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Weird news story of the week
Nov. 14th, 2007 07:03 pmMan convicted for sex with bicycle (BBC News)
The headline would grab anyone's attention. The charge, "sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex," makes it sound like he was in the middle of the street at the time, which would be a different matter entirely. This turns out to be far from the case.
The act itself doesn't faze me. I've learned well that people do some bizarre stuff with their genitals. No, what weirds me out and makes this entirely fucked up is that this "breach of the peace" was performed in the man's own bedroom, behind a locked door. And for it, this gentleman has been placed on a sex offenders registry for three years.
Three years. For fucking his own bicycle, in his own locked bedroom. The hell???
(In the interest of fairness, this was a bedroom at a hostel. There may be rules in place at hostels regarding what is and isn't private space, but somehow I suspect that if the cleaners had walked in on him with another consenting adult, there would have been nothing more than a few blushes and a quickly closed door. Feel free to correct my assumptions here.)
Sex offenders registries help no one, when the innocent bicycle fetishist and the high school senior that happened to turn 18 before his high-school-senior girlfriend are lumped in with the serial stalkers and baby-rapists. That's a big gap, here, but two years from now nobody's going to look at this guy and see a guy caught in an embarrassing, but harmless situation. No, they'll see a sex offender, and treat him accordingly.
Sense of perspective, anyone?
click
The headline would grab anyone's attention. The charge, "sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex," makes it sound like he was in the middle of the street at the time, which would be a different matter entirely. This turns out to be far from the case.
The act itself doesn't faze me. I've learned well that people do some bizarre stuff with their genitals. No, what weirds me out and makes this entirely fucked up is that this "breach of the peace" was performed in the man's own bedroom, behind a locked door. And for it, this gentleman has been placed on a sex offenders registry for three years.
Three years. For fucking his own bicycle, in his own locked bedroom. The hell???
(In the interest of fairness, this was a bedroom at a hostel. There may be rules in place at hostels regarding what is and isn't private space, but somehow I suspect that if the cleaners had walked in on him with another consenting adult, there would have been nothing more than a few blushes and a quickly closed door. Feel free to correct my assumptions here.)
Sex offenders registries help no one, when the innocent bicycle fetishist and the high school senior that happened to turn 18 before his high-school-senior girlfriend are lumped in with the serial stalkers and baby-rapists. That's a big gap, here, but two years from now nobody's going to look at this guy and see a guy caught in an embarrassing, but harmless situation. No, they'll see a sex offender, and treat him accordingly.
Sense of perspective, anyone?
click
