Where the Boys Are
The Mary K. Letourneaus of the world — and what they say about men.

By David Klinghoffer, editorial director, Toward Tradition and author of The Lord Will Gather Me In.
August 22, 2001 9:00 a.m.

onfession: As a fourth grader I had a love affair with my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Chirinian. Well, "love affair" is a bit strong. I swooned with a secret crush but all I can remember getting from her was a Citizen of the Month award with a heartbreakingly terse citation she'd filled in by hand: "Quiet, gets his work done, and doesn't bug people."

That was 1975. The latest trend in education has male students getting to know their female teachers in a more special way. The Pacific Northwest has seen the widest outbreak of this, starting with the Mary K. Letourneau case out of Des Moines, Washington. Back in 1996, 12-year-old Vili Fualaau bet a friend $20 he could seduce Letourneau, then 34 years old and his sixth-grade teacher. Vili won the bet. He went on to father two children by her. When she gets out of the Washington Corrections Center for Women in a few years, he intends to elope with her to Paris.

Lately, in Marysville, Washington, a 37-year-old second-grade female teacher has been accused of having sex with a 14-year-old boy and fondling another. "She loves kids," said the mother of another of her students. Evidently. In Federal Way, a Seattle suburb, a teacher was convicted of child rape for loving a kid too well, namely her 15-year-old special-ed student. Over at Puyallup High School, south of Seattle, a 44-year-old teacher merely kissed a 16-year-old boy in her American Sign Language class, which turns to be a misdemeanor. No fuddy-duddy, she also took him to see Shrek and got a "Goth" tattoo. He praised her for "showing me another side of life." Just across the border in British Columbia, a 30-year-old teacher has gone to jail for ten months for sleeping with her 17-year-old student.

Evidence that female teachers across the country are showing boys another side of life comes most recently from Charlotte, N.C., where a 39-year-old was found in a van, naked from the waist down with a 13-year-old from her science class. She pleaded guilt to taking indecent liberties with a minor.

No indications yet as to whether these boys are getting their work done or bugging people any more than they might otherwise. Actually I'm not too worried about the minors themselves, who will enjoy dining out on hot-for-teacher stories with their buddies for years to come.

I'm worried about what this says about guys my age, thirtysomethings who should be the more logical love interests of these teachers. It used to be taken for granted that women go for older men, but adult American males have been getting younger and younger. Not literally. (If only!) Rather by any measure you can think of, apart from the strictly biological, men are choosing to remain boys.

I say this as a 35-year-old who shows up at the office every day in clothes that, 40 years ago, no 35-year-old would have considered wearing in public except maybe to the beach. Jeans, flip-flops, t-shirts. I'm not alone. Men who ought to be going to work in suits are to be seen on the streets of American cities in all kinds of ridiculously youthful getups, often with the word "Abercrombie" plastered on them. And the clothes are just the outward indication of an inward devolution.

We marry later than our fathers, much later than our grandfathers, because we're scared of giving up the feeling of boundless possibilities that is one of the blessings of youth. Every time I read a news story about "air rage, " where a guy in his thirties or forties throws a fit on an airplane, I think of the fits of spoiled rage I'd throw as a six-year-old. Listen to guys my age talk about their favorite sports teams — the maniacal passion for ball games. It would sound strange to men who fought in world wars, where the opposing team was Germans or Japanese. No doubt this accounts for the fascination with books and movies about World War II, when American men were unambiguously men.

No wonder that Mary K. Letourneau and her girlfriends find themselves fooling around in vans with 13-year-olds. She first encountered the police when a cruiser picked her up in a van with Vili, in a parking lot near the Des Moines Marina. At first the cops couldn't quite believe that anything amiss was going on. They forgot that American women of Letourneau's age are in the strange position of choosing between two classes of boys: those below age 20 or so, and those over.

Women of marrying age find few actual men, so some are going for boys, who in any event have more hair. Who can blame them? Teachers, who encounter more boys under 15 than most women, were naturally the first to get caught, but they won't be the last.