Yet another intergenerational-sex rant (considering my necessary relation to many readers, the hyphen could have been omitted or even nudged one word to the right, I suppose).

Needless to say, it depresses me endlessly how few Americans would regard the following story as an example of the insane, despicable, and flagitious use of police power to torment those who discover themselves to have been sexual nonconformists (why, btw, can’t we foster the use of that notion — i.e., sexual nonconformity over deviation and, worse, offense — to underscore the obvious religious homology [and for purposes of American jurisprudence, at any rate, make the 1st Amendment of the Constitution—rather than the 14th or the notoriously privacy-penurious “penumbras” of 1 through 5—the indurate touchstone for assaying sex-afflicting laws, as it now does religion- and speech-afflicting ones]?).

I never will cease to be just flabbergasted by the fact that the overwhelming majority of my fellow citizens (and, it goads me to suppose, readers as well) swallow without the slightest question the utterly counterintuitive (if you bother to think about it) belief that consensual intergenerational sexual relationships are seriously dangerous to the younger participant (in even the rarest best cases).

Is there any other realm of life where this is bizarrre view holds sway?

Sadly but surely, even the most exultant and enthusiastic younger participant, an entire class of person strenuously obliterated by conventional opinion, may eventually be badgered by the accumulated mass of years of its droning, weighed against the tragic effervescence of memory, into believing that (a) his or her consent was culpably compelled by the elder one; (b) their sex was for that very reason alone traumatizing; and (c ) the trajectory of such trauma is as immutably unidirectional as that of gravity, from the most superficial itchy genital nerve endings of the elder deep into the softest throbbing heart-chambers of the younger—bastard rasp doomed ever to impale placenta.

That’s my tendentious reading of what happened in this sad case, anyway.

No records found alleging sex abuse by private school teacher

TOWSON, Md. (AP)—Authorities have been unable to find records of allegations against a private school teacher charged with sexually abusing a student decades ago.

Stanley Virgil Ashman, 60, was arrested last month in Birmingham, Mich., where he was teaching at the private Roeper School [where Mika Cooper attended nursery school, ed.], police said. He is accused of having sex with a then-14-year-old girl at his Baltimore home and at the Park School in the 1970s [emphasis added, thoughout].

The headmaster of the Park School issued a statement saying that he learned about the allegations in 1997, met with Ashman and contacted social services officials. Maryland law requires educators, doctors, nurses, police officers and human-services workers to report suspicions of child abuse to authorities.

But Baltimore County police and social services officials said a search of records produced no evidence that they had received such a report.

A spokeswoman for the Park School said Tuesday that David Jackson, head of the school, called the county social services agency in September 1997 when he learned of allegations against Ashman and met with him. As a result of the meeting, Ashman resigned in 1997, Jackson said in the statement, which was released Monday after police announced Ashman’s June arrest.
. . . .

Police said the abuse began in 1973, when the victim was in the ninth grade and Ashman was her teacher and student adviser at the Park School.

The victim told police she came forward when she learned Ashman was teaching again. . . .

Click here for the full story.

OK, so here’s how I read it, doing all the relevant math. In 1973, fourteen-or-fifteen-year-old X begins (a key word in the story that makes no sense unless they had sex in at least one subsequent calendar year) a (therefore) persistent consensual sexual relationship with twenty-six-year-old teacher-adviser Ashman . [Full disclosure (for those readers who haven’t been forced [or is it seduced?] into enduring one of these rants before): in 1972, fourteen-year-old Mika Cooper began a persistent consensual sexual relationship (love affair) with thirty-year-old teacher-friend Irene, which relationship became one of the most positively influential of her life. In recent years, she’s had serious relationships with persons half her age. Of course, I’m reading my experience into this set of facts! It’s experience, after all — something invoked all too rarely in these discussions. It qualifies my judgment in both senses of that word — entitles as much as it circumscribes.] It seems reasonable (to me) to infer that the Ashman-X relationship did not involve forcible rape or assault, since (a) it appears to have been a somewhat long-term one and (b) that highly narratable detail would otherwise surely be a juicy component of our story today. Perhaps the affiliation ended amicably; perhaps not. But it seems likely to me that, all things considered, at the time it was experienced by both participants as a real sexual relationship, in short an affair, not as an ongoing felonious assault.

By 1997, twenty-four years (a generation; intergenerational prosecution!), later, X has come to hold the view that her affair with Ashman constituted a sexual violation of her. I wonder why? The conventional rote response is, of course, that only then did she at long last summon up the extraordinary courage to come forward and publicly confess the shameful assault to which she was despicably subjected so many, many years earlier. I would argue, however, that precisely because that response had by 1997 become conventional and rote, she arrived at her eventually extreme judgment by dint of nothing more courageous than bobbing like flood-borne filament on the surface of public opinion. Characterizing her affair in such scandalized terms is, far from courageous, the easiest possible way of at once making it speakable and locating herself in the enviable social position of being publicly perceived to have suffered (what has contingently come to be regarded) a great injury, yet being privately none the worse for it. It astounds me that no one ever mentions the obvious fact that it would have taken much more courage for her (let alone him) to have spoken out about the relationship in positive terms. The story of an intergenerational relationship that has positive consequences is the more unspeakable story these days (if not the most).

Anyway, twenty-four years later, the now thirty-eight-year-old X communicates her old story to the school’s present head, Jackson. Jackson meets with Ashman, now fifty years old, and Ashman is compelled to renounce his lifelong (24+ years) association with that school. Again inferring, I’d guess that X was told he’d never teach again, or something like that, and accepted Ashman’s leaving the profession as sufficient punishment for the ancient affair (else, I’m guessing, based on what’s going on now, she would have pursued the criminal case at the time). Nine years later (X is now approaching fifty [forty-seven or thereabouts], Ashman sixty), somehow or other (could it be . . . Google?) X discovers that Ashman is teaching at Roeper, in Bloomfield Hills, MI (the Pre-K-through-12 school where I was Pre-K). And she flips out. Cuz the deal was supposed to be that he’d pay for his seducing her fourteen-year-old self by abandoning the profession forever.

I’m sorry, but in my view the statute of limitations on punishing the affair had already long run out by 1997. By 2006, the law becomes a perverted Javert.

It happened thirty-four years ago! The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

But what if he was a vile seducer who in fact cruelly manipulated her naïveté, calculatedly abused his position of trust to have his selfish way with her, plagued her with abominable urges, then tossed her aside like a used tissue, heedless of her pain and feelings of betrayal?

Those details aren’t given in the story. They are, however, presumed by the story. Their glaring omission suggests either that they aren’t factual or that their specification isn’t relevant in rendering judgment of Ashman. The mere fact of sex tout court is all that is given as relevant. For punishment after thirty-four years!

The bedrock of my belief, against which no spade goes unturned, is that sex by itself, as the story gives it, can never justify such persecution. Only significant evidence of pernicious, severe, long-lasting damage delivered with malicious intent could support such torture of an old man by a middle-aged woman and an enabling sick society, thirty-four years after the fact.

Now, weirdly enough, the story, as evidenced by the headline, supposedly revolves around not the affair itself (though, of course, that’s what makes the whole thing narratable: imagine if the issue were some limp crime like helping her cheat on exams or falsifying her grades) but rather whether or not in 1997 headmaster Jackson complied with the law requiring him to notify the Maryland authorities of the twenty-four-year-old affair. Who’s to blame for the appalling (we take this for granted) lapse of allowing Ashman (a) to walk away in 1997 unscathed and (b) to end up teaching again?!

How dare that sixty-year-old imagine he’d lived down his iniquitous past!

ijustgoberSERK  ·  sexgender-system-files

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