Loverboy

A local story is getting a lot of attention: two female junior high school teachers had affairs with the same 13-year-old boy at different times in the past year. The had no knowledge of each other's relationship with the boy. Both women have been arrested and charged with sex crimes.

My former coworker, Mary Ann, was vice principal of a junior high school. Years ago when Mary Kay Letourneau was in the news because she wouldn't let go of her similarly-young lover, and even went to prison over him, Mary Ann said to me, "I don't understand why a grown woman would be interested." She pointed at the young kids in the office. "Look at them. They're little boys." The way she said "little boys" sounded like she thought of them as being infants. Come to think of it, they weren't that much removed from that stage, based on their immature behavior in the halls and office.

When I look at the mugshots published in the newspaper of the two teachers I see pictures of a couple of moms, maybe even grandmas. One is is 39, the other 46. Both have their own teenage children at home. There are a lot of double standards when it comes to older women/younger men. If you think of a man aged 46 having sex with a 13-year-old girl you get quite a different mind picture than a woman having sex with a 13-year-old. With the man you think of pure perversion, with the woman you think...what? I think of some sort of emotional need being fulfilled. That was the way it was with Letourneau. Letourneau got a lot of media attention. She was constantly bombarded with the question, "Why?" I heard her answers but I'm not sure anyone was ever satisfied. C'mon, Mary Kay, we all asked, you're in your 30s and you're risking your home and family for a kid who is 12? No wonder everyone wanted to know why. Since we hear more and more stories about grown women having sex with boys as young as 12 or 13, we should ask ourselves what they are after. A woman's sexual needs are so different than a man's, especially in the emotional range, that finding some sort of sexual attraction with a 13-year-old sounds less perverted than just weird.

Beyond the reasons for it, any teacher having sex with a student is walking through a minefield. If the kid tells, and kids tell their friends everything, she's going to be found out. Even if he said nothing now, even if he waited until he was an adult and then told, the law could still come after her, because there is no statute of limitations on sex crimes with minors.

Personally, I don't see the boy as victim. He had sex with two women who were old enough, older even, than his mother could be. He kept his lovers from knowing he'd had sex with the other. What kind of kid is this? Is he some sort of superstud, some sort of Svengali hypnotizing the objects of his lust? I have no idea. He deserves to spend some time on the psychiatrist's couch, too, just to see what is going on in his horny little head.

In an entry for this blog called Gerrie, I wrote about my 14-year-old lust for my 8th grade English teacher. Every time I read about these teachers having sex with their male students I wonder what would have happened had Gerrie taken advantage of me. I don't have to think too much about it because it wouldn't have happened. If Gerrie had the desire to have sex with any male student I would have been at the absolute bottom of the list of boys she'd have sex with. And even if all the stars, planets and comets had come into alignment and she had wanted to have sex with me, at the age I was then my mother didn't let me out of her sight for long periods. If I'd been gone after school she would have been looking for the reason why. According to news reports, these teachers took the 13-year-old to various places, but didn't have sex in the school. Where was the boy's mom? Dad? Why did he have time enough to have sex with his teachers?

I hope they helped him with his homework after they were done with him.