when a society is ruled by laws, common sense flies out the window. if there is a law dictating that anyone who spits on the sidewalk must go to jail, then a 95 year-old with throat cancer who is no longer able to swallow will be sent to jail for spitting on the sidewalk.
yes, that imagined example is extreme, but its extremity helps to make the point of how the law cannot be fair if it cannot be tempered with common sense.
looks like another teacher is losing her career and about to go to jail for sleeping with a teenager. she is 35 and the student was 16.
i ask you: how many 16-year-old boys wouldn’t jump at the chance to sleep with an attractive older teacher? (lisa glide doesn’t look like much more than a teenager herself in the photo.) those boys wake up every morning dripping with their own semen; estimates on how many sexual thoughts they experience each day range up in to the thousands. the supersized sexual hunger of the average teenage male is so well-known it is beyond cliche — a simple raised eyebrow or rolled eye acknowledges what everyone knows to be true.
do you think the average 16-year-old boy is “damaged” in some way if an older woman sleeps with him? i don’t — i think he’s most likely learning some things he really needs to know and having a cracking good time learning them. he’s going to fall asleep every night for weeks dreaming of exactly what they did together and auditioning for a do-over.
mrs. robinson is a social archetype for a reason.
turn it around: the 35 year old guy and the 16 year old virgin girl, who does not wake up sticky with orgasmic juice and dreams of being loved rather than getting laid. who can easily be made to believe that an older man is offering love when all he is offering is sex. she won’t smile herself off to sleep in a fever of recalled coitus; she’s going home with blood on her panties and will stay up all night weeping because he didn’t say he loved her.
but we have one-size fits all laws.
do i think it’s okay for teachers to sleep with their young students? nah, it’s probably always a bad idea. but the law is not about that, the law is about rape, and it’s the crime of rape — “sexual assault” – that lisa glide is charged with. if you define rape as unwanted sex, i submit that it’s just about impossible to rape a teenage boy. he can barely keep the fucking thing in his pants! he is one big finger looking for a hole in the dyke. and then he finds one! and then…SHE gets locked up.
give me a fucking break.
does this boy feel as if he’d been assaulted? was he damaged in some way by their romps? if so, then there is reason for an investigation. but if he, as a typical teenage hormonemonger, bragged to friends about this conquest and came looking for a repeat, can anyone seriously believe that a crime has been committed?
it’s unspeakably ridiculous. i’m all for protecting young people, but we need to protect them from harm.
i don’t know how the law can be rewritten to account for consensual sex between a minor and a major. that’s the problem with law in general, it has no common sense. everything is black or white and utterly absolute.
does the world look that way to you? right/wrong, black/white, yes/no, and nothing in the middle?
do you think this teacher should be fired and tried for the crime of rape?
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Jackie, I am going to have to strongly disagree with you on this. The laws on statutory rape are in place to prevent adults from harming our children sexually. Is a 17 year old boy still a child? In many ways, yes he is. Did he enjoy his relationship with this teacher? I’m sure in many ways he did, but what has this taught him about trust? What has it taught him about boundaries? How will if affect his later relationships in life? Will he respect sexual boundaries?
Yes, young men have hormones in overdrive and so do their female counterparts. That doesn’t make it okay to take advantage of those feelings. A 35 year old teacher should know better than to take advantage of a young man’s hormones, no matter how cute he is and how much he pursued her.
Why is it more wrong for a man to do this to a teenage girl? Because she’s going to bleed? Because she could get pregnant? Are we assuming that a teenage girl is any less willing to have sex with a man twice her age? Are we saying that she is less able to enjoy it? Do you think she won’t go back for more ?
I know girls who have been in “relationships” with much older men while they were still teenagers. The sex wasn’t the problem. It was the sense of betrayal when they realized that the older man had taken advantage of their youth that caused long lasting trust issues.
I have two older brothers and many nephews. I have watched them fall in love in their teenage years. Yeah, love often was more about pursuing a girl because they were attracted to her, but the emotions and the sexual angst were very powerful. I’ve seen them have their hearts broken. Sure they wouldn’t show that side of themselves to the other guys at school, and maybe not even their parents, but I’ve seen it. It is no less heartbreaking than when it happens to a girl. Even worse they are “men” and they believe they are not supposed to feel that kind of hurt and that sets up all kinds of internal conflict.
Unless you have evidence that a young man suffers no long lasting harm whether physical, emotional or psychological by having been taken advantage of by an adult then I see no reason to make a gender specific law on Statutory Rape.
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Jackie, while I do agree that common sense should definitely supersede the law at times, the situation you’re talking about is complicated. Look at it this way; it’s clear that males and females have certain differences emotionally. What’s not so clear is how much of those differences are due to nature and how much to nurture. I think it’s definitely some of both. The nurture part, though is problematic.
There are some serious double standards in our society with young people and gender roles, especially in terms of sexuality. Boys are expected to want to and try to bone everything that walks as soon as they hit puberty. Girls, on the other hand, are expected to either be pure or maintain the image of purity (like Laura Palmer), while suppressing their sexuality. The argument that it’s not as bad when it happens to a teenage boy relies very heavily on these unhealthy stereotypes and imposed gender roles. Who is to say, that those boys aren’t damaged? At the very least, sexual encounters with 35 year old women reinforce those double standards and introduce boys to sexual power struggles. Struggles that they will carry with them into adulthood in their sexual encounters with other girls and women.
And when it comes down to it, what the hell is any grown-ass adult, male or female, doing having sex with a teenager? What healthy grown up would be sexually drawn to a kid (teenagers are still kids). When a man or woman has sex with a teen, there is a power imbalance, no matter how enthusiastic the kid is. Sex should be a willing exchange between two equal partners. I’m not judging this lady, but there has to be something not right going on there. The teenager doesn’t know any better. What’s her excuse?
I feel that arguing in favor of this woman is beside the point. The larger problem lies in the double standards pertaining to gender roles. Closing that gap is more important. There are places in the world (and this country) where young women are killed by male family members for being the victim of rape. This would not happen if we didn’t have these messed up double standards. And in the end, ANYONE who is an adult needs to screw another ADULT. It’s really that simple. Let the teenagers fumble around with other teens under bleachers or in a car or any other shadowy place. At least that way they are gaining their experience with equals.
If you want to do that teacher a favor, introduce her to some adults!
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i want to thank melissa and marcus for their very thoughtful comments — they both made a lot of good points. it’s a complex question, and there’s never going to be one right answer. my hope is that we, as a society, can find a better way of handling these things than automatically sending someone to jail based solely on their age. unquestionably, some of these major/minor sexual encounters are horrendous and jail time is absolutely the correct response. i simply don’t think it’s the correct response in every case. perhaps not even in most cases.
Jackie, the whole concept of teenage boys wanting nothing more than to get laid, and these hot teachers providing that for them sounds like common sense on the surface, but let’s think of that for a minute. How would the public react to teacher who was older and far less pleasant to look at (someone he would be less apt to brag about), and a boy who was, say 15 instead of 16. Now the case looks more like manipulation and taking advnatage than it does a no brainer for both parties, but if the law allowed for the teenage boys to get it wherever they could, teachers not excluded, then the manipulative relationship would be legal, and common sense would again be under assault. The point is, as much as a kid wants to hook up with his teacher, it is unethical and wrong for the teacher to take advantage of that.
As far as the legal response, the point is to make the penalty tough enough so that those who might be influenced by witnessing the results will be deterred and those who commit the crime can suffer only as much as is necessary to correct the behavior. It is a very tough balance to hit and rarely do the results have full agreement. If we start tailoring too much, then we have what there is already too much of, injustice -This teacher was hot, so let’s not punish her. That teacher was fat an ugly, so she should get more jail time because the kid surely didn’t want to sleep with her without being manipulated. You see how it doesn’t work? So in the end, one rule, everyone follows it, and justice SHOULD be blind.
In the end, she knew better but ultimately she broke the law and destroyed her career over sex with a teenage boy, something that most women will tell you is usually way below par. What does that tell us? It tells us that she either has no regard for the law, no regard for the kid’s personal boundaries (as mentioned above), no regard for her career, poor judgement, some form of mental illness, or some combination of the above. Whatever the case may be, something is rotten in Denmark and it is a good thing it was caught and is being dealt with.
And I cannot imagine what it would be like for this kid, at 16, for the rest of his highschool career. What has he learned? Should he hit on any teacher he has a crush on? How confused will he be when this is discouraged to the point that he finds it is EXTREMELY inappropriate? Bad enough to be thinking of your math teacher’s thong at that age, but to be thinking she rejected you, and then you only got a 72 on the final- is it because she doesn’t think you’re good enough to sleep with- was she insulted? Maybe you should have sent flowers first? Hormones also have a way of screwing with anger and rage, and those are the years we’re supposed to be getting that under control. I would not want to be in this kid’s head for the next few years.
I’m torn on this one, actually. I know a number of boys (gay and straight) who slept with older men and women consensually at a younger age and while they enjoyed it, some have regretted it. They realized later on their was a definite shift in the power balance. I was looking up age of consent laws for America and they are different in every state…and much of it makes no sense. The teacher should be fired, but not charged for rape. A person in a position of authority — whether its in school or a corporate setting — should not bed the underlings. It always ends in tears.
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Hey, Jack, it happened again: http://wcbstv.com/topstories/baldwin.naked.sex.2.888922.html
He waz askin for it I tellz ya! THEY ALL ARE!
this isn’t quite “again” — there’s a universe of difference between 13 years old and 17 years old. at 13, i agree that it is assault.
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