My wife and I were driving home from the movies last night and as we pulled into our road we noticed several little boys who were playing baseball in a small grassy area all pointing at a fully naked person walking around their livingroom infront of their largest window. She seemed to be minding her own business but it was very blatent that she was fully naked and standing right infront of the window. My wife was shocked and I was half amused and half shocked. We kept driving and pondered whether or not that was indecent exposure or not. She was in her own house, on her own property… And she just seemed to be minding her own business…just naked.
What do you all think? Was this indecent? Or totally normal?
This has come up in GQ a few times. The summary is that it is indecent exposure if normal people passing by get exposed to it accidentally. It isn’t if they have to go out of their way to see it and it is Ok to be nude in your house as long as you have reasonable expectation that others won’t see you.
A little old man got called into court by complaint from his elderly female neighbor. The judge says: “Mrs. Johnson says that you parade around your house in the nude and she sees your thing hanging out all day every day.”
The man says “Well Your Honor, I do like to do housechores in the nude but I don’t have any glass doors and Mrs. Johnson’s windows are at a very different angle than mine and I am sure that she wouldn’t be able to see me at all.”
Mrs. Johnson replies: “Your Honor, I can see him just fine if I stand on my kitchen chair.”
Then it’s totally indecent. Only the beautiful should prance about naked.
Seriously, as mentioned above it would be indecent exposure unless she could reasonably assume that that a passerby couldn’t see her.
Such as, I’m naked walking around my apartment on a regular basis. Only place someone might see me is in our living room, and that’s only if the balcony blinds are opened. Of course, the only people that even could see me are the ones on the third floor two buildings over, and they’d have to be trying. Now, if I stood on the balcony naked, that’d be a problem.
This, exactly. Recently, a similar case involving a Vancouver man (although not merely indecent exposure, but a juicier indecent act,) went all the way to the Supreme Court. (Word Perfect link.) Google’s HTML rendering here.
In Spain there’s no such thing as indecent exposure, at least at the country level; the law was eliminated sometime in the 1980s. Some towns prohibit it in municipal land but that’s considered akin to a bar’s owner saying “no naked customers”, you have the right to decide who enters your property.
NO, we do not all go to the beach naked, sheesh. And anyway not every single person at the beach has just stepped out of a CK ad, you know. But now when a bag lady takes a bath in a public fountain, the charges are a health-related issue, not indecent exposure.
In the UK, it is, for example, perfectly legal to sunbathe nude in your garden- as long as you aren’t visible from the road to passersby.
Performing an indecent act in your living room while in full view of the public is one thing- answering the door in your undies or walking around your own home naked- no cause for public alarm.
I remember “prancing around” naked, in our big picture window . . . when I was about 3 or 4. I knew that exposing my penis was wrong, so I pulled up my scrotum to cover it. Sometimes you have to make do with what’s available.
A few years back, a man was arrested and convicted for indecent exposure in his own home in Fairfax, VA. Fox News and some others were making it sound like it was PC run amuck, but the allegation was that he was intetiionally exposing himself to passersby.
Years ago when I was pulling into a friends driveway I saw a car pulled off the road and the man driving was staring at her house.
As usual she was running around nude with all the lights on and the shades up. I told her about the man and she just shrugged.
She liked flaunting her body for male attention.
I worried that one day she would attract the attention of the wrong one.
I did that, and a few years later I built it up to late night streaking with the neighbour boys, then by high school it was skinnydipping and truth or dare with boys & girls. It was the sticks so we had to make our own fun. The OP’s question can’t be answered without a location given. Different jurisdictions define “indecent exposure” differently. For example in California mere nudity is insufficient, it takes a actual lewd act (though municipalities can pass stricter rules). Same situation in Vermont, and in Canada it’s illegal to be nude in public unless you have a lawful excuse (& legally you aren’t naked if you’re wearing shoes). It’s actually perfectly legal for a woman to expose her breasts whenever she wants in a surprising number of jurisdictions.
In Virginia, the court that hears misdemeanors is the General District Court. A guilty verdict there can be appealed “as of right.” Unlike the usual procedure for a criminal appeal, where the appellant must identify some error at his trial and show that his guilty verdict is the result of that error, a Virginia appeal from the general district court to the circuit court is automatic; it erases the guilty verdict and a new trial (“trial de novo”) is held.
