When I was fifteen years old, I fell deeply in love with my geometry teacher. Let’s call her “Ms. Shimizu.” In my recollection, she was tall, thirtyish, and resplendent with confidence and grace. I would’ve gladly let her teach me the rudiments of grown-up romance. Ms. Shimizu possessed wisdom enough to strategically ignore my fumbling teenage flirtation. But she spoke to me like an adult, teaching me the respect I should expect to give and receive as an adult.
I remembered Ms. Shimizu this week, when former Fox News ingenue Megyn Kelly delivered her cack-handed and obnoxious defense of grown men chasing teenage girls. Kelly’s claim of a categorical difference between prepubescent children, and adolescent teens, provides just enough rhetorical coverage to justify those who already believe that. But it does nothing to address the question of whether teenagers can provide informed consent to adult sex.
My teenage infatuation with Ms. Shimizu taught me two tentpole principles of my philosophy of consent. First, yes, adolescents are sexual beings, and censorious adult efforts to squelch teen sexuality have maladaptive consequences later in adulthood. But second, adolescents don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. Teenagers have sex for the reason grade-schoolers run and jump and scream constantly: they’re learning to control their rapidly changing bodies.
This carries an important corollary: I can only imagine three reasons adults would pursue sexual relationships with teenagers. Either they’ve forgotten the different reasons adults and teens have sex; or they’re enacting their own arrested adolescent psychosexual development; or they’re simply bad people. Each of these reasons carries its own appropriate response: education, treatment, or punishment. But fabricating excuses, as Kelly did, only makes other adults complicit.
Mass media in the last twenty-five years exacerbates this tendency. (Maybe longer, but that’s when I noticed it.) Prime-time dramas like The O.C., Gossip Girl, or Pretty Little Liars feature sexually precocious “kidults” who often pursue relationships with surrounding adults, including teachers. I still cringe at Veronica Mars, whose teenage protagonist dated an adult cop. Though targeted at teenaged and twenty-something audiences, these shows have significant adult viewership.
These are mass media caricatures, sure, but as our economy allows adults fewer opportunities to make friends their own age, it’s easy to forget the distinction. Age-inappropriate relationships reflect a common adolescent desire: many of us thought ourselves unfairly circumscribed by social standards. And many of us wanted an adult mentor to teach us the ways of adulthood, skipping the fumbling experimentation we needed to understand ourselves.
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Furthermore, these shows distort adult perceptions of what teenagers even are. Labor laws and the vicissitudes of puberty make real teenagers difficult to work with, so most mass media teenagers are played by actors in their twenties. Except for parents or working teachers, most adults have limited opportunities to even see teenagers regularly, and as we drift further from our own teens—when we considered ourselves very mature—we think TV teens are realistic.
Our society produces two equally deleterious responses to adolescent sexuality. Conservative parents advocate for “purity culture” and abstinence-only sex education. These movements keep teenagers swaddled in childhood innocence for years, then dump them on adulthood’s doorstep catastrophically unprepared. More progressive parents take a permissive hand, if not outright encouraging adolescent sexuality, at least providing insufficient adult guidance for making good choices.
Then there’s the third option. Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps an extreme example of adult exploitation, an attempt to commodify teenagers’ sexual inexperience. But almost every teenage girl, and no small fraction of teenage boys, has the experience of being propositioned by adults who see adolescents’ bodies as something to consume. When youths are mature enough to have sex, but not experienced enough to understand sex, they exist in a precarious balance.
Bill Clinton and President Taco may be extreme examples, insulated from consequences for years by power and money. But even before the Epstein revelations, both men were famed for their voracious sexual appetites, both seeing women not as fully developed humans, but as vessels for male gratification. Both men, born to absentee fathers, pursued wealth, power, and the attendant sexual attention, as shields to protect the festering wounds in their souls.
All this is to say, I understand Megyn Kelly’s intent; but she’s still wrong. It’s possible to acknowledge teenagers as sexual beings, and respect their arc of self-discovery, without throwing them to the ravening appetites of dangerous or damaged adults. If we don’t provide the guidance and defense they need, then we’ve failed an entire generation.
On a related topic: Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?
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