Ever wondered exactly what you have to do with your penis to be charged with indecent exposure in Virginia? Need to know what sort of aperture you have to be looking through in order to be convicted of peeping? The Washington Post is here to help!

Last week, 29-year-old Eric Williamson was charged with indecent exposure after “a woman and her 7-year-old son walked by his Springfield house and saw him, through the window, naked.” The woman claims she was walking her son to school one morning when Williamson presented his naked body to her not once, but twice—first “standing nude in the doorway, ” and then “through a large window that appeared to have no drapes.” She called the police.

Williamson concedes that he was hanging out naked in his house, but denies that he intentionally exposed himself to the woman and the boy. The police response, Williams says, was extreme. “All of a sudden, I get woken up by police officers, and this guy has a Taser gun in my face,” he said. “I’m freaking out. Is this a movie? A horrible dream?” He called Fox News.

The incident has courted international attention to Virginia’s indecent exposure and peeping laws. In a Washington Post online chat yesterday, Fairfax attorney Atchuthan Sriskandarajah administered a quick legal lesson on the peculiarities of Virginia’s sex statutes. Can a person indecently expose themselves from the privacy of their own home? By the same token, can passersby who happen to spy a naked person through the window be charged with peeping?

According to Sriskandarajah, indecent exposure must require three elements:

* Exposure. Displaying your private parts (breast-feeding doesn’t count).

* Intent. The question that plagued the Justin Timberlake-Janet Jackson Superbowl flap.

* Obscenity. The nudity must be accompanied by an obscene act to be considered “indecent.”

In Virginia, a person can be convicted of indecent exposure even if the exposure occurred inside their own home—as long as they got naked, deliberately revealed that nudity to passersby, and, like, grabbed their genitals or something.

Virginia’s “peeping” statute also contains three major elements:

* Secrecy. No matter where you’re peeping, the peep must be “secret or furtive”—the naked person can’t be aware you’re looking at him or her.

* Residential peeping. In order to prove you’ve peeped into someone’s home, you gotta peep through something. The statute lists windows, doors, apertures, holes, cracks, or any “other similar opening through which a person can see” as acceptable peepholes.

* Commercial peeping. If the peeping is occurring outside a residence—like in a “restroom, dressing room, locker room, hotel room, motel room, tanning bed, tanning booth, [or] bedroom”—you still gotta peep through cracks and holes. But this time, you gotta be seeing something naked. According to the statute, that includes “the purpose of viewing any nonconsenting person who is totally nude, clad in undergarments, or in a state of undress exposing the genitals, pubic area, buttocks or female breast.”

Photo by rick, Creative Commons License.

The “beaded collar,” (prices vary). Available in the classic “circle/rope” pattern, as well as a few flashier models.

For the nudist biker:

For the nudist Republican:

For the nudist cat lady:

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“Sheer pants” and matching jacket; $49 and $59 respectively. So that even when your dick’s not hanging out, your dick’s hanging out.

The “uniwrap” for men, $25. A skirt.

The “sportif shorts” for men, $47. A skirt.

The zippered “Just Bare It” hat, $14. In case they can’t figure out your nudism based on nudity alone.

The “intimate area shaver” for men and women, $69. But how do you tote this along with no thong to tuck it into?

The “buckle dress,” $49. I knew Dov Charney was in on this somehow.

The Huffington Post’s latest foray into celebrity eye-candy linkbait, “Iconic Swimsuit Movie Moments,” comes in two flavors: Male and Female.

The Huffington Post, it seems, has tired of just fetishizing female bodies, and has moved onto more equal-opportunity objectification. Since it’s too much to ask for a Web site to refrain from objectifying any humans, is this a cause for celebration?

Blogger Echidne of the Snakes, for one, isn’t convinced by the Web site’s newfound gender-neutrality. The effort falls short of equal exploitation, she writes, as HuffPo’s readership appears to decisively prefer one set of skin-baring pics over the other. So while Phoebe Cates, Ali Larter, and Bo Derek are currently workin’ it to the top of the Web site’s “Popular Stories” slots . . .

. . . Daniel Craig, Patrick Swayze, and Sacha Baron Cohen are being boxed out of the top spots by such decidedly nonsexual fare as this:

That’s right: Huffington Post readers are more interested in discovering the key to happiness than checking out semi-naked dudes. Say it ain’t so!

Echidne’s got her theories: “Huffington Post wants to make money and advertising money is in clicks. And what gets clicked is bodies of chicks. By dicks? I’m getting carried away here, but let me just add that I would have thought Huffington Post has female readers, too. I guess their clicks don’t have the power.”

So, is the Huffington Post engineering some sort of mass sexist conspiracy to push naked ladies onto the front-page while subjugating the male bodies to barely-linked territory? Not exactly. HuffPo is just cashing in on that same old mass sexist conspiracy—the one that’s been around long before blogs figured out how to make money off of it.

Here’s a refresher on that old thing: Young, thin, hairless, and female bodies are for being sexy. Aged, hairy, fat, and male bodies are for making jokes about how un-sexy they are.

By adding the “Male” gallery—and encouraging readers to click through for the hot swimsuit moments—the Huffington Post isn’t making an honest attempt to expand the definition of what’s sexy, or to ease the objectification of women by objectifying men alongside them. What the Huffington Post is doing, I think, is responding to some recent criticism by turning the heat on its readers, not its editors.

Once HuffPo offers up the naked girls and the naked boys, it’s not up to the site’s editors anymore to determine which bodies are click-worthy—”you” decide for them.

Unlike Echidne, I don’t think the popularity of the female body on HuffPo’s site necessarily means that the site’s female “clicks don’t have the power” of its male readers. I just think that we haven’t been taught to objectify male bodies like we have female ones. Cosmo’s valiant efforts aside, the objectification of women is a mainstream entertainment standard—and both women and men grow up taking it all in. It’s telling that HuffPo’s male beefcake gallery has to be filled out with a couple of joke entries—Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat, Eddie Murphy in Norbit—in order to meet sexy slideshow quota. Women—even heterosexual women—are more likely to check out photos of bikini-bedecked females than Speedo-clad males. This trend doesn’t let purveyors of female flesh off the hook, of course. Offering men photos of girls in swimsuits helps men see women as objects. Offering women photos of girls in swimsuits helps women feel bad for not looking like them.

Is the Huffington Post’s focus on scantily-clad women still sexist? Sure, but it’s a sexist view that comes with the support of at least 2,890,011 male and female viewers. Would HuffPo print a sexist op-ed, even if it were of interest to millions of Internet trolls? Probably not—HuffPo readers are usually self-aware enough to shun clear sexism when it’s written in black-and-white. But when it’s written in tits and ass? Click click.

If the Huffington Post decides to keeps up its gender-neutral exploitation efforts—despite the poor page-views for the male portion—I have just one request. When you’re objectifying male bodies, can you try not to ridicule female bodies while you’re doing it?

The Huffington Post has finally discovered the porthole through which its sexist entertainment content can jump off of the Entertainment page and onto more explicitly political verticals. What is this valuable new discovery which suddenly makes sexy naked women so politically relevant? It starts with a P, ends with an Eople For the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and it has been pulling this liberal sexist bullshit for years.

Well, PETA and HuffPo are together at last, with two super-sexy animal protection stories making their way onto the site’s “Green” page this week. After the photo-accompanied “Lydia Guevarra, Che’s Daughter, Poses Semi-Nude for PETA” made a semi-nude splash in the Web site’s Popular Stories last week, HuffPo cashed in on the theme with the full slide-show: “The Sexiest PETA Ads of All Time.” Click on it for the environment!

To HuffPo—and PETA’s—credit, the collection of PETA’s notoriously naked ads includes its share of topless dudes alongside the unclothed women. But as the interactive poll feature demonstrates, Huffington Post readers are not so down with this nudity-for-all tactic.

Readers are allowed to rate each PETA rep’s naked ad on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 signifying “Rather have meat” and 10 “Pass the produce!” Here are the current rankings, from hottest to not-est:

Charlotte Ross 8
Alicia Silverstone 7.6
Annalise Braakensiek 7.6
Sophie Monk & Maggie Q 7
Dita Von Teese 6.9
Jenna Jameson 6.7
Pam Anderson 4.7
Kathy Najimy 3.7
Jamie Bamber 3.7
Two male models making out 3.4
Tommy Lee 2.2

Let’s take a look at the hierarchy here. The nine women on the list all score higher than the four men. The women lose points as they get closer to the porn spectrum, with the exception of Kathy Najimy, who is un-young and un-skinny enough to rank just above the men. At the bottom, we have the four guys: The dude from Battlestar Gallactica ranks above the overt display of male homosexuality, but the kissing guys still beat out the universally reviled Tommy Lee. In my opinion, Tommy Lee’s low-ranked bare chest alone is enough to debunk HuffPo’s “sometimes a nipple is just a nipple” theory. Nobody wants to see that shit.

The Huffington Post brushes off the idea that the female nudity focus on its Entertainment page has any impact on its progressive political cred. In passing off interactive nude slide-shows as environmentalism, however, HuffPo wades into explicitly political sexist territory. PETA paved the way here by exploiting women in the hopes of ending the exploitation of animals. HuffPo joins the fray not by presenting a counterpoint to PETA’s sexist tactics, but by reveling in it—asking its readers to rank the “hottest print promotions.”

I have to wonder if PETA’s T&A has ever convinced a soft-core porn enthusiast to stop eating beef. I bet the naked stuff is actually used more of a peace offering to the general public—they may be annoyed by PETA’s radical vegetarianism, but at least there are naked chicks.

But unlike PETA, the Huffington Post is not a one-issue newspaper. PETA objectifies women in order to save the lives of the poor, helpless bunny rabbits, but it never professed to care about women. HuffPo objectifies women in order to save its entire politically progressive business model. Why not pull a fast one on PETA and stick to objectifying wallabies instead?

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Since Arthur Delaney has already produced the definitive narration of the Coachella tasered wizard video (above), I will take a page from the Huffington Post manual and aggregate his brilliant retelling here:

The police officers beg and plead for the man to put on his robes, but all the Naked Wizard wants to do is be free of his wizard sleeves and hang in the breeze. He throws his colorful garb onto the grass.

“It doesn’t have to stop,” the Naked Wizard says.

“I’ll tell you what,” the cop says. “You can have a great time — but you can have an even better time if you put your clothes on…Can I get them for you?”

The officer grabs the gown and tosses to the Naked Wizard, but he casts it away again. Then the cops put on their rubber gloves, and things get ugly.

After finishing their tenure at Creative Loafing Tampa and graduating from Yale, Scheinman and Reed came to work at the Washington City Paper (Scheinman remains as CP’s Online Producer; Reed has since moved on to a Croc Fellowship at NPR). Before my new coworkers even arrived in the District, I heard tell of their cover-boy exploits down South, but I hadn’t actually set my eyes the cover until last week. When the newspaper was unceremoniously dumped in my cubicle, I approached the cover as I would the site of a terrible collision: Not knowing what else to do, I simply stared, wondering why the tears were not coming.

As with any unexplained tragedy, the image piqued my curiosity; I needed to know how and why this had happened. In an interview, Scheinman detailed the genesis of the cover. “It was [Editor-in-Chief] David Warner’s idea. There were a bunch of half-assed ideas being kicked around about the cover, and then [Warner] asked us if we would do this,” says Scheinman. “He clearly was not joking.”

Scheinman and Reed—who had penned an essay for the issue on the “Caliente” nudist resort and community of Land O’Lakes, Fla.—were interested. “We thought about it for a moment, and no one could think of any reason not to,” says Scheinman. Though Reed admits he was nervous the night before the photo shoot—”like the night before the first day of school”—he was comfortable with the idea. According to Scheinman, the pair had become accustomed to lounging together naked while undergrads at Yale. “Oh, yeah, yeah. There’s a seedy subculture In the Ivy leagues of naked, Dionysian revelry,” he says. “There were naked parties.”

Scheinman clearly was not joking.

On the day of the shoot, Scheinman and Reed, both 23, disrobed at Caliente in front of another Creative Loafing reporter, who took their photograph, and an advertising rep, who simply “wanted to come along,” says Reed. After posing for about 100 shots, the Creative Loafing editorial team narrowed the selection down to a few possibilities, which were sent to the newspaper’s Atlanta office to be finalized for the cover. “We knew, obviously, that the key areas were to be covered up,” says Reed. “That was implied.” After the digital insertion of the check marks, Reed and Scheinman were told that all copies of the nude photos would be destroyed, save for one CD of the photographs which remains in Reed’s possession.

But while Scheinman and Reed were comfortable with their nude photo experience, I am not particularly comfortable with it. I generally am not opposed to the display of nude art in the workplace, but I do find saucy nude photographs of my co-workers moderately disturbing. I am not alone: In the aftermath of the issue, Warner wrote in a blog post, “the manager of a sports bar told us it was ‘inappropriate for a paper featuring naked boys on the cover to appear at a family establishment.’”

Or, you know, in your office environment. Scheinman and Reed’s essay, admittedly, is soaring:

They took a moment to look at us, lounging decadently in big, reclined patio chairs, sipping our drinks, smiling, feet up on the table, naked and spoiled as the day we were born, our cranberries dangling papally.

So soaring, in fact, that the image of papally dangling cranberries will forever be seared into my brain each time I approach our Online Producer with a modest question concerning our Web stats.

Even more unsettling is the inside photo. The second shot shows Reed and Scheinman, again naked, this time embracing an unidentified woman (also naked):

I may have just lost my naked lunch.

Am I right to be disturbed by this? Or is the nearly-naked coworker a sight we all must endure in the Internet age?