“You Always Hurt the One You Love,” the song popularized by the Mills Brothers in 1944 (not like I was around then or anything) glided smoothly into my mind when I was thinking about an aptly ironic title for this column.
I’d been giving a lot of thought to the fairly recent phenomenon of reasonably desirable young female teachers seducing their male teenage students and getting into gobs of trouble. I had actually forgotten the name of the New Hampshire teacher who persuaded her teen lover and his friends to kill her husband in May of 1990. Pam Smart was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering and is currently serving a life sentence.
The more recent case of the wild-eyed, and likely unbalanced, Mary Kay Letourneau, who pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape in August of 1997 in connection with a long-term affair involving a student (by whom she became pregnant when he was 14) was easier to recall. Letourneau was married with four children at the time she and the boy, Vili Fualaau, actually met — when he was eight years old and she was his 28-year-old second grade teacher. Letourneau wound up having at least one more child by the former student; they were married after her release from prison for convictions on charges stemming from her refusal to leave the lad alone. Happily ever after? Who can say? I’d sooner ask the children from her first marriage than anyone else.
Even more memorable is Debra Lafave, the 24-year-old Tampa, Florida, middle-school teacher who was criminally charged resulting from trysts with a 14-year-old; more memorable of course because it was the most recent of similar cases, but also because she was generally considered to be a knockout. To each his own, I suppose.
Inappropriate student-teacher relationships have been with us for quite awhile, but until recently they typically involved men seducing young girls in their charge. Scandalous, yes, illegal, yes, but I think most people — even in the media — put it down to the fact that men are generally understood to be less restrained, more visually stimulated and more naturally sexually aggressive than are women. My opinion is that any adult in a position of trust who treads this path ought to be prosecuted to the fullest regardless of sex. Still, the question remains: What’s all this with the mature babes going after underage boys?
There’s been an increasing amount of talk over the last few years regarding the dangers of “early sexualization of children.” This usually elicits an aft-deck-of-the-Titanic chuckle from me, because we’ve been way, way behind on that one for a long, long time. This process has been going on for decades, beginning during the sixties — when I was a child.
Whether you’re male or female, if you’re thirteen or fourteen and already perceive others of similar age as sexual objects, why would anyone assume that the attraction ends simply because you get older? I was exposed to enough knowledge of sexual acts by the time I was ten to be considered (at least) criminal neglect these days. When I was thirteen, it was generally assumed that if a guy had not bedded at least one or two girls by the time he was fifteen, he was probably gay — and this was over 30 years ago. Young girls were afraid of “dying virgins” (quite a few I knew said so), and the idea that if men had a promiscuous nature than it ought to be acceptable for women as well became conventional wisdom. “It’s love — we love each other,” became the cry of many a tearful girl or confronted boy, when it was really inner confusion, hormones, and lust indulged with the approval of morally-bankrupt advertisers, politicians and media types.
There were indeed a few teachers I had during my teen years upon whom I would have pounced in a New York minute had I the opportunity, but then I came from a grossly dysfunctional family situation in a marginally functional cultural environment, as opposed to a marginally dysfunctional family situation and a reasonably functional cultural environment, or a reasonably functional family situation and a marginally functioning cultural environment, or — well, you get the picture; it would have made for a lovely rationalization in any case. The point is that from the aspect of my teachers’ generation, such things just were not done.
Nowadays, if you have a young, sexually libertine woman who saw 13-year-old boys as sexual beings when she was 13 and indulged — and who now also happens to be a teacher of same — you can more easily reason how these things occur, icky though it may appear.
Factor out all I’ve learned (or unlearned) in the last 20 years, and I would now be eagerly seducing underage teenage girls, two at a time, by the transoceanic cargo shipload. I mean, have you looked at any these days? They’re so delectable that they can barely keep their hands off of each other — although that, as they say, is for a whole ‘nother sad and sordid column.
But that’s not who I want to be anymore, and it has little to do with fear of incarceration, or diseases, or the fact that I happen to be living in a state of matrimony, or angry parents, or that God might get monumentally ticked at me. I just don’t want to be the kind of person who causes that kind of emotional damage to another human being. And it is damaging when children and teenagers engage in — or are coerced or forced to engage in — sexual entanglements. There’s far too much power in such relationships, and far too many unresolved emotional and identity issues in play at that age.
In short, teenagers aren’t mature enough to be having sex with anyone, let alone savvier adults in positions of trust. The kids don’t know better, and at this juncture, neither do a lot of the adults, given how they were raised. I’m sure some of the adult women in these cases — like Mary Kay Letourneau — really believe “it’s love.” I could probably offer a similarly convincing argument if I were staring down both barrels of a child rape charge.
One of our most high-profile sociopolitical commentators said recently that he couldn’t see blaming liberalism for the rise in pedophilia or child rape cases. Well, who do you think is responsible for the program of early sexualization of children that’s been under way over the last few decades? There, gentle reader, is your smoking gun.
Erik Rush is a columnist and award-winning author whose first novel, The Angels Fell, a mystery-thriller, was released in 2002. He’s also been involved in music production, biomedical research, marketing and local politics.
