restrictions post-sentence. If it is the social consensus that “sex offenders” cannot truly be rehabilitated, then life sentences would seem appropriate. That said, as others have pointed out, the definitions of sex crimes are far too broad and, sadly, do not reflect current mores.

There may have been a time that 18 was an appropriate age of consent, but it certainly isn’t today. When I graduated from high school in ’67, The boys’ brave stories notwithstanding, I’m confident that three quarters or more of my classmates were virgins and most were very naive sexually. Steaming up the car windows on a backroad and some, sometimes heavy, petting was the limit of sexual adventure for most. And it wasn’t fear of pregnancy, it was absolute TERROR about pregnancy that restrained most of us. Birth control pills were available but doctors wouldn’t prescribe them for a minor without parental consent and most girls weren’t willing to have that talk with their mother in those days. Once they were over 18, they could get them without their parents’ knowledge. If you lived in a small town, and many more of us did in those days, even buying condoms was not an easy matter. I never knew a girl to have one back then and boys took a considerable risk of their parents being told or even of the store refusing to sell to them AND telling their parents. Your father might have taken it OK if told you had been buying rubbers at the Mini-Mart, but it sure isn’t a discussion I’d have wanted to have with my mother. And all that is from the perspective of a Hell-raiser who played in a rock-and-roll band and had long hair, as that term had meaning then; my hair is actually longer now than it ever was when I was in high school – though there’s less of it. By the time I was sixteen I was regularly playing music out of town and even at colleges. Life could be a lot more adventurous sexually when you were away from home and especially on a college campus but it wasn’t that adventurous unless you had drugs.

The increasingly ready availability of drugs and the pill by the late ’60s, early ’70s changed all that. When I started college in the fall of ’67 the girls couldn’t wear their gym clothes about campus, so they all wore a London Fog topcoat to an from the then-mandatory gym class. Two years later those same girls were walking around campus in hip-huggers an eighth of an inch north of pubic hair and wearing a see-through lace top with no bra. It changed that fast! And it changed most everywhere and for the vast majority of people. Except for the most conservative and the most devoutly religious, America went on a sexual binge that lasted at full tilt until AIDS put the brakes on in the mid-eighties.

Many, maybe most, of the daughers of the women of that era were on the pill at mother’s insistance as soon as they began having their period. I raised a teenaged daughter as a single father in the ’80s and that is the second hardest thing I’ve ever done! I’ve been flirted with by many of her friends, propositioned by a couple of them, and came home late one night to find one of them in my bed. (No, I didn’t, but there was an interval with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other having a pretty good argument.) I resolved during that time that if I could get her to 21 without an unwanted child or a felony conviction (for either of us), I’d be a success at fatherhood.

Fast forward to my step-kids who were teenagers in the ’90s; that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and on so many levels. For those of you who haven’t raised teenagers and who think that you can keep them from the influences of popular culture, you best be moving to a cabin in the wilderness with no neighbor in walking distance, no TV, no movie rental, no FM radio, home schooling, and no visitors, not even the ones they meet at church. I think my oldest stepson was born trying to get some girl in the sack and by middle school was well along to his goal of sleeping with all living females. I sat down with him to have “the talk” when he was twelve or so and he all but asked me what I wanted to know. And, yeah, I bought the condoms for him and really all I could do with him was admonish him to be careful. I was amazed at how sexualized both the girls that followed him and the friends of my stepdaugher were. What were those parents thinking when they let their daughers go out like that? Hookers working the corners in LA wear more clothes than those girls. I learned later that under those baggy jeans and sweatshirts that they left home wearing or in the backpack was where the hooker outfit was when they left home. Likewise, with the daughter all we could do was control the time she could be out, exercise some control over where she went, and admonish her to be careful. All three of them had tried and recreationally used drugs by high school and only the oldest really stayed away from drugs because he was an athlete. We got them to 21 without the felony or the unwanted child but it was a close-run thing.

So, in thirty years it went from sex and drugs in the late teens in the ’60s, to high school in the ’80s, to middle school in the ’90s. Some significant percentage of middle-schoolers are having consensual sex. And yes I know all the stuff about how reasoned and informed that consent is, but whatever is happening it isn’t rape. Even the definitions of statutory rape and child molestation don’t reflect the reality of highly sexualized and sexually agressive teenagers. Sorry, but even in my day sex between a fifteen year old boy and a twenty-something teacher wouldn’t have been rape or abuse in his mind. It should be some sort of crime and it should be a bar to employment as a teacher, but it isn’t rape or molestation. And what about the 15 year old girl? Even by the ’80s, that song by The Police (I think), “Don’t Stand So Close” about a teenaged girl and a young male teacher resonated enough to get a lot of play time. Is it rape or molestation if the older man is outright propositioned by the sexually active and agressive sixteen or seventeen year old girl? It is something, don’t infer that I’m approving, but it isn’t rape or molestation. Maybe it is some sort of assault, but it isn’t something that should mark the man for life. Having been on the receiving end of a couple of those propositions, I can tell you that it is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. If you don’t and she says you did, you’re guilty until proven innocent and it is damned hard to prove yourself innocent in today’s climate. Frankly, nobody, starting with her parents, is going to believe she was the agressor.

We all know that molestation of young children is a heinous crime and in some instances warrants the most dire punishment. Unfortunately, like the zero-tolerance of weapons laws that have caused so much controversy of late, the laws relating to sexual offenses simply do not reflect present realities. There are lots of shades of gray and the laws try to make it all black and white and in do doing ruin many lives. I’m just glad my kids don’t need teenaged babysitters any more, don’t have teenaged friends any more, I don’t have subordinates with teenagers anymore, and I just hope nobody with a teenaged daughter moves in next door.