Enough of this Peeping Tomfoolery.

Time was when a Peeping Tom was a creature to be scorned or at least pitied. He (almost always male) was a poor soul, sometimes mentally ill, who got his jollies by peering into other people's windows, usually bedroom windows.

On one occasion some years ago, one mother--so outraged that a peeper had been peering into her daughters' bedroom windows--went looking for him while carrying a baseball bat! Fortunately for the trespasser, local police apprehended him before Mom did her impression of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa on his skull.

It may be just lack of attention on the part of this writer, but we don't hear much about Peeping Toms these days. They must be out there. Human nature hasn't changed that much. But to paraphrase a 1960s song title, "Where have all the Peeping Toms gone?"

The answer to that question is easy. Who gobbles up the supermarket tabloids? Who reads People magazine and watches Hard Copy, Entertainment Tonight, and a host of titillating offerings of that ilk?

Some readers may be old enough to remember when a magazine called Confidential burst onto the publishing scene. There had always been pulp magazines that published what today we would call "soft porn," but the characters in them were fictional. Confidential caused a sensation because, for the first time, it named names, usually marginal movie and radio celebrities with a sprinkling of celebrities from other fields. But the scandals they trumpeted would evoke yawns today. "Who was the woman seen at a nightclub with that married actor?" "Is it true that the unmarried actress is expecting?"

But like an underfunded missile, Confidential fizzled out in short order. Happily the market for it was limited. There weren't enough literate Peeping Toms to please advertisers, and even those--happily--had short attention spans.

But down the road a few years, a new phenomenon arose: the supermarket tabloids determined to give subtlety a bad name. First came the National Enquirer followed by the Star, the Globe, and others. At first they shouted weird stories: "Child Born with Mother's Tattoo" and "Statue of Elvis Seen on Mars." Their editors learned that there was a readership for bizarre stories about real people. No need for the stories to be provable. As long as they were possible and the headlines carefully worded to avoid libel suits.

Soon the tabloids lucked out. There were O.J. Simpson stories open to almost any interpretation. There were Princess Di, Charles, and Camilla, and then a bonanza: The princess was killed in a mysterious auto accident. And when there was a lull in such sensations, there were always the Kennedys to fall back on.

Meanwhile the so-called mainstream media looked down its corporate nose at the trashy tabloids. "Thank God we're not like them!" But a day of reckoning came when the mainstream read the circulation and profit figures of the competition they so disdained. Circulation of most metropolitan newspapers had begun to decline, and the once highly profitable TV news divisions began to lose some of their market share. Why can't we take a leaf from the success book of the tabloids, they asked?

So almost imperceptibly the mainstream media began to interlard (a good word, by the way) hot features into their real news. This increment was gradual for a while, but then came Monica, Paula, and Linda, not to mention the Unabomber. The editors thought they had died and gone to heaven. This is what the people want, they argued, we're only giving them what they want. Well, maybe.

When the Starr "Pornography" Report was trumpeted in a manner that made news coverage of World War II seem almost secretive, our once-treasured respect for privacy was blasted to hell. Its holier-than-thou authors asserted that the report was really about alleged perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, but they knew damn well that few, if any, readers would plow through its dry-as-dust legalisms. Let's sex it up!

Barely noticed in the brouhaha over the independent counsel's version of telephone sex was the story that a federal judge had unsealed a 47-page psychiatric profile of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. In this report the most intimate details of this pitiful criminal's sessions with psychiatrists were spilled out for the delectation of the prurient--about a man who will spend the rest of his life in prison.

And to think that the Watergate conspirators were forced to break into a psychiatrist's office in an attempt to find "dirt" about a man on Nixon's "enemies list"! Today a federal judge could be forced to open those files to the public.

Are the cynical media moguls (with help from some Congress members) right? Is the public's appetite for the most intimate details about the lives of others really insatiable? Is it true that most of us can't get enough of this stuff?

Please God the intrinsic decency of people will prevail.