The naked truth about American sexual prudery

Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on Monday morning, October 19, and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure.

It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her seven-year-old son along a path beside Williamson's house espied the naked householder and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a cop.

"Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was alone, in my own home and I just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."

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The story ended up on TV, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behaviour. Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case rented accommodation) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.

Williamson will be lucky if they don’t throw a cobbled-up indictment at him

Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop's wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokesperson, stirred the pot of innuendo: "We've heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident."

The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They've also been papering the neighbourhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson - a white guy who's a commercial diver, and who has a five-year-old daughter, not living with him.

I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch keen to make his own plea deal, a faked police line-up, maybe an artist's impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Eric could end up losing his visitation rights and, if worst comes to worst, getting ten years in jail and being posted for life on some sex offender site.

You think we're living in the 21st century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the 17th century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women for being witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

Now let’s head north from Fairfax county to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials.

How about if you're white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and... But let my Boston friend pick up the story, because it happened to him.

"It was the early 90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom - no warrant. They only backed off after they realised that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there, the born-again Christians who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.

"My girlfriend was dressing in the bedrooom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.

"I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal."

Year after year in America, this prudery exacts a terrible toll

This was in the early 1990s, please note. This was when the wave of hysteria over satanic abuse of children was in full spate, with people being imprisoned for life on just the sort of "evidence" the cops are now trying to marshal against Williamson. Massachusetts actually saw the first trial of a daycare teacher charged with satanic abuse. Bernard Baran was released after nearly 22 years and exonerated three years after that, on June 9 this year.

As the attorney Mike Snedeker, who co-authored with Debbie Nathan the 1995 book Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, recently reminded us on the CounterPunch website, there are victims of that hysteria, almost certainly innocent, still rotting in prison almost a generation later: for example, Fran and Danny Keller in Texas, and James Toward and Francisco Fuster in Florida.

The 'satanic abuse' hysteria was particularly appalling, but year after year in America prudery exacts a terrible toll – as witness the unfortunate female schoolteachers packed often to prison with hefty sentences for having affairs with boys in their mid to late teens.

Is America permanently lodged in the 17th century so far as moral policing is concerned? The answer is Not exactly, since gay marriage wasn’t a big item on the legislative agenda of the colonies at that time. But regulation of sexual behaviour is the preferred route to wider social control.

The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing overt political censorship. Sexual repression, often through the allegation of 'deviant' fantasy crimes, is the designated stand-in for violations of the social order that are hard to crush in a courtroom. As Williamson is now ruefully aware, the state not only has a long arm, it has a long gaze.

Moral: the eyes of the law are on you at all times, even at 8.30 am in the supposed privacy of your own kitchen.