You see stories like this onefairly often these days where a 20-40 year old teacher is carrying on an affair with a 12-17 year old student.
When adult men go after considerably younger teenagers the explanation is usually that men are just sex pigs and if they can tap it they will. Women are usually portrayed as being far more selective and judging a man’s capability for protecting her and/and prospective children, delivering resources etc. Beyond this men who are more mature and carry themselves with confidence etc. are usually seen as being more attractive.
An adult woman choosing to begin an affair with a cute 15 year old boy would seem to put all those hypotheses in the weeds. What causes a grown adult women to become sexually infatuated with a young teen boy?
IOW, all those theories about how women choose people to have sex with?There’s some pretty clear data that that’s not universal. It’s perfectly plausible that women, especially when they’re not looking for a life partner, are just as shallow as men. It’s also possible that women who want to have sex with teenage boys are likelier to go to an occupation that enables this behavior, e.g., teaching high school, than women without such a desire.
As a woman, I don’t understand it. No matter how good looking he is, a teen boy is still a teen boy. I didn’t much like them when I was a teen myself. Even worse is when they remain teen boys after they supposedly grow up. But that’s another thread entirely.
Maybe the women think it means they look/act/seem lots younger than they are because they appeal to such young guys. Maybe the boys trigger high school memories that the teachers are trying to recapture. Maybe they’re just pathetic women with poor judgement.
or this one, where the teacher is accused of screwing 6 boys and is actually on tape blowing one of them in the presence of another. The boys were 13 and 14 at the time.
These are child molesters. This one is a female Humbert Humbert.
My guess is that they’re somehow unsatisfied with their married lives (when do you hear about single teachers doing this?) and feeling unsexy, so they resort to this kind of thing with someone who they feel like they have some degree of control over, so they won’t get hurt. It’s a power thing, I suspect.
Then again, there’s probably some sub-set of them who are just sex fiends and like the fact that teenage boys are like Energizer bunnies in the sack.
Immature/troubled women allow the girls in their school to become their peer group, and these women compete for the attention of boys the girls see as desirable.
Doesn’t appear true in all cases, but in many, the boys are good looking, athletes in high profile sports, and so on. These are boys who have already had a fair amount of sexual experience with women, even at 12 or 13 yo.
In other cases, as LHoD and TN mentioned, it’s straight up child molestation by people who entered the profession with those inclinations. Often because they were molested as children themselves.
And of course, there is always the old joke of the married couple, both 54.
The husband takes up with an 18-year old, and in retaliation, the wife finds an 18 year-old lover also. She points out to her husband that 18 goes into 54 more often then 54 goes into 18.
I don’t think you can make a big deal about something that a tiny percentage of the population do. There are exceptions to everything and there are all sorts of personalities who don’t fit the way people “are usually portrayed” on any issue you can imagine.
But FWIW, I was once discussing this with my wife and she suggested that many women might find something attractive about a situation where they are pretty much in control of the relationship and have the boys wrapped around their finger.
Lots of men at least talk about liking the idea of screwing virgins and “breakin’ 'em in right.” For at least some subset of women the same thinking ought to apply.
Women are much more sexual creatures than polite society of the 1940s and 1950s would have had one believe. Yet that’s the baseline era for our laws and many of our media attitudes, especially towards schools & teaching.
In 2015 that 1940s sex hang-up thing doesn’t really describe what goes on in the head of a young HS teacher born in 1990. It won’t be long before the first 21st Century babies are teaching high school. Whatever else they’ll be, they won’t be traditional schoolmarms like I read about as a kid in the 1960s.
As somebody pointed out in a thread recently, even into the 1970s female teachers were transferred to non-teaching duties or put on leave of absence as soon as they started to show a pregnancy. Gosh forbid a child might see a bulging abdomen.