Men and Girls, Women and Boys
(In this piece, I will be addressing topics relevant to sex, consent, and statutory rape. For the purposes of this blog post, I will use the term sex* to denote an instance where a minor has sex with an adult that they (the minor) purport to authorize. The reason I do this is to signify that there is a salient difference between this phenomenon, and rape commonly understood.)
Earlier this week, a popular YouTuber by the name of June Lapine (whose channel is called “Shoe0nHead”) uploaded a video on her channel entitled “The Creepy Female Teacher Epidemic.” Her video sets out to accomplish three different tasks. First, she makes known the cases of female junior high and high school teachers who have had sex* with their male students. Second, she provides commentary on the way that media outlets cover these kinds of stories, as compared to stories where girls have sex* with grown men. In the case of a woman having sex* with a boy, headlines read something to the effect of “Teacher Sleeps with Male Student.” In the case of a woman or man having sex with a girl, headlines make use of words like “rape” and “molestation.” Lastly, Lapine provides evidence to support the claim that people, by and large, have this attitude that a woman having sex* with a boy is less bad than a man having sex* with a girl because the boy “wants it” in the former case. Moreover, she argues that this attitude is unfounded.
When I watched Lapine’s video, it obviously made sense to me: molesting children is wrong, whether the perpetrator is male or female. I discussed this video with some people and discovered, as Lapine suggests, that many people fail to classify many of the cases of women having sex* with boys as molestation. In what follows, I will attempt to construct forceful arguments in favor of this conclusion and show why they fail.
Boys generally want to have sex* with their teachers, and girls generally don’t. Because of this, a boy is generally less likely to experience psychological trauma after having sex* with a female teacher whereas a girl is generally more likely to experience such trauma.
One might do well to ask the question: “Why is it that boys generally want to have sex* with their teachers?” Some might insist that social forces are at play here that condition young males to seek out these kinds of sexual experiences for power and status among peers. I do not think this is a concern that should be taken lightly. However, many would argue that hormonal differences that exist between males and females, independent of social forces that may be at play, would predispose a boy to wanting sex* more than a girl. For the sake of toppling the most iron-clad version of this argument, I will grant that there are real biological differences between males and females which may serve as the basis for this distinction.
Once we grant that boys are more likely to “want sex*,” we must ask why this serves as grounds for de-problematizing the act in question. Surely, there are many things that children want that they do not get because allowing them to get those things would be wrong. Children have future autonomy interests, or interests in being able to develop such that they can become autonomous agents someday. This is why it is wrong if a parent permits their child to get addicted to heroin, and why it is wrong for a parent to abuse their child. A boy wanting to have sex with an older woman, in other words, cannot serve as the basis for justifying why it is less wrong for a woman to have sex with a boy because the woman could be undermining the boy’s future-autonomy interests, especially if he is exceptionally young.
Psychological trauma is a complex phenomenon and if we grant that there are relevant biological distinctions between males and females, we ought to also grant that manifestations of trauma can be wildly different in males and females. Even if young girls are more prone to express outward disturbance after having sex* with a man than young boys are with a woman, the trauma of a young boy may manifest differently. Perhaps, his expectations about sex become completely different than what they otherwise would be. Or he becomes deeply heartbroken when he realizes that he cannot express any feelings that have been developed for his older sexual partner in a public context. He might become depressed later in life, and bear his burdens in a manner characteristic of repression. Male trauma may be qualitatively different than female trauma in relevant ways, so it would be naive to suggest that boys are generally less traumatized by sexual experiences that occur early in life.
There might be a boy who is extremely self-possessed who is genuinely able to give consent to have sex with their female teacher. If this is the case, there can’t be much wrong with the sexual act in question.
Given the fact that females tend to mature emotionally faster than boys, I find it more plausible to suggest that a girl could be sufficiently self-possessed and consent to sex with her male teacher. That being said, we run into an epistemic problem: How do we know that someone is self-possessed to such an extent that they can authoritatively consent to having sex with somebody who is that much older than them? Granted, this problem exists for any person at any stage in life, but it is exceptionally pointed in the case of individuals who are on the precipice of adulthood. It is safe to say that 9-year-olds are almost always too juvenile to be self-possessed, and that 40-year-olds are almost always sufficiently self-possessed enough to give sexual consent. But what about a 16-year-old who appears to be extremely self-possessed? A 19-year-old who is extremely immature? We need to have a workable conception of those faculties relevant to the authorization of sexual consent, and must furthermore be cautious when engaging in sexual relations with people who are significantly younger than us because the stakes may be just that high (refer to the conversation above about future autonomy interests).
This criticism completely overlooks a crucial aspect of the teacher-student sex* problem which makes it uniquely wrong. Teachers are in a position of authority, and can exploit this authority to manipulate students into doing things they otherwise would not do. Just because a boy is self-possessed does not mean that he cannot fall prey to consenting to something that, all things considered, he would not do. Consider scenarios in which a male employer threatens a female employee with a salary cut or promises her a raise in exchange for sexual favors. We view these scenarios as wrong, even if there was a part of the woman that was okay with the sex, because individuals in positions of authority are obligated not to knowingly wield their power so as to get those whom they have authority over to compromise their most intimate parts of themselves.
When it comes to the molestation scandals associated with the Catholic Church, people are rightfully outraged. Little boys being preyed upon by men is categorically wrong, and I would hope that few people would disagree with me on this point. But I would like you to imagine a perfectly conceivable scenario wherein an altar boy might have “wanted” to perform sexual favors for a priest. Everybody in the boy’s Church tells him that his duties are first and foremost to God and to the Church. The priest tells the boy that performing sexual favors for him would help the Church and would be what God wants. The boy, in that moment, wants to do what he’s about to do. But what he does ends up hurting him in the long-run. In this scenario, we call the priest a predator, the scum of the earth.
But this outrage suddenly falls away when the child predator is a woman rather than a man. Quite frankly, I do not know why this is the case. All I know is that we have to start calling cases of women having sex* with boys what it is: statutory rape, molestation, and pedophilia.