SOMETHING ABOUT TEACHER
Hi Jo-Anne and readers!
Did you have a crush on a teacher in high
school? Or a scandal when a student became romantically involved with a
teacher?
I’m of the vintage when relationships
between young teachers and older high school students (I’m talking 17 – 18
years old), while not respectable, weren’t uncommon. My high school saw at
least one teacher and student moving in together after the student graduated.
And all the girls in my year level had enormous crushes on our very handsome
Business Studies teacher (although as far as I know he never succumbed to our
flirtatious come-ons).
Attitudes towards student teacher
relationships have shifted in the last 30 years. Today these relationships are
not tolerated, they are viewed as paedophilic, pure manipulation and abuse of
power on the part of the adult participant. In many cases this is true,
particularly where the student in question is under the age of consent.
Yet what an arbitrary line the age of
consent is.
Sixteen is as tender as fifteen and not a
whole lot less mature than seventeen. At sixteen many teenagers are discovering
the incredible power of their burgeoning sexuality, not only in regards to
their peers, but also in relation to the effect it can have on adults.
I feel for modern teenage girls. From
primary school age they’re subjected to an undercurrent of sexual conditioning
via first world culture - music videos, TV soaps, magazines, advertising,
modelling from the young women in their lives. It doesn’t take long for them to
get the idea that sexual allure is a highly valued quality. I’ve tried to
protect my 9 year old daughter from explicit music videos and mature commercial
content, yet she occasionally (and disturbingly) mimics the sexy poses and
behaviour she observes in the world around her. Sexiness is so embedded in our
culture we hardly notice it.
The unguarded nature of today’s
communication means young people are exposed to complex sexual ideas long
before they have the maturity to understand them. Sex education is delivered
and helps to avert silly, misinformed mistakes, but no sex education program is
going to prepare them for the lived experience and consequences of entering a
sexual relationship, particularly with a mature adult.
As a young girl’s body blossoms and
hormones rocket through her blood, it’s not surprising she decides to ruffle her
sexual feathers and test out her allure. For some girls the most accessible man
available to her is a teacher. There are many teachers in my life and all of
them have a story about a teenager who targets the youngest, handsomest member
of staff with her substantial charms.
The ramifications of this can be dire. No
matter how responsibly he behaves, these days he is the one who is going to be
held to account. If she manipulates him into an uncompromising position she
will be the victim and he will be explaining himself, even though he may have
done nothing to encourage her affections. One story I was told involved a fifteen year
old girl who used tutoring as a ruse and showed up on her teacher’s doorstep
dressed provocatively holding a bottle of wine.
Teenagers are susceptible to developing
intense romantic attachments – real or imagined. First love is a teenage rite
of passage and it’s only natural a percentage of teenagers choose a favoured
teacher as their first love object. And if that teacher is vulnerable to the
flattery of a young person’s attraction and attention, the situation can become
psychological dynamite.
It was the romantic element of these
relationships that interested me when writing The Yearning. We are not
comfortable with the idea that there could be a real attraction between a
teacher and student, so this aspect of the relationship is glossed over. It’s seen
as an aberration, a delusion, but that’s not how a teenager experiences it.
Our first experience of love and sex stays
with us, marks us out and shapes our expectations of future relationships. I
believe we should be talking to teenagers, particularly teenage girls, about
how to assert and experience their sexuality in a way that empowers them, not
buys into the confusing double standards society lays out for them – be
sexually alluring but don’t be a slut. They need to understand the consequences
of entering a sexual relationship with a mature adult may affect the rest of
their lives.
The Yearning speaks to this issue. It asks
who seduces who and why? How do we realign our expectations in relationships,
our trust, our love, after our first sexual experience? It asks what do we want
from love versus what we can have?
The Yearning by Kate Belle
Synopsis:
It’s 1978 in a country town and a dreamy
fifteen year old girl’s world is turned upside down by the arrival of the
substitute English teacher. Solomon Andrews is beautiful, inspiring and she wants him like nothing else she’s
wanted in her short life.
Charismatic and unconventional, Solomon
easily wins the hearts and minds of his third form English class. He notices
the attention of one girl, his new neighbour, who has taken to watching him
from her upstairs window. He assumes it a harmless teenage crush, until the
erotic love notes begin to arrive.
Solomon
knows he must resist, but her sensual words stir him. He has longings of his
own, although they have nothing to do with love, or so he believes. One
afternoon, as he stands reading her latest offering in his driveway, she turns
up unannounced. And what happens next will torment them forever – in ways
neither can imagine.
Read an extract
here
Buy The Yearning:
Ebook: Amazon
Reading group questions here
Author Bio
Kate is a multi-published author who writes
dark, sensual contemporary women’s fiction. She lives, writes and loves in
Melbourne, juggling her strange, secret affairs with her male characters with
her much loved partner and daughter and a menagerie of neurotic pets.
Kate holds a tertiary qualification in chemistry, half
a diploma in naturopathy and a diploma in psychological astrology. Kate
believes in living a passionate life and has ridden a camel through the
Australian desert, fraternised with hippies in Nimbin, had a near birth
experience and lived on nothing but porridge and a carrot for 3 days.
Blog/website: http://www.ecstasyfiles.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/katebelle.x
Twitter: @ecstasyfiles https://twitter.com/ecstasyfiles
The Reading Room: http://www.thereadingroom.com/kate-belle/ap/2394119
Every reader who comments on any Kate Belle blog post before December 23 2013 will go into the draw to win a digital copy of The Yearning (Open to Australia/New Zealand residents only. Selected winner must be contactable by email to claim their prize.)
I'll throw in an ebook of The Yearning to anyone who comments on this post. Just leave a comment telling me if you ever had a crush on a teacher, with your email address. Winner will be drawn December 23rd.
