This Week in Sexist History:

Good Ol’ Day: July 30, 1908

Dateline: Washington, D.C.

Subject: A District man's "attentions" to local married women—the phone calls! the hugging!—inspire a band of husbands to retaliate. Their weapons? Tar, feathers, nude sitting-on, and accusations of turn-of-the-century witchcraft. (In 1908, they called it "hypnosis"). Let the olde-tyme male slut-shaming begin:

Calling on a woman? In the evening? Bad slut. Bring out the tar:

So, Bliss comes to visit this chick in Columbia Heights. Says they're engaged. In love. Headed to New York to seal the deal. NYT reporter, however, is not buying this guy's love story at all. But couldn't this all be cleared up by—I don't know—asking the woman what happened? No? Fine:

Side note: How do you spontaneously tar and feather someone in a Columbia Heights basement? Where do the feathers come from?

Kinky. Though he arrived in the home as a mere adulterer, he left as THE SLUTMONSTER OF CAPITOL HILL:

But surely, the three dudes who captured him, stuck him in a basement, took all his clothes off, sat on him, painted him with tar, and then dusted him with the insides of a couch did so for good reason:

He's a witch!

Ah, the old I-fell-under-his-hypnotic-influence-at-an-innocent-dinner-party-and-was-unable-to-control-myself-when-I-got-his-messages-by-mental-telepathy trick. How dare this man take advantage of this poor, weak-brained woman! Only this hypnotist's slutty witchery could possibly have caused her to stray from the dude who sits on naked people in his basement and then exacts olde-tyme tortures on them. Yep, she sure is lucky she wasn't whisked away to New York City, never to see her husband again. Whew. Close one.

Telephone calls? Embraces? It's about time we got this guy off the streets, and into some crazy olde-tyme BDSM basement in Columbia Heights.

"The only concern we have is that the substitute costume is technically a dragon," Eli's father, Tomicah Tillemann, explains over the phone as the boy's mother travels by car to inspect a last-minute switcheroo offered up by a neighbor: The Pottery Barn Kids "Dragon Costume" (below).

But the anatomy of the dragon, as any 3-year-old can tell you, deviates from that of the Tyrannasarus Rex in one obvious way. "It has wings," laments Tillemann, who has already begun devising a plan for explaining away the extra appendages to a suspicious Eli. "If forced, we will explain that the wings are a result of an evolutionary process, but that it is still very much a dinosaur," he says.

Eli's parents have tried to keep the explanations to a minimum since they discovered the missing package, now four days overdue. "We have tried to keep it quiet as best we can. He certainly realizes that something is afoot, but he's not sure what," says Tillemann. Eli's parents are not so blissfully unaware. "Needless to say, the news hit his parents like a meteor strike at the end of the Cretaceous period," says Tillemann.

When they discovered the box missing, Eli's parents notified the Capitol Hill community Listserv of the theft and implored neighbors to help them restore their son to "Jurassic proportions." "Unfortunately, the city's retail establishments seem to have sold out of anything resembling dinosaur outfits, so we're relying on your collective assistance to save our would-be Tyrannosaurus from extinction," wrote Tillemann. But this was about more than just a dino costume, he informed the Listserv; this incident could very well shatter young Eli's entire "faith in the fundamental goodness of humankind."

Once summoned, Eli's Capitol Hill community sprung into action. Tillemann says he fielded a "half-dozen" replacement costumes from generous neighbors within a day of posting the notice; after a couple interviews–one with the aforementioned dragon, one with a frog—Tillemann decided on a costume that is "almost identical" to the original. "The only difference is some polka dots," says Tillemann.

The dino-thieves who sent the Tillemann family into a frantic search for the toothy disguise, however, are not forgiven. "We continue to view the theft of the original T-Rex outfit as a cold blooded, reptilian assault on all that is good in the world," Tillemann insists. "However, in the aftermath of this tragedy, we have also been amazed by the decency and goodness of our Capitol Hill neighbors."

Yesterday evening, Tillemann voiced his gratitude on the neighborhood Listserv. "[D]ue to the efforts of many noble neighbors, our little guy ended up with a magnificent T-Rex costume," Tillemann wrote. "Our son is delighted. His parents are relieved. And all of our faith in the fundamental goodness of humankind has been restored."

The inspiration for Dupont Circle resident Jeremy Trylch’s new D.C.-based web series came in the hot, steamy contents of a stove-warmed tortilla.

“In January of last year, I was eating a chicken quesadilla and thinking about camgirls, as I often do,” says Trylch, a 36-year-old writer and cameraman. “You always hear about scandals where guys get involved with these girls, but I thought—as I was eating—I started thinking of it from the other point of view: the camgirls who get involved with those guys.”

Long after the quesadilla was consumed, the camgirls stuck with Trylch. Soon, he had recruited three writer friends from Johns Hopkins; together, they began hammering out a storyline about online strip-teasers and the bureaucrats who love them. The show, called “Dirty4U,” centers around the online and real-life exploits of five twenty-something District archetypes: Craig, the Hill staffer; McKenzie, the secret camgirl; Jonto, the armchair misogynist; Ashley, the goth; and Neville, the scandal-hunting journalist.

“This story couldn't be told anywhere else. It's purely D.C.,” says Trylch of his sex scandal series. “Nowhere else do you have the mix of morals that you find here. On one side, you have a group of people who come here as idealists, and on the other side, you have people just trying to survive, who are trying to make a dollar to be a part of that high-priced lifestyle.”

Count Trylch and company in the ‘idealist’ camp. “This is the greatest plan to not get rich quick,” says Trylch. “Or at all.” The team wrote the show over the course of last year under less-than-glamorous conditions: “We had these meetings in the middle of the night when our families were sleeping,” says Trylch. Some days were better than others: “There's also a pool at my building," says Trylch. "Sometimes we would meet at the pool.” In addition to penning the script, Trylch also gathered a local cast and crew—including director T.H. "Stone" Lyons—and recruited local indie rockers Exit Clov to compose the theme song, "Game Over."

Trylch hopes the free web series will appeal to both Washington insiders and outsider voyeurs interested in seeing a personal side of below-the-Beltway scandals. “The East Coast is a very different culture than middle America,” says Trylch. “People think it’s sleaze, that it’s Hollywood East, Hollywood for ugly people.” At the same time, "politicians are extremely repressed, because they have the same private desires and activities as anyone, but they live completely in the public eye,” he says. “In Washington, it's ‘Breaking News: Senator Had Sex.’”

During the show’s production, Trylch and company found inspiration in D.C.’s real-life sex scandals, from Larry Craig’s bathroom visits to Eliot Spitzer’s Mayflower rendezvous to John Edwards’ Rielle Hunter affair. “Those really pushed us to continue on with the project,” says Trylch. “We kept saying, ‘See! See! It's not that absurd!’”

Still, Dirty4U’s online sexploits will likely prove a bit tamer than D.C.’s non-fiction affairs. “That is probably going to be the let down,” admits Trylch. “[The characters] don't really do anything that sexy in the show. It’s an edgy romantic comedy. There's no sex or nudity.”

The PG-13-level webisodes will be available at dirty4u.org beginning Friday, October 3. Trylch originally sought out a different URL, dirty4u.com—but found it had already been filled with more explicit content. “Be sure not to go to dirty4u.com, because that's actually a porn site,” advised Trylch in an e-mail. “We knew we were spot-on, but that's a little close for comfort.” Still, Dirty4U’s crew has invented a new catchphrase to help spice up their staid .org tag: "The .org stands for orgasm."

“Dirty4U” will consist of 24 to 25 five-to-seven minute webisodes which will be released each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from October 3 until November 21.

Photos, from left: Melissa McConnell as McKenzie; Devin Rumer as Craig; Christina Borders as Ashley.