tim's experiment

You don’t get many complaints from the DAB, but there is one issue the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment etc has made its own: glass escalators. We have been here before. The DAB has a Women’s Affairs Committee. From time to time before it has complained that the architecture of some staircases or escalators makes it possible for men to see more than a gentleman ought to see when the installation is used by a lady not wearing trousers. Some of the cads concerned even take pictures. This  curious preoccupation with the possibility of illicit knicker glimpses has now blossomed into an annual survey.

The number of places to which the survey objects has “more than doubled”, said The Standard. It has gone from seven to 19. The committee’s chairman, Elizabeth Quat, said that the places on the list were only the tip of the iceberg. Well if she really means that it seems rather a scandalous waste of everyone’s time to put out the survey results at all. Count them properly or shut up. I also have some misgivings about providing people with a list of the best places for this sort of thing. I am sure none of my readers is interested in looking at underwear but just in case, apparently the peepers’ paradises are the Ping Shan Tin Shui Wai Public Library, the swimming pool in the same place (not a City of Sorrow for everyone, apparently) the Hong Kong Central Library, four MTR stations – Tin Shui Wai (again!) Long Ping, Kam Sheung Road, and Hung Hom – and several shopping malls of which Hysan Place and Popcorn were named.

This is a strange problem for the DAB ladies to get their knickers in a twist (to coin a phrase) about. It appears to be totally victimless. The usual response that the committee gets from shopping malls is that nobody has complained. And why should they? Being beheld by a man is perhaps, if you notice it at all, mildly irritating. But in the end, what harm is done? It is difficult to believe that the activity which bothers the DAB ladies is as common as they think it is. After all a preoccupation with underwear is an unusual sexual foible. Most of us get no excitement from a surreptitious upskirt view. And many of those eccentrics who do would not, I fancy, wish to spend a lot of time lurking round escalators in the hope of getting a glimpse. After all if you really want this sort of thing the internet will provide plenty.

One also has to wonder about the DAB women’s committee’s priorities. If this is a social problem it is a tiny one. is the committee so steeped in complacency and admiration for our government that it sees no need for research or action on issues like domestic violence, child-care, sexual harassment, exploitation, discrimination against women at work …? The DAB from time to time announces the results of some dubious survey which has revealed that Hong Kong people are concerned about livelihood issues, not politics. Have the DAB’s students of public opinion tried asking women what issues they would like more work on? And if they did, how many women asked for action on transparent escalators?