Hindsight

The good people of Franklin County, Ohio, have a new courthouse, which opened for business this past Monday. One new tenant -- Court of Common Pleas Judge Julie Lynch -- is complaining about the central staircase in the lobby. The staircase, you see, has clear risers (you know, the vertical pieces between the steps that you stub your toe on). Now "floating" stairs with no risers at all are hardly some great grotesque innovation; they've been around for years.

But apparently the first thing that popped into the mind of Judge Julie when she first beheld the stairs was . . . wait for it . . . "guys can look up my dress." Well, sure. We guess that's so, although we can't say that it's the first thing that would pop into our heads. And we assume this also means that Judge Julie has never herself perched on a bar stool wearing her little black dress.

In the interest of full disclosure, we confess that we're neither a girl, nor have we ever even played one on TV. It could be that the average woman spends a good deal of her day carefully scanning her surroundings, seeking to detect occasions for guys looking up her skirt. But we doubt it.

It's clear that Judge Julie thinks differently, since her only explanation for this horror is that it had to have been designed by men, which reasoning carries with it the implicit assumption that any woman would immediately think "up skirt!" But that seems to us a bit inconsistent with the steps that have been taken pending a permanent fix: court security officers now warn all women before they take the offending steps.