Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  “For guys, the different issue than for young women is that it’s supposed to be the best thing anybody could want in terms of what society is saying or their friends,” says Lonnie Barbach, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Erotic Edge. “But they don’t necessarily feel okay about it, so then they’re acting against their feelings. I see a lot of guys with sexual problems who’ve had that experience. Problems with erections are pretty common, as is anxiety around sex in general.” But then, she points out, she only sees the ones who have problems.

  It’s extremely common for boys who have been molested to be drawn exclusively to much older women from then on. “There is something about early experience with sexuality that tends to stay with you,” Barbach says. “A lot of it is by chance. If you are a child who stumbled upon a magazine with women who have very large breasts, you may eroticize women who look like that in adulthood. It’s funny, I don’t know why it is, but as a child you are just more susceptible.” Anything sexual that happens in childhood has a better chance of making a kind of imprint on your erotic consciousness.

  Even if we take as a given that it’s always wrong for a grown woman to have sex with her teenage students, or her son’s friend, or whatever other fifteen-year-old she gets her hands on, a question still remains: why would she want to in the first place?

  Teenage boys are not, as a rule, the world’s most expert lovers. They are not known for their emotional sophistication or sensitivity. And they do not excel at the tests of masculine status women are supposed to be fixated upon. “If Debra had had an affair with a man who was richer than me, or more successful, that I could have understood,” as Debra Lafave’s estranged husband, Owen, put it. “But this was a boy. What could he offer her that I couldn’t?”

  Power, for one thing. Compared with a teenage boy, a woman will almost always make more money. She will always know more about sex. She will generally be more competent and experienced and more able to assert her will on him than vice versa.

  If you spend a little time going over stories of grown women who pursue boys, they start to blur together. Often, the woman was a victim of sexual abuse in her own childhood. So in some cases adults’ having sex with children is familiar, reiterative. Psychologists say one reason women engage in this is to create a new narrative: If they as adults can have sex with a child in the context of a loving romance (imaginary or real) rather than as an obvious enactment of exploitation, they can then more easily conceive of their own abuse as a love story. To them, the experience of being a gentle perpetrator can be redemptive.

  “Sometimes, the woman is not much older psychologically than the boy is in her developmental stage,” says clinical psychologist Judy Kuriansky. “She has arrested development. So she’s having sex with a fourteen-year-old, and in her head, she’s fourteen, too. She’s getting the attention she never got.” She’s Blanche DuBois. And, Kuriansky says, “there’s nothing more erotic that being adored, for women.”

  Consider the poster couple for pedophilia or true love, depending on your point of view: Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. A review: Letourneau was Fualaau’s second-grade teacher, then she taught him again—and had sex with him—when he was a twelve-year-old in her sixth-grade class. She gave birth to their first child shortly before she went to jail. She became pregnant with their second child when she was out on parole. She went back to jail for seven years. After her release, they got back together. Letourneau and Fualaau were married in a televised ceremony last May and registered for china at Macy’s. They have been together ten years.

  You could clearly hear Letourneau imbuing her student with power; trying to convince the public as she’d convinced herself that Fualaau—her lover, her hero—was on more than equal footing with her: “He dominated me in the most masculine way that any man, any leader, could do.”

  He was twelve. She was thirty-four.

  When Diane DeMartini-Scully first started going for walks with her daughter’s fifteen-year-old boyfriend on the North Fork of Long Island, it made him feel special. “She would just talk to me about life situations and shit,” he says now, a year and a half later. “It was pretty cool.” This is something DeMartini-Scully, a forty-five-year-old blonde who vaguely resembles Erica Jong, would have been good at. She was, until recently, a school psychologist at East Hampton Middle School. She knew how to draw a kid out.

  And the boy, let’s call him Jason, had some things on his mind. “I was making a lot of money in New York,” he says, and when I ask him how, he gives a nervous laugh. “I was doing a lot of things.” I ask if the things he was doing and the company he was keeping (mostly in Jamaica, Queens, he says) were part of the reason his family left Mattituck, Long Island, where they lived just down the road from DeMartini-Scully, for Jacksonville, North Carolina, where they currently reside. He says yes, but the reason his mother has given the press for the move was to escape the escalating cost of living on the North Fork. Detective Steven L. Harned of the local Southold Police Department says, “We were already aware of [Jason]. He has had some court cases here on other matters.”

  When Jason’s family was ready to relocate to Jacksonville, he still had a few months of school remaining. It was decided that Jason would finish off the year living at DeMartini-Scully’s house on Donna Drive. “We would go to Blockbuster and rent movies, and when we watched them, she would put her hand on my lap,” Jason says. “I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  One night, when DeMartini-Scully’s daughter, with whom Jason was still involved, was at a friend’s house, and after DeMartini-Scully’s son had gone to sleep, she asked Jason if he wanted to watch television with her in her bed. “Then she kissed me.”

  That night, Jason and DeMartini-Scully “basically did everything.” He remembers the experience as “okay…I wouldn’t say it was upsetting. I wouldn’t say I didn’t want to, but…I figured she was letting me stay at her house, I’d just do what she wanted.”

  This was not an isolated incident. For the next three and a half months, Jason estimates, the two continued having sex at the house and in her car. “Nobody suspected anything,” he says. “And I didn’t want nobody to know because I was messing around with her daughter. I found it funny that Diane was letting me stay at her house when she knew about that, but I never asked her why: I figured she was doing it because she wanted something.”

  I ask Jason what he wanted: whether he was having sex with DeMartini-Scully because he enjoyed it or because he felt obliged to. “When I wasn’t drunk, I felt pressured to, but when I was drunk, I wanted to…you know what I mean?” He claimed he got alcohol, and sometimes pot, from DeMartini-Scully.

  When summer came, DeMartini-Scully took her son and daughter and Jason down to Florida, where they met up with Jason’s family for a vacation en route to Jacksonville. What was supposed to be a quick stop to see Jason’s family’s new house became an extended stay when DeMartini-Scully was injured in an accident. “She hurt her leg pretty bad when I was teaching her how to ride the dirt bike,” Jason says. “You could see her bone and shit.” She stayed in North Carolina for a month.

  When she finally left, Jason’s mother was glad to be rid of DeMartini-Scully. She had become suspicious when she found out that Jason and DeMartini-Scully had been in a room with the door locked. But on Columbus Day weekend, unbeknownst to Jason’s mother, DeMartini-Scully returned to a hotel in Jacksonville to visit Jason. “So I want to know, what’s so special about me?” Jason says. I ask him what he thinks. He laughs. “I’m not gonna say.”

  He spent three days at the hotel. His mother found out about the visit, and “that’s when all the drama started.” She contacted the police, who charged DeMartini-Scully with kidnapping and providing marijuana to a minor but not with sexual assault, because Jason had, at this point, already turned sixteen and passed the legal age of consent in North Carolina. She was subsequently charged with third-degree rape and performing a criminal sexual act in Suffolk County, where th
e age of consent is seventeen.

  Jason stayed in school for just three weeks in Jacksonville before he dropped out. He says he will join the Marines after he gets his GED, “but just for the money.” He doesn’t miss DeMartini-Scully, he says, who by the end was suggesting she wanted to marry him. But he also says he doesn’t feel raped. “I just, I don’t know, I feel weird. She was thirty years older than me, so I feel a little bit taken advantage of. If I was a girl, I probably wouldn’t talk to you about it, but a female can’t really rape a guy, you know?”

  Jason says he would not have given a statement to the Long Island police incriminating DeMartini-Scully if he hadn’t been under pressure. “They said if I didn’t they were gonna press charges on me because I was with Diane’s daughter,” who is only fourteen, and now Jason is seventeen, thus making him guilty of “sexual misconduct” himself. As of his last birthday, Jason’s relationships switched status in the eyes of the law: Sex with the then-forty-four-year-old school psychologist who had been after him since he was sixteen became okay; sex with her teenage daughter became a crime.

  (“It is a strange law,” says Harned. “I didn’t write them, I just enforce them.” Harned says that it is still likely that the Southold Police Department will press charges against Jason for his relationship with the daughter and that Jason was not pushed into giving a statement about the mother.)

  “I just think about how Diane’s daughter must feel now,” Jason says. “I was pretty close to her; I still am. I’m talking to her on the computer right now.”

  I ask Jason if this is an experience he will try to avoid in the future, getting involved with much older women. He thinks about it for a minute. “Depends how old,” he concludes. “How old are you?”

  Stalking the Stalkers

  Kelly Kyrik

  It’s late on a Tuesday night and Sarah Kinsler [not her real name], a forty-four-year-old mother of two, is online again.

  The former homemaker is not cruising eBay looking for specialty cookware or checking out the latest in designer drapery. Instead she’s hard at work in her cramped office, playing the part of a thirteen-year-old girl while chatting with a virtual stranger—one who appears to have all the makings of a pedophile.

  Although they’ve only been Instant Messaging for a few minutes, he’s already checked out her profile and declared her “hot,” at least judging by the grainy Polaroid shot that Kinsler has posted, which shows an apple-cheeked teen smiling innocently for the camera. He also knows her hobbies—“ditching school, hanging with my friends, and jacking cigs from my mom!”—and her supposed age, but that hasn’t deterred him in the least.

  “Do u like older guys?” he asks, sending a virtual wink along with his message.

  “Dunno…” Kinsler types, hedging a little, as a young teen might. “Maybe, I guess. A/S/L?”

  Kinsler, who has ten years’ experience trolling for predators, first as a civilian, now as a Reserve officer in a small town in the Bible Belt, uses chatroom lingo to ask her wannabe predator for his Age/Sex/Location. She already knows the answers because she’s read his profile, which lists “lots of sex” and “loving pretty girls” as his hobbies. But she wants to draw him out and pin him down, all the while collecting evidence for her chat log.

  “All male/Chicago/and that depends,” types her wannabe predator, adding a smiley face at the end of his sentence. “How old is too old?” Kinsler sips her tea as the familiar script unfolds, all too aware that she has another live one on her virtual line.

  “Gosh,” she types, all innocence, “maybe 25?”

  “Uh-oh!” he replies, sending a frowny face to show his supposed chagrin along with another wink that reveals his real intentions. “I’m 28, r u gonna ditch me now?”

  From experience, Kinsler knows that he’s probably ten or so years older than his purported age and already she can tell that there’s a good chance that she’ll bust this guy, if not tonight, then sometime in the near future. She can also pretty much script how their “relationship” will develop over the course of the next days or weeks.

  “After a while he’ll start asking questions about my sexuality, or lack thereof,” she says. “He’ll want to know if I’m a virgin or if I’ve ever experimented with sex. He’ll kind of fish for information to see how sexual I’m willing to be or how far I might go.”

  Soon, he’ll press Kinsler for pictures, maybe ask for a provocative pose. When he asks for phone contact, she’ll feign worry that she might get caught to throw him off. Of course, she’ll give in at some point and they’ll exchange brief, whispered conversations wherein he will press for phone sex while Kinsler giggles and evades his graphic questions. Eventually, if all goes according to plan, he’ll start pestering her for a face-to-face meeting. When she finally agrees, he’ll probably show up at their prearranged meeting place armed and ready for sex, likely carrying condoms, lubricant, sex toys, and maybe even alcohol and/or drugs.

  “Once we’ve arrested him and have his computer,” says Kinsler, a veteran who’s seen close to a hundred of “her” offenders convicted, “there will be even more incriminating evidence. He’ll usually have a ton of child porn plus chat logs that detail all his online activity, and often there will be evidence of prior victims. These guys almost always plead guilty before trial because there’s just no way they can explain away the fact that they’re obviously soliciting kids for sex.”

  But all that comes later. For now, Kinsler waits to see how far this guy is going to go, settling in with a fresh cup of herbal tea and steeling herself for what could be a long night.

  Internet Facilitated Crimes

  Kinsler isn’t the only cop working online to catch pedophiles. As a matter of fact, she’s part of a new breed of investigators who are tracking a relatively new crime: Computer Facilitated Crimes Against Children. Hundreds if not thousands of officers are blazing a trail that was virtually unheard of ten years ago, when access to the Internet was limited. Working in conjunction with various organizations like the federally funded Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), these new cyber-cops are ferreting out and apprehending pedophiles in chat rooms around the world, which are prime feeding grounds for perverts.

  “Pedophiles go where the kids are,” says Kinsler, “and since teens spend so much of their time online, these guys just lie in wait in the chatrooms. Every time I log on, even though I’m just sitting there not saying anything, I’m inundated with personal messages from guys. And a lot of them come on really strong right from the start.”

  The reason for the aggressive and often seemingly reckless behavior of these pedophiles is due in large part to the anonymity of the Internet. Back in the old days, when predators were forced to solicit their victims in real time, it was much harder to meet, talk with, and seduce their intended victims. But now they have the freedom to access, converse with, and groom their prey, and they’re able to hone their skills over time. And while pedophiles have of course always been around, many investigators believe that the Internet has brought about a whole new era of abuse.

  “My opinion is that the Internet and all the stimuli from child pornography has resulted in an upsurge of victimization,” asserts John Schneider [not his real name], an investigator with a large, metropolitan police department located in the western United States. “Before, people were only able to fantasize to a few pictures, and even those were hard to come by. But now with the click of a mouse you can look at thousands of images. These guys simply can’t handle all that stimulation and are now going after kids more than they would have in the past.”

  There’s no doubt that the Internet acts as a conduit between perpetrator and victim, and unfortunately, predators often move at lightning speed.

  “It doesn’t take long to initially hook a couple of potential prospects,” says Schneider. “And then once you actually hook up with somebody, depending on how motivated he is, it’s usually over quick
ly. I’ve had some guys come down to meet us in just two hours.”

  Predator Typology

  Pedophiles who set up meetings with their victims are known as “travelers,” and investigators consider them particularly dangerous. Not only are they brazen enough to single-mindedly pursue their prey until they’ve achieved the ultimate goal—sex with an underage child—once they’ve started, they rarely stop on their own. An upcoming study of incarcerated travelers reveals that nine out of ten travelers admit to having sexually molested other children before their arrest.

  “Some of these offenders are the most dangerous persons a child can meet online,” writes Detective James McLaughlin in a report detailing the findings. “One [of the offenders we apprehended] would operate concurrently in teen sex rooms and child torture rooms. He eventually sent money in the mail to get a male child to run away. One other offender’s home was searched and photographs of dead children in shallow graves were seized. Still another was already in custody for child homicide. The subpoena had been complied with and the account owner/suspect identified, but it was too late.”

  The Keene study also details three other types of predators:

  “Collectors,” as their name implies, collect and trade child porn, and they dedicate extreme amounts of time and energy to their particular predilection. It’s not unusual for a collector to have thousands or even tens of thousands of images on his hard drive, usually organized into very specific categories. McLaughlin refers to collectors as “entry-level” offenders, given their lack of previous crimes and the fact that they don’t come into personal contact with victims.