Christina Formella, a 30-year-old Illinois high school teacher, was arrested last week for engaging in inappropriate sexual contact with a 15-year-old male student. Formella is married, and conventionally attractive.
There has been a rash of such stories in recent years: easy-on-the-eyes, often wedded teachers having sex with their teenage male charges.
I attended high school between 1982 and 1986. Most of my teachers were Baby Boomers. I’m sure such things happened back then, but it’s safe to say that the frequency was exponentially smaller. I can’t recall any such stories making the rumor mill at my high school. Nor do I recall seeing any news stories about Boomer female teachers poaching their Gen X male students.
This seems to be a Millennial and Gen Z thing. The upsurge in such cases corresponds directly to the entry of Millennial and Gen Z women into the teaching profession. Based on her current age, the aforementioned Christina Formella was born in 1994 or 1995. My generation was already long out of high school by then, and our former teachers were already thinking about retirement.
And yet, seduction at the hands of an older woman was a constant fantasy among teenage males of my generation, at least in the teen movies of the era. In 1983, Rob Lowe was seduced by a friend’s mom in Class. In Coach (1978) Cathy Lee Crosby portrayed a retired Olympic gold medalist who ends up as the coach of a high school boy’s basketball team. And of course, sparks fly between her and one of her hunky teenage players.
Just in case you didn’t get the message, there was also the Van Halen song, “Hot for Teacher” (1984). The MTV video (which every high school boy of the mid-1980s saw, multiple times) depicts a group of adolescent boys lusting after their much older vixen of a homeroom teacher.
There was no hand-wringing in the media about any of this. It was basically accepted that lusting after older women was something that heterosexual teenage boys simply did. There was probably some truth to that assumption.
I speak from experience here. In the summer of 1981 I was 13 years old. The object of my adoration that year was the 19-year-old girl who lived across the street. Needless to say, she didn’t know I was alive.
I can’t recall any specific attractions to any of my teachers. But during those formative years, I was alternately drawn to: the twenty- and thirty-something women who worked at my dad’s place of business, the 40-year-old mother of another boy who lived down the street, and a 30-ish woman who worked at the KFC where I worked when I was 16.
Celebrity crushes have never been a major factor in my life, but at age 13 I did harbor a boyish lust for Olivia Newton-John. (That was the year “Physical” hit the charts.) She was then in her thirties, and about the same age as my parents.
Not that I discriminated against girls my own age, mind you. A teenage boy thinks about sex 24 hours per day, and he casts a wide net. (I am now in my 50s. Being far more mature, I now think about sex no more than 12 or 14 hours per day.)
I don’t claim to know the minds of women, gay people, or transgendered individuals. But I do know the minds of young males, in the adolescent rush of testosterone. I know, because I used to be one such male, in the adolescent rush of testosterone.
The inanity of political correctness clouds everything. Since the 1980s, it has become verboten to suggest that men and women are fundamentally different, that we have different levels of aggression, or that male and female sexuality represent two different phenomena. As a result, our media outlets feel compelled to describe Christina Formella (and female teachers like her) as rapists and child molesters. Fox News, for example, declared that Formella “molested” the 15-year-old boy.
I know that some of you are already going apoplectic. Some feminists will be irate at me for suggesting that women do not have the agency to engage in a male-specific sex crime. Men’s rights activists—always eager to ventilate their various grievances—will complain that I am going easy on the women: “Yet another example of female privilege!” the MRAs will snort.
Let me be clear here: there are any number of reasons why a 30-year-old woman who would have sex with a 15-year-old boy should not have a teaching license. This is certainly not “normal” behavior for an adult woman. And yes, there should be legal consequences.
But we do no one any favors by pretending that an attractive adult woman has to force herself on a heterosexual teenage boy. As a former teenage boy myself, I simply know otherwise.
-ET