My guilty pleasure

I have watched the first two episodes of the CBS Thursday night slasher-TV drama, Harper's Island. If you aren't familiar with it, Harper's Island is a mystery series that will end after 13 episodes.

There have been two episodes of Harper's Island and so far five people have been killed. The way people die in this show is why I think of it as slasher-TV. They all die in gruesome and horrible ways, just like in an R-rated slasher movie. With the popularity of the CSI franchises and all of the creative ways people die on those shows, not to mention the stomach churning scenes of corpses and autopsies, we've become more desensitized to violent death on TV. The movies have been doing it for 40 years, and now TV has caught up to the perversity of it all.

The basic premise of Harper's Island is that a whole wedding party descends on the island "37 miles off the coast of Seattle, Washington." Henry Dunn is marrying rich girl, Trish Wellington, and they invite all their friends, who so far number a couple of dozen as far as I can tell. Trish's dad is there as is her univited ex-boyfriend, Hunter.

Henry Dunn is played by Christopher Gorham, a young actor who had a big role in Ugly Betty as Betty's boyfriend, also named Henry, Henry Grubstick. (Maybe Henry changed his hairstyle, took off his glasses and changed his last name, then met Trish.) For some reason Gorham just doesn't look like a guy who would attract a rich girl, but then I don't know what those guys look like. They don't look like me, either.

The star of the series is Elaine Cassidy, a really fine young actress. She's yet another in a long, long string of people with accents who play Americans, and talk better American than us Americans. Is this a fad of some sort? To hire Australians or Brits, or in Ms. Cassidy's case, Irish, and train them how to speak American English?

Cassidy plays Abby, a girl who grew up on Harper's Island, who knew Henry when he was a working stiff (oops, maybe 'stiff' is the wrong word) on the island during summers. Her estranged dad is the police chief (or the whole police department, since so far he's the only cop we've seen). Several years before when Abby was a child her mom was killed in grisly fashion by serial killer John Wakefield and in turn Abby's dad killed him. But now that the wedding party is on the island the killings have started again.

The fishmarket isn't the only place on Harper's Island where I pick up a piscatorial odor. There are enough red herrings being dragged all over the place to fill San Francisco Bay.

Anyway, even with the gory murders I have a terrible guilty pleasure, enjoying this show as entertainment. According to an article about the series, it's a mix of Scream and the novel by Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None. The killer in And Then There Were None was extremely clever in his engineering of the murders, and when I read it as a junior high student I enjoyed the hell out of the book. But that was before I fully understood how we as a species regard death as something we want to see. At least in fantasy form, that is. When it happens to real people it's a tragedy, when it happens on a TV show or a movie it didn't really happen, so we can excuse it. It's sick, but it's the way we are and have been forever. I'm sure when our stone age ancestors were sitting around a fire at night the storyteller of the group was regaling them with tales of death, how Og, Son of Fire got bashed in the head and had his brains eaten, and everyone around the campfire laughed...you know, like prehistoric horror movies.

Take a chill pill, Dr. Phil!

Dr. Phil was going on yesterday on his TV show with some parents about their children and the "sexting" phenom. That's the one where kids take pictures with their camera phones of themselves nude, or of their genitals and then send them on. The problem is that the person for whom it is intended may send it on, causing a ripple effect. One young girl who had done this was interviewed and told by Dr. Phil she had done a "dumb thing" but it did not make her a "bad person."

Wow, Dr. Phil, do you live in a bubble? These sorts of self-pics are all over the Internet and I strongly suspect, based on what I found just this morning on a site devoted to exhibitionists, that these girls don't have any problems at all showing themselves, and would like the rest of us to see, also! Of course they're not bad people, they're good people! It's just that I may have a slightly different idea of "good."

I'm all for people being over 18 in order to post these things online, and the site I accessed claims that everyone in these pics is over 18, so I'm not sending out anything illegal. With a couple of exceptions I stayed away from total nudity or pictures of girls "pleasuring themselves" (a term I heard on Oprah a couple of days ago). But I think you get a strong message from what these girls are showing us: they like their bodies, they are happy with themselves, and by golly, they'd like us to know it! Who am I to pretend I know best for these fine young women? I would like to publicly thank them--and the makers of digital cameras and for the Internet and entrepreneurs who know for everyone who likes to show off their body, there are 10 people who like to look at it--for making these pictures of themselves available.

Our two grandgeniuses

Sally and I love being grandparents. My son, David, is a good dad, he's in a good marriage and has a couple of great kids, both girls. Bella was 4 in December, and Gabby will be 3 at the end of June. Bella is very smart, and by having her precedent to guide her, Gabby is ahead of the curve for her age.

One of the things about grandkids is you get to hear funny stories and I love to share. Recently David sent me a note saying that he got out his digital camera only to discover that Bella had taken some pictures. That wouldn't be a big deal, but he had shown her once how the timer worked, so she set up the camera on the coffee table, set the timer, and took pictures of herself and her sister. David also tells these stories about the pair:

The girls didn't want anything to do with the Easter bunny when they saw him at the mall. When I told them that the Easter bunny was coming to bring them stuff (to make them act good), they kept asking me if the Easter bunny would stay outside and not come in our house. I had to assure them that the Easter bunny would knock on the door while they were sleeping and give Mommy and Daddy the treats, but NOT come in the house!

They're both starting to develop their own personalities. Gabby is going to be the class clown, and is more extroverted. Bella is like me, and introverted, but thinks about things logically. I don't know if I told you, but we bought them a little table and chair set. It had to be put together. When I put the chairs together, I let Bella help me screw in the screws. Now, one of her favorite things to do is get the screwdriver and take apart the little chair and put it back together. It's only four screws, but just like the camera, you can show her once, and she remembers. Maybe she'll be an Engineer, whereas Gabby could be a lawyer-type.

Gabby won't take no for an answer, and she figures out ways to barter for what she wants. Sometimes she gets what she wants, because she makes a good case. One example, on Easter, we gave them chocolate. We let them only have a certain amount. Gabby found an extra piece of chocolate, and we told her that she had to wait until tomorrow because it was too late. Bella would have said okay and gave us the chocolate back. Gabby, on the other hand, tried to make a deal with us and said, "It's OK, just let me hold it. I'll keep it safe, and I won't let anyone eat it!". We ultimately got it back, because her attention span is still shorter than ours.

See what I mean?

What the hell are you thinking, people?

I had one of those nude-in-public dreams last night. In the first part of the dream my brother Rob and I are trying to pitch a script idea to a producer. I'm nude, but no one seems to notice. In the second part of the dream, still nude, I'm heading to the cash register at a restaurant. My wife says, "Do you have the check?" I say, "Look at me. Do I look like I'm keeping the check somewhere?" When we leave the restaurant I remember feeling sorry for the other patrons who had to look at me.

Some people make these nude dreams come true! The Internet is a place where, with a bit of looking, you can find amateur sites where exhibitionists can send in pictures of themselves, in lingerie, nude, having sexual intercourse, performing oral sex, bondage, you name it!

The sky is the limit when it comes to debauchery and compromising one's self.

Despite that, the site I am referencing has rules: No pictures of menstrual pads or blood, no stool, and no kids under 18. Well, at least they have some rules, because they don't have any rules against people making fools of themselves.

Here are some pictures I've culled off that site. It'll be nameless. I don't want to get sued by them. The people in these pictures can't sue me for public defamation because they've already defamed themselves.

Many of the folks blur their faces, crop off their heads (in the photos, not literally), wear masks or otherwise disguise themselves.

Some should disguise themselves.

Other people seem proud to be showing their goods to the world.

Did I mention the guys who like to dress up?


Some day I might see you on this site, but you'll never see me. God bless the Internet and its endless entertainment.

I did a double take when I saw this Macy's ad last week in my local newspaper. Welcome back 1960s!

That dress looks a lot like dresses my wife wore in 1969, the year we got married. Forty years later time has reversed itself and we are revisiting the '60s.

I think the skirt could be a little bit shorter. I remember them as shorter, or maybe it's just my feverish imagination. Life published some mini-skirt pictures in the '60s, not all of which are represented on their photo website. But this is one I remember from the time.

Yesterday Sally and I watched CBS Sunday Morning with a segment on the musical Hair, which is making another run at Broadway. The creators of Hair aren't the hippies they were 40 years ago, but the play looks like it's going to be a hit all over again. This time it will not only be playing for people my age, but their kids and grandkids. The kids can turn to their parents and say, "And you criticized me for being a punk?" The grandkids can say, "Jeez, and you think I'm weird!"

There's a movie coming up on the Chicago 7. If you don't remember Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, John Froines, Rennie Davis and Tom Weiner, (and Bobby Seale, who made them originally the Chicago 8) then you'll get a chance to see what we saw on the news every night as we followed their trial.

A few years ago I started noticing the boys in high school sprouting hair; they went through a short hair period, then the unruly hair started popping up on more and more young guys. It looked like the same moptop hairdos we tried to grow in the early '60s when the Beatles took us by storm in America, and that our parents and school administrators fought so hard. This time the boys grew their hair out the universal reaction was so what? Nowadays everywhere you go you see people with long hair. It doesn't look as radical now because we've had almost 50 years to get used to it.

In the 1960s rebellion was mixed with fashion. Long hair made a statement. Now it's just fashion. Now that I look like a square old man looking bemusedly upon young men with mushroom hairstyles and girls with skirt hems up to their bums, that the tables have turned. I am now what the older generation was at that time looking at us.

.

Tall hair and long dresses

I wasn't surprised to see the polygamous FLDS sect open their YFZ ranch to Oprah Winfrey on Monday, March 30. It is part of a carefully orchestrated PR effort by the group. I think Oprah was sucked into the stories the women told, but to me they sounded more coached than spontaneous. They were uncomfortable with questions about jealousy among wives, and said they had to "overcome those feelings," which is the reason they were there, to progress past those very human feelings.

The whole openness thing was so opportunistic I'm surprised Oprah, who isn't dumb, was taken in.

I have lived around polygamy. I live in Sandy, Utah, the real-life town that is the hometown of the fictitious Hendrickson polygamous family of the TV show, Big Love. When I moved here in 1975 several Mormon fundamentalist (polygamist) families lived in the neighborhood. I don't think they were FLDS, but their women dressed like the FLDS women: tall hair, long dresses. They were a bunch that didn't communicate with anyone outside their group. If you were to try to talk to them in a store they wouldn't stand and chat. They'd move on. They want to be left alone. Some of it is because of the men, who are like an American Taliban. Women have their place, and their place isn't talking with outsiders or strangers. If the women don't show jealousy it doesn't mean the men don't. (And I don't for one minute believe there isn't jealousy amongst the wives.)

A lot of people feel live and let live with the polygamy community, and I'm OK with free exercise of religion as long as it doesn't involve sexual abuse of children or ritual human sacrifice. The FLDS in the Oprah piece denied knowing anyone who got married too young, but marriage was what the young girls who were interviewed aspired to.

When the FLDS lived in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, they were ignored by the law and society for decades. They could do anything they wanted, even marry girls 12, 13 or 14 years of age to older men. When Warren Jeffs was their prophet (before he became a convict) he banished several young men because they competed with the older men for the young girls. They showed up in Salt Lake City, homeless and unprepared for life outside their former community. They were called the Lost Boys. None of that was covered in the Oprah interview, and even if the question had been asked the members would have played dumb. Their goal with permitting the interview was public relations, not any revelations about dirty secrets within their families or communities.


A journalist who has covered the YFZ story had this to say in a blog last summer:

. . .the FLDS is very coercive indeed. Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet." At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind -- children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she's likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who's been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death. At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches "blood atonement" -- the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they've done it: [Jon] Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband's brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband's desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment -- meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who've left report being threatened with the same fate. There's a whole lot more depth and nuance to this story, and I'll try to get at some of it over the next several days. But let's start with the premise that almost nothing you're hearing in the mainstream media about this group can or should be taken at face value.

--Dennis Neiwert writing in the blog Orcinus.

By going to their YFZ Ranch Oprah did more good for the FLDS than anyone else could have done. She has very high credibility, and I'm sure a lot of viewers left with a feeling about the FLDS: they're odd but harmless. But anyone fooled into thinking that the answers she got to her questions were honest is very naive, and hasn't lived around these secretive people.

Obsessive love

I've had a couple of posts recently about women who have sacrificed their families, careers, and dignity to have sex with young teenagers. I've wondered why, and what would make them throw away everything for sex with such a young partner. When it comes to sex, sometimes people just do bizarre things.

In 1977 Joyce McKinney was a worldwide tabloid sensation. She had kidnapped a Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in England, taken him a rented cottage in Devon, tied him to a bed and had sex with him repeatedly.

She spent her life savings on this endeavor. She dragged along an accomplice, a man as obsessed with her as she was with Kirk Anderson. They both ended up in jail, both ended up skipping out on their bail, getting back to the States by posing as mute Irish actors. Wow.

McKinney had been a beauty queen; although born in North Carolina she had once been Miss Wyoming. She converted to Mormonism and attended BYU, where, by some accounts, she went after Wayne Osmond of the famous singing Osmond family. Wayno said no, no, and she moved on, changing her obsession to the young, tall, dark and handsome Anderson.

If the story ended there it'd be good enough, but it actually gets better. McKinney moved back to North Carolina, and ended up in the news again when she paid to have her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a South Korean company. She traveled to Korea to pick up the puppies, and used the name Bernann McKinney, but the British press wasn't fooled. They realized quickly that the eccentric American woman who had paid $50,000 to get her doggie duplicated was the same American woman who had kidnapped and had sex with the Mormon missionary. She initially denied she was the same woman, but later changed her story.

Now that is a really great story of obsessive love. We've seen it in movies like Fatal Attraction, we've read about people stalking or killing the objects of their obsessions. Unfortunately, it's all too common. But rarely had the events come together like McKinney and Anderson. The images of him spread-eagled on a bed, handcuffed to the bed posts, and McKinney in a see-through negligee having her way with him were irresistible.

It was a short-lived story, though, and until she popped up again in 2008 to claim her puppies in Korea it had been mostly forgotten. Probably not by Anderson. In 1984 she was caught in Salt Lake City where Anderson lived, in what everyone assumed was another run at getting him alone. The ropes and bondage gear in her trunk led police to that conclusion.

Spending your life savings to have sex with a guy thinking that will make him yours...spending $50,000 to have a dog cloned...these are all part and parcel of obsession. When more stories surfaced about McKinney after the cloning story broke, she was shown to be a litigious person who sued others over trivial matters. Obsessive with love, and all-in-all, a real pain in the ass.

No end in sight

There're always people who think the end of the world is imminent. We used to see cartoons of guys with wild hair and beards, dressed in robes and sandals, wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR. Sometimes it's hard to take their fervor seriously.

A local group is claiming they can feel the hot breath of God on our necks because gay people want to be married. If it isn't war news from some faraway place it's crime at home. It's Internet porn; it's the drug problem; it's the economy, stupid. It's like Roseanne Roseannadanna: "It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another thing." They read signs of the end just like ancient sorcerers read the entrails of goats.

In 1964 I remember the Apocalyptic types going after the topless bathing suit. If you remember that you're as old as I am, or maybe you heard about it. In the year of the Beatles and Hard Day's Night, Johnson and Goldwater, Civil Rights marches, and the heating of the Vietnam conflict, here came a simple swimsuit that caused people to say it was the end of the world. I turned 17 that year, and still young and naive enough to think that when other people said it, especially people who I thought had more experience than me, that maybe, just maybe, they knew something I didn't. So I remember a few stabs of guilt that I was very curious about what designer Rudi Gernreich foisted on the public that caught their imagination in such a way. I was halfway sure it would bring about God's punishment in some awesome and awful way, just like the religious people were saying.

If you look at the suit in this famous photo of model Peggy Moffitt, you see it exposes the breasts, but covers expansively the rest of her naughty parts. Her navel doesn't show. Many swimsuits over the years have exposed much more, especially in the lower area, than the Gernreich suit. But it was one of those things that caught public attention and for a time caused a firestorm of controversy and talk. It also caused some public officials in places worldwide to enact ordinances that prohibited wearing the suit on a public beach.

All I can say is the folks who got upset about the topless swim suit--and it upset me, in a horny teenage boy sort of way--should have looked 45 years into the future and they would have seen that not only did the world not end, things got much, much sexier.

Now you tell me...?

I won't make you read this March 19, 2009 article about prostate-cancer testing unless you want to. Click on it to make it full size.

I was referred to my urologist by my family doc, who felt a hard node on the left side of my prostate during a routine digital rectal exam December 17, 2008. I've been getting those since I was in my forties. I'm used to them now, but some men are skittish about having someone's finger in their bum. Anyway, for years I've had BPH, which meant my prostate was enlarged. I've also taken a PSA test each year, which is a blood test that can indicate specific antigens in the prostate, leading to a clean bill of health or--brrrr, shudder--cancer.

In my case the PSA number was 258, which is pretty well within the normal range. It was higher than last year's test, but not that much, and the urologist asked why she referred me with that number. As soon as he felt the hard spot he knew. On January 16 I had a needle biopsy and on February 14 I had my prostate removed. The left lobe of my prostate was 19% cancer and the right lobe 1%.

Now comes a study that says that men who get PSA tests don't live any longer than men who don't. So maybe they're right, because as the urologist told me, "Many primary care docs wouldn't send me a guy with a PSA this low." So the guy would have cancer and no one would suspect because the PSA didn't show a large number. So what does it all mean? It means that men need the combination of the PSA and digital exam to see if there is anything unusual about the prostate.

Men are often told that prostate cancer is slow growing, so watch and wait. I have no idea whether my cancer was aggressive or slow-growing. The hard spot on my prostate was not there the year before, and then 1/5th of my prostate had gone malignant. Is that aggressive? I don't know, but I knew I wanted it out of my body, and the urologist agreed.

My friend has a dad who was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 78. His doctor told him, "We won't take it out because prostate cancer is slow growing and something else will kill you first." (I hope the doctor didn't put it that bluntly.) Now my friend's father is 88, his cancer has spread and is killing him. So my friend is mad at the doctor for not taking the prostate out originally. Who knew he'd live long enough that the doctor's prediction didn't come true? Anyway, something will get us eventually, but I want to hold off as long as possible. I've got some things to do yet, and die of cancer at a young age is not one of them. My urologist said, "You could live another twenty years!" I try not to think like that, because it puts a timetable on my life. Cancer has a way of making you sit up and take notice that what I've been denying all my life is true: there is a timetable on mine and everybody's else's life. I've just got to push it back a ways.

If eyebrows could talk

Audrey Hepburn sat across from me. I was on the sofa, and she was sitting in a large chair. Her legs were crossed, and she was wearing the shoes she was wearing on the cover of this 1957 Harper's Bazaar magazine.

They were cute, but she was also wearing the black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's, and they didn't match. Her hair was short, pixie-like, and she looked about 25-years-old.

Audrey had her elbow on the arm of the chair, her fist to her chin, profile to me, watching, wistfully, I thought, some children playing on the lawn. They could be my granddaughters, but didn't want to get up and break her reverie by peering out the window. My mind spun. I had Audrey Hepburn in front of me, and now what do I say to her? I thought, oh, I know. I started to talk, "You know, there are only three movie stars who have really stood the test of time. When it comes to beauty, I mean. There's Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and you." If I expected a reaction to what I said I was mistaken, because she acted like she didn't hear me. I continued, this time thinking that I'm going to talk, but I'll make a fool of myself: "Of the three, you are the most beautiful, Miss Hepburn."

She finally turned to me and looked at me full face, but didn't say anything. I was startled, because her eyebrows were very thick. They went almost to her hairline. I wanted to say, "Good Lord, hasn't somebody told you your eyebrows are out of control?" but I never got the chance. I woke up.

Eyebrows notwithstanding, Audrey Hepburn has a quality I find appealing. I like to look at her. I'm sure that even in her movie star days when she took off her makeup, put on a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, her hair in curlers, she didn't look so good, but that's the magic of Hollywood, the power of the glamour factories that turn out young and attractive women by the trainload. They're all cute, vivacious, have great teeth, perfect skin, perfect boobs, but they're also fake. I believe Audrey didn't need any of the stuff they have now. There was something extra about Audrey, something that Hollywood and the publicity machines can't manufacture out of today's crop of lovelies.

Audrey died when she was nearly 64, way too young. I've seen her movies and the pictures of her as a mature woman, but when I think of her I think of the young woman with the impossible eyebrows, the huge, luminous eyes. See you in my dreams, Audrey.

Goodbye Ron Silver

Yesterday Sally and I watched the 1990 movie, Reversal of Fortune, then found out via TV news that actor Ron Silver had died. Although Silver played lawyer Alan Dershowitz, on whose book Reversal of Fortune was based, he wasn't the lead character. The two leads were Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as Claus and Sunny von Bulow, respectively. The movie presented more than one point of view, relegating the Dershowitz character to an almost secondary role.

But Ron Silver was no second banana. You've seen him on various television programs and in some movies, but he was primarily a stage actor, and that's the way he comes across on screen. He projects to the last row. This picture of him as Dershowitz, with his eyes burning, is typical of his style, which I'd describe as intense.

I saw him play a quiet role, once, in The Arrival, starring--of all people--Charlie Sheen. Silver played Sheen's boss in a less histrionic manner, but you couldn't help but think there was something underneath the quiet, and there was.

Ron Silver was 62, and died after a two-year fight with esophageal cancer.

The thing that surprised me--or not, in retrospect--was that Silver went from being a liberal to a conservative "9-11 Republican" as he called himself. Under the right circumstances anyone can change a political viewpoint. Look how many Republicans voted for Obama. But that isn't what I'll remember about Ron Silver. I'll remember the burning eyes and the way he could take a scene away from another actor. Even Jeremy Irons, whose Claus von Bulow portrayal is one of the screen's greatest, took a backseat in some of the scenes he played with Silver. That's talent!

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.