Last Sunday Taylor Swift arrived at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, to support her boyfriend Travis Kelce at the NFL game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos.
The couple are a media magnet, but this time it was Swift’s bodyguards stealing the limelight.
In footage widely circulated online, Swift’s security team can be seen shouting at the photographers inevitably stationed around the stadium – who are kneeling to take pictures of the singer. Swift, who happened to be wearing a tweed Versace skirt suit, appears to slow down before approaching the photographers, while members of her security team repeatedly shout “Stand up!”
She only begins walking towards the crowd of photographers again once they are all standing up.
Fans of the singer, or ‘Swifties’, all jumped to the same conclusion on social media – that Swift and her team were concerned that the photographers were taking the opportunity to ‘upskirt’ her – the practice of taking photographs or filming under someone’s clothing.
“Oh this is so disturbing,” commented one user on X (formerly Twitter), with another adding, “Her security is amazing but it’s disgusting they had to do that.”
The term ‘upskirting’ has also come to generally define the act of taking sexually intrusive photographs of someone without their consent.
It’s not unusual for photographers in the front row of a press pack to kneel so that the ones stationed behind get a good enough view, but it does give insalubrious paparazzi the opportunity to take indecent images.
A classic point at which paparazzi historically like to take images of female celebrities is when they are getting in and out of vehicles while wearing dresses, leading to thousands of ‘how to’ guides being published online, including one from WikiHow entitled: How to Step Out of a Car Without Flashing Your Underwear.
Upskirting laws in the US vary by state, and was only made illegal in the UK in 2019 after vigorous campaigning by activist Gina Martin, after she was targeted at a music festival in 2017.
Upskirting has been illegal in India since 2000, but a court in Kerala recently ruled that taking non-consensual pictures of women in public did not count as voyeurism, and was therefore not a criminal offense.
Earlier this year during the Paris Olympics CEO of the Olympic Broadcasting Services, Yiannis Exarchos, revealed that he had felt the need to remind camera operators to film male and female athletes equally to avoid “stereotypes and sexism” becoming a feature of the visual coverage of the games.
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