A Teacher Kissed Me in High School

..but please don’t call me a victim.

♦

“That’s where Mr. X kissed me,” I almost said.

My husband Ian and I were watching the Hallmark movie A Heidelberg Holiday. It had been filmed in the German town where we’d met as teenagers while students at an American school.

In our short time together (he’d transferred there our senior year), we’d wandered around many of the places used as scenery shots in the film, including the cobblestone street outside the Church of the Holy Spirit.

That was also where a substitute teacher had stuffed the entirety of his tongue into my mouth a little after midnight one New Year’s Eve.

Wanting to say something was a reflexive instinct to point out my own private error. For the longest time, I’d taken for granted that it had happened in the shadow of that church—hidden in the deeper dark of an awning, away from the light of streetlamps—but seeing the actors stroll right over the spot we’d stood shifted the memory. It had actually happened dead in the middle of the cobblestone street, the bar high schoolers frequented on one side of us (the beer-drinking age was 16) and the 500-year-old Gothic church on the other.

The Substitute

Mr. X had a large penis, in my 16-year-old assessment. I hadn’t seen too many penises by that age (my recent ex-boyfriend’s and a few flashers), but the day that week’s young, attractive sub wore his tight jeans to class, I glanced down for no good reason and couldn’t help noticing that what was there seemed — again, to my sexually unsophisticated eye — substantial.

One girl flirted, “Nice jeans, Mr. X.”

Whispers and mischievous side-eyes traveled from desk to desk, and Mr. X’s cheeks turned the same red as his lips.

My face was warm, too.

It would take recalling the moment years later to identify the source of the heat as the guilty thrill of discovering my inner predator.

It wasn’t that I was interested in his penis. As large as it was (or had seemed to be), its striking visibility behind the taut swath of dark denim was more of a curiosity, some unlikely and unusual thing for my attention to stumble over during a lecture.

It was that others in his situation would have reacted with mature distance. But Mr. X had blushed, and for the first time, even as the increasing giggles prompted him to project a manly-sounding “Hey, now,” I saw him as cute.

♦

I had grown up boy-crazy but aware boys weren’t available to me. From elementary through middle school, I was skinny. Had big teeth. Wore long straight hair in a perm era.

Naturally, I was stunned as a high school freshman when a junior asked me out through a friend. He was a cute boy, which made me wonder Why pick me?, but he was also kind. We were an instant couple.

After a while boys, who weren’t my boyfriend were expressing interest. There were lasting looks and even a little negging (not understood at the time to be obnoxious).

It was strange and thrilling, and I didn’t bother investigating why it was happening. Whatever the reason, by the time my boyfriend and I broke up during my junior year, I was itching to bust free, ready to explore.

♦

Within two weeks, a tall stranger stepped into the smoky high school bar. He was nineteen with a deep voice and had a way of finger-combing his long bangs away from his forehead. A lot of the other girls were watching him do it, too.

That it was me, and not one of those other girls, kissing him outside the bar later that night was as much of a surprise as it was an awakening. That I could crave and receive the attention of someone I found attractive was like penetrating the barrier to an alternate reality.

It felt powerful.

Mr. X wore his tight jeans to class around this time. Still timid, though, I stuck to realistic options into my senior year (with the occasional flirty “Hi” at Mr. X in the hallway).

The new territory was electrifying. From one day to the next, whether I was hot-faced with the rush of unexpected eye contact (such as with that cute Ian kid, new to my school that year) or a tangle of desire and rage while losing a gorgeous player’s intoxicating game, something was always exciting.

Until Ian let me catch him one woefully short year into my exploration. He was a relationship type.

We’d been together two weeks — and I was desperately trying to enjoy the stillness—the night Mr. X kissed me.

The kiss

Next door to the high school bar was another where older people went: graduates, soldiers, and that night, a few teacher types. We high schoolers would filter in if our friends had gone home.

I went in after Ian had left to make his 11:30pm curfew. And I immediately forgot about him.

Mr. X was sitting at a table.

New Year’s Eve was MESSED UP, I wrote the next morning in my diary. It was cool until Ian left. Then I went next door, and Mr. [X] was there. We went outside and he said he wanted to kiss me. The strange thing is, he DID kiss me. The substitute teacher kissed me!

“You knew this was going to happen,” he said after our faces separated.

We were standing between the bar and the church. I was ready to go inside, but I didn’t know how to be kind about not wanting to kiss again. (I can’t say what I’d have done if I’d been aroused by it.) I did know as I led us back toward the bar that I’d had no idea anything like that could possibly happen. I mean, I flirt with Mr. [X], the journal entry goes on, but everybody flirts with him.

30+ years later

Watching the Hallmark movie reminded me of that un-Hallmark-like moment for the first time since before the #MeToo movement. Until recently, my reaction when I’d remember that night was pure giddiness.

It’s obviously unethical, if not illegal, for a teacher figure to kiss a student. And it goes without saying that no one should pressure anyone to engage physically.

Because I wasn’t pressured, I enjoyed that memory. Here’s why:

I am a long-married, hopelessly faithful woman with the kind of rigid life discipline that renders a change in routine frustrating.

As a child-to-pre-teen, I was generally unappealing and horribly awkward.

That tucked between these fairly square bookends of my life I had a brief moment of having been the (bad) girl who kissed the cute substitute teacher everyone flirted with had always been a personal thrill.

But that was before my cherished memory of that phase of sexual power became tainted by a companion impulse to pre-empt my private thoughts with the disclaimer, I wasn’t victimized.

Granted, I was 17. Without knowing more, anyone would assume I’d been taken advantage of. But I’ve seen too many people discount women even when they say they weren’t damaged. You must have been, they say.

It’s insulting to know someone would likely say that to me now–say it to an adult woman more than capable of evaluating the kiss in hindsight.

What do we say about women when we assume they’re all victims?

There’s been a wave of writing that doesn’t stop at righteously defending little girls from actual predators; it equates legally adult women to children.

A popular feminist social media account posted a text image saying “girls” between 18 and their early 20s “should be able to venture into and get a grasp on adulthood without grown men taking advantage of their naivety.”

Elsewhere, The Pine Log editor Renee Fain assumes manipulation in claiming Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well” exposes Jake Gyllenhaal as “a creepy man…with a thing for girls half his age.” At the time of their relationship, Swift and Gyllenhaal were adults at 20 and 29, respectively. (And at 29, Gyllenhaal’s frontal lobe may not yet have fully formed.)

If we’re to believe legally adult women are generally rendered powerless by men’s innately (apparently?) superior mental prowess, surely no one would believe I, at 17, had stood a chance against a man in his mid-twenties.

After all, it would be months before I’d be miraculously gifted the intellectual capacity to vote for our country’s leadership. Donate my organs. Go to prison with people even older than that substitute.

And it had been five short years since I’d reached an age many states would deem me fit to raise children (I got my period at twelve).

People might even suggest I’d been “groomed,” a word women angry at men who’ve hurt them currently use far too easily, minimizing the truly abhorrent tactics pedophiles use to gain the trust of vulnerable children — actual children — in order to more easily sexually exploit them.

♦

Women’s brave and energized fight against abuse and harassment from men has somehow splintered.

There’s an offshoot embracing mental weakness and flinging aside personal accountability when it comes to merely heart-painful or even mildly unpleasant experiences with them.

They manipulate us. They trick us. They take advantage of us. They groom us, the messaging goes.

“They” are men, the bad, omnipotent monsters.

This vocal branch inadvertently gives men an inflated position of influence by communicating that their unevolved behavior (abuse aside) so penetrates our sense of self that it can alter our lives, even the state of our mental health.

Feminist social media accounts fixate on and complain about older men dating younger, legally adult, women. Why aren’t we more interested in ourselves, in what draws us to older men? (Evolution, says science.)

Why is our “empowerment” dragged down by resentful posts about sad men who only want women for mommying? Why aren’t we laughing, brushing them off as a waste of time?

Why do we insinuate that adult women are feeble, defenseless victims of creepy, sneaky men and not that we’re moving along just fine in spite of them — even when we get it wrong?

Which I did not in the case of that kiss, by the way.

The only regret I ever had about that night was how my behavior affected Ian. This is the rest of the journal entry from the next morning:

What’s awful is that I did that while going out with someone. With IAN! And almost right after he left! I feel terrible. I really care about Ian. I don’t give a shit about Mr. [X]. He’s just fun to flirt with.

I told Ian what happened when we saw each other at school the following Monday.

The next weekend, I kissed someone else — that gorgeous, tormenting player. I was a terrible girlfriend.

But only because I chose to be.