Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

A media archaeology of the creepshot

Chrissy Thompson & Mark A. Wood

To cite this article: Chrissy Thompson & Mark A. Wood (2018) A media archaeology of the
creepshot, Feminist Media Studies, 18:4, 560-574, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1447429

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447429

Published online: 20 Mar 2018.

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Feminist media studies
2018, VOL. 18, NO. 4, 560574
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447429

A media archaeology of the creepshot

Chrissy Thompson and Mark A. Wood
The School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent Creepshots; misogyny;
incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990s, disseminating media archaeology; social
and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs via the internet. media; gendered regimes of
Alongside upskirting, creepshotting is a recent iteration of image- visibility; folksonomy
based sexual abuse, whereby images are captured and distributed
without consent online. In order to understand the evolution of the
creepshot and its current status as a major form of online misogyny,
we have to excavate the past, and analyse the technological
developments that have enabled this behaviour to proliferate today.
Whilst we are concerned with the present state of creepshots and
online misogyny, we situate these forms of technologically facilitated
violence against women against a backdrop of developments in
audio-visual media that have altered the gendered regimes of visibility
women are entangled in. We therefore conduct a media archaeology
that examines the technological preconditions for both producing
and disseminating creepshots online.

Introduction
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the
video voyeur of the late 1990s, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photo-
graphs on websites and online social media. Alongside upskirting, creepshotting1 is a recent
and harmful iteration of image-based sexual abuse (Clare McGlynn and Erika Rackley 2017),
whereby sexual images are surreptitiously captured and then often distributed without
consent online. Whilst academic studies on the scope and implications of creeping are few
(see Anastasia Powell 2010; Marc Tran 2015; Chrissy Thompson 2016), the phenomenon has
received significant attention and condemnation within news media (Jacqueline Maley 2012;
Andrea Waling 2017). One need only visit Twitter and search #creepshot to see a daily stream
of new images and recordings uploaded without women’s knowledge or consent. Twitter,
reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and an array of other mainstream social media host creepshot
forums, as do a large number of dedicated creepshot websites, such as CandidFashionPolice.
com. Depending on the platform, images and recordings may be uploaded differently. For
example, reddit is a forum-based platform where links to other websites are embedded

CONTACT  Chrissy Thompson  clt@student.unimelb.edu.au

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 561

within users’ text-based posts, whilst conversely, platforms such as Twitter and Instagram
are more image based, where users will directly upload creepshots to the site.
Rather than mapping out the aesthetic principles of creeping, such as its commonalities
with gonzo and amateur porn (see Susanna Paasonen 2011; Niels Van Doorn 2010), in this
article we are instead concerned with the audio-visual technologies that lie behind this new
iteration of non-consensual photography. In order to understand the evolution of the creep-
shot and its current status as a major form of online misogyny, we must excavate the past,
and analyse the technological developments that have enabled this behaviour to proliferate
today. Whilst we are concerned with the present state of creepshots and online misogyny,
we situate these forms of technologically facilitated violence against women against a back-
drop of developments in audio-visual media that have altered the gendered regimes of
visibility women are entangled in. We therefore conduct a media archaeology of the creep-
shot that examines its technological preconditions, as well as the implications new media
have for the distribution, classification, and legitimation of this form of online misogyny.
Most studies that have examined the women/media/objectification nexus have focused
on the content of media; i.e., how women have been represented in film, television, and
advertising (Erving Goffman 1987; Laura Mulvey 1975). Examining developments in image-
recording technologies, the first half of our article is similarly concerned with the production
of media content that objectifies women. Here, we argue that irrespective of the victim’s
knowledge of a creepshot being of them, the very act of objectifying them constitutes an
act of violence in and of itself. In the second half of this article, we then turn from the issue
of production to that of storage, classification, curation, and consumption. Specifically, we
examine how online creepshot websites represent a new form of consuming and classifying
women’s bodies. In doing so, we examine the dark side of internet democratisation and
folksonomies, and their potential to reify misogynistic regimes of objectification and
classification.
At the heart of our analysis are questions of visibility. To look or be looked at creates
various relations between actors—relations that differ depending on a series of questions
concerning the act of looking. Such questions are connected to structurally patterned asym-
metries of visibility and include who is looking at who/what, why they are looking, how the
looking is done, and where and when this takes place. We cannot divorce regimes of visibility
from their socio-politically structured contexts without risking abstraction. Ultimately, vision
is not projected in a vacuum, it occurs between people/objects in spaces/times and is guided
by affordances, possibilities of action and invitations to action (Andrea M. Brighenti 2010).
In line with this, Brighenti (2010, 3) notes that visibility is “a phenomenon that is inherently
ambiguous, highly dependent upon contexts and complex social, technical and political
arrangements which could be termed ‘visibility regimes’.” Brighenti (2010) defines “visibility
regimes” as systematic, routine, and strategic sets of practices that maintain the visibility or
invisibility of particular phenomena for particular ends. In examining the creepshot and its
precursors, it is important to foreground how visibility creates relationships, and what these
relationships mean within the context of looking and being looked at.
Whilst the history of optical media technologies has been explored in depth elsewhere
(Friedrich A. Kittler 2010), relatively few studies have specifically traced the implications of
these developments for gender relations. Watching is active while being watched is passive,
and as Brighenti (2010, 28) notes, in many Western societies, it is typically the male who
watches and the woman who is watched, resulting in a form of control and domination (see
562 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD

also Mulvey 1975). This arises as a result of gendered vision (Alessandro Gribaldo and
Giovanna Zapperi 2012), or what Thompson2 terms “gendered regimes of visibility,” which,
building on Brighenti’s afore-discussed work, are often intimately connected to the sexual-
ised dimension of visibility. Sight, after all, can violently provoke lust, desire, and voyeurism.
Through shaping the (in)visibility, self-presentation, and practices of actors within different
social fields, this gendered vision has been, and continues to be, used as a power device for
the control and domination of women, taking place in the social field of visibilities that
produce and reproduce these social relations. Indeed, to gaze implies more than “to look
at”—“it implies a social, psychological relationship of power in which the gazer is superior
to the object of the gaze” (Kenneth Nguyen 2007, np). Gendered regimes of visibility, then,
are the construction of subjectivity through the creation, development, and maintenance
of visibility relationships. In looking at the complex social, technological, and political con-
texts that form “regimes of visibility,” we can see how a specific gendered regime of visibility
is created by the asymmetrical relationships that vision can produce.

Excavating the peeps of perverts past

Before we begin our analysis, a word on our methodology. At its core, media archaeology is
a trans-disciplinary methodology that examines the emergence, practices, affordances, and
potentialities of new media by drawing insights from past media (Jussi Parikka 2012, 134).
As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (2011, 1) note, “studies of new media often share a dis-
regard for the past.” By contrast, scholars who take a media archaeological approach address
the history and development of media cultures, and untangle the relationships between
past, present, obsolete, and forgotten media. As a methodology, then, media archaeology
maps “the co-existence of new and old media cultures intertwined through practices, appa-
ratuses, and recurring ideas” (Parikka 2012, 160). As its name suggests, media archaeology
is indebted to Michel Foucault’s (1972) archaeological method. Yet, it is the work of German
media theorist Friedrich Kittler that has had the greatest impact on the approach’s develop-
ment. In line with Friedrich A. Kittler’s (1992) account of the technological a priori of discourse,
media archaeologists are concerned with the technological and mediatic underpinnings of
discourse, sense(making), subjectivity, and sociality. The parameters of discourse, subjectivity,
and sociality, according to media archaeologists, are shaped by the way specific media trans-
mit, store, and mediate information. Understanding the development of media therefore
lies at the heart of understanding social changes.
Given Kittler’s renowned sexism and techno-determinism (see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
2011), taking inspiration from his work in a feminist project such as this might seem slightly
incongruous. Indeed, to date, few feminist scholars have employed a media archaeological
approach (see, for example, Rena Bivens 2015). However, unlike Kittler, media archaeologists
generally are not technological determinists who ignore social, cultural, and economic drivers
of human behaviour. Parikka, for example, argues that media archaeology asks the following
basic questions: “what are the conditions of existence of this thing, of that statement, to
these discourses and the multiple mediated practices with which we live?” (2012, 18). These
questions are, as Parikka notes, simultaneously political, aesthetic, economic, scientific, and
technological, and require an examination of the nexus of these forces. Approached through
a media archaeological lens, an examination of creepshots would have to examine how
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 563

women’s bodies have been subjected to particularly regimes of visibility and how media
have facilitated, extended, and limited the possibility of women’s visual representation.
As media archaeology reminds us, language is not the only system of subjectification.
Drawing on Foucauldian conceptions of power, media archaeologists examine “structures
of power through a technological analysis” (Parikka 2012, 136–164) and note that subjecti-
fication is, in part, a product of media specific practices. Subjectification, in other words,
occurs not only through people and institutions, but in the circuits in which our media
systems are made (Parikka 2012, 70). Specific media, alongside the culturally coded practices
they enable, generate particular regimes of visibility and looking that are imbued with power
relations. As Brighenti (2010) stated, the visible is stratified and within this strata discourse
can always be located. Discourse, Brighenti (2010, 33) suggests, is imbued with images and
it is unhelpful to separate the visible and the articulable, where one corresponds to the
non-discursive and the discursive respectively. Instead, it is better to understand how the
two are interwoven and how “inscription in the visible through inscription technologies is
consequently a process that always takes place in the dual form of the observable and the
articulable” (Brighenti 2010, 33). In our following analysis, we examine how technologies are
implicated in a wider set of desires and dreams related to erotic, scopophilic, and voyeuristic
fantasies involving the female body. By doing so, we hope to demonstrate media archaeol-
ogy’s utility as a methodology for conducting feminist media research.

Cameras, creeping, and the architecture of voyeurism

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free
myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and
pull away from objects. I creep under them.—Dziga Vertov (in John Berger 1972: 17).
“Photography,” Susan Sontag suggested, not only remorselessly encroached on the turf of
painting, but enthusiastically plagiarised from the genre, usurping the “painter’s task of pro-
viding images that accurately transcribe reality” (Susan Sontag 1977, 94). Despite contesta-
tion by some over whether photography invigorated or dethroned painting, what is clear is
that photographs are as much an interpretation of the world around us as paintings and
drawings are (Sontag 1977, 6–7). Because technology gets its meaning from the pre-existing
discursive contexts in which it is introduced (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011, 8), we can under-
stand the crucial role of photography and the camera against the backdrop of nude paintings,
which were previously the predominant public representation of the female body until the
late nineteenth century. Underlined by the desire to facilitate and instigate “intensive seeing’,
photography thus marked the beginning of a new era of visibility and changed the very way
men saw (Berger 1972, 18). While the camera had been developed from as early as the
eleventh century by physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Beaumont Newhall 1982), it was not until the
nineteenth century that the first successful camera image was created in 1816 by Nicephore
Niepce. Finally, in 1888, the first photographic film was devised by George Eastman, resulting
in what he called the Kodak (Newhall 1982). By 1900, the Brownie box camera was introduced
along with the concept of the snapshot, popularising the camera and providing the catalyst
for a fundamental change in human perception (Newhall 1982). Indeed, the “representational
possibilities and mass proliferation of photographic images became key features of modern
culture” (Tim Dant and Graeme Gilloch 2002, 6). Moreover, the industrialisation of camera
technology enabled the democratisation of all experiences by translating them into images
564 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD

(Sontag 1977). We need only think about selfie culture and the practice of uploading travel
photos and family “happysnaps” to social media to see just how true this has become.
Not only is the camera an essential tool for creepshotting, but it is a piece of technology
that has instituted a new visual code, which determines “what is worth looking at and what
we have a right to observe” (Sontag 1977, 3). In particular, mechanical reproduction changed
our understanding of images and visual culture, and, as Huhtamo and Parikka (2011, 7)
suggest, “the unprecedented availability of reproduction was turning the past into an
archive.” The automobile and, decades later, new media are often cited as key technological
innovations that propelled us towards the postmodern world we now inhabit, but the camera
has had an equally profound influence on our present. Perhaps one of the most important
changes that has arisen as a result of the new codes of vision produced by the camera is the
fundamental shift in how we approach both distance and proximity.
As Larsden (in Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller
2014,125) notes “distance [and proximity] have never meant so little and so much, with the
world getting smaller and larger at the very same time.” The camera allows vision to be
extended in ways that are inaccessible to the naked eye and, like the microscope, allows a
close examination of things at a resolution that is beyond ordinary perception, capturing
the world in new ways. While this produced photographic seeing that enabled an aptitude
for discovering beauty in the ordinary, it also resulted in a tremendous promotion in the
value of appearances as the camera recorded them (Sontag 1977, 85–89). In addition to
altering how we approach that which appears before us, it provoked a fundamental shift in
how we understood the private and public, a shift that was altered even further with the
advent of surveillance and video cameras (William G. Staples 2013). As a result, private sites
and sites previously inaccessible to the public were slowly rendered more visible, a phenom-
enon we can clearly see occurring in the case of upskirting in the 1990s and creepshotting
circa 2010s. In this context, we can understand why Roland Barthes (1981, 15) asserted that
“the ‘private life’ is nothing but a zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object.
It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.” The private here has become
redefined as a space where individuals can retreat from the gaze of the camera, protecting
themselves from the personal death that occurs as a result of becoming a “total image”—a
fate they are subjected to as soon as they enter the public sphere. All of a sudden, we were
simultaneously able to see more and in turn come to know more about the world around
us. This is how the photograph and the camera came to be regarded as an instrument for
knowing things and, as such, reinforced the relationship between seeing/knowing/power
(Sontag 1977, 93).
Here, we can see how creeping has started to take shape through the regimes of visibility
generated by cameras and photographic seeing. Prior to the advent of the camera, men
who wanted to look at women’s intimate areas were limited to doing so through using
unaided vision. The most common incarnation of this was embodied in the “peeping Tom”
who looked through house windows or lurked under stairwells trying to catch a glimpse of
their victims in various states of undress. Ordinary (unaided) vision means that looking up
a woman’s dress/skirt is usually quite difficult, at least if discretion and covertness are desir-
able. Using a camera to photograph a woman’s genital and anal region violates ordinary
vision through the shock of seeing that which is normally private. Again, we can see how
both distance/proximity and public/private are ascribed new meaning as a result of the new
ways of seeing instituted by this technology. This situation is amplified and further
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 565

complicated when we consider Minor White’s famous statement that “the photographer
projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to
know it and feel it better” (1952, np). What does it mean, then, for the photographer to project
himself into a woman’s intimate areas, rendering visible that which she wishes to keep hid-
den? Again, Sontag (1977, 14–15) provides a response to this question, noting that,
There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate
them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can
never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera
is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder,
appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
As the above quote asserts, there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera, and the
person or thing photographed is the “target” in the literal and figurative sense of the term.
As an “ideal arm of consciousness,” to photograph someone is to appropriate them and
render them a thing. In the case of upskirting and creeping, this ideal arm of consciousness
extends vision to men so inclined to use this technology to capture sights not normally
visible to the naked eye. Sontag’s analysis makes plain the objectifying power of the camera.
However, it says little on the gendered power relations at play when it is a man who is pho-
tographing a woman. More recent scholarship examining the modes and power of online
pornography (Paasonen 2011; Van Doorn 2010) offers a particularly fruitful lens for gendering
the camera, as does Martha C. Nussbaum’s (2010, 68) work on objectification. In its most
broad definition, objectification commonly refers to (in this instance, the treating of women)
“as objects for men’s use and abuse” (Nussbaum 2010, 68). As Nussbaum (2010, 68) explains,
under this definition, “the objectifier treats the objectified as a mere tool of his ends, not as
an end in herself.” Objectification is, however, a “cluster concept” that cannot be reduced to
a single plain or attitude. It is important to understand the various actions and attitudes that
objectification extends to, as it is much more than simple instrumentality and a denial of
autonomy. In examining the technology a priori of creepshots, we therefore marry Sontag
and Nussbaum’s theory, and put it to work in explaining how new technologies have altered
the gendered regimes of visibility that underpin the objectification of women.
Today, voyeurs are armed with equipment that facilitate their objectifying behaviour in
different ways, enabling a degree of discretion and secrecy that was previously unattainable.
We wish to stress here that while the technology has evolved, the recurring desire to look
at women in this particular kind of way has remained. As technology has advanced, cameras
have become easier to conceal and creepshot pictures became much easier to take. Even
during the 1990s, as video voyeurism3 became more popular, the practice was still limited
and somewhat difficult to carry out covertly. This was primarily due to the size and bulkiness
of hand-held cameras and camcorders, which would attract suspicion when placed at a
peculiar angle in public. With the invention of micro-cameras, however, devices have become
so small that they can be concealed in tiny spaces such as the hole in one’s shoe designed
for shoelaces. Inexpensive and easily accessible, these devices are both covert and mobile,
enabling voyeurs to stalk their subjects as they catch a train, shop, or complete a workout
at the gym (Calvert and Brown 2000). “The ‘peeping Tom’ of yesterday,” Maria Pope (1998,
1167) notes, “is now armed with a new arsenal that threatens more than just the unsuspecting
victim standing by an open window.”
566 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD  

Folksonomies of misogyny: classification and subordination

Before unearthing the online archives from dedicated creepshot websites and social media
pages, it is important to understand how these images have come to form a daily stream of
covertly captured images on Tumblr and Metareddit feeds. As technology has developed
over the last several centuries from painting, photography, and videotaping, so too have
the ways in which women have been represented. Furthermore, the practices have under-
gone shifts in how they were named and labelled, moving from peeping, to video voyeurism,
to upskirting, and finally creeping. It is not just the miniaturisation of the camera that has
contributed to the evolution of this phenomenon but the “disruptive technology of [the]
camera phone” (Alan Ku 2005, 681) that has become prolific since the turn of the 21st
century.
The ways in which creepers frequent online platforms and interact with one another mark
another key difference between the video voyeur/upskirter of the late 1990s and early 2000s
and the creeper. Whereas the video voyeur of the early 2000s might also disseminate upskirt
material online, these were often fetish or pornography websites and were relatively isolated
from most internet users. Today, however, the popularity of mainstream social media, web-
sites and their recentralisation of the internet, has changed the way in which information is
disseminated and received by users. Social media platforms provide forums for the celebra-
tion and affirmation creepshotting, and the beliefs that underlie what it means to be a
creeper. The technological affordances of social media websites have enabled creepers to
congregate together in an online misogynistic community where creeping is actively cele-
brated on these websites, often creating an atmosphere of acceptance both implicitly
through the viewing and sharing of such images, and explicitly through the proud use of
the “creeper” label.
In addition to examining the changing conditions for image production, research into
image-based sexual abuse must take into account the changing context of information
storage, classification, and retrieval. As Jacques Derrida (1996, 17) reminds us, owing to the
technical structure of the archive “the archivization produces as much as it records the event.”
In the case of creepshoting, we must examine the changing conditions participatory social
media sites provide for archiving footage of creepshots and upskirts. In the information age,
the archive is no longer confined to physical storage centres; they are dynamic, constantly
changing and renegotiated through everyday practices of network culture (Parikka 2012,
133). The archive is principally concerned with inscription of meaning, and the categorisation
of artefacts. One form of archival categorisation that has emerged with the advent of social
media has played a particularly crucial role in creepshot communities: the folksonomy. A
portmanteau of the words “folk” and “taxonomy,” folksonomy can be defined as an online
system of classification and organisation built out users electronically “tagging” content into
different categories. As Jennifer Trant (2009, 4) explains, “we can think of tagging as a process
… of folksonomy as the resulting collective vocabulary … and of social tagging as a
socio-technical context within which tagging takes place.” Similarly, Emanuele Quintarelli
(2005, np) defines folksonomy as a form of “user-generated classification, emerging through
bottom-up consensus.”
In line with other techno-optimist writings focused on the democratisation of the internet,
folksonomy has been frequently, but not universally, praised. As a mode of information
classification, it has frequently been lauded by academics, technologists, and journalists for
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 567

its non-hierarchical, bottom-up, and democratic nature. Timo Hannay (2004), for example,
argues that folksonomy “cleverly harnesses selfish acts and directs them towards the com-
mon good.” Further, numerous popular and academic articles have extolled folksonomies
for their perceived ability to improve information retrieval (David Weinberger 2007).
Additionally, folksonomies of tagging Quintarelli (2005) notes may foster the creation of
interest communities focused around classification—a by-product he frames in entirely
positive terms. Finally, folksonomy, Jodie Nicotra (2009, 260) argues, has also heralded a shift
away from traditional hierarchies and classification systems by disrupting the single author-
ship practices apparent in print-media and earlier forms of communication. However, as we
will argue below, this conflates collective aggregation practices as more democratic and
equal than previous communication technologies because it enables more people to par-
ticipate. This overlooks the power relations apparent in everyday interactions between users
and begins from the position that all users can participate in multi-user-tagging in an equal
capacity. As Tim Highfield (2016, 156) states, technologically literate white men often have
the loudest voice both online and offline, resulting in a greater volume of messages (or tags
in the case of creepshot images).
Through incorporating collective social tagging systems, creepshot websites have gen-
erated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user-tagging practices that function to tag content
in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. If Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr act as (some of )
the platforms where the creepshot archives are stored, then folksonomies of misogyny can
be conceptualised as the filing system, or system of order responsible for structuring both
visibility and reality in these domains. Folksonomies of misogyny are not limited to creepshot
and upskirt images, however, and can also be observed on pornography websites that host
revenge pornography and subsequently tag content in sexist ways. Hierarchical power rela-
tions that we argue are a crucial aspect of gendered regimes of visibilities are clearly apparent
on these social media platforms, and one way this happens is through folksonomies of
misogyny.
In the context of creepshot sites, folksonomy provides a tool for developing and reifying
a misogynistic lexicon for classifying and objectifying women’s bodies. Such folksonomies
of misogyny offer a new architecture of voyeurism and objectification built around crowd-
sourced non-consensual sexual photography, distributed classification, and improved find-
ability. Given that folksonomies reflect a population’s conceptual models (see Quintarelli
2005), folksonomies constructed on creepshot websites offer a barometer of the vocabulary
used to objectify women. But much more than just reflecting existing classificatory regimes
for objectifying women, the folksonomies developed on creepshot sites represent a new
gendered regime of visibility erected through social-tagging affordances, “bottom-up” clas-
sification, and networked misogyny (Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kate M. Miltner 2015).
In online communities anchored around the distribution of creepshot images, women
are known only through the various tags identifying physical attributes, while men identify
and tag themselves as proud #creepers, #voyeurs and #perverts. They are the ones who see,
judge, and assign value to the images of their targets online and the women in these pho-
tographs, and recordings are known only through the male gaze of their perpetrators.
Women are divided into parts (“booty,”“tits,”“cunt”) and identified as #hotshoppers, #asian-
girl, or #blonde (see Figure 1). Through this multi-user-tagging practice, women are judged
and assessed based on their (faceless) body and subjected to misogynistic attitudes that
revolve around objectifying their target in various ways.
568 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD

Figure 1. Screenshots taken from Twitter following the #creepshot hashtag. Source: https://twitter.com/
search?q=%23creepshot.

Before their image even reaches the online domain, unsuspecting victims of creepers
have been subjected to objectification thrice over; their autonomy, agency, and subjectivity
are denied, ignored, or considered subordinate to the desire of the perpetrator to capture
non-consensual images, which subsequently become sexualised and decontextualised from
the context in which they were taken (Nussbaum 2010). This happens both because the
objectifier treats the objectified person as lacking in any boundaries and also because he
uses the objectified as a tool for his own purposes, in this case to upload, assess, and discuss
the images they have acquired. Frequently these images are treated as trophies of their
conquests and badges of bravery (for getting close enough to take a clear image of their
target). Once uploaded to social media platforms, the victim undergoes a transformative
process where their humanness is stripped away and their identity is reconstructed according
to what is made visible in the photograph or recording. In undergoing these folksonomies
of misogyny, the victim is treated as interchangeable with other images of a similar nature.
For example, she might be categorised under the hashtag of #booty or #asiangirl, transport-
ing her image to a running newsfeed of other similar images and identifiable only through
her association with these sexist labels.
For this to occur, she is reduced to both body parts and appearances, and her presence
online is structured entirely around her physical body. In a multidimensional process of
objectification (Rae Langton 2009, 228–229; Nussbaum 2010), she is treated according to
how desirable (or undesirable) her body parts appear to the men responsible for tagging
and re-tweeting these images. In doing so, she is silenced through this process of viobility
(see Nussbaum 2010); she cannot speak because she is not a she, but an object that has
been appropriated, filed, and sorted according to the male gaze of the various members
engaged in the multi-user-tagging practice associated with folksonomies of misogyny. As
Nussbaum (2010, 80) suggests, through the power of the Web 2.0 and internet connectivity,
“the objectifier can create an entire world in which [Jane] DOE 1 exists as a mere thing, a
cunt, a set of tits.” We argue that, for this reason, the capture and distribution of creepshots
are not victimless, or less serious (see Kelly, for hierarchies of sexual violence); rather, this
action constitutes the participation in, and promotion of, a culture of misogyny that sees
the objectification of women as a pastime, a hobby.
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 569

Misogyny aggregation: legitimating objectification through networked

misogyny
Feminist research on folksonomy has primarily focused on Twitter hashtags (a form of social
tagging and folksonomy production) and, specifically, their potential to promote gendered
solidarity and facilitate feminist online activism, feminist digilantism (Emma A. Jane 2016),
awareness raising, and popular feminism (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2015; Rosemary Clark
2014; Ricardo Drüeke and Elke Zobl 2016; Sherri Williams 2015). While the merits of hashtag
feminism have been the subject of much discussion in feminist literature (see, for example,
Shenila Khoja-Moolji 2015; Lara C. Stache 2015; Mark A. Wood, Evelyn Rose, and Chrissy
Thompson 2018), comparatively few studies have examined the potential for folksonomies
to promote solidarity among men holding misogynistic views (see Emma A. Jane 2017). In
the final section of this discussion, we wish to illustrate how social media platforms aggre-
gate not only creepshots but creepers, creating networks where sexist attitudes and behav-
iours are not only discussed, but actively encouraged through the collective sensemaking
of online tagging.
To use Manuel Castells (2009, 47) terms, the novelty of creepshot sites and their associated
social tagging practices, and what separates them from pre-internet media used to facilitate
misogyny, is that they have “programming power”: the ability to generate new networks,
rather than simply strengthening existing networks. Creepshot sites, in other words, provide
forums for what Banet-Weiser and Miltner (2015) term networked misogyny: violence and
hostility towards women in online environments. Whilst Banet-Weiser and Miltner concep-
tualise networked misogyny as systemic online abuse and harassment directed at women
in online environments, here, we suggest expanding the definition to encompass homosocial
online environments that legitimate misogyny through their programming power—and,
specifically, their ability to aggregate men holding misogynistic attitudes.
On numerous creepshot sites, networked misogyny is explicitly didactical. One creepshot
website, for example, offers “guidelines” for taking “good” creepshot images and a code of
conduct governing its community of users (see Figure 2). Further, such sites provide affor-
dances for members to share tips and threads specifically dedicated to improving the quality
and success in taking creepshot and upskirt photographs. Within this gift economy of tips,
trade secrets, and freely shared images, these modes of interaction offer new ways to objec-
tify and perpetuate gendered harms. Moreover, they offer a networked community where
likeminded individuals can actively reproduce misogynistic attitudes and induct new mem-
bers into the creeping subculture.
In the tips above, a toxic and hegemonic masculinity is promoted as not only desirable
but necessary in order to participate in creeping behaviours. Men who do not get close
enough to their target are labelled here as “lazy” and “scared,” and furthermore, it is empha-
sised that “any limp dick” can take a picture, but it takes skill, guts, and confidence to take a
good creepshot. Here we can see Raewyn Connell’s (1995) work on how social relations of
gender are realised and symbolised through the body and its performances. The act of taking
a creepshot is a performance of one’s masculinity, and failing in this community means
risking being labelled in any number of aggressive, sexist insults. One’s status as a successful
creeper (and man) is determined by the community who assess not only the quality of the
images (blurry will be interpreted as a lack of skill or confidence in getting close enough to
the target for a good shot) but the desirability of the target (“not every Plain-Jane ass is
570 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD    

Figure 2. Creepshot tips taken from www.creepshots.com.

Figure 3. Forum discussion of a creepshot. Source: http://anon-ib.co/ci/res/3105.html.

creepworthy”). If a perpetrator takes a picture of a target the community deems unattractive,

then their status and position in the hegemonic masculine order may be called into question.
On these social media platforms, we can see that the gendered relations are not only harmful
for the women who are objectified but fraught with risk for the men who participate in these
forums and offer not only their visual trophies up for assessment but also their position in
the hegemonic masculine order.
In Figure 3, taken from a website dedicated to image sharing, the OP (original poster) has
surreptitiously captured images of a friend’s girlfriend and asked users whether they would
like him to share his content with them. The anonymous poster exclaims that “she needs
some dick! Nice lil phat ass,” which we can understand as reflecting a cultural pattern of
violence where members of the privileged group (men) use violence not only to assert or
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 571

sustain their dominance but also as a homosocial transaction between other men (Connell
1995). In the exchange above, the threat of sexual violence not only represents a threat to
the woman but also functions as a way of interacting with the OP. Another poster responds
by suggesting and encouraging the OP to further violate his friend’s girlfriend (here she is
referred to as property, as belonging to her boyfriend) by breaking into her phone to acquire
nude pictures to distribute online in the community. Exchanges such as these demonstrate
the subcultural capital new creepshots may afford those who upload and gift them to a
group. In doing so, they in turn demonstrate that creepshot forums and their regimes of
visibility have networked misogyny, offering the once solitary peeper a thriving community
of practice.

Conclusion
By tracing the technological a priori of objectification from the birth of the camera to the
present, this article has examined how technologies past and present have structured gen-
dered regimes of visibility that limits and extends the capacity for visibility within the context
of creeping. Far from being simply technological, though, the issues we take up here relate
to the asymmetrical social relations between men and women. These asymmetrical social
relations become particularly apparent when examining the gendered regimes of visibility
that condition how women are looked at and how they are visibilised in various social fields.
We argue that, as with many discursive relations that are unequal and hierarchical, gendered
regimes of visibility are not always evident. In fact, part of their effectiveness in structuring
and reproducing visibilities is that they become invisiblised, as they are absorbed into the
fabric of everyday life. Technologies are not responsible for the practice of upskirting or
creeping. Whilst they contribute to the evolution of the naming of the practice and can
facilitate new ways of extending vision, technology is not the reason such voyeuristic prac-
tices exist. Nonetheless, in examining non-consensual sexual photography of women, it is
equally important to avoid adapting an instrumental theory of technology, which views
technology as merely a neutral tool that “serve[s] the purposes of their users” (Andrew
Feenberg 1991, 5). Instead, we should address the values inscribed into these technologies
(Mark A. Wood 2017), and how these values shape gendered relations, and power differen-
tials. Whilst technologies such as the cameraphone and social media certainly did not pro-
duce voyeurism, they have reconfigured it and generated new practices of collective
sensemaking, objectification, and misogyny in the process of doing so.

Notes
1. 
While a creepshot may include an upskirt style image (that is, the covert visual recording of a
person’s anal or genital region), it may also include pictures of someone’s breasts, thighs, and
buttocks, which may or may not be covered with clothing (e.g., jeans or yoga pants). Conversely,
an upskirt image, by virtue of its definition, only includes the visual recording of a person’s anal
or genital region, which may or may not be covered with underwear.
2. 
This concept emerged in Thompson’s doctoral thesis on upskirting (forthcoming).
3. 
Video voyeurism is a term that came into vogue in the 1990s (particularly in the US) describing
the use of video cameras to film the intimate areas of women without their consent in public
places.
572 C. THOMPSON AND M. A. WOOD

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article and the two guest editors of this
edition, Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera, for their invaluable feedback. We also want to thank Alison
Young and John Fitzgerald for their detailed feedback on the PhD thesis chapter that formed the basis
of this article. Finally, we would like to thank those who attended and participated in the “Sex and
Tech” session at the ANZSOC 2017 Conference, where an earlier version of this article was presented.
In particular, we would like to thank Asher Flynn, Nadine McKillop, Anastasia Powell, Rachael Burgin,
and James Roffee for their insightful comments and feedback on the ideas presented in our paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Chrissy Thompson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research examines
upskirting and other forms of image-based sexual abuse in Australia. She has published on topics
including online viral justice, the relationship between mobility and participation in public events,
and social media-facilitated countersurveillance. Her work has appeared in Theoretical Criminology
and Surveillance & Society. Email: clt@student.unimelb.edu.au
Mark A. Wood is a Lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne. Most of his research falls
within the sphere of digital criminology, examining informal justice, crime-watching, public criminol-
ogy, networked offending, and countersurveillance on social media. His first book, Antisocial Media:
Crime-Watching in the Internet Age, was released by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. Email: mark.wood@
unimelb.edu.au

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