A male Cinerama employee was accused earlier this week of hiding a video camcorder in the theater’s women’s room.

Reports of this same crime have occurred earlier this year in other cities. At those times, bloggers/pundits (all female) asked out loud why the hell any guy could get off on the sight of a woman on a toilet.

I myself asked the same question out loud in 1999, when Penthouse magazine, in the last years of founder Bob Guccione’s direction, briefly featured professionally-posed pictorials of women urinating.

Such scenes never turned me on. But I tried to figure why anyone else would be.

As best as I could guess, I deduced it must have been something about viewing a woman at a moment when her public persona is as “down” as her slacks.

Sometime circa 2003, I read something by former porn-biz blogger Luke Ford about a porn producer who’d reported some stolen videotape masters or something like that. After the pilf was recovered, a police detective made arrangements to personally deliver it back to the producer. During the handover, the cop said he’d always wanted to meet the porn producer. The cop said he particularly loved XXX videos for the occasional moment when a leading lady, in the peak of passion, would drop all feminine pretense and reveal pure, un-acted emotion.

That moment, I guess, is what toilet fetishists also seek.

But there’s no need to degrade yourself into committing criminal acts in order to play out this fetish (or any other).

In the Internet age, porno images of every kink can be attained quickly and cheaply. Many are created by trained professionals, with unobstructed camera angles and adequate lighting, featuring models who are not only aware and willing but even paid for the job of entertaining you.