose face was masked with a scarf asked if I would like to watch him fondle himself. Another told me in graphic terms what he would like me to do to him.

Apart from a sweet but banal conversation with a Spanish student who wanted to improve his English, and a courteous Turkish architect, most of the encounters I experienced left me feeling that I had become the unwitting participant in a porn film.

The ability to parachute into the lives of strangers is simultaneously addictive and repellent. Just like pornography, it leaves the user feeling dirty and ashamed.

Most of the people I encountered were foreign - and while their English was often poor, they knew the words required to fulfill one purpose: to persuade young girls and women to undress.

Chatroulette may have been invented by a child, but it's clearly not appropriate for children - and it's anything but a game.

But, thanks to celebrity users such as Paris Hilton and Ashton Kutcher, teenagers are flocking to the site.

Indeed, if you swiftly 'next' your way through your matches, you will find that around 50 per cent of users appear to be younger than 20.

The fact that my daughter and her friends are not shocked by the site is shocking in itself - it's a further indication that such aberrant behaviour has been normalised.

'If you don't like something, you just click "next",' my daughter blithely told me. It saddens me that she has grown up in a society that makes it possible for her to be so worldly and resigned at such a young age.

But she is not alone. Even more depressingly, it seems that - thanks to the internet - such sexualised behaviour is pervading all generations.

Just last week, a newspaper column related the story of a woman who had recently gone on a date with an unnamed parliamentary candidate. Their date went well, but - as the source revealed - the very next day she received an email containing a photograph of his genitals.

Shocking enough, but sadly not a unique occurrence. I have a number of middle-aged friends who are newly divorced or still single (sometimes still very married) and navigating the tricky minefield that is internet dating. They have found that conversations online all too quickly turn vulgar. And increasingly pornographic, too.

One told me of a man who, within minutes of meeting online, tried to engage her in dirty talk. Another had an online suitor who bombarded her with a series of naked pictures.

Of course, my friends did not participate. But one short afternoon on Chatroulette and you will find that there are a number of women who will. So what is it that is attracting so many modern men and women to such disturbing exhibitionism?

Dr Taly Weiss is a Jerusalem-based marketing trends researcher with a PhD in Social Psychology. She says that internet encounters, be they ones such as on Chatroulette or dating sites, or the sending of explicit photos, are about satisfying the feeling of excitement that comes when we are allowed inside private places and invite people into them too.

Chatroulette, in particular, where you are literally live in front of a total stranger, takes this to extremes.

I fear for what is going to happen next. For, when you think back to the creation of mobile phones, what started as a useful way of communicating quickly turned into sexting (sending explicit text messages).

Now, we face the worrying prospect that a growing number of men find it acceptable to expose themselves to strangers online - and the young girls watching them not only think it's normal, but some even agree to perform sex acts on themselves in return.

Will this soon become the perverted future of courtship?

Just think of the way that Ashley Cole threw away his marriage to Cheryl Cole by texting naked photos of himself to a stranger, before embarking on an alleged affair with her. 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall was raped and murdered by 26-year-old Peter Chapman, a man who had met and groomed her on Facebook.

Let us no longer pretend that this is all a 'bit of fun'. How long will it be before we hear of a similar Chatroulette tragedy?

Sarita Yardi, a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is studying the role of technology in teenagers' lives. She says that the idea of showing your face to strangers violates almost all social norms of the offline world.

'If someone walked up to you at a cocktail party, stared at you intensely, then simply walked away, you would feel confused and probably offended,' she says.

She advises parents to think carefully about what material is socially appropriate for their child and to weigh up the risks and rewards. 'It's like an online Lord Of The Flies,' she says.

'There are too many unacceptable cultural and moral boundaries that are crossed - like random and unpredictable exposure to nakedness - for it to persist in its present state. This brings up interesting questions of governance.' Indeed it does.

The startling lack of internet controls has been a cause of anxiety for parents for some time.

While users of other social networking sites are urged to check the identities of those they talk to, Chatroulette aficionados socially enter into conversation with random strangers who remain entirely anonymous.

'The fact that my daughter and her friends are not shocked by the site is shocking in itself'

Our children live in an age where the internet is all that they've ever known and they have access to all manner of images and information that we, as children, were not exposed to.

According to a recent Home Office report on the Sexualisation of Young People, 99 per cent of eight to 17-year-olds have access to the internet and 60 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds say that they mostly use it on their own.

The study found that 49 per cent of children aged eight to 17 have an online profile on sites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook and that girls report being under increasing pressure to display themselves in their underwear online.

Almost half of them say that their parents set no rules for the use of such sites. Chatroulette has taken social networking to the next level and provides a perfect forum for men to prey on vulnerable girls and women.

The images I encountered were shockingly pornographic, and it disturbs me profoundly to think that my 16-year-old has been exposed to them, even if she does have the street smarts to move swiftly on if she encounters anything unseemly.

The site is little more than a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs.

It's not a game, it's porn, and pornography is addictive, corrosive and promotes unhealthy sexual stereotypes and behaviour for girls and boys. It undermines dignity and respect for others by making sexual intimacy into little more than a spectator sport without love, commitment or responsibility.

Depressingly, the business world has been quick to exploit the opportunities of this viral site, now worth an estimated £30 million, which has spread like bushfire around the world.

Fred Wilson, a New York-based venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures who has invested in dozens of dotcom companies, including Twitter, states on his blog: 'The internet is this huge network with over a billion people worldwide on it.

'Chatroulette feels like a cool way to take a quick trip around that network, meeting people and talking to them.'

But while the site's founder claims he built it so he and his friends could start doing things together online, like watching movies or making things, those aims have quickly been subverted.

And, as I discovered during my short venture into that world, it's yet another example of the pernicious sexual culture that threatens to corrupt the fibre of our children's innocence.

original article here

Voyeurs 'Held ' After Filmed Men getting Changed at Leisure Centre

Two men have been arrested over claims they secretly recorded men getting changed at a leisure centre and then put the footage on a gay website.

Up to 28 men are believed to have been filmed in various states of undress at the FX Leisure Centre in Gateshead.

Existence of the footage only came to light when one of the men said to have been taped as he changed at the gym saw pictures of himself on a gay website.

Two men have been arrested after allegations that men getting changed at a leisure centre were secretly filmed. The footage is then said to have been posted on a gay website

The businessman contacted the club's management and police after seeing footage of himsself, according to the Daily Mirror, and two men were then arrested.

A staff member at FX Leisure Centre told the newspaper the man ‘thought it was a joke at first but then realised he had been filmed in the changing room’.

‘He went straight to the club management to complain. Some of the members are not too happy about their manhood making an unwanted guest appearance on a gay website.’

A spokesperson for Northumbria Police confirmed: ‘A 30-year-old man and a 34-year-old man were arrested on suspicion of voyeurism and have been bailed.'

Officials at the Gateshead leisure centre have declined to comment on the police investigation.

original article here