Hot for Teacher

There were a few stories in the local news a while back about women, often teachers or PTA officials, having sexual relations with underage schoolboys. There was a bit of criticism over the light punishment these women received relative to what a man convicted of child molestation or statutory rape would expect and of complaints of an unfair double standard. However what is actually unfair is that there is not more of a double standard, a reasonable double standard based on obvious and relevant differences between male and female sexuality.

In the first place, while male perverts can and do molest girls of all ages, a woman can have sex only with a boy capable of erection and ejaculation, which requires her underage partner to be an adolescent rather than an actual child. Since most adolescent boys are physically stronger than most women, and since, excluding the really bizarre and unlikely, the boy cannot participate involuntarily, there is typically no question of assault in the normal usage of the term. Finally, there are risks, emotional factors, and opportunities for exploitation in an older man’s seduction of an adolescent girl that usually are not present in an older woman’s making herself available to a teenage boy ( starting with the obvious fact that a boy cannot become pregnant but by no means limited to that). Indeed in many cases the horny little bastard , aka the alleged victim, is likely simply to feel that he got lucky. I think most men who can remember life and the guys they hung out with at age fifteen or sixteen would agree.

The laws of a few years ago were about right. Women caught with teenage boys should be ridiculed, fined about a hundred bucks or so for contributing to the delinquency of a minor or something similar, and sent on their way. If they work at schools, firing and blacklisting would be appropriate. Treating them with the severity shown to male child molesters or seducers of adolescent girls is inappropriate and wasteful of taxpayers’ money. Some of these women may be seriously messed up. They may deserve the public’s contempt and be fair game for its ridicule, but they do not belong in the pen. Even the best prisons are very unpleasant places. Citizens have an obligation not to send people whose acts are not seriously criminal to them.