Boy, that article I am afraid even though mostly objective and dispassionate still has hints of sympathy for these vicious cruel predatory monsters, who even though either spending their entire life in prison or you know, like dead, should in no way shape or form to get even the slightest shred of sympathy compared to the poor wholly innocent pure and faultless tiny little cherub of an eighteen yr old.
The women teachers on the other hand are also faultless. Those boys (girls?) should be tried as adults and sent to Huntsville forever. Forever.
And, as a reminder that one should never read the comments, the top comment in the Post suggested that in a small town, there's a relatively small dating pool, so new teachers fresh out of college would find the most concentrated pool of age-appropriate (! again) prospects at their workplace. The female teachers were mostly fairly young, late 20s (which is still old enough that the idea of dating a 19 year old student shouldn't be too appealing), but the guy who killed himself was 41.
At any rate, it's clear that there's something quite wrong here. I suspect retraining teachers to clarify that it's wrong to date the students won't do much to fix it.
Yeah. I think probably they already knew it wasn't legit.
the guy who killed himself was 41
The second link says 47, not 41. And he was married, so you'd think the commenter would realize he had the whole dating thing covered.
I don't know, I would think dating is even trickier for married people.
You kind of have to wonder if the number of predatory teachers was a statistical fluke or something strange going in in the school culture. Like, was there some kind of implicit understanding that students were fair game? And if so, how does that get started?
Or if you start normalizing small talk about students being hot, you could probably set the stage for it to escalate ion a case by case basis.
When a TV show is made based on your school.
They did seem to be especially hot students.
6: Sorry, you're right. Was going by memory. I have no idea whatsoever why a 47 year old guy might be attractive to an 18 year old girl (other than daddy issues), although I get why 18 year old girls are attractive to older guys.
Maybe they thought their students were all actors in their mid-20s playing teenagers.
12: Remind me in four years and I'll check.
Huh, I was pretty sure Moby wasn't a 14 year old girl.
Oh, depends on the 18 year old, depends on the 47 year old. You never had impure thoughts about a middle-aged actor as a teenager?
The roller skate dance dude who rents one of the studios in Sunday mornings is videoing himself, he's giving instruction as he dances. Home exercise video??? Seems awfully dangerous.
Alan Rickman was an early object of my impure thoughts. Mmmmmmm.
Teachers interact with a ton of teenagers. If they're reasonably charismatic, decent looking for their age and predatory I don't find it at all bizarre that they'll find students who they can successfully seduce or even the occasional one that is interested without grooming.
Have I told y'all about the scandal at my high school? This was several years ago now. A high school history teacher and cross country coach had sex with a girl on the cross country team. The teacher is my second cousin, is a year older than me, graduated in the high school class ahead of mine. Also the son-in-law of the then-principal of the high school, and father of four. (I was not surprised at all. This cousin had always been a little shit, and I wouldn't put much past him.) The trial was a huge deal in the county, with everyone taking sides. Cousin went to jail for a few years, the principal had to resign.
The student involved was the much younger sister of a guy who was in my high school class. He went kind of insane over the incident, and started all of these public campaigns to "crack down on crime" in our county. He ran for judge with that as his platform. He tried to smear my cousin's entire extended family in really ineffective and creepy ways. No excuses for my cousin, but all of this guy's reactions had weird paternalistic creepiness about his sister's honor.
And then! a few years later the guy from my class was teaching high school (his law career never took off, I guess), and he got fired for having sex with a student. What?! I'm not sure he ever did any jail time for it (unlike my cousin), but he did get disbarred. And I just now googled him, and the website STL Mugshots shows that he got booked last month for probation violation.
Man, small towns. I knew both those guys really well.
19: It's not just small towns. A guy I was friends with in high school who went on to teach at a rival high school was disciplined a few years ago for sexually harassing one of his students. (And one of the parents in his school district now has a website -- the first hit if you Google my friend's name -- hosting all of the documents from the school district's investigation.)
Alan Rickman was an early object of my impure thoughts.
Who can resist sexy Obadiah Slope?
I would also like to speak up for the potential sexiness of people in their 40s. And not just men! Anna Gunn is my age, for instance.
22 s/b Connie Britton, of course.
Sense & Sensibility, was the voice that did for me. Then in a very disturbing (but by no means less effective) way An Awfully Big Adventure. Didn't know about Barchester role until years later and actually have never seen it, but understand he really chews up the scenery.
I saw him as Valmont in Les liaisons dangereuses on Broadway when I was in high school. Hubba hubba.
I was a practical sort of 18 year old, I guess. A 47 year old would have been about my parents' age. I didn't find most movie stars that age especially dreamy (I'd guess mid-20s was probably about where I stopped finding stars attractive when I was a teenager). I had real life age-appropriate boyfriends who were sufficient for daydreaming and sex acts ending in -job. I usually figured if someone more than about five years older was interested, they probably were immature in some way I'd get sick of. Now that it's age-appropriate, 40somethings are totally sexy. 19 year old guys, though, are most certainly not, even if I would have thought so when I was 18.
My last year of high school, a friend of a friend had to register as a sex offender when he (a very immature 23) ran afoul of his 16 yo girlfriends' parents. He lost his job at a daycare and had to move into his parents' basement.
Heh, I assumed the Alan Rickman thing was because of Die Hard.
When I was 14 I had a crush on the I think 23yo guy who taught the lifeguarding class I was taking. Then he asked me out. Any crush-like feelings disappeared immediately. (After I refused him, he told me that he had dated girls younger than me, but they were clearly mature enough to handle it. Creeper!)
The willingness to mention and fixate on a particular older man, very typical of teenage girls in my youth, wasn't something balanced by any attraction I had to older women. There'd be boy-talk about the sexiness of movie stars, but it always seemed to me to have a pro-forma, performative quality; I didn't feel it and didn't take it seriously.
To restate what I said last week, fortyish women now are the most attractive to me, IRL and onscreen both.
I nominate Essie Davis
I nominate Ossie Davis. Rowr.
I really liked Bruce Willis in Moonlighting/Die Hard, but he was only thirty/early thirties. Have never understood the Alan Rickman thing, yuck.
On people in their 40s: Tina Fey. Amirite, gynophiles? (Is there a better noun for all people sexually attracted to womenfolk?)
Have never understood the Alan Rickman thing
You have to be an American sucker for British accents.
Asilon, did you go over to Ireland this weekend?
More a pitch/texture thing, actually.
No, but my in-laws did. Poor Dan Martin - think C actually cried on Friday for him. C got a text from his dad today about where they were, and something about possums down. C assumed this was some quaint Irish placename. Half an hour later, got another text: possums should be pissing.
Did he give the possums a diuretic?
For me the Alan Rickman thing was because of Truly Madly Deeply. Maybe the scenery-chewing Sheriff of Nottingham a little. Saw them either on video or TV when I was in college - certainly didn't have any interest in middle aged men as a younger teen.
37: yes weather has been especially crap last little while. Niece's first communion yesterday, children afterwards all got soaked on bouncy castle.
Pissing Down also sounds like a quaint Irish place name.
Pissing Downs is the site of an unpleasant horse race.
Is "pissing down" not an American idiom too?
My name is Moby and it's been about an hour since my last pretending not to understand something perfectly obvious so I can make a joke about it.
On people in their 40s: Tina Fey. Amirite, gynophiles? (Is there a better noun for all people sexually attracted to womenfolk?)
I like "gynophiles." I hadn't thought of it before. It would be interesting if "gynophiles" and "androphiles" because the default way to talk about sexuality, rather than "gay" and "straight."
Also, you are of course right about Tina Fey.
45 - obviously I never take anything you say seriously. Other people confuse me though. Where's Standpipe when you need hir?
It is exceedingly odd to observe the beginnings if pairing off among the kid's peers. He is happily above/below it all, but aware and gives us updates. At both schools the kids have generally known each other for years and years, so we know the protagonists more than I'd thought we would. I am sufficiently not-idiotic to keep to myself any hint of preference for any of the young women as a first love, but I definitely have opinions.
Actually that last is not strictly true. During the Ncracker one of the 10 year olds (?, could be 11) proclaimed backstage that her putative best friend was in love with my kid, to a crowd of baby mice, party girls and soldiers. During a performance. There were floods of tears, hurried repair of eyeliner and inner reserves of grit called on to face the audience for the Chinese dance. Very nice girl, smart and funny, but parents seem to be some inscrutable combo of tattoo friendly right wing religious home schooling Texans strictly adhering to a blizzard of dietary restrictions, marooned in SF. So when discussing with the kid that I very much appreciated his calm and gentle way of dealing with the whole brouhaha, I did mention that whilst the girl seems quite nice the entire familial package seems like trouble, to be avoided for emotional entanglement.
NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH TEXANS.
>There were floods of tears, hurried repair of eyeliner and inner reserves of grit called on to face the audience
And that was just dq's kid. NTTAWWT.
He wasn't in Chinese but they totally wouldn't hesitate on the eyeliner front! Ballet's demographics are heavily skewed towards Exoticastan for both gals and guys.
I've heard, "It's pissing out" to describe a moderate, but strong rain.
tattoo friendly right wing religious home schooling Texans strictly adhering to a blizzard of dietary restrictions
Are they rockabillys? I bet they're rockabillys.
Oooh I think you're on to something.
Rockabilly dietary restrictions: Go!
It would be interesting if "gynophiles" and "androphiles" because the default way to talk about sexuality, rather than "gay" and "straight."
Stay traditional and just mention whether you like snails or oysters. Or, indeed, both.
MY TASTE EXTENDS TO BOTH JELLO SALAD AND CORN DOGS.
Kate Beckinsale is 40. Mary-Louise Parker is 49.
Also, I had multiple crushes on middle-aged teachers as a high school student.
Who didn't? I guess I should have acted on my crush and see how far it got me (it wouldn't have gotten me very far, I don't think.)
I had a crush on a teacher who was probably 30 or younger at the time, and apparently I'm one of the weird ones here?
I know a guy who waited until after graduation to get blown by his hot (~50 y.o.) teacher. It was just a one-off thing, but there was clearly some genuine sexual energy there.
It's like the marshmallow test for adults and near adults.
12:
Why do you care what sort of guys an 18-year old girl is attracted to?
Maybe she's attracted to older guys because they can provide things like financial comfort, emotional security, and a quasi-parental, quasi-mentoring role in her life. Or maybe because they just have the emotional maturity that an 18-year old boy is likely to lack, and are less likely than the 18-year old football captain to be using her for sex. That's what girls I know who date older guys usually say: "unlike the boys my age, they're interested in more than just sex". And maybe, most improtantly of all, she doesn't subscribe to feminitwit propaganda that tells us that relationships should be between relative 'equals' in terms of age, economic status, life experience, maturity, etc. (St. Paul, in his advice to husbands and wives, said very little about 'equality', and a lot more about duties of the superior to care for the inferior, and the inferior to submit to the superior.)
I'm in my mid-30s and (in theory) have a date tomorrow with an 18 year old. I hope I'm lucky enough to continue to be able to date 18-year olds (if I'm still single) when I'm 43, or for that matter when I'm 53.