"Please Miss -- may I look up your skirt?"

In a mood to indulge in some heavy reading, I just finished browsing an article concerning predatory pedophiliac schoolmarm, Mary Kay Letourneau and her child groom, Vili Fualaau in (OK, I'll confess) People. The first thing that struck me was, if she had been a 34-year-old male teacher making "the beast with two backs" with a 13-year-old girl, the cell in the joint would still be occupied, and would probably continue to be so for many years to come. The second thing that struck me (and probably the more important of the two) was what a sinister, manipulative, self-indulgent abuser she was, and still is.

Is Mary Kay loopy? I'm not qualified to say. She was found sane enough to do seven years inside for what was deemed, justifiably, a crime. She was a predator by any conventional understanding of the word. She stalked her prey, a barely adolescent boy, who was, like most adolescent males, a mass of churning hormones. "Hey, is my hottie teacher hitting on me?" And Mary Kay is a hottie (in all senses of looks and horniness), so how could he balk at the opportunity. Most boys would respond to perceived sexual overtures. And, yes, she was hitting on Vili, and yes, she got naked with Vili, and yes she screwed Vili's 13-year-old brains out while, at the same time, rejecting her husband and children in her quest for whatever that quest was.

What the quest was, was control. Relatively powerless in her 'real' life, Mary Kay chose a victim over whom she could assume complete dominance, and she used the power between her thighs to achieve that. And this is where we get into the realm of 'abuse'.

Abusive control between the sexes in dysfunctional relationships is as old as cross-gender interaction, unfortunately. Coming from males towards females the usual pattern is verbal and physical abuse, as well as all the sexual domination categories ranging from outright rape, through harassment, to manipulative seduction.

From female to male, it's subtler, and often involves the use of sexual wiles in order to gain what is wanted -- and what is wanted is a co-dependent yearning on the part of the male to masochistically keep coming back for more, as long as the hormones are still functioning. In that it's a similar syndrome to the woman who forever returns, filled with forgiveness, to the asshole who regularly punches out her lights.

Reading the comments of Vili, it is apparent he is very much a victim of abuse. He is in a situation from which he (with his limited experience and education) can see no escape. A few months ago he was busted for DUI. He has to make nice with Mary Kay's kids who are his age, and whom he suspects hate his guts. He would probably be right, and Mary Kay, in her need to control would have her kids from her first marriage hate Vili more than they hate her, because that keeps her control nicely intact.

You have to feel for a guy like Vili, who is still in his early 20s. Will he ever escape the wiles of this particular she-devil? Not if she has her way about the matter. She will grow older and less trusting, and her net around him will increase. Forecasts for a happy ending? I'd be interested to know your thoughts.