Incinerated Innocence

Must-read article here:

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/other-side-story?fullpage=1

I wonder how often these illicit teacher-student relationships occur. Considering the number of times this sort of scandal has arisen in my own high school, perhaps it is more common than frequently reported in mass media. When I was in eighth grade, a chemistry teacher from my neighborhood high school was arrested for sexual misconduct with a minor. In my freshman year of high school, a yearbook teacher got in trouble for charges related to child pornography. Three years after I graduated, an assistant principal was arrested for unlawful sexual contact with a minor--a girl who happened to be from my brother's year.

Or perhaps I just grew up in a strange environment, where it seems underneath the haze of upper-middle-class malaise bubbled a darkness that I didn't comprehend at the time. I've always wondered if I experienced a "normal" teenage experience. Was it normal that by my freshman year of high school, I had known three people--all within two years of my age, people that I had interacted personally with in varying degrees--who died? There are people who experienced more traumatic losses at a young age than mine. But there are also luckier people who do not encounter these reminders of mortality until later in their lives.

A piano teacher I admired--who passed away few years ago from a heart attack, he was only in his forties--once asked my teacher if I had experienced a traumatic event as a child. He told her that I connected with sorrowful songs far better than anything else. He was the one who recommended that I learn to play Rachmaninoff's Elegie. My mother and my teacher assured him that I had a fairly tranquil upbringing. But as I thought about this incident over time, I began to wonder if I had subconsciously internalized the jolting awareness of my own mortality as a child. Though she and I were two years apart and not the closest of friends, I think that regardless, learning as a sixth grader that your friend was shot and killed by her own father in a murder-suicide will leave some kind of impact on you.

Going back to the teacher-student relationship addressed in the article, I have always been appalled by how much these sort of affairs are romanticized and fantasized in certain subcultures of fiction. I can't count how many times I've encountered this trope in shoujo manga. As much as I reviled the patronizing condescension I faced when I was a teenager, in retrospect I feel that those years were akin to how I feel under the influence of alcohol. You think you're in total control, but in reality you fumble around and make many questionable decisions. Can a 14-year-old and a 23-year-old actually be in love? Perhaps. But I would hazard to say that most 14-year-old girls are not on the same page mentally or emotionally as 23-year-old men.

But the devil's advocate may ask if my opinion would change if she had been seventeen at the time instead. Just because you legally become an adult at age eighteen doesn't mean you mentally become one, nor does it mean that nobody under the age of eighteen has the ability to make mature rational decisions. Looking back, as an eighteen-year-old I was definitely not mature enough to handle a sexual relationship--and considering the fact that the "teenage hormones" people speak of seemed to have bypassed me completely during high school, everything worked out for the best. But I have friends who were curious at a younger age and who were "ready" by the time they took the plunge. Are things more "okay" if a "ready"16-year-old satiates their curiosity with an immature 17-year-old, versus if they were with, say, a mature 19-year-old who treats them with care?

A college friend and I discovered recently that through a couple of degrees of separation, we both knew of a couple separated by an eight-year age difference. The girl is a high school senior; the boy is a medical student three years older than me, which puts him in his mid-twenties. Supposedly, their parents approve of the relationship. Perhaps we can say they are in love. But is this situation tolerable at least partly because he does not hold a direct authority position over her? Or is it because she's almost, if not already, an adult under the eyes of the law? How on earth can you qualify when someone is "too young to know better"?