Female teachers having sex with students is rampant. At least, that’s what media reports would have us believe.
Female teachers having sex with students
The prevailing view is that female teachers have nothing on their male counterparts in this regard. A report in the Washington Post (on January 20, 2015) affirmed that view. It showed that male teachers accounted for two-thirds of teacher-student sexual relationships in 2014.
Yet female teachers having sex with students dominate media reports. Perhaps that’s because it strikes most as a man-bites-dog phenomenon.
But there’s no denying that pairing is more titillating than male teachers having sex with students. In other words, latter-day Mrs. Robinsons (The Graduate) get more likes than latter-day Prof. Humbert Humberts (Lolita).
These female teachers are shattering gender stereotypes. There’s no denying that. The presumption has always been that men think with their dicks. And that this causes them to prey on kids.
What, then, are we to make of the increasing number of women doing the same? That they think with their clits?
Lindsey Jarvis got caught with her panties down just last week.
[Married teacher] Lindsey Jarvis, 27, allegedly had sex with the underage boy [i.e., younger than 16] when she worked as a social studies teacher at Woodford County Middle School in Kentucky. … The victim told police that he slept with Jarvis, while his cellphone had evidence that he and the teacher were in a romantic relationship. …
Jarvis was arrested by Lexington police and pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape on Monday.
(New York Post, June 21, 2017)
Teachers cannot legally have “romantic relationship[s]” with underage students. That’s why the police arrested Jarvis.
Trendsetting Mary Kay Letourneau
The case of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau (34) and student Vili Fualaau (12) is instructive.
The police arrested Letourneau in 1996 for having sex with Fualaau. It was as much a sexual scandal as a cultural aberration back then. Yet their “romantic relationship” survived her spending seven-and-a-half years in prison.
They married in 2005 and have two teenage daughters. And, in the May 2017 edition of Vanity Fair, they said their bond is stronger than ever. That is, despite serial reports of their marital doom.
The point is that their aberrant relationship soon became a cultural trend. Female teachers soon defied all social norms to have sexual relationships with students – the legal recriminations be damned.
Unlike their male counterparts, everyone presumed female teachers were sensible enough to resist jail bait. Yet a shocking number of them followed the precedent Letourneau set. They ate the bait and ended up in jail.
But reports about their exploits were so titillating that I couldn’t resist commenting. And boy, did I play to stereotype. The title of one of my first commentaries says it all:
- “Hot Teachers Helping Schoolboys Think with Their Other Head,” June 24, 2005.
My only redeeming claim is that I came to my senses mere months later. That’s when, in another post, I laid out a jurisprudential principle for dealing with these cases. It still passes muster today.
That principle led me to write what I thought was the more socially redeeming, “Surely Some Student-Teacher Sexual Relationships Are Okay!” August 9, 2013. Yet, it incited the same amount of flak. Hell, you’d think I had blessed the mortal sin of Catholic priests raping little boys.
The role of social media
Every case of female teachers having sex with their students now “goes viral.” Indeed, social media posts explain why so many think female teachers are more predatory.
What’s more, social media facilitate these relationships. Because they often begin with messaging that leads to sexting. Notably, White females compose nearly 100 percent of these predatory, pedophile pedagogues. I’m not sure why…
But social media have blurred or eradicated all lines of social decorum. Gone are the days of personal discretion, professional boundaries, and public decency.
Exhibit A is the self-subjugating craze of “ordinary” women objectifying themselves. That makes female teachers contributing to the delinquency of their students seem normal. And their grooming often involves sending explicit selfies.
Never mind that Letourneau and Fualaau defied this cautionary fairy tale. But this is not the forum to delve any further into this topic.
Instead, I’ll suffice to share that I’m an ardent feminist. And I am genuinely dismayed that so many women are aping men in this sexually perverse context.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Tuesday, at 6:18 p.m