(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

Not long ago in Maryland, a judge decided that mooning is “disgusting but legal.” That seems like an especially sane approach to the matter. After all, everybody has an ass. What should be so shocking about the sight of one? So long as it’s not blowing gas or spewing shit in your direction, you can always free yourself of a mooner’s ass by looking away.

Many asses may even be a joy to behold. Was that the case with the inebriated 23-year-old jaywalker (er, moonwalker?)? So far no amount of googling could turn up her name, let alone a picture of her face or posterior. Let’s assume that she and her friend were out on a bar crawl. She’s in the bloom of life. She’s got some sass to her. Probably her ass wasn’t so disgusting, even if it was illegal in Georgia. (Too bad she didn’t run away from the arresting cop. Would they have put her ass on a Most Wanted poster?)

If there is a moral to the story, it has less to do with mooning per se than with showing up a police officer. If you get stopped for jaywalking, odds are you’re dealing with a persnickety cop. It’s such a minor offense, or at least it is here in New York, that the arresting officer will likely be glad to write you up for anything else he can think of. Don’t mouth off, don’t flip him the bird, and by all means don’t shake your buttocks in front of him — unless you happen to be in Maryland.

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

Here is a picture of Mr. Miller. When you look at his face, the neighbor’s comment that “he’s not right” echoes in your head. He looks a little off, and also a little sad.

Here is the juicy part of the police report, as posted on the Smoking Gun:

The male white, later identified as Ronald H. Miller, was lying on his sofa inserting an item, later identified as a claw hammer covered with a plastic bag, into his rectum while completely naked. We observed he had some type of lubricant on his genital area and buttocks which we later learned was motor oil.

Officers entered the home and observed Miller didn’t acknowledge our presence until we addressed him. He removed the hammer from his anus and sat upright but didn’t say anything. When I told him he was under arrest for public indecency, he asked me for another chance, that I give him a break.

Presuming that he had the handle and not the claw of the hammer up his ass, it’s not so weird. He must have wrapped it in a plastic bag so that he wouldn’t get splinters in his rectum, and also so that he wouldn’t have to smell his own ass when doing repair jobs around the house. On the other hand, using motor oil as a lubricant is kind of whacked. It is smelly and hard to wash off. You wonder whether this was part of some intricate fetish — sex with things you can find in a garage — or whether these just happened to be at hand when he felt the need to sodomize himself. “No KY? No baby oil? No lotion? Damn… Well, there’s that Valvoline in the garage…”

On the internet there is a forum or group dedicated to nearly every weird fetish. However, no amount of searching turned up one where guys who jerk off with claw hammers and motor oil can share their experiences. Doubtless that is why Mr. Miller pleasured himself with blinds up and door open. He must have been very lonely, and by exhibiting himself he may have hoped to attract like-minded individuals or to educate others in the joys of masturbating like a deranged auto mechanic.

Here is a picture of the wanker. He looks like the kind of guy with whom you might play a game of pick-up basketball in the park — but clearly he was less interested in picking up than in pulling off. News reports fail to say whether he made any witty comments about manufacturing his own special sauce.

You can’t help but wonder why exhibitionists choose to reveal themselves in the places that they do. If a guy pulls down his pants in front of a kindergarten, you automatically assume that he’s a pedophile. But you can’t really make the same inference about a person who exposes himself at a McDonald’s drive-thru. He probably doesn’t have a sexual fetish for McNuggets or for women in polyester uniforms. So why that? Why there? It’s difficult to imagine, especially when there is the obvious risk of revealing your face, the make and model of your car, and your license plate number. Furthermore, given the recent spike in gasoline prices, it’s not cheap to drive around exposing yourself. (What do green exhibitionists do — expose themselves from bicycles?) Maybe it was precisely Mr. Brady’s perversity not just to expose himself, but to expose himself in a costly way.

If you put Mr. Brady together with the woman recently arrested for trading sex for gasoline, you might even make the case that perverts react to social crises too. Usually people think of perversion as a warped expression of individualism, and yet perverts live in the world the same as anyone else. Are there people whose sexual pathologies are influenced by gas prices? Economic trends? Crashes and booms?

To prolong the theme of female aggression, take the case of the Israeli tourist. Some workers cat-call her? She strips naked. Take that, jerks. Evidently it quieted the men. Cops picked her up but laughed it off. A few days later, something happens in a bar. Unfortunately, not a single news outlet describes the origin of the incident. Did the bartender say something lewd? Did he lean in close and whisper, “Hey, aren’t you the tourist who stripped at an ATM the other day? Well, I can whistle at you too…” She promptly tried to put out a lit cigarette in his face. She’s a female Rambo, a sister of the Uma Thurman character in Kill Bill. Don’t fuck with her. She takes no prisoners.

Frankly she sounds completely sane — so why did the police end up dumping her at a “mental health unit?” There are two possibilities. On one hand, maybe she really is a nutjob, a ticking time bomb, a homicidal assault waiting to happen. The papers didn’t say so, but they may not know. On the other hand, maybe she’s just a strong-willed “not unattractive-looking lady” with some Israeli Defense Force training. Determined not to take any guff, she was tossed into the loony bin not because she’s crazy but because cops — and men in general — probably aren’t accustomed to a lady with such balls. You can imagine her assaulting the very cops who tried to arrest her.

Meanwhile, if the headshrinkers don’t lobotomize the aggression out of her, the Naked Israeli tourist may want to consider a post-sanatorium career in dominatrix work. Sane or insane, she’s got just the right attitude for the job.

There is nothing particularly perverse about this incident, and of course it’s wrong to go around vandalizing property that belongs to others. But once you’ve made those qualifications, it’s hard not to detect a certain gleeful brutality in the whole thing. It can be fun to destroy stuff, as anyone who’s ever played with a gun or a stick of dynamite knows. And to get naked while destroying stuff? Hey, that’s the only way to run amok. Tossing off your clothes is like freeing yourself of everything civilization ever imposed on you. “I’m an animal! A Norse God! A Destroyer of Things! Grrrr!”

Except for the hangover and the handcuffs, the guy probably felt great afterward. In fact, you can imagine a parallel world in which bored businessmen and bank executives leave off with their corporate retreats to go to exclusive hideaways where they can simulate this sort of behavior with impunity. Instead of staid golf courses there are little installations of seemingly drab suburban life — a convenience store, a bowling alley, a chain restaurant. The “tourists” drink up in some louche strip bar and then, when their inebriation hits critical mass, they’re given baseball bats, mallets, ball-peen hammers, maybe a flare gun or two. They can strip down, paint their bodies with war colors, run amok on simulation towns. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Afterward they return to the strip bars to indulge in rape simulations.

Why not? Sex tourism is booming. Why not violence tourism too?

“It was no joke,” the woman insisted — but in her disavowal you can hear a deep furrow of absurdity running through the whole episode. Really, if you have to be harrassed by a flasher, could you be doing any sillier thing than picking okra? Somehow the very word undermines the gravity of the whole story. That’s not to say the woman wasn’t genuinely frightened, or that the man might not be a potential attacker. But the moment you hear okra, you just can’t take the incident too seriously. It’s as though the man were naked except for a pair of Birkenstocks. The detail subverts the horror of the thing.

Fortunately for the victim, she kept enough presence of mind to scare the flasher off. A psychologist quoted later in the story advises that “the best reaction for a woman faced with such a scenario is no reaction.” The idea is that the flasher gets off on the look of shock on his victim’s face, so if you show no shock, you give him no gratification.

On reflection, though, that hardly seems like an efficient way to deal with a flasher. It’s too late to discourage him with lack of reaction. He’s already dropped his drawers. Wouldn’t it be better to discourage him a little more strongly? You could say something like, “If I wanted to see a baby gherkin, I’d buy a pickle,” or, “Little boy, why don’t you come back when you and your wee-wee have grown up a little?” Or if you happen to be picking okra when you are accosted by an exhibitionist, perhaps you could take advantage of the fact that the little pods are covered with spines. (”Coming in contact with the spines can lead to a burning, itching and unpleasant sensation wherever one’s skin touches the plant.”) Invite your flasher to step closer, then whip some okra at his peter. That’ll teach him to keep away from the okra patch.

(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

There is some video of Reverend Whipkey attending court at News2 (”the only camera at his court hearing today” — is that an exclusive? Or an example of the station’s high standards of reportage?) When you look at the picture of Reverend Whipkey in his priest get-up, you see that his collar does seem rather confining. His head looks like it’s about to burst out of his raiments. Evidently his entire body strained to free itself of his black robe. Before nude jogging, his previous episode of “inappropriate personal behavior” involved “shaving naked at a summer camp for boys.” Well, well, well… Just what do you think he was shaving?

No doubt the Church is embarrassed once again and the locals are making all sorts of jokes about the poor cleric. (”Hey, it’s Reverend Whip-It-Out-Key, ahuh, ahuh.”) But presuming that the guy isn’t a molestor — and no one’s saying he is — then you have to wonder why this is scandalous or outrageous. Wouldn’t you prefer to live in a world where it would be no big deal for a guy to go for a naked jog in the middle of the night? After all, where’s the harm in it? Is he going to be spotted by children? Then worry about the parents who let the kids out at 4:30 AM. Is he going to be spotted by anyone else? Then grow up. It’s just a middle-aged guy with his weenie hanging out. If you can’t shrug that off, you probably shouldn’t be out at 4:30 AM either.

It was disappointing to hear that Mr Wong explained his fetish by anthropomorphizing the cars and comparing them to women’s bodies. It makes him sound like a loser who can’t get “real” women and satisfies himself with automobiles instead. To be attracted to a fender because it resembles a hip is not so interesting. It would have been much more fascinating if he’d been attracted to certain women because they resembled automobiles. Give that one to Shakespeare: Shall I compare thee to a ‘67 Camaro? Thou art more lovely…

Then again, perhaps it is wrong to overemphasize the vehicular aspect of Mr Wong’s sexuality. Yes, he likes cars, but he also likes exposing himself and women with big feet. This is a peculiar assemblage of desiderata. Often a perversion requires a conjunction of elements, but the conjunction seems logical or, at the least, familiar. If a perv lusts after the big toes of little girls, it doesn’t seem at all strange that he should combine pedophilia and foot fetishism. But Mr Wong seems to have welded more disparate elements into his psychopathy. A car hood, a large foot, a scandalized public — it’s as though he’s forging a sexuality that is no longer narrow or obsessive but a sort of collage, a constructivist perversity.

(Thanks to Dani for the link.)

Here is a picture of “Bubba” Dills. The Smoking Gun reproduces the affidavit of his arrest, which is replete with descriptions of his video:

Mr. Dills is naked and wearing a mask. Mr Dills is visible on tape as he is simulating a sex act with a utility pole… As the car pulls away Mr Dills is standing by the utility pole shaking his penis and masturbating within five to ten feet of the automobile. Mr Dills then lays down onto the lawn and “humps” the ground… Mr Dills then goes back to a tree near Kiwanis Avenue and “humps” on the tree trunk and ground as cars drive by…

While humping the ground, a tree, and a utility pole may not be the normal fare of exhibitionists, Mr. Dill’s actions do not particularly suggest that he harbored a fetish for these things. It sounds more like he was putting on a show for passing cars. Dills is probably the same sort of guy who takes off his shirt at a football game being played in a blizzard. Translate that impulse into sex and you have a guy who shakes his penis at passing cars. Simulating sex with a tree was the sort of thing he did not because he wanted the tree but because he imagined the shocked reaction of passersby.

The initial reports suggested that Mr. Dills engaged in “sex acts with traffic signs.” A thousand bloggers picked up on it and imagined him in various absurd scenarios with Yield or Slippery When Wet signs. (Can a Stop sign ever give consent? Hmmm…) However, the affidavit says nothing about this strange possibility. It’s too bad, because a clown waving his dick at traffic is much less interesting to contemplate than a man harboring an enigmatic fetish for the bright colors, geometric shapes, and fragmented language of signs. Could anyone really get turned on by Do Not Enter or Deer Xing? Where is the fetishist who experiences uncontrollable arousal at the sight of Hidden Driveway?

When you’re a registered sex offender, it would be prudent to keep a bathrobe or a spare set of clothes by the door. Or at the very least, you might want to get a peephole in your front door so that you can see who’s knocking. Why answer the door naked if you don’t know who is there? One time PervScan was expecting a certain somebody and, when the doorbell rang, flung open the door wearing no more than a birthday suit. Lo and behold, it was a little old lady who lived around the corner. Ooops! It was an honest accident, and if you were trying to judge Mr. Gomez charitably, you might think something similar happened to him. But really, if you’re a sex offender, you should take some extra precautions. You think murderers answer the door with a gun in their hand? Only if they’re suicidal.

Meanwhile, you can laugh at this unwitting exhibitionist all you want, but you should not let it obscure the really important point about the story. Did you notice how he picked up his jail bait in a Christian chat room? Plainly it is not just MySpace that harbors sexual predators. These Christian chat rooms are probably teeming with all sorts of perverts. They may call themselves pastors or priests, but don’t let that fool you. These places are dangerous for young people. If legislators ever get around to creating a “red light domain” extension such as .sex or .xxx, surely these Christian chat rooms should be forced to relocate there. That way impressionable young minds can be steered away from the evils lurking in god.sex, god.xxx, or any form of god whatsoever.