Content note for this one: sexual assault/abuse/exploitation of minors.
Recently a media arts teacher at my old high school was arrested for sexually assaulting and exploiting two of his female students.
You know when you hear a piece of news that ought to be surprising, even shocking, and yet somehow it just… feels true, completely and immediately? That’s what happened to me when I heard about Mr. Field.
It’s not that I’d ever seen him being overtly creepy in school – after all, many long-term abusers get good at flying under the radar, operating on such subtle levels that their victims can never quite tell for sure whether they’re being manipulated and mistreated or not. But as I reflected back on my time at Rosedale, I remembered that he had “favorites” every year – students, usually girls, who he spent extra time with, heaped extra praise onto, and had extra expectations for. A close friend of mine was one of these girls, and I saw the micro-level boundary-overstepping time and time again – most notably, an occasion where Mr. Field needed something from my friend’s locker for some art project, and she wasn’t at school at the time, so she just texted him her locker combination. I shudder now to think of what he could’ve done – what he maybe did – with that information.
The reason behavior like this went unremarked-upon at Rosedale was that odd relationships between teachers and students were sort of the norm there, especially since it was an arts school whose student body and staff lineup alike were always packed with nerds and weirdos. Not all of these relationships were abusive or problematic by any means – in fact, feeling able to trust some of my teachers in a way I’d never trusted a teacher before was one of the major things that helped me get through high school as a person with chronic depression and anxiety. I felt supported and cared for in a way most schools would frown upon. But I can see how that core belief Rosedalians held – “Our teachers are cool teachers, and it’s cool to be friends with them” – could easily devolve into grooming and exploitation in the wrong hands.
In the wake of the allegations against Mr. Field, I started hearing rumors about other teachers at Rosedale. I don’t know anyone who goes there anymore, but lots of people I know have younger siblings or friends who still go there, so I hear things through the grapevine sometimes. I heard a male English teacher got fired for having a mental breakdown at school and acting erratically toward his students (which he was already doing when he taught me in the 10th grade); I heard a civics teacher who I always disliked had been dismissed from his job for making creepy comments toward teenage girls; I heard one of the heads of the music department was kicked out for trying to kiss a student; and, most terrifyingly for me, I heard that the man who’d been my very favorite teacher – let’s call him Mr. J – had (maybe) gotten fired for (maybe) having sex with a student while (maybe) high on cocaine.
Now, granted, rumors are rumors, and it’s hard to know for sure what’s real and what isn’t. (I reached out to Rosedale’s administration for comment/confirmation, but as of this writing, they had not gotten back to me after four full weeks.) But like most people of my feminist ilk, I believe that the immense bravery and difficulty involved in coming forward with sexual abuse allegations are a sturdy enough barrier that false accusations of this sort are vanishingly rare (and the research bears this out). I tend to think that if the rumor made its way to me – particularly from multiple sources, which was the case with this one – that it contains at least a kernel of truth. And that fucking sucks. My heart goes out to every victim of every perpetrator of abuse and exploitation at that school and everywhere else.
This favorite teacher of mine, Mr. J, was an upper-level humanities instructor who brightened my days and changed my life. Ever-cheerful and ridiculously smart, he taught me things I still think about on a near-daily basis, made jokes that made me cry with laughter when I was supposed to be doing my readings, and wrote notes in the margins of my essays that made my heart jostle jubilantly in my chest. I became one of his “favorites,” I guess, and while I’d often been a “teacher’s pet” throughout my days as a nerdy, anxious goody two-shoes, this felt different; it felt like he actually liked me as a person, not just as a student. He took me aside before class on occasion to ask what I’d been reading lately (“I know you share my love of the written word!”) or what I’d been writing (“Did I hear that you won a poetry award?!”). He praised my answers in class discussions until I blushed and slunk down in my chair, too shy to talk to most of my classmates but never too shy to talk to him.
The memory that stands out the most to me about Mr. J is the time I was standing in the cafeteria line and I suddenly realized the two girls behind me were talking about him. They were a year or two younger than me, and were enthusing at each other about how cuuuute he was and how they wished they were taking one of his classes. Just then, he appeared, as if by magic. He greeted me, we bantered like we always did, I blushed like I always did, and then – without consulting me, without making a big deal about it – he quietly told the lunchlady to put my pasta salad on his bill. I didn’t fully realize what he’d done until he’d already paid and was out the door, and by then I had a free container of pasta salad in my hands, two jealous girls staring at me, and a brain soaked with syrupy infatuation and looping the thought, “Did that really just happen? Did that… really… just happen?”
I’ve been wanting to write an essay about this since I first heard the news about Field in August, and I thought the main point of the essay would become clearer in my mind the more that I thought about it, but it hasn’t. And that’s because… this is complicated. I had a crush on my teacher Mr. J, obviously. He thought I was cool, obviously. But what’s less obvious is: Was he grooming me, or was he just friendly and supportive? (Nothing overtly creepy ever happened; what I’ve described here is the closest he ever got to anything like that with me.) Are the rumors about him totally true, or totally inflated, or totally false? Should I be drastically revising my mental image of him?
The other thing that makes this complicated is that some of my biggest kinks first showed up in those interactions with Mr. J all those years ago. I mean, there’s a reason I talk about him in my “I’m a good girl” blog post. The idea of being “teacher’s pet,” of being “the favorite,” of being smart and good and celebrated and praised – these all loom very large in my present-day sexual psyche and they have for a very long time. Part of the reason I had a crush on him was that he inadvertently put me in a role that is, I now realize, kind of an erotic one for me. And yeah, that creates a weird dynamic where maybe I was (unbeknownst to him and even to myself) getting some kind of gratification from our relationship that he hadn’t necessarily consented to. But then, if these rumors are true and he’s a predator, maybe he was also getting something from me that I didn’t know about or consent to. Honestly, it makes my head spin to think about it.
What this ultimately points to, for me, is a fact I already know and would do well to keep learning until it’s completely drilled into my head: Fantasy is different from reality. I am sure that many predatory teachers’ “favorites” have, at some point or another, entertained fantasies of a romantic or sexual sort about their teachers. Abusers of this type actually work to create that feeling in their victims, often through horrible psychological manipulations that bear some resemblance to pickup artist techniques (neg them, play them hot and cold, keep them guessing, et cetera). But fantasizing about something doesn’t necessarily mean you want it. Or maybe it means you want it in fantasy but know it’d be a bad idea in reality. Or maybe it means you think you want it, but if it ever happened for real, it would horrify you and traumatize you.
I’ve felt very conflicted about my past feelings for a teacher who may or may not have preyed on my fellow students, but when I look at it through a consent-first framework, I can see that there’s nothing I need to feel guilty about. Having ached for some kind of relationship with Mr. J in fantasy does not mean I wanted one in reality, or that it would’ve been acceptable for either of us to pursue that. I was his student. True consent cannot exist in that situation; the power dynamics are too, well, powerful.
I still don’t know whether the rumors I heard were true. I still don’t know whether I need to denounce my past crush even though it was such a formative experience for me. But I do know that this experience has made me even more aware of the divide between fantasy and reality, between desires and behavior, between whims and decisions. I wasn’t wise enough back then to know that stuff, so I felt guilt for no reason about dreamily “wanting” things I didn’t actually, literally want. But the only person who ought to feel guilty, in situations like this, is the person in power, the person doing the victimizing. The atrocities they enact should only ever, at most, exist as fantasies inside their heads – and they ought to know better than to impose those fantasies on people too vulnerable and scared to even understand what’s being done to them.