Florentina Pop is Italy’s answer to K-Pop
No, wait … it’s a refreshing European micro-brew. Slogan: “Have a few pops.”
No, wait … turns out it’s an actress who has only been in two films
You say you never heard of her? Join the club.
The film is a French/Austrian drama about pedophilia. I gather from the reviews that it’s not exactly pro-pedophilia, but is ambivalent about the lead character’s desires. (He’s a “non-offending pedo” who just admires young boys without molesting them.) The film’s theme and various on-set antics let to a great deal of controversy, as detailed at some length in Wikipedia.
The important thing for us is that there is female nudity:
I’ve seen some of this director’s films, really bleak art movies that seem like the actors are being left out to dry, not surprised I guess
One of the teachers at my high school claimed to be a non-offending pedophile, though I doubt he used that phrase. In addition to being a public school teacher, Peter Melzer was also Secretary of NAMBLA. That fact was known by the NYC Board of Education when I was a student at Bronx Science in the 1980s. The Board had decided there was nothing they could do about Melzer because there was no evidence he molested a student. All they could prove was that he advocated making it legal to molest children. The Board decided that his advocacy was protected by the 1st Amendment. Melzer is usually described as a former physics teacher, but he actually taught Earth science. The distinction is important because, at Bronx Science, physics was a course normally taken by seniors, while Earth science was a freshman course. Coincidentally, there was reporting that Melzer claimed to be attracted to boys up to the age of 14.
In the 1990s, John Miller, who went on to be an official with the NYPD and the FBI, was a reporter with WNBC in NYC. He got a hidden camera into a NAMBLA meeting, which recorded Melzer advising a younger teacher not to reveal his membership until he had tenure. Believe it or not, after the exposé ran on the 11:00 news, the Board promptly suspended Melzer and began efforts to fire him. Melzer spent the next 7 years in the “rubber room” with other suspended teachers, earning his full salary. Eventually, Melzer lost his last appeal, and he was terminated.
I am all for protecting the right of free speech. However, the decision to fire Melzer, though not content-neutral, should have easily survived strict scrutiny, i.e., a policy of firing teachers who admit they are sexually attracted to children is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest (the protection of children from abuse). To be fair, if 100 male heterosexual teachers were hooked up to a polygraph and asked if they found any 16-year-old students sexually attractive, how many would be able to truthfully deny it? However, we expect adult men, especially teachers, to resist any attraction to underage girls (and boys). I think Melzer’s case was different. Presumably, none of those 100 would be members of an organization publicly advocating to make it legal for them to have sex with their students. That should make a difference, right?
For the record, Bronx Science is a pretty big school, and I not only never took one of his classes, but I had no memory of him when the story broke.
I don’t know. He’s an advocate for something that has been the position of most of humankind until recent times, namely to have a lower age of consent. (One of my grandmothers was married at 14. Women who finished 8th grade were considered part of the work force and nubile. What else would they do besides get married, enter a convent, or get a job. More education was considered unnecessary for women.)
He has the right to argue for a lower age of consent, just as anyone has the right to argue for a change in any law, as long as they don’t break it while it remains in force.
Having said that. I’d add that the age of the student is only the legal part of the discussion. There’s the factor of unequal power and/or outright exploitation. For a teacher to have sex with a 17-year-old student is LEGALLY worse than with an 18-year-old student, but laws are arbitrary. In a very real sense, having sex with the 18-year-old student, from a moral or ethical standpoint, is equally bad, isn’t it? Similarly, lowering the age of consent to 14 doesn’t make it better to hit on the 14-year-olds. There’s no automatic expiation of guilt granted by the 18th birthday, except in a courtroom, where that day somehow magically turns rape into entertainment.
I guess what I’m saying is that even if they lowered the age of consent to 14, that would not make it OK for a teacher to seduce a legal student, just as it’s not OK now for them to seduce an 18-year-old senior. It’s not just the age thing that we should be concerned about.
That said, I’ve known a lot of couples in my life that began as teacher/student (two of the couples started as teacher and high school student), and some of them went the whole distance on that “til death to us part” thing. One was the principal of my high school!
So maybe the whole situation is just too complicated for a chowderhead like me to understand.
Change of topic: what did the teachers do in the rubber room?
My understanding is that NAMBLA advocates for the abolition of all age-of-consent laws, though I doubt that they’d be opposed to lowering the AOC to 14. As I understand it, until about 20 years ago, the AOC in Hawaii and (the 51st state?) Canada was 14. Of course, teachers are not allowed to have sex with students, no matter what age they are.
Politically, once that report aired, the Board of Ed had no choice but to suspend him. The children of some very influential people go to Bronx Science. For example, the father of one of my friends was chairman of the Assembly Education Committee. Melzer was actually on sabbatical when the report aired, so he never faced a class that was aware of his membership. If he had ever been reinstated, I can’t see how he could have taught. Assuming there were parents willing to let him teach their kids, I doubt he could keep his classroom under control. Even if he could, he’d have to live in fear of students accusing him of an inappropriate touch. In a school with close to 4,000 students, there would have to be a few that would think that would be a service to the school. That would get him sent back to the rubber room.
I believe that teachers in the rubber room were technically supposed to work on curriculum, in practice, they read, listened to music on their walkmans/iPods, or played chess. I am sure that once portable DVD players and laptops were a thing, a lot of movies were watched. So long as they signed in on time and didn’t leave early, they got their full salaries. The only financial penalty, if you can call it that, is that they couldn’t earn any overtime by covering the classes of absent teachers or doing after-school work. When I was teaching 20 years ago, the overtime rate was about $46/hour. If you had a good relationship with your principal, you could a decent bit of extra money.