Respect Authority

It feels like far too often lately I’ve been reading about misguided female teachers getting caught pants-down, sometimes literally, with their students. At least four times in the last two months have I stumbled across a local news story about some lonely 33-year-old who convinced both herself and a semi-willing eighth grader to experiment sexually behind the jungle gym.

These stories culminated earlier this month with the tale of a Long Island PTA mom found pantless in a car with a 13-year-old boy. There’s a lot wrong with this picture:  44-year-olds and 13-year-olds probably shouldn’t be hanging out alone in cars regardless, but even when they do it’s most likely in everyone’s best interest that pants be worn all around. Oh, and when cops ask what you were doing, and you’re not wearing pants, “kissing” may not fly as a valid answer.

In all seriousness, “Hot for Teacher” is a good song and everything, but in practice the concept is both disturbing and way illegal. This isn’t to say I didn’t have my fair share of adolescent daydreams over younger male teachers - shit, I didn’t volunteer to be player manager of Mr. Willard’s baseball team in junior year just to boost my physics grade - but there’s more than a fine line between innocent crushes and not-so-innnocent statutory rape. At this point I’m inclined to insist that my own hypothetical children have elderly teachers, preferably geriatric. At least that way I can be mildly more sure I won’t catch them banging more than erasers.

After all, who could forget the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who served seven years in prison for having sex with her student, only to emerge from jail in time for their nuptials. The two now have multiple children - who hopefully know better than to regale people with the story of how their parents met.

And since I know few pre-teen boys with the inclination or nerve to turn away the advances of a woman more than a decade their senior, the responsibility here quite obviously falls on these convoluted cougars to stop dipping their pen in the company ink. We can’t send kids anywhere these days - churches, schools, the backseat of strangers’ cars - without running the risk of them coming home abused by someone in a position of actual or moral authority.

At least not until college - at which point sleeping with your teachers is totally okay.