“A 41-year-old man is behind bars today after he told police he left photos of his genitals on the vehicles of up to 100 women in the East Valley, officials said. Police arrested Jeffery Howard Pritchert, of Mesa, on Tuesday on suspicion of public display of explicit sexual materials, public sexual indecency, possession of dangerous drugs and drug paraphernalia, Mesa police Sgt. Chuck Trapani said. Mesa police have been investigating at least 30 reports of photos left on the cars of women since 1999… Mesa police got a break in the case when a man left DNA when he touched himself in front of women at two separate locations in November and December. The DNA from both samples matched and was placed into the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). Last month, police got a match to the DNA linking the crimes to Pritchert. Detectives began surveillance on Pritchert and said they saw him place a photo of his genitals on a woman’s car.” —AZCentral.com (US)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

It would be tempting to think that this was some strange new sort of perversion, exhibitionism tempered through the American obsession with cars — a sort of automotive perversion such as you might encounter in JG Ballard’s famous novel Crash. But odds are the truth is much more homely than that. Leaving photographs of his genitalia on car windows was probably a cowardly form of exhibitionism, self-exposure in a mediated fashion that would minimize the perp’s risk of getting caught. After all, look what happened when he did in fact expose himself to real live women: he “left DNA” — is that a euphemism for ejaculate? — that ended up identifying him and leading to his arrest.

When you consider the case from a more general standpoint, you can’t help but imagine something like this: a woman comes out of the supermarket, finds a penis picture on her car, throws it on the ground in disgust, and then looks up to see a beautiful youth (male or female) plastered across a billboard wearing Calvin Klein underwear. Why is the first a criminal perversion and the second an advertising technique? You could say that the model, though exposed, does not exhibit his genitalia — but does the mere visibility of a penis constitute a crime? You could also say that a car is private property and a billboard is a public space, thus the crime consists in something like trespassing. But if that were the case, then wouldn’t it equally be a crime for a cop to leave a ticket under your windshield wiper?

If you want to test the limits between exhibitionism and advertising, this would be an interesting experiment. Start up a blog where you post naked pictures of your private parts. Then go around parking lots leaving flyers on cars — and on the flyers you should just print the web address of your blog. That leaves a very fine line between exposing yourself and promoting yourself, and it would be interesting to see if the authorities had anything to say about it. Would the courts consider this a form of (criminal) exhibitionism? Or would it just be yet another crass attempt at self-promotion?

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