The Sex Offender Shuffle

Myspace allows for transmogrification from pervert to fun Myspace user, and soon we're all an "Add A Friend" away from certain disaster.

I am alerted to this situation by my reliable friend Veda, who has posted an informative blog about Myspace sex offenders. Apparently 90,000 have been identified and booted from the service recently, up from the 40,000 or so previously reported. It got me thinking - are these the real sex offenders that your mother warned you about, those strangers that you are certainly not to talk to or take candy from, or are they the countless "others" who have been caught up in a wave of paranoia and the predictably failed, draconian response of law enforcement?

I ask this because pedophilia is a specific evil. Even the television show "To Catch A Predator," while disturbing, certainly blurred this line and did so in a questionable way. Because pedophilia is sex with children, and anything else isn't, we really, REALLY need to generalize less about this.

The sex offender list may be useful, but putting everyone on it certainly isn't. The first comment on Veda's blog goes something like this: "They should all be castrated!" Really? How would one castrate a woman teacher who had sex with a student? And why would one want to destroy her genitalia? Or anyone else's for that matter, seeing as we are trying to live in some form of civilized society and mutilation runs counter to that advanced ideal? Anyone who wants to mutilate people is suggesting a personal blood lust, similar to the death penalty blood lust that has killed innocent people, similar to the torture blood lust satisfied on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detainees (save America from those brown shepherds with the funny names!) It's amazing to me how so many "good Americans" are ready to destroy any remnant of this country's moral fiber by reducing us as a whole to the same level as the people we're attempting to punish. But give that commenter a knife and present them with the genitals of one of these "sex offenders" and see how sure it is wielded. Those with that particular bloodthirsty affliction would rather have the government do the dirty work, and that is beyond a reasonable doubt. You bring us down.

Oh, and leave your chemical castration musings at the doorstep along with your chemical lobotomy conjecture, Mr. or Mrs. Medical Expert. You sound like you might be from Nazi Germany.

The teacher thing: problem. A 21 year old male who has to register as a sex offender for having sex with a 16 year old girlfriend: problem. Is the 21 year old misguided? Sure, probably, but lumping this dumb guy in with a hardened criminal rapist or unrepentant pedophile waters down the list. I mean, how many times do have we have to hear that someone got in trouble for anything remotely related to sexual misconduct and then we read "and so-and-so had to register as a sex offender." What, did they have a Penthouse mag in the desk drawer at work when they got caught masturbating? Lewd and lascivious! Not constructive, especially when we realize that the list isn't set up to be punitive but to be informative to the community that the sex offender is released to. I don't need to know if Ms. Lefave is in my neighborhood. Psychologists and super-liberals can cry wolf all they want to about how the boy who has sex with the hot teacher can be as affected by that experience as the situation in which the male teacher gets his jollies with a student, but I will disagree here. The dynamic is different, and while I think that the female teacher/male student thing is a somewhat strange phenomenon, I also think that placing these women on a sex offender list is silly. Doesn't all of the publicity generally take care of that?

So what is the quality of this list of 90,000 Myspace sex offenders? How many are a threat, and how many are an annoyance? I would imagine that the real deal, felonious sexual predators are deeply in the minority. How many are pedophiles, attempting to lure kids through a social service, and how many are rapists? If a grown woman doesn't know to be careful before meeting one of these Myspace chaps at this point, then she may never learn. Kids are different, but private accounts and parental supervision go a long way.

The issue is that everyone is a sex offender now and on such a list despite the quality and severity of the crime and most importantly, the actual threat to the community. When did we forget that the safety of the community is the whole point of these lists, and not an opportunity for dimwits to moralize about "perverts" on one hand while advocating mutilation on the other? Which is worse?