Debate Guide:Teacher-Student Sex

Sex / relationships between teachers and students, even if consensual and/or lawful, are exploitative and wrong. There's an unequal power dynamic, and potential for conflicts of interest and favoritism.

Teacher-student sex and relationships are sometimes subject to scandal and widespread debate in online and popular media, even if they are lawful between university students and staff. Arguments against these experiences sometimes cut across legal thresholds, since teacher-student experiences can involve high-school students (statutory rape) or younger students, contrasted with older / university students and staff who will typically be 18+. Prohibition arguments usually rely on and accept power disparity, exploitation, doomed to fail or dangers of stigma claims, which we have addressed in these separate linked pages.

Minor-Older Teacher-Student Sex

• In the case of minors / young people who engage in consensual (mutually willing) sexual experiences with older teachers or staff, you can point to former young student's positive testimonies. Accomplished university professor Pat Sikes wrote of her heterosexual experience:

I met the man I married in 1970 on my first day at upper school when I was 14. He was 22, starting his first day as a teacher and I was in his history group. Very quickly, but without anything being said, we recognised our mutual attraction, although it was not until two years later, on the evening that he left the school to take up a post elsewhere, that we explicitly and unequivocally declared our feelings for and to each other. Despite our discretion, I later learnt that senior members of staff had been aware that there was something there and they were not in the least surprised when I returned to school, after the summer vacation, as their ex-colleague's girlfriend. I doubt that any one considered me to have been ‘exploited’, and I certainly felt nothing of the kind. [P]upil–teacher relationships were not unusual, and [sic] the staff were, on the whole, young, progressive and full of the social idealism of the 1960s.

In one of many lesbian testimonies, Amy (16) recalled a relationship at 12 with a dance instructor (23):

I had known my dance teacher for three years before she brought me out. I was very attracted to her when I first saw her, and from then on, I grew to be more and more in love with her. When I was ten, I had a crush on a friend of my older sister, and some time after that another crush on a cousin of mine. But these didn't last long. I always wanted to be near my teacher, dance well for her, and have her touch me! Often while falling asleep at night I would think about her holding me in her arms while I'd go to sleep or about her kissing me. [...] When she said, ʺLet me help you take this off,ʺ I could only hope something might happen. [...] ʺYou are so pretty,ʺ she said, placing her hands on my neck and then running them down my chest and then running them down my chest, over my breasts and then cupping them in her hands. I loved what she was doing, especially when she licked her index finger and began rubbing my left nipple, making it hard. She did the same with the right one, and I held her tightly around the waist. ʺDoes this feel good?ʺ she asked. ʺYes, donʹt stop.ʺ [...] ʺI want to make love to you. Letʹs go to bed.ʺ We continued that night, all weekend and for almost three years until I had to move with my family. I became a lesbian and a woman that weekend!

Teacher-Student Sex at Universities

• In the case of university students and staff, you can again point to positive experiences and youth perspectives and testimonies. Feminist film scholar Laura Kipnis (2015) wrote:

You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they're abusers of power [...] On my campus, several such "mixed" couples leap to mind, including female professors wed to former students. Not to mention the legions who’ve dated a graduate student or two in their day—plenty of female professors in that category, too—in fact, I'm one of them. Don’t ask for details. It’s one of those things it now behooves one to be reticent about, lest you be branded a predator.

When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims—back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t make my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.

As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of. She admits to seducing more than one of them as a grad student—she wanted to see them naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing, according to her, because it was a way to experience your own power.

But somehow power seemed a lot less powerful back then. The gulf between students and faculty wasn’t a shark-filled moat; a misstep wasn’t fatal. We partied together, drank and got high together, slept together. The teachers may have been older and more accomplished, but you didn’t feel they could take advantage of you because of it. How would they?

Which isn’t to say that teacher-student relations were guaranteed to turn out well, but then what percentage of romances do? No doubt there were jealousies, sometimes things didn’t go the way you wanted—which was probably good training for the rest of life. It was also an excellent education in not taking power too seriously, and I suspect the less seriously you take it, the more strategies you have for contending with it.

• If you are winning and/or hold the mic / platform, you may also wish to accuse your opponent of jealousy and/or ulterior motives and force them to respond.

• You can also argue against the age taboo / age apartheid more broadly: how the incorrect use and concept creep of pedophilia / the pedophile smear has been wrongly extended and used to stigmatize even lawful adult-adult relationships, ignoring and denying the agency, choices and voices of younger partners. Feminist writer Jessa Crispin (2020), has argued that "contempt for age gap relationships serves to strip both men and women of their agency." She wrote:

Implying that all men possess inherent power also implies that they must possess power over something or someone else. The harm in this is that it necessarily insinuates that all women have a power deficit, if not total powerlessness. Through this lens, every heterosexual coupling is subject to scrutiny, lest a man get away with abusing his power over a defenseless young woman. Of course the female subject, awash in feelings and hormones and femininity, is insufficient as the primary judge of whether her relationship is problematic. [...]

Rarely interrogated is what a younger woman might be getting out of these relationships. [...] While a younger woman might reject suitors of her own age due to unmatched emotional maturity or cultural sophistication, looking to an older man to provide what a younger man cannot is often dismissed as indicative of “daddy issues.” This renders young women trapped within a childlike psychological complex.

The definition of harm done by these relationships is left purposely ambiguous. Every relationship worth having is fraught with coercion, manipulation, and deceit. Yet with these age gap relationships, that harm—whatever form it is supposed to take—flows only one way. The younger partner is somewhat frozen into a state of risk, and the older partner is condemned for their bad intentions. The “ews”, the “ughs”, the “so creepy,” all reveal that this has more to do with disgust and fear of transgression than genuine concern for a woman’s wellbeing.