By SnifflesOkay, so two really disgusting invasion-of-privacy stories have surfaced in the last week.
We're not quite ready to comment on Professor Henry Louis Gates, so we'll talk about Erin Andrews instead. Some creep took peephole video of the ESPN sportscaster as she walked around naked in a couple of hotel rooms. The rest is Internet history.
Now, we cats aren't football fans, so we can't say before this that we were even aware of who Ms. Andrews was. But we've noticed that when networks covering games employ female "reporters" on the sidelines, they're invariably very attractive. We've also noticed that this tendency is, sadly, not restricted to the world of sports.
We will refrain from commenting on society's annoying habit of viewing women as merely decorative. However, clearly this peephole-video thing would never happen to someone like, say, Pauline Frederick. (Of course, Ms. Frederick was a real journalist who was valued for her brain.)
Oh, well. Our sympathies go out to Ms. Andrews, not just for the invasion of her privacy but for its onerous fallout. She and her lawyers will be kept busy, we suspect. But it's a cautionary tale, too, for other women in the public sphere whose celebrity is based primarily on their looks. We wonder if — once she resigns and loses her official protection — Sarah Palin might not be peephole prey someday.
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