In Follow Up to Below-Mentioned Men's Room Scandal

I really hadn't thought about the Craig brouhaha in these terms, but this is a really good point.

By the cop's own admission, he (the cop) "pumped his foot slowly up and down in response." In other words, Craig asked for sex using an arcane code extremely unlikely to "alarm, anger, or disturb" -- according to the the equally arcane code defining disorderly conduct in Minnesota -- an uninitiated fellow-lavator, and the cop knew what it meant and said yes.
Where's the victim?

(3) What I find more astonishing is the definition of "disorderly conduct." By this reckoning, ten years and thirty pounds ago, I had disorderly conduct foisted upon me approximately...let's see...15,923 times.

Per week.
Give or take.

But, even if they're unwanted advances, that's the natural order of things, right? Whereas men have to be protected from the unwanted advances of men at all costs (why? because they're worried they just might succumb to a particularly persuasive piece of foot telegraphy?).

Given the constant, daily harassment women endure (come on now, don't tune out; stay with me, here) -- harassment that makes us compress our daily activities into daylight hours, that circumscribes where we go, who we go with, and even what we wear; intrusive harassment, ruin-your-day, make-you-feel-powerless/angry/depressed harassment -- the overzealous prosecution of the toe-tapper really pisses me off. It's like those sophomore discussions one has of human trafficking, in which someone invariably says "but what about the men?", and then the rest of the discussion, in some form or another, is overwhelmingly preoccupied with those minority cases. Heaven forfend we don't keep men front and center, even if it makes lousy Bayesians of us all.

Look: if there'd been groping, a physical risk, or even just a persistent advance in the face of a single "no" (which doesn't seem to have ever been uttered), I'd be supportive regardless of the gender base-rates involved. But "he tapped his foot and looked at me funny"? Please! Men! Grow a pair!

Some of the conversations I'm seeing (e.g., here and here) in response to this include arguments that the issue is the illegal act that the behavior will lead to, similar to a john soliciting a prostitute. Even given that that wasn't what he was charged with, I guess it's fair as far as it goes.

But the, um, zeal of such a sting operation is puzzling. Is the purpose here to protect unwilling people who are propositioned (the "disorderly conduct" and peeping justification)? As above, women deal with it every day, in many many contexts, and they're not encouraged to seek police action. The response to bathroom peeping Toms on my college campus back in the days of yore--a scourge my freshman year--did not involve elaborate security stings. When there was a response at all--boys will be boys, after all--it involved trying to catch individual offenders as it happened until, ultimately, there was the elegant and passive solution of door locks. No attempt at rounding up the pervy pervs who peek at women in bathrooms.

If the crime is the sex act in public, and the victims are people who are forced to be exposed, then surely there are better and more efficient ways to go about preventing it than parking a policeman in a bathroom stall, awaiting suspicious foot tappings. More random security checks? Cameras? A bathroom attendant? And also, it might make sense to arrest someone for actually doing the thing you're accusing them of. Just a thought.