This is how screwy our sex laws are. Last August, an 18-year-old high school football player named Hunter Osborn was dared by a teammate to expose his penis in his team's official photo that was taken for the school yearbook. As the photo was being taken, Hunter pulled the top of his dick out of his waistband.
The photo was developed and was placed in the yearbook, and nobody noticed Hunter's dickie because--sorry guys--it's not that big of a deal. The school received no complaints about it. Nobody went blind or was otherwise scarred for life over it.
Eventually, someone noticed the offending appendage, and when school officials realized what happened, they did what school officials are good at doing: they overreacted. They called the police. The police launched an investigation, which led to a charge of furnishing harmful items to minors—a Class 4 felony that carries up to 3.75 years in prison—and 69 misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure, one for each student present when Hunter did the diabolical thing. And they fitted Hunter with an ankle monitor.
Let's put this in perspective. The 69 students who were the victims of Hunter's heinous act were not looking at Hunter when he whipped out the top of his dick. Moreover, they, and everyone else, could barely see the offending object in the official photo.
These same victims presumably saw Hunter's whole penis--and everything else--in the team shower before and after games and practices without anyone suggesting the sight of Hunter's naked flesh victimized anyone.
The charges were later dropped--presumably everyone realized this was overkill. What Hunter did was stupid and it shouldn't be excused by the school. But the initial reaction by the school of involving the police, and the police reaction in charging Hunter, were typical hysterical overreactions to anything penis.
Hunter probably got a good scare--albeit more than the good scare he deserved--and my guess is he'll never do anything this stupid again. And yes, this was pretty stupid.
There's also a lesson for the adult and student editors of the yearbook: ya need to carefully check photos featuring boys to make sure they aren't showing more boy than they're supposed to.
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