Yes, but we horny straight guys didn’t fantasize about adult men. If adult men had coerced the teenage me into sex, sure I’d be screwed up now. If a smokin’ hot blond teacher had taught me the birds and bees at age 14, I’d be twice the man I am today.
Or am I misunderstanding–did you do older women as a teen, and THAT screwed you up? Ho man, there must be a joke in there somewhere, no offense.
Excellent points, Askia.
Zagadka, you are arguing as if ALL instances like this are abuse. I agree that many probably are, but certainly not all. It seems you are only looking at the difference ages, and refusing to analyze the situation any further.
I repeatedly said that it’s certainly possible this was a case of abuse and the boy may be a victim. Can you meet me halfway and admit it may have been a fully positive experience for the boy?
Count me in as another one who would have sold my left nut to bag that chick. I know you guys are going on about how sex is to a kid and such. I can’t honestly say much about that. I didn’t really do much emotional maturing from 14 to the first time I had sex anyway, but that’s beside the point.
First I feel no sorrow for this kid. Think about it. He is going to be the KING at his highschool. This kid is going to be brimming with confidence for the rest of his damn life! He’s probably going to be a millionare or at least President later on.
Secondly, those of you who say that he is going to have emotional scars I agree, but probably not any bad ones. He’s probably only going to feel sorry and possibly guilty about what has happened to her. I have had innappropriate sexual relationships before (not of the illegal kind) and although it did hurt it did teach me a lot about life and more about me as a human being. To those of you who only want to have sex with your lifepartner, and anyone else is just a matter of finding the right one, I’ll disagree. I have learned a lot about myself through chaotic relationships, and I think I’ll be able to appreciate it even more when I find, “the one.”
Survior’s story does interest me. If he managed to have sex with an older person when he was that young, and if it was with a hot woman, then I suppose I’ll reconsider. If it was homosexual, I would understand a little more, considering the psychological problems that come along with living in a heterosexual socitety, etc.
In my opinion, its the ultimate sign that we live in a male-dominated society and that we still have a long way to go. Imagine being the kids father. If I put myself in that position, I would be disapointed, and would be worried that he is going to have problems and be worried that he surely can’t be normal. But when it comes to males the whole idea of victimhood is pretty much not there. We are so ingrained with the fact that whenever a man and a woman have sex it because the woman let him. Honestly, give me any attractive man, and have a hot woman come up to him and ask him for sex? He would never turn it down, because for us sex is like shoping. Although we aren’t necessarily looking for this particular sweater, its marked down, so why not take it? Okay he would have to know that she isn’t a psycho, so it would have to be someone that he knew wasn’t psycho from work or something.
I am not saying this is right, but I think it is a pretty good representation of the single male.
I wanna find this kid and take him to Vegas, something tells me he’s got good luck
Your psychologist is right, I didn’t actually have a huge crush on one of my teachers, she was just subtly abusing her position of power over me by being pretty. She didn’t have to comb her hair or shower! 
So how do you decide when sexual abuse caused a male to become a predator and an abuser? If all :rolleyes: males are sexual predators and abusers then how do you know that this ‘abuse’ has caused it?
Aside from this comment I agree with both sides of the argument. It is wrong what she did and we do need to have a standard age of consent in order to be able to define when a crime has been commited (maybe not as high as the U.S age of eighteen) but on the other hand I am in the ‘hack off my right nut’ school off thinking - have you seen the woman in question? If this kid gets any negative effect from this I’ll be highly suprised.
Zagadka:
:dubious:
I’m not predatory. I don’t go around trying to “make sex happen”, although I am at times receptive to negotiations; I’m not sexually aggressive. I’m male.
I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to sling around generalizations like “all males are”. Not only do you erase the existence of people like me from consideration in these discussions, you also knock off the table the possibility that sexual politics — the dynamics of the male part of the socialized sex-role dance — rather than innate characteristics, are a big part of the patterns that we see. And as feminists have pointed out on occasion, widespread conformity to a sex role doesn’t mean that members of that sex are inherently “like that” or that being assumed to be inherently “like that” doesn’t do a lot of damage to folks.
Diogenes the Cynic — Insofar as you’ve only ever been one sex, you do not know if, or how, “it’s different for boys than it is for girls”. And ditto what I just said to Zagadka.
Don’t be sexist.
You support NAMBLA then?
&, having read the full thread now, my own responses:
I think too many of y’all (especially lots of you male posters) are imagining yourself in the skin of the 14 year old kid and thinking “halle-fucking-lujah!”.
• If the 14 year old were a girl, then right at the time when the action was going down she, too, might be feeling some “halle-fucking-lujah”. The negative consequences we imagine for her mostly take place the morning after, the week to follow, the remainder of the year, the remainder of her time in high school. So let’s have a little even-handedness for the boy, mm?
If you can get past “damn that teacher’s hot”, imagine him showing up outside her sliding glass doors all happy and glowing about this situation and she shoos him away. Repeat, with variations and elaborations, for several weeks. He at some point in the presence of someone else, somewhere, tries (perhaps just with body language) to position the two of them as a couple, “we’re an item”, and she distances herself from that, perhaps without even consciously intending to, and it’s humiliating to him. At the age of 14 when you’re a guy you don’t necessarily consciously know that it would be offensive to be wanted and valued only as a fuckable object and disregarded as anythin akin to a partner, friend, or social equal; but it certainly can be, and this would be discovering it the hard way.
• Statutory rape is not a problem because of the age of the victim. (My answer to the thread title alone would be: “No, not wrong at all, unless you mean with each other”). It’s not even a problem because of the difference, although that is part of it. The biggie is childhood, the legal and societal status of being a child as opposed to being an adult. And what makes age difference and the adult/child thingie a problem is the power differential. I don’t have a problem with 14 year olds having consensual sex with each other. I don’t have a problem with 8 year olds having consensual sex with each other, for that matter (although alarm bells would go off in my head about whether one or more of them were being sexually molested by adults). I do have a problem whenever anyone with considerably more power has sex with someone who has far less, because that makes “consent” very murky. Teachers should not have sex with their students even if the students are 30 years old. Adults should not have sex with children. And even if the adult/child divide didn’t fall in between 14 and 23, I think that’s too big an age gap as a percent of the younger age.
Several posters have brought this issue up, but you have not addressed it Zagadka.
What exactly did you mean by this sentence?
That all males are abusers?
Please clarify.
Just a couple observations.
First, in the absence of phsyical or emotional coercion, or pre-existing psychological problems that make the 14-year-old overly susceptible to the advances of the teacher, I fail to see any meaningful difference between doing it with the teacher and doing it with another 14-year-old. That doesn’t absolve the teacher for violating the societal taboo and committing a crime, of course, but it’s difficult for me to any significant victimization here.
Second, I bet this kid does end up with some lasting problems here. Not because of the sex, but because of the media circus that’s going to swamp him. Hell, the poor kid’s going to have his buddies going on TV talking about him nailing his junior high teacher, and we’re a bunch of strangers discussing him on a message board he’s never even heard of before. Not a pretty outlook on the privacy aspect of this.
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Actually I agree with you that boys below the age of consent should not be having sex with older women, but you have abandoned any appeal to logic by calling all men predators and abusers. It is an idiotic statement, and entirely indefensible.
At first my reaction was the same as many guys. “Lucky bastard, I’d have done her at 14 too.” And the truth is, I would have.
However, let’s think of all the things that I would have done at 14 that I find troubling now:
Shot songbirds with a pellet rifle
Set off home-made incendiary devices
Demolish others personal property
And the list could go on. Now I feel troubled about some of the things that I did at that age. I think that sleeping with a teacher, while high up on my list, is a good thing for not happening.
Clurican, there is little question that the choices we make in our youth are often ill-advised, but the chances are excellent that we wouldn’t be who we were today if not for the mistakes we’ve made, and what we’ve learned from them. I had sex with a person my age when I was that young, it was the coolest thing ever and I was so very excited about the whole affair. In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to do and it definitely impacted our relationship (we were not dating) in the very long term. Nevertheless, though it caused much emotional pain, and made some roads more difficult, I could not be who I was today without that experience.
I was the victim of an attack by some jocks who didn’t like the way I looked (they called me a “stoner in training”). They got out of the car and hit me. By any account, they did a bad thing, I was hurt physically and emotionally by it, and so on. But I don’t look back at it and suggest that we need to put sensors on our kids so that these things don’t happen. Power struggles are a natural facet of human existence, and every society I’ve even given a cursory glance to has had some very rigid hierarchies of power.
I don’t think a teacher should sleep with a student that attends the teacher’s school, whether a high school teacher or a college prof, or even a teacher’s aide. The same goes with work relationships: for me, they are out of the question. Anyone who has a formal position of power over another person should not have a relationship with them. But it is a different thing for me to say that I support the demonization or incarceration of these people.
14 is a fine line for me. The person of that age is eager to be in the world and assert independence, and make choices–all of which are, generally, terribly ill-advised because the 14yr old has no larger context to place these actions in and quite often cannot see the impact they will have two weeks from now, nevermind ten years later, or how the actions may shape this person for the rest of their life. But growing up, living, and learning is something we all have to do.
The teacher should have been fired, IMO, without question. Formal authority figures should not be having trysts with those underneath them in any respect. But any average woman and a teen? Well, I don’t see why but I don’t see why not, either.
I really think the situation is not nearly as complicated as some are making it out to be. Here’s my take:
-Kids differ in their ability to handle “mature” behavior. Hence, the real age of consent is as variable as individual kis.
-It would be a logistical legal nightmare at the very least to try to judge each case of questionable sexual activity on merits alone.
-Hence, an essentially arbitrary legal age of consent must be established, and hopefully that age is not so arbitrary as to not represent the reality for the majority of kids. In other words, the best info. we have regarding psychosexuality will inform the agreed-upon legal age of consent.
-After that, it’s up to kids and adults to be aware of the law, and the practical consequences of breaking it. Psychosocial consequenses are not easy to predict or define, and must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. This is not the realm of the courts, and shouldn’t be.
I would add to all the above self-evident stuff that:
-Boys are not the same as girls. They often approach sex differently. Despite our aspirations to certain sexual ideals, the sordid reality isn’t always all that romantic or flattering to the human species.
-The reality shouldn’t completely get in the way of our aspirations. Part of the reason we try to be sensitive and responsible about sex (even when our instincts pull us in the very opposite direction) is people can behave naturally and still get hurt. We can’t avoid all hurt, but some hurt is bad enough that it warrants fairly vigilant avoidance.
-Sex isn’t nearly as dirty, forbidden, damaging, and sinful as our puritanical heritage makes it out to be. At least half the reason sex fucks us up so badly is because we let our unhealthy preconceptions about sex rule our feelings about it. A lot of guilt about sex is pointless, and a lot of the taboo irrational.
-Having said that, some sexual activity is clearly highly damaging, and there should be strict interdictions against abusive sex. What defines abusive sex should be data, not factually baseless superstition and folklore.
Lastly: Don’t freak out. What the boy and the teacher did was inappropriate. Both parties probably bear some of the burden of blame, though certainly the teacher deserves the lions-share of it. If people don’t blow the whole episode out of all proportion, and the boy’s peers show a little compassion (the likelihood of either is very low, sadly), the kid will probably be fine after getting a little counseling, and there’s no reason to think he can’t go on to have healthy, normal relationships in the future. The teacher will need to find a new line of work, and perhaps should be barred from any career that involves working closely with minors.
FWIW, here are more photos of Ms. LaFave.
That’s okay, the vast majority of people are weeping for your twisted views. Makes it even, I suppose.
For the record, as much as I fantasized about gettin’ some from older women at that age, I agree that no adult should have sex with a minor, regardless of the minor’s apparent ability to cope.
I’d need counselling to get over the fact that the greatest moment in my sexual life would already have been and gone at the age of fourteen. I think she should go into the private tutoring business, I’m sure she would be very successful.
In all seriousness she has obviously acted very inappropriately and will, I’m sure, regret this episode greatly but I still doubt she has caused mush damage to this kid directly, it is the indirect damage that will be caused by the media that worries me.
You’re right, I did overstate that case.
However, I was merely upset that so many people are perfectly fine with NAMBLA’s practices.
MY VIEWS?
My views opposing sex with minors are something to weep about.
Right. DOn’t you have a child to be raping?
Zagadka, is it beyond reasoning that a 14 year old boy could be equivalent to some other 18 year old somewhere else? It is likely that he is quite physically mature, because she did come back for sex again. Some guys start out objectifying women, and never have to be abused or raped or whatever verb you want to use, so in that case he wouldn’t be any more messed up than he had been before. Nobody has mentioned whether or not she deflowered him. He could have been a huge stud and thats how she got the idea to want to sleep with him. I’m not saying that this is the case, but it quite possibly could be and in that case, would it be wrong then?