To be honest, I'm not sure what started me along this path. It could have been boredom or the excitement of a new passion. I was working a dead-end job where it was my duty to make sure incoming cardboard packages were transferred to the proper airport. On weekends, I always stopped by the local adult book store, where one fateful day I was solicited for work by the man behind the counter.
"We're expanding," he said. The internet opened a new market that they intended to exploit. Across the city, intrepid agents had drilled peep holes into women's dressing rooms or into gym bathrooms. Now that the system was established, they needed camera men (all of us were male) to record what was appropriately titillating.
I've realized that many of our sexual thoughts and fantasies are fueled in large part by the basics of voyeurism. I've always found that being denied full nudity is in many ways more erotic than seeing everything. So do our customers. Some of my co-workers take it to extremes, and some play it safe. Nevertheless, our private glee and secret arousal often is motivated by observing something supposedly off-limits and forbidden.
With time, those fantasies grow more refined, layered, and amplified due of our own advanced personal tastes and the growth of rich fantasy life. Both are further enhanced as we grow older.
Some years later, I read My Secret Life. It's an erotic book published by an anonymous author around the end of the 19th Century, shortly before the conclusion of the Victorian Era. It could never be confused as a work of great fiction, or even good fiction, but its veracity could not be questioned. One particular anecdote has always stuck with me.
In the days before mass produced, easy to obtain pornography, men turned to other sources to appease themselves sexually. I recall one section of the work, an extended interlude upon a group trip through the woods. The men were to dress and bathe in one segregated area of the camp. The women were to occupy still another space where they might presumably have privacy.
Several men took vantage points along the top of a hill, directly next to where the women dressed. They witnessed many women changing and taking time for bodily functions. The account was, like the rest of the book, alternately bizarre and at times uncomfortably graphic. Its author was much kinkier and sexually adventurous than I was or ever would be. He fancied himself a bit of a dandy and was willing to take risks I could not and would not. He was quite wealthy and could afford to play daredevil. I envied his proficiency and access, though some of his behavior was beyond even me.
As I learned later, voyeurism paid. A market existed for it. I had to buy my own equipment at first, though I was eventually reimbursed for it within the first month or two. Digital video cameras are a fraction of the size they used to be and I learned many ways to disguise what I was doing. Disguise was my stock in trade and I coupled that with enough raw nerve to achieve every target goal.
Every morning, even Saturday and Sunday, I received a fresh e-mail from my boss. They were usually curt and to the point, typed in all caps. TARGET DRESSING ROOMS IN HECKART, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM, COLLEGE STUDENT RUSH. One wouldn't want to hang around for too long, as that would attract attention. I stick around for 45 minutes at most, and then keep moving.
The times really have changed. Technology makes much possible that was once impossible, or at least consigned to the realm of speculative fantasy. Photographs are much easier to take, because they last only a fraction of a second or two, but the customers clamor for videos. If you were curious, don't worry about trying to find our website.
You won't come close unless you're an expert in navigating parts of the web beyond the reach of Google or have a few hours to spend fruitlessly linking from site to site. Most of our business is spread by word of mouth, though at times a few persistent and lucky people have encountered our site on a whim and subscribed. Everyone knows the risk involved. As the saying goes, you pays your money, you takes your chances.
Every assignment has its own challenges and unknown variables. One day at a department store I spied only middle aged women, which is fine for some, but we tend to get more requests for the younger set. I'll let our customers provide the color commentary. For me, this is just a job. My foremost responsibility is not getting caught. I'll concede there is a degree of taboo fun present for me sporadically, but that's mostly faded into the background. I've become a professional, a label that always eluded me beforehand in every other occupation I tried.
How I do it is a trade secret I would prefer to keep mostly hidden. Suffice it to say that it wasn't learned overnight. In the beginning, I silently observed whoever entered a stall, feigning that I was trying on clothes myself. Having attained access to the dressing room area, I then balanced uneasily on a chair or by whatever elevation was possible for me.
My focus was on an immediately adjacent room. Half-standing, half-crouching, peeping just over the partition, I recorded a few minutes or so before noiselessly ducking back down for protection. Before I perfected my technique, I almost got caught on more than one occasion. My first few attempts were unusable because I couldn't hold my hand steady. I was too nervous, too fearful of getting caught in the act.
I don't know the identities of anyone else who works this same basic job. This is a condition of employment. We can't be seen at the same place too frequently or be somehow linked together even in guilt by association. Some men are assigned very different tasks from my own. Those who are skilled with hidden cameras have a basic understanding of concealing their equipment in an inconspicuous way, inside walls, bricks, bathrooms, and showers. Some shoot from the floor, with their camera focused upwards, capturing legs and feet.
I'm not smart enough or proficient enough for setups like those. Since none of us receives formal training, what we bring to the table are skills we've likely cultivated as a hobby, often to appease our own private peccadillos. Those jobs I've just mentioned pay more because there's increased risk involved and arguably more work. I'm not sure how to remove mortar around bricks or to chisel a small opening for a camera lens, nor do I care to learn.
I make enough. My paychecks never bounce, but they always come from a front company that is totally legit, but vague enough to not attract suspicion. For what it's worth, I'm good at what I do. I never have to leave the city and I don't scout my own assignments. In the summer, certain people are assigned to beach detail, drive a couple of hours to the coast, then setting up cameras inside shower stalls where women change into bathing suits. Year-round, some find ingenious ways to enter and visually document women's locker rooms at pools, spas, and gyms.
The only drawback for me is that weekends are always busy. When everyone else is out having fun, I've hit four or five dressing rooms, usually in the touristy part of town. I've done this long enough to know what to expect and when to expect it. If nothing especially interesting shows up within a few minutes, I know alternate locations that have worked well before. But unlike those who know how to conceal a hidden camera which runs for hours, then edit it down proficiently, my usable videos might last for a minute or two tops, or at best they might last for no more than five. To correct my earlier mistakes, I try to keep my hand steady and I don't make a sound.
At the moment, I've just finished up recording a young woman who appears to be in her early twenties. On my knees in the adjacent stall, I've managed to take an effective camera position. She is too busy trying on swimwear and then talking on a cell phone to know what I'm doing. These are the easy ones. Posted on every door in the changing area is a reminder that it isn't sanitary to try on bathing suits without first donning underwear. This woman doesn't seem to notice, but I could care less about store policy. She stays reasonably still and will be a popular upload.
