Hot Teen Sex

On my late night post regarding real-life Mrs Robinson, Mary Kay Letourneau, reader Lloyd Albano fairly asks:

Now, for Stephen – you rightly pooh pooh the prosecution of this behavior, at least when underage men are involved. How do you square this with your/my/our condemnation of the Catholic church for enabling teenage boy/priest sex. Seems like those boy scouts and army drill sergeants were right after all.

I’d have no quarrel at all with the Catholic Church if the underage sex were:

1) Rare.
2) Not covered up.

Once again, the cover-up hurts more than the crime. Even today, the Church can’t bring itself to report priests who only get caught one time, providing they get caught by the Church and not the cops. The cover-up is not just systematic, but also systemic. Not so in the case of Letourneau.

Second, a teacher taking advantage of a student is not much different than a priest taking advantage of a parishoner. My earlier post had moved away from those instances, and towards adult-teen sex in general. And in general, I think that young male/older female sex is less harmful than older male/young female sex. Like it or not, there is a power structure in sexual relations. In some ways, the structure favors males, and in others, women.

Is that a biased view? Perhaps. It certainly isn’t gender-neutral — but, then again, neither is reality.

After all that, I feel the need to re-read Mike Hendrix’s essay on Tough Chicks, and send a really nasty email to Melissa at work.