Dear Cecil, although I am dutch, since the election of Trump I visit the Fox News site every day. It really opens a window on a different world.
There is one thing that really bugs me. After a few months I saw a pattern of at least once a week a story on Fox News about a female teacher having sex with a pupil. Then I started taking notes and it really is true. Every week regular a teacher is accused of sex with one or more pupils. Check for yourself if you don’t believe me.
I have never seen a similar pattern in one of the other news outlets that I check daily (CNN, Frankfurter Zeitung, BBC, Guardian and a few dutch newspapers). Why only Fox News? What is going on over there?
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Although… “De Telegraaf”, the dutch political counterpart of Fox News is in the last few weeks copying the Fox News items about teacher sex as ‘interesting news’ from abroad.
There was one where the teacher and student were having sex in the parking lot of a Chick-Fill-A. Some wag in the comments section wrote: “Fill-A-Chick at Chick-Fill-A”.
If I had to speculate, reporting on this type of story hits a few of Fox News’ triggers: 1. Sex. They like the sexy things; just look at the women reporting their news. 2. It allows their viewers to “tsk-tsk” and say aloud “This world is going to h-e-double-hockey-sticks and it’s all because of those godless and permissive liberals.” That’s one of their favorite things; just look at the Hannity show. And 3. It plants a small seed of distrust/dislike into a sizeable chunk of their viewers’ minds against public educators. Win-win-win.
Or the news director just has a student-teacher sexual obsession he’s never outgrown.
That’s probably not the most GQ answer in the world, but I don’t know if there is a GQ answer to this question. If there is, and I just needlessly jumped directly into politically-loaded assumptions, I apologize.
Female teacher/male student sex stories are quite marketable and shocking but not always in a bad way. Many men had an attractive teacher that they wanted to bone so it is a way of living vicariously. I know it is a crime and an abuse of power but many people don’t take it that seriously.
It isn’t just Fox news. Fark.com is obsessed with it too. There are also webpages devoted to the phenomenon. It turns out that there a whole lot of them that got caught and probably many more that haven’t been yet but they still keep doing it.
I think there’s a “man bites dog” phenomenon here, which is that a story about a man getting in trouble because of a high sex drive isn’t remarkable, but stories about a woman getting in trouble because of her high sex drive would be considered newsworthy or unusual.
They are famous for being outraged by half-naked women parading around everywhere, while also filling the article of pictures of said half-naked women, and then also a column full of story links to celebrities in bikinis.
Why does Fox do it? Titillation, anti-feminism to the extent they don’t cover the male counterparts, and to get super Freudian, an anger at a perceived double standard and deep seated desire that male abusers could receive similarly light hearted treatment in the wider culture.
Gee whiz, folks.
Yes, this is the SDope—but we don’t always need to get all Freudian or look for deep political analysis about feminism or the liberal-conservative social schism.
The simple question is: “why does Fox do it?”
The simple answer is : Money. Sex sells.
A story about a male teacher raping a female student is sad.
But a story about a female teacher seducing a male student is sexy.
For about a two year period, liberals and angst-ridden feminists have tried to convince the world that women are pure victims of nasty, horny men. It doesn’t matter that quite a few of the allegations of rape, fondling, rubbing, diddling or harassment turn out to be crap and little more than attempts at extortion or attention-getting tools. I’m not at all defending the guilty bastards but people are innocent, in the eyes of the justice system, until proven guilty !
Fox news is deftly pointing out that any gender can have their wrong-doers and criminal elements and the girls are NOT the epitome of pure innocence.
I’ve never (ever) watched Fox News and I can confidently state that I’ve been seeing these types of stories on my local network channel news sites at least once every week or two for the past couple years. What’s more, they are appearing on the news sites only because they happened in this state or in the adjoining states. I have often commented to my wife that its virtually an “epidemic.”
