Women CANNOT rape boys over eleven!

I don't care what anyone says; 29-year old man with 13 year old girl=RAPE. 29-year old woman with 13 year old boy=NOT RAPE. I feel very strongly about this. They even make movies and TV shows celebrating older women who seduce younger boys ("Tadpole", "Jimmy Reardon" and "Six Feet Under"). How comes nobody is supporting this view in the media? The Post even went as far as labelling the affair "sordid" and "sick".

It's not "sordid" or "sick"...it's fine. Mary Kay LeTourneau married Vinny Fulaau and they're both pretty happy.

I suspect that this kid (now 23) reported this affair because his life wasn't going well and he felt that he needed to blame it on something. I cannot stand victim mentalities. In this age of Oprah, Doctor Phil and cry-on-tv-and-thou-will-be-cleansed, there are very few VICTIMS but there are many VOLUNTEERS.

This article is ridiculous. I could rip it to shreds on so many different levels that I feel it's not even warranted. Susan Estrich...you are a tool. Bill O'Reilly showed you to be the laughing stock that you are.

Statutory Rape Double Standard
Susan Estrich
Thursday, Feb. 17, 2005

The date has been set. The bride has made her selections and registered at a downtown Seattle department store. The couple already has two children, so some people might say it's about time. In this case, it isn't.

This is a couple who never should have been together. It is a crime, not a cause for celebration.

Mary Kay Letourneau, 43, and her former sixth-grade student, Vili Fualaau, 22, are planning to marry in April. Letourneau was convicted in 1997 of statutory rape and served seven and a half years in prison for the crime.
"It's going to be fabulous seeing them get hitched finally," one of their friends told the Seattle paper. "It's long overdue."

Would he be saying that if a 33-year-old male sixth-grade teacher had raped and impregnated a 12-year-old girl?

Letourneau was not even imprisoned after her 1997 conviction until she refused to obey the judge's order to stay away from the then-14-year-old. Only when she made clear that she had no intention of ending the relationship did the judge order her incarcerated.

No man in a similar situation would have enjoyed such leniency. Men who commit statutory rape, particularly if it involves a student-teacher relationship and an age disparity as big as this one, are called rapists and punished severely. Their victims are rightly considered just that.

Women who do the same thing are called "Mrs. Robinson," and their victims, too often, are afraid even to report the crime lest they be mocked for not knowing how "lucky" they are.

Upward of 90 percent of all rapes are committed by men. But across the country, a recent spate of cases resembling the Letourneau case has cast attention on the other side of the gender divide. In Tennessee, 27-year-old Pamela Turner is awaiting trial on charges that she had sex with a 14-year-old physical education student of hers; in California, 28-year-old Sarah Salorio has pleaded not guilty to charges of having sex with two of her students and inappropriately touching a third boy, all of them under 14; in Florida, lawyers for 24-year-old teacher Debra Lafave are planning to offer an insanity defense against charges that she had sex with a then-14-year-old student in her home, classroom and car.

None of these women is "Mrs. Robinson" and none of these boys will escape the injury and stigma that rape victims too often suffer. In many respects, being a boy can make it even harder – harder to come forward in the first place, harder to testify, harder to deal later on with the complex of emotions and feelings that can so easily get in the way of a healthy sexual relationship.

It doesn't matter if the boys "went along" with their teachers – consent is no defense to statutory rape. What makes all of these cases particularly egregious is not only the gaping age differences between the women and the boys, but also the abuse of power inherent in the teacher-student relationship.

All of this is so clear when the man is the teacher and the girl is the student that it is striking to see how automatically most of us apply the double standard. Criminal defense attorney Bernie Grimm makes the point that in his experience, defending some 3,000 different criminals, good-looking women always get lower sentences when accused of the same crime.

The teachers here face sentences ranging from five years to 40; Letourneau's seven years was decidedly on the long side, especially for a good-looking woman. Yet there is no telling what price these boys, or their wives and girlfriends, will pay later in life, for the harm done by women whose job was to teach them, in classrooms where they were supposed to be safe.