Come again?? :eek: Is this supposed to be tongue in cheek?
And treating people “differently but equally” is a step too close to the “separate but equal” stuff I thought we got rid of long ago.
At least Mary Kay Latorneau (sp?) was harshly punished and did (IIRC) go to jail, and her case got a lot more media attention.
Of course they’d jump at the chance. That isn’t the point.
Kids at that age will jump at the chance to do sort of things that can cause permanent damage – e.g. sniff glue, play chicken, fuck random orifices – because they have not yet fully developed the capacity to understand risks and consequences.
I sure would have jumped at the chance at 14.
Had I done so, I’m pretty confident, based on my knowledge of my personality, that it would have done some serious psychological harm.
Not particularly the preceding quote, but so many others on this thread.
I think we are all getting a little too PC. Women and men and boys and girls are exactly the same as to how they treat sex and are influenced by sex. ------ That is the real bullshit part.
'tain’t so you know.
The vast majority of guys who had a relationship as a younger teen with an older women would brag to everybody who would listen and be proud as a rooster. And he would be considered “God” in the eyes of his buddies.
Now-----is the reverse true?===a very young teenage girl with an older man?
Of course not. Apples and oranges here.
LaFave should be given a medal. Keep going girl!!.
Okay, but if we’re going to drop the PC we should admit that there are also teenage girls who like to sleep around and who might just have a thing for older men. They might even do their best to seduce said men. And it might not be psychologically damaging and tramautic to the girl – at least not moreso than to the guy who bagged the older woman. But the law has drilled it into us that no matter the circumstances, no matter how willing and seemingly untramautised the girl in question may be, the older guy who sleeps with her is guilty of rape – and, in effect, his career, his marriage, and perhaps his freedom are over.
So as far as I see it, either we allow more wiggle room for both cases (older man/younger girl and older woman/younger guy) depending on the circumstances and the willingness of the participants, or we take the hardass approach for both cases.
“wiggle room” works for me.
Yes, and she’s already served her time, and I even think she’s now married to the guy she was having an affair with.
La Havre’s sentence was a lot harsher than the article in the OP suggests. For one thing, she can’t be within 1,000 feet of children, which means her teaching career is ruined, of course, but that’s pretty hard to do just while going about your routine life. She’s going to become a registered sex offender, which will make future employment quite difficult. She has to take lie detector tests, and will be on probation for I think ten years. She also has to enroll in a three-year problem for sex offenders, and do a certain amount of community service, as well as pay for psychological therapy for the boy.
Granted, she’s not going to jail; but I guess she had a good lawyer. Obviously it was statutory rape, and fourteen is pretty young, but the boy did consent to the affair. A lot of fourteen-year olds are having sex with their peers–perhaps his attitude had something to do with it too.
I thought the sentence was a little harsh myself. But what the hell?
At least the idea that she was temporarily insane was dropped.
She was just horny, and the kid was just horny. No insanity there.
No doubt – just as a kid huffing glue thinks he’s a badass. It doesn’t mean either one of them isn’t doing serious harm to themselves.
If anything is PC it’s this damnfool notion that teenage boys are nothing more than walking erections, and that nothing they do or have done to them will ever come back to bite them in the ass.
I am a serious believer that teenage boys are nothing more than walking erections and that nothing they do or have done to them will ever come back to bite them in the ass.
Oh for the good old days.
For the vast majority of teenage boys-----all it is about is the good old “in and out”
I think girls take it much more seriously.
Tell me about it!
I normally teach adults, but occasionally they send me students from L.A. High (which is run like a prison, BTW) when they’re “off track,” to improve their English. At first, I had an entire class of them. It was a disaster, because I treated them like adults; they were actually throwing shoes at each other.
One day I got a call from one of the students, sixteen, I think. I have no idea how she got my number (which is unlisted.) She said she wanted advice. At first I thought she might have needed academic help, even though she was a good student. Or maybe she was gay, and that was why she needed help. Then she said it was because she was interested in someone but didn’t know how to proceed. She eventually comes around to saying the person she was referring to was in fact myself. I told her that it was illegal to even consider something like that, and that it would be against my personal policy anway if she were ten years older. She was newly arrived from Nicaragua, didn’t think anything wrong in it (and quite stunning, to my chagrin).
Then there was the student who always sat directly behind the overhead projector (which I put befind the first row of desks to project a larger imagine). Quite a few times (as the lights were dimmed and no one could see), she’d lean her head back to my rear end. I eventually told her she shouldn’t be such a “coqueta,” and she acted as though I were making things up.
We wised up, and limited the amount of high school students per adult class, and I quickly learned that you need to pair them with adults, and they’ll act like adults. The policy was that didn’t have to accept more than five, but I got a group that was so good, well-behaved, and who got along so well I took on about eight of them. They were all girls (mostly from Central America), and it become the greatest class I’ve ever had. They were extremely and pleasantly sassy, but always quite respectful, as far as i was concerned. They were intelligent and well adept at double entredre jokes, both in English and Spanish–but nothing crude or offensive. They flirted a lot with me, and were all extremely fetching. I don’t know if they “slept around,” but I think they were psychologically pretty well-adjusted with regard to sex. I can say this because a local community group would come around every once in a while and have discussions in the classes (mainly about AIDS), and they all addressed the issues maturely
I suppose some of them just stay that way.
Not true anymore. Tough luck and too bad.
IMHO, anytime a person or group in society is segregated and labeled (black, white, gay, straight, male, female etc.) the whole point of separation is to establish a double standard to gain a competitave edge, either real or imagined. Competition is human nature at all levels, whether it is for a better job or a higher place in society, or for who has to take the garbage to the curb on a cold morning. That said, the age difference is not really a socially implied label. No matter what sex the offender is or which party is consentual such an assult on a minor is wrong and it is the older party’s duty to take responsibility for their actions (the younger person must also be taught to take responsibility because they would not have enough life experience to understand the nuances of right and wrong, that plus the whole pubescent hormone explosion kind of makes them unstable anyway).
I don’t really get how treating men and women the same would be a crime to humanity. Other than the obvious (and quite appreciated 
) biological differences, social responsibility is the same and accountability should be the same. I know of a lot of men who get custody even though most judges tend to side with the mother. The law is impartial but the way each judge applys it up to their disgression.
"Women will never be truly equal to men until they can walk down the street in sweat pants with a bald head and a beer gut and think ‘Damn, I’m sexy’ 
"
How would you know these things? Because of your vast experience with yourself and your friends? Because of your faded and idealized memories? Because of an article you read in Penthouse?
I work with teenagers, boys and girls. I know hundreds of teenage boys: I have heard their hopes and dreams and fears. I’ve watched them triumph and I’ve watched them face catastrophe, and let me tell you something: teenagers are a complex and varied bunch. You can’t generalize and say it’s mostly about the “old in and out” because they just aren’t all the same. I can think of five or six boys that I teach right now that I know cannot treat sex like that, be it because of their personality, their religious convictions, or because they’ve either been sexually abused or witnessed the sexual abuse of girls/women they love. And these are just the ones that I know about.
For kids in these catagories, having a teacher manipulate them into sex would cause real and lasting harm. Maybe if it had been you, you’d have been just fine. Which is why it would never have been you. The attraction here is not sex. Women who are “just horny” don’t engage in what had be an incredibly difficult thing to coordinate/conceal, risk their careers and jail time, and go against every societal expectation in order to get some. They go to a bar. They call an old boyfriend. They jump a coworker. The attraction here is the chance to fuck with someone’s head, and so they will pick and manipulate the kid who loves his girlfriend, the kid who is wracked with religious ambivilance, the kid who is filled with rage towards his sexually abusive stepfather. Protecting those kids is more importance than protecting the possibility that some of the emotionally sound kids might actually get some.
I think this is the theory behind the double standard. We assume that the boys will not be harmed emotionally by having sex with a teacher, while the girls would be.
The goal is to protect the children, if they are happy with the situation, genuinely happy and undamaged emotionally, then why would we demand our pound of flesh? Unfortunately, our laws can’t make assumptions on this topic, so it comes down to potentially questionable prosecutorial discretion.
Ever seen a size 22 ass crammed into size 16 mock-leopardskin leggings, and hair blonde-bleached so brittle it breaks if you look at it? The drive for equality is doing its best. 
I work with a lady like that. 
Jim
The news report I saw on this case this morning on Today was that the mother of the victim specifically did NOT want a media-drenched trial where her family’s personal history was aired out for the world to see. So I think the prosecution was willing to bend on the point of incarceration out of respect for this wish.
The defense lead was on saying he had three psychologists ready to testify that she had serious mental issues due to traumas she had endured just prior to the affair. So the prosecution may have been swayed by that as well.