Naughty Birdwatching

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Mannion: She's sure taking a long time in that shower!
Wiley: Yeah, honey, come on over here by the window!
Insignia: Don't you do it, honey! You take your own sweet time!
Stefanowski: There's another one over by the washbasin--taking a shampoo.

Insignia: Yeah. But why the hell don't she take her bathrobe off! That's a stupid damn way to take a shampoo!
—Mister Roberts

The use of binoculars or telescopes for prurient, non-ornithological purposes. Typically consists of men ogling women who are busy taking a shower.

A favorite activity of The Peeping Tom. See also Binocular Shot.

Examples of Naughty Birdwatching include:


Film

  • Body Double. A man uses a telescope to watch a beautiful woman in another building who likes to do an erotic dance while scantily clad.
  • Stripes. A U.S. Army officer uses a telescope to watch female troops in a shower.
  • Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man uses a high-powered astronomical telescope to ogle Gwen Conliffe.
  • Rush Hour 2, the hotel scene in Los Angeles.
  • In the film Almost Heroes, there is a scene where Leslie is admiring a woman bathing in a pond through his telescope. When Bartholomew asks him what he is looking at, Leslie lets him look, but the woman had moved and a man had taken her place. Hilarious misunderstanding ensues... but is quickly cut short when Leslie looks through again in response to Bartholomew's shock and moves the telescope to aim in the direction of the woman while chiding the man for taking her place.
  • Jeff in Rear Window spies on his neighbors out of boredom while he's laid up, including a shapely dancer he calls "Miss Torso". Then things get serious when he suspects one of them has murdered his wife.
  • Marty's father in Back to The Future.
  • Jon Lovitz's character in the opening of Little Nicky, who is spying on a woman from a window. He falls out of the tree to his death and winds up in Hell.
  • In Radio Days, Joe and his friends start out searching for fighter planes with a pair of binoculars but end up far more entertained by a woman dancing naked in front of her window.

Literature

  • In Then Again, Maybe I Won't, a 1971 young adult novel written by Judy Blume, a boy discovers the girl next door likes to undress in front of the window. So he asks for some binoculars for Christmas for "bird watching" from his parents.
  • Subverted in Alas, Babylon. Mrs. Henry assumes her neighbor Randall is ogling her through his binoculars, but it turns out he's really watching her pet lovebirds, which he thinks are Carolina Parakeets, which went extinct some 40 years before the events of the story.
  • In "The Sandman" by ETA Hoffmann, excessively romantic student Nathanael purchased a telescope specifically to watch an enigmatic girl in the neighbour's window and quickly fell for her head over heels. To buy it from the creepy merchant whom he suspected in being the evil alchemist who killed his father perhaps wasn't a good idea, though.
  • Robert Westall's Futuretrack Five has the Ests who spy on the Fens population via listening devices and binoculars whilst pretending to be birdwatchers.

Live Action TV

  • Frasier and Niles use a telescope to spy into other apartments in Seattle. Their father despairs:

Frasier: Oh my God... breathtaking.
Niles: (impatient) Well, don't be greedy! Your turn was over forty seconds ago!
Frasier: All right, all right, Niles, all right. [steps away] It's the penthouse unit, fourth from the left.
Niles: (swooning) Oh, mama!
Martin: You two know that what you're doing isn't right, don't you?
Frasier: We're simply admiring a very rare Brancusi armchair, not a naked woman.
Martin: (sighing) That's what I'm talking about.

  • George Jackson in the Inspector Morse episode "The Dead of Jericho".
  • A series of sketches on Alas Smith And Jones.
  • Odd variation on Last of the Summer Wine, where an adulterer uses birdwatching as an excuse to meet up with his lover in the privacy of a hut, but is so determined to ensure his knowledge of ornithology is good enough to withstand inspection that he spends half the time actually birdwatching, much to her disgust.
  • Jack O'Neill in Stargate SG-1 is ribbed about having a telescope on his roof to spy on his neighbors, a fact he doesn't exactly deny.

Sam Carter: But, during the totality phase of the eclipse, you should be able to see matter spiraling towards it [the black hole].
Jack O'Neill: "Actually, it's called the Accretion Disk."
Daniel Jackson: "Well, I guess it's easy to understand why the local population would be afraid of something like that... [[[Beat]]] what did you just say?"
Jack O'Neill: "It's just an astronomical term."
Sam Carter: "You didn't think the Colonel had a telescope on his roof just to look at the neighbors, did you?"
Jack O'Neill: "Not initially."

  • In early seasons of Smallville Clark uses a telescope in his "fortress of solitude" (aka the loft in the barn) to admire his love interest/neighbor Lana Lang from afar.
  • The Professionals. At the end of "Killer With A Long Arm" Cowley catches Bodie and Doyle sniggering over a long range sniper rifle they've captured. He takes a peek through the telescopic sight and sure enough finds it pointed at a scantily-dressed girl in an apartment a couple of miles away. Cowley chews out the shamefaced pair...then corrects their estimation of the girl's dimensions.
  • The Whitest Kids U Know did this once. 6 people died.
  • The Pilot Episode of Family Matters showed Eddie doing this before Carl came up to the attic for a father-son chat. Carl took the binoculars before leaving.
  • Taken Up to Eleven in an episode of NCIS, when a pair of Marines discover a murder while using a spy satellite to check out a female officer sunbathing nude on a naval base.

Music

Newspaper Comics

  • An old The Wizard of Id cartoon had an astronomer using his telescope for closer examination of a "heavenly body".

Stand Up Comedy

"I was seeing this girl for about six weeks, until someone took my binoculars."

Tabletop RPG

  • Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) supplement The Asylum and Other Tales, adventure "The Auction". An astronomer has a telescope in his apartment which he uses for his secret hobby, voyeurism.

Theatre

  • In the first scene of Mister Roberts, the sailors use their binoculars and spyglasses to spy on two attractive blonde twin nurses. One of them suggests that they could get a closer look without being seen by sneaking up on them as Mobile Shrubbery.

Video Games

  • In The Sims 2 sims using a telescope during the daytime will sometimes spy on a neighbourhood sim, who will get mad and come over and slap them.
  • One of the ways to recover health in Silent Scope is to use your rifle's scope to spy on sunbathing females.
  • Kingdom of Loathing features a telescope, obtained in an optional dungeon, which can be used to either look at the stars for a stat boost or look at the Naughty Sorceress's tower to see what monsters it has.

Web Comics

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