By Walt Forest
Every few weeks the local news in my area (and perhaps yours) runs a story about a female teacher who has been arrested for allegedly having sex with an underage male student. A mug shot of her is included—especially if she is good-looking.
Though presented as journalism, these “hot teacher” stories are essentially propaganda. Their purpose is to convey not truth (in fact, as I will show, they suggest the opposite of truth) but rather the ideology of “correct” gender politics which is causing great pain to great numbers of men.
There is a temptation to point to these stories about female teachers who have sex with underage male students and say, “See? Women are just as often guilty of sexual crimes as men are, if not more so.” But when we say this, we are basically agreeing that female teachers face the same sexual temptations male teachers do and succumb to them just as often. This is to say, we are agreeing that male and female sexualities are the same—a myth which does men more harm than perhaps any other.
We should resist the temptation of the women-are-just-as-guilty argument. We should instead denounce these “hot teacher” stories as the misleading and unethical journalism that they are.
Most local news organizations focus almost entirely on female teachers who have been arrested, and ignore male teachers who allegedly commit the same crime. There are exceptions—when a male teacher sexually abuses a young child, for example—but it is usually the female teachers who get the headlines. This unbalanced coverage creates the impression that female teachers have sex with underage students just as often, or even more often, than male teachers do.
The reality is the extreme opposite. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 95% of statutory rape victims are female. More than 99% of offenders are male These statistics do take into account incidents involving teachers and underage students. The Bureau of Justice Statistics gives similar numbers for sexual assault of minors.
Are some of these male teachers falsely accused? No doubt. Do some cases in which the offender is female go unreported? Yes.
My purpose is not to deny that female teachers are sometimes sex offenders, nor that their victims are sometimes underage men. It is rather to point out just how rare these incidents are, how the media attempts to mislead us into thinking they are common, and especially how the myth of sameness, to which these stories contribute, is hurting men.
How does this myth hurt men?
Set aside for a moment the image of the hot teacher and her underage male victim which the media force on us with such insistence. Instead imagine a far more common scenario: a young man (or for that matter, a not-so-young man) who does NOT have sex with his teacher, but desperately wants to. In fact this man would like to have sex with many of the women around him, but — with very few exceptions — he cannot. In short, he is an ordinary man with ordinary desires. He may have lived at nearly any point in history, in nearly any culture, but let’s place him in our time, our culture, for the problem I describe is not male sexuality, which is timeless and universal, but the way our society denies this sexuality and pretends that it is the same as women’s.
We bombard this man from all sides with false assurances that our society is now sexually free. We teach him that the roles traditionally assigned to men are no longer necessary. We pretend that our rituals of courtship are obsolete. In short, we mislead him in the very areas where he most needs guidance.
More to the point, our media and increasingly ordinary people assure this man that women he hardly knows (even his teachers) will suddenly lead him by the hand to their beds for no other reason than the pleasure of having sex with him, “no strings attached.” This kind of thing is ordinary, we tell him. It “happens all the time.”
When it does not happen—of course it never does—he is left to think that he must be something less than an ordinary man. If he dares to voice his disappointment, we tell him that he places excessive importance on sex, views women as “objects,” and the rest of the standard pop feminist rhetoric designed to put the blame back on the man himself. We blame the man because we MUST if we are to avoid blaming ourselves for all the lies we are telling him.
These lies hurt men. It is difficult for anyone who has not suffered this hurt first hand to understand just how bad it can be, but from my own experience I believe these lies are helping to create the ongoing male suicide epidemic (which our society, tellingly, also refuses to acknowledge). These lies certainly make countless men miserable. For this reason I believe exposing the myth that male and female sexualities are the same should be the men’s movement’s first priority. Hot teacher stories obviously make up only a tiny part of this myth, but because they are such a blatant distortion of reality, they are a good place to start.
