Oh for fuckity fuck’s sake! Are you fucking serious. Ok, so The Washington Post reports that a 17 year old boy in Manassas, VA was arrested for sexting videos of his penis to his his 15 year old girlfriend. The cops have charged him with producing child pornography. Now in the name of “gathering evidence” they have gotten a warrant to take the kid to the hospital and give him an erection inducing shot so that they can take pictures of his penis to compare with the photos that they have seized from the girl’s cellphone.
Really? REALLY?!?!?
There are a billion things wrong here, but let me just start with five.
1) In the interest of saving the lovely tax payers of the city Manassas and Prince William County a lot of money, let me help you out here. Yes, it’s his cock. I have not seen his cock. I have not seen the photos from the girl’s cell phone. I have no direct knowledge of the case. But purely from the evidence that is not in question in this case (17 year old boy, 15 year old girlfriend, they both own cellphones with cameras) I can give my expert opinion with 99.99999999% accuracy, that he did in fact send her dick pics. Honestly, that is why even the cheapest cellphones have cameras on them. I spent years doing technology design, and even though I didn’t invent the camera phone, I can tell you that the design meeting went something like this:
Bob: Wow, that’s cool, you figured out a way to get a camera in the phones and send pics back and forth. They’re going to love that on the elite model.
Joe: No, we have to put it in all phones.
Bob: But we can’t. It will make the phones more expensive. We’ll put it in the slick upper models for the geeks and gadget addicts, but we need to make these cheap $50 phones for teens to buy. That’s the bread and butter market right there.
Joe: That’s just the thing though. We HAVE to put them on the cheap phones. Teen boys are totally going to want to send pics of their dicks!
Bob: Egads! You’re right!
Seriously. I’m sure it went exactly like that.
The point is, the brain of the teenaged boy works something like this. “When I see pictures of vagina, I want to fuck it. So clearly, if I send her penis pics, she’ll be into that.” Teen boys have not yet caught on to the fact that penises are innately ugly. To be fair, neither have politicians or quarterbacks in their forties, so you can’t fault them for that.
2) Which brings us to point #2. Can we please stop pretending that teenagers who send naughty pics of themselves to each other are doing something wrong? At least according to the paper, the case came about because the mother of the teen girl saw the dick pics on her phone and called the cops. Apparently, the girl sent naughty pics as well, but she hasn’t been charged. Ok, lady, let me make something really clear to you. The reason he’s sending these photos to your daughter is because he’s fucking her. At the very least he’s trying to fuck her, but given what I’ve heard here, she’s fucking him. I’m slightly less sure of this. Let’s say 99.44%. I am as sure as Ivory soap that your daughter is not as pure as you probably think she is. And seriously, that’s ok. Stop trying to pretend that teenagers don’t have sexual needs and desires. It will only get you into trouble. This isn’t about someone victimizing children. This is about someone being upset that their daughter might be sexually active. You know what? Deal with it.
3) Taking him in for an injection to make his penis erect?!?!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!? Again, in interest of saving tax payer dollars, let me explain 17 year old male physiology to you. You do NOT need to give this kid a shot. Just on the off chance, have you tried spending say seven bucks on the most recent copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure this will give you the desired effect. Honestly, he’s 17. There’s a strong possibility that you don’t even need stimulus. You could just stand there and wait a little while. Erections are likely to occur.
4) I’m pretty sure there’s at least one male member of either the police department of Prince William County or their district attorney’s office. This means that they are completely aware of the basic physiology in point 3. I must therefore conclude that, its more that they just have some really kinky needle fetishes and REALLY REALLY want to get off on taking pictures of this kid’s penis. I’m just saying. I mean, They’ve already taken shots of it flaccid. They must know that there are simpler ways of achieving erections. They just really want to use the needle. You know, on a 17 year old “child” that the law is supposed to be protecting. Yeah…
5) This one isn’t about the case. It’s about The Washington Post itself. Seriously, guys… this is the internet age. If you’re going to post a story about sexting, even if you don’t want to show the actual “victims” you really need to come up with some flashy graphic or photo for the article so that it looks good when people link to it. Did you seriously think it was a good idea to write that story with no photo whatsoever? Sigh. Luckily, I have my own to add. So thank you to Shiima and Mallory for posing for this shot… you know, seven years ago, because I totally anticipated writing this someday.
Frist!!one!1!2!!
Thanks, Sam. Very eloquent.
Just trying to help with your Blog posting system. Don’t think there’s much debate that the actions described in the articles about this are awful.
yeah… I know. And it totally worked. Thanks. 🙂
I’m having a really difficult time getting past the “We don’t want teenagers taking pictures of their genitals and then showing them to people, so we’d better take more pictures of this kid’s genitals so we can show them to a judge” part of this issue.
Jessi, I still haven’t gotten past the fact that taking a picture of your own body and sending it to your girl/boyfriend can be a felony that puts you on a sex offender list. THEN we get to the stupidity of how they want to prove this “crime”.
“We’re protecting the children! By arresting the children!”
What’s really kinda neat, and another added bonus of the whole “using my blog to write stuff” rather than just Facebook, is that WordPress auto-linked to my thoughts from a previous time I bitched about this, all the way back on Livejournal in 2004. So here’s my thoughts on a similar case a decade ago: http://www.chrismaverick.com/wp/2004/03/30/1kwffh-on-the-prosecution-of-victimless-sex-crimes-by-underaged-self-offenders/
Dmitri: That’s an awesome idea. You should totally start a movement to get all men across america to start doing that.
Good rant, Mav, but let me chime in that the paradox of making child porn to prove child porn is the bit that simply blows my mind. (As Jessi suggests above.) Aren’t the police committing a federal felony? Someone tell the NSA, Secret Service, FBI!
On the case: yeah, Les, that’s the point most media outlets I’ve seen mention this have taken. The Manassas police seem oblivious to the irony. If you follow the link to the Washington post, there’s a follow up statement the police released where they basically defend their actions arguing that this is different because it’s in the interest of justice. Also, the Manassas police are full of shit.
On my blog software: ok, yay! It’s mostly working now. You can all clearly see the posts. And mostly the comments are being sync’d. The only weird bit is Dmitri isn’t showing up on the blog version. I can only assume that he has some kind of magic anti technology field going on.
Didn’t read it all, but just so you know, in their late-found wisdom, Manassas police let the paperwork expire because they realized it was a bad idea.
UGH