My, what a can of worms I seem to have opened here.
Of course doing it with the really younger ones should entail some jail, if not asylum time. (Although I maintain I personally would have been over the moon if my 7th-grade math teacher, who was real Playboy Playmate material, had done me.) But the case of Heather Shelton, 22, doing it with an 18-year-old should be a firing offense at best. Sounds like that’s all she got, but it also sounds like she could have been up for jail time, and I couldn’t go along with jail in her case. (Note that grin on her face in her mugshot :D.)
I believe now it is a firing offense at many universities for profs to sleep with their students. I agree this is probably a good idea, in the sense that the prof could threaten to give poor grades etc, and there’s no reason they couldn’t wait until after the teacher-student relationship is over. But this sort of behavior at university was portrayed in movies as cool for so long by the likes of Eliot Gould, Walter Matthau and Alan Alda, among others.
Sex with a teacher is not “no strings attached” sex. Think about it-- you have to see her ever day. She has power and authority over you. Not to mention that several boys in the OP’s link did apparently turn into relationships: LeTourneau, the woman who ran away with her 14 year old student, the woman who demanded her lover kill her husband.
Also, got news for you guys-- plenty of teenage girls want to screw their male teachers. PLENTY. Some of them make no bones about their interest. The younger male teachers have to walk on eggshells.
And their attraction makes as much sense as the boys’ attraction to their female teachers. Teenage boys are not particulary attractive, I have to say, having dealt with them for 8 years. I didn’t like them much when I was a teenager either, for that matter, because IMO men don’t start getting attractive until they’re at least 20. Of course teenage girls have crushes on their 25 year old teachers… they have much more to offer in pretty much every way than the girls’ male peers. But I see no such approbation for male teachers who screw their hot, willing (and often much more physically mature) little female students. Horror, outrage, draconian punishments are the order of the day.
The double standard here is bullshit, really. Any adult who would abuse his or her authority in this way deserves punishment. The 22 year old teacher’s aide with an 18 year old student… not as much as the 39 year old woman with the 13 year old, of course. But none of them should be allowed to teach, and they should probably stay away from young boys if they really, for some completely inexplicable reason, can’t keep their hands off them.
Why? Men and women are different. Period. Sure, women aren’t always the timid creatures that some portray them as, but they are different from men as far as sex and emotion is concerned.
The fact that 8 of every 10 men of all ages would have probably welcomed this scenario at that age and wouldn’t consider it scarring. Are you presuming that you know better than those of us with a penis?
Every certified teacher knows that sexual relations with a student are professionally unethical. It’s not just a matter of law and certainly it’s not a matter of what would feel good. There are other reasons that teachers are not supposed to become involved with their students.
It is about the stupidest thing that a teacher can do.
They’re not as different as you think they are. We are not from Venus and you are not from Mars. This is why 25% of teenage girls have an STI– because a lot of them are fucking, and most of them are fucking older men. I think this idea that girls want sex less than men, or only want it in the context of a long term, loving relationship, is just not as true as people want to think it is.
Please point out where I said that I know better than a man what men want, that teenage boys would not welcome the scenario. Teenagers (boys and girls)welcome a lot of things that are not in their best interest, and because they are still kids, it’s not allowed for them to do it. Teachers who have sex with students are abusing their power no matter how horny their students are. Obviously how criminal it is varies with the kid’s age, but it is still an abuse of power and still should be punished.
My point, which you totally missed in your urge to point out your penis, was that a male teacher who screwed a 13 year old female student would be crucified, no matter how willing the 13 year old girl claimed to be. I don’t see any of the men defending the male teachers who have sex with 13 year old girls, though I do think it’s exactly the same and should be treated the same. I think Mary Kay LeTourneau is a nutjob, as are any of these women who threw their lives away for sex with some teenage boy, no matter how much he may have wanted it. Can you look past your memories of your teenaged libido and see what I’m saying here? When you agree to be a teacher, you’re agreeing to keep your hands off the kids. I can’t believe that’s a controversial statement.
Men and women are not that different. Mostly, men like to think that women are less interested in sex in general, rather than just less interested in sex with them, personally. Are you presuming to know better than those of us with a vagina?
Let me make this very, very clear to you. When I was a teenager, there were teachers I’d have had sex with had the opportunity arisen. I sincerely doubt that I would have been “scarred” by the experience. Does that mean that it would have been okay for them to have sex with me?
and some common sense. maturity, and knowledge of the laws regarding this issues.
A grown woman having sex with underaged boys with sick, wrong, and most of all, illegal. Despite the physical differences between young boys and young girls, underaged people are not emotionally and mentally mature enough to handle a sexual relationship. If we were talking about male/male or even female/female relationships like these, everyone would be squicked out.
Nothing like teaching a youngster that it’s okay for grownups to have sex with underaged people. That’s NAMBLA’s line, right? Nobody gets hurt, it’s another type of love. It is also BULLSHIT, in big letters.
If a teacher really has the hots for a student, they should also have the maturity to wait until said student is older and wiser.
It’s not really a question of what men like to think, as what the weight of experience tends to teach. I mean, I’d like to think that there were scads of horny women out there who were just as up for it as the erotic fiction in the letters page of Amateur Gynaecologist Monthly would have you believe, but this isn’t borne out either by personal experience or by an informal polling of male friends over the years. Obviously that could just mean that all the guys I know are just as repellent to the opposite sex as I am (is it me, or does this well-water taste funny?) but I don’t think we should close our eyes to all alternative interpretations of the observed facts. Conversations on this subject here on the Dope usually get away from the claim that women are just as horny as men pretty darn quick, and make a beeline for the (more defensible?) position that if they aren’t, it’s All Our Own Fault.
All of this purely for the intellectual exercise, you understand. I personally have always enjoyed mutually beneficial and satisfactory relationships with the opposite sex.
And yeah, female teachers hitting on underage male students is skeevy, and arguing from adolescent male fantasies is teh dumb.
We’ve been here so many times, Malacandra. All I can say is that my experience and an informal polling of my female friends indicates that we really, *really * like sex. We like it with people we love, like, don’t like, and can’t quite remember whether we liked or not. We don’t like it with people we’re not attracted to, and I suppose that one could argue that women are more discriminating in whom they’re attracted to, or that men will have sex with people they’re NOT attracted to, but my observation is that while both of those things may be true for some people some times, they don’t hold up consistently.
All observable facts are open to interpretation, but that interpretation, IME, tends to say more about the observer than the facts. Observations as diametrically opposed as yours and mine just tend to make me think that the truth is somewhere in between, and that maybe we both need to broaden our data pool. Hearing (reading?) our discussions about this, people probably think that I spend all my time at the Playboy mansion and you spend all yours at that pub on the corner that no woman has walked into for years. Some day we’ll have to meet at a neutral location and bring our clipboards.
While I never had sex with one of my teachers, when I was 16-18 I did have sex with several women old enough to be my teachers. Every one of those experinces was wonderful, and I have good memories of each. I regret nothing. I certainly was no one’s victim. In every situation I initated the relationship. If I had any hot high school teachers I would have pursued them. No bragging here, just fact.
However, every situation is diffrent. Every situation should be judged on its own merits. Teachers shouldn’t have sex with students regardless of age and it makes sense to punish anyone who violates the rules, but in many cases a suspension or fireing is probably far more reasonable than jail time.
I knew what I was doing at 16. If any of my lovers had been put in prison for having sex with me it would have been a tragic injustice that probably would have destroyed any faith I had in the legal system.
But would you have felt the same way if Miss MILF had, by virtue of her interaction with you, become Pregnant Miss MILF, and instead of following your own desires after high school you had been forced to work to care for the unexpected Thrash, Jr? Or if Mrs. MILF’s hypothetical boyfriend had recent experience with a low-budget prostitute, and had passed you a fun case of syphilis through Miss MILF?
Look, every time you have sex, you are taking on a series of risks. If I go out tonight and meet a girl in a bar and decide to have sex with her, I’m tacitly accepting any number of risks and responsibilities: the risk of pregnancy and the attendant responsibility if one occurs; the risk of contracting an STD; the risk that my wife will find out and my marriage will suffer; the risk of experiencing unexpected emotional attachment and subsequent emotional damage. Now, I’ll be 31 this year. I have a wife, a child, and have had a full-time job for a decade. I have 27 years of reading, watching the news, and engaging in social intereactions under my belt. I know what rent costs, what parenthood entails, how to read certain emotional signals; what risk I take on, I take on as an experienced, educated, and understanding adult.
Obviously, when I was - say - eight years old, none of these things was the case. Ten dollars was a fortune. The idea that intercourse can lead to pregnancy and most kinds of intimacy can transmit illness was in my head theoretically, but I had no tools to grasp the meaning of those things. I think we’d all agree that, while I probably could have been easily persuaded to “consent” to have sex with a 25-year-old woman with the promise of a new video game, I was in no position to understand the implications of that consent and therefore it was meaningless.
At some point between eight years old and now, I attained that understanding. When did it happen? Twelve? Fourteen and six days? Sixteen and three quarters? Twenty (which is when I actually had sexual intercourse for the first time)? Twenty-two? Identifying a moment like this is impossible, as it is for all people. It is certainly so that some 14-year-old boys (or girls) are ready to make an informed decision about sex, and that others still aren’t ready at 21. So what do we do? Thrash suggests this:
In a world where justice is dispensed by an omniscient being who can precisely judge a person’s readiness to provide informed consent, this would be a nice system. But we don’t have that sort of world. How, exactly, would you propose “judging each situation on its own merits?” A 28-year-old woman has sex with a 14-year-old boy. Let’s judge it on its merits. How do we decide whether he was ready to consent in an informed fashion, in which case everything is fine, or whether he was not, in which case she has victimized him?
Ask the boy? “Hey, Tommy, do you feel emotionally scarred by this?” Well, I mean, how does he know? I guess you could ask him in a decade, and prosecute then, but that’s kind of silly. “Hey, Tommy, do you fully understand the ramifications of what you did?” If he doesn’t, he’s not going to know he doesn’t, you know? I suppose you could administer some kind of psychological test to every kid from the age of 13 on up, once every six months, to test readiness to consent to sex, and grant the ones who pass a sort of “license to screw,” but that’s not a practical answer.
There is a practical answer, though. You draw a line. You draw it high, so that the majority of kids will fall under it. You pick an age and say, "by this age, most people have sufficient knowledge and experience as to be able to grant informed consent for sex. Some people may have that knowledge and experience sooner, but whereas we have no way of testing for that - and whereas “banging adolescent boys” is not a Constitutional right that we are aware of - we’re just going to say “keep off the grass until the grass is 18.”
And if you cross that line, you get punished. Seems reasonable, practical, and fair to me.
If you can read a “right to privacy” into the 3rd, 4th and 5th Amendments, then you can certainly read a right to banging adolescents into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I realize you’re joking here, but I feel safe saying that all of my 7th grader students are still little kids. The vast majority of the boys, and most of the girls, have not passed through puberty yet, so they are still small and immature. A couple of them have “girlfriends,” but from what I can see, those relationships are pretty platonic. They are more interested in their Gameboy Advance and playing Halo and Call of Duty than touching actual girls. Which is not to say they would turn down an aggressive offer, but I do think it would be psychologically unhealthy for them to have their hypotenuse measured by anyone, even someone age appropriate.
The few kids in 7th grade who I did know of having sex were girls who were having sex with older men, in their late teens and even twenties. I did not think, “Oh, good for them, scoring that older hot guy!” That wasn’t even close to my thoughts, even though every single one of those girls would have told you it was consensual and they wanted it. They looked much older than 12-13 and were physically mature. Where are the attaboys for that?
Things change a lot in just a couple of years. I know it’s very different for 15 or 16 year olds. However, as storyteller0910 pointed out, kids that age are not capable of dealing with the consequences of a sexual relationship yet. The boys cannot support children, and the girls’ future prospects will be seriously affected by having a kid in high school. Not to mention the STI issue. I’m not naive enough to think that my saying so makes it so, but I wish they’d just WAIT a little longer to have sex. Our society is not conducive to teens having children-- it screws up the lives of the teens. Of course they want to do it. It’s our jobs as the adults in their lives to encourage them to make the difficult but right decision. Thus, having the attitude of, well, if you’re horny, and you want it, you’re ready, go for it, champ! just doesn’t cut any ice with me. In fact, I find it rather destructive.
I wonder how all you guys would feel if it were your teenage child having sex with a teacher. Parents have to pay their son’s child support until he’s old enough to do it, you know. Probably wouldn’t be so much fun to be on that end of it.
Sex has risks. The risks same risks would have been there if my partner had been 16 or 26. Why does the 26 year old go to jail and the 16 year old get a pass? Most of those risks are greatly diminished by applying safe sex and common sense, things I had then and many of my middle aged coworkers lack today.
Judging each case on its individual merits is exactly what our justice system does. If I kill a man I might walk away and I might get the death penalty. It all dependes on the circumstances. Why should sex with a minor not get same consideration?
Putting a 20something in jail when her only crime is giving in to the advances of a sexually experinced guy who just happens to be a few monthes shy of the legal age of consent who suffers nothing from the encounter is stupid at best.
