OF SCHOOLGIRLS AND TEACHER’S PETS (SPECIAL RE-ISSUE)

School isn’t just a place where we learn how to save lives and bring about world peace through Algebra. It’s also where we come of age and learn things that our parents never dreamed of teaching us. Admittedly, school does have its quaint charms in kindergarten and the early part of the grade school years—as we develop crayon addiction, agonize over penmanship, and feign sickness to escape quizzes. However, things only get more frighteningly interesting as our grade school stint comes to a close.

From high school onwards, a good number of us take on the unwritten subjects in the school curriculum. Cutting classes. Passing around notes with nasty commentaries about hated teachers and/or classmates. Smoking. Drinking. Bathroom vandalism. Trying out chemical substances. Having sex.

These unofficial but equally educational “courses” definitely beat listening to tales of Jose Rizal’s women in Philippine History or learning how crochet glass coasters in Home Economics. Save for staunchly Catholic nerds who lived in perpetual fear of being punished with sore eyes or chicken pox by the Holy Spirit, everyone had a hell of a time participating in some or all of the nasty things mentioned. School rules were made to be broken.

So it’s no surprise that school is the setting or, at the very least, the take-off point of men’s erotic fantasies. The most celebrated of these shameless fancies is The Schoolgirl Fantasy.

Men, as I have deduced from the way their eyes get as big as saucers when they espy pretty girls in uniforms or lithe young things in regulation schoolgirl getup, go gaga over studious Lolitas. Exhibit A: the startling success and word-of-mouth popularity of the Barely Legal porn series. (It’s so popular, it inspired a National Lampoon movie!) This delightful franchise banks on men’s fascination with schoolgirls. Need it be pointed out all of that all of its installments feature men doing it with girls who are barely of legal age?

Shrinks will most likely employ the Freudian paradigm to explain why the heck grown men go bonkers over schoolgirls. Or some armchair expert will say that it’s a power thing, that the innocence that schoolgirls seemingly possess is the most potent aphrodisiac for men.

Then again, as my friend Brian simply put it, “It’s probably just the uniform that gets men hot.” But I figured that it’s got to be more than the uniform. If an older woman (even if she were as gorgeous as, say, Kylie Minogue) dons a schoolgirl’s uniform, it wouldn’t be the same thing.

It is worth noting though that Japan has been identified as the country whose men are downright schoolgirl-crazy. In the 1997 article “Schoolgirls as Sex Toys,” Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times, reported on Japanese men’s obsession with schoolgirls—particularly those in uniforms. Kristof wrote: “A disturbing new national pastime has taken root in Japan: a male obsession with schoolgirls dressed in uniforms. In Tokyo there are now several hundred ‘image clubs,’ where Japanese men pay to act out their fantasies with make-believe schoolgirls in make-believe classrooms, locker rooms, or commuter trains. A customer may, for example, act the part of a teacher who walks into a classroom and tears the clothes off a schoolgirl. Or he may choose to fondle a schoolgirl on a crowded commuter train.”

To explain this phenomenon, Kristof hypothesized that perhaps it was partly sanctioned by the fact that it was “legal for men in Tokyo to have sex with children who are older than 12.” He went on to quote male psychiatrist Masao Miyamoto who theorized that “Japanese men feel threatened by the growing sophistication of older women. So they turn to schoolgirls.”

In the Philippines, the men are more discerning as the predominant schoolgirl fantasy they harbor is confined to adventurous college girls.

It seems that Filipino men are suckers for college girls gone wild or college girls forced to find alternative ways of earning some cash for mobile phone loads. Thankfully, it’s less risqué than Japanese men’s preferences. Still, it proves that this fantasy is more or less universal.

Keep in mind though that we’re just discussing The Schoolgirl Fantasy from the perspective of Vladimir Nabokov trying to cast a sympathetic eye on a fictional middle-aged man’s obsession with a 12-going-on-13 nymphet in the immortal Lolita. We’re not espousing child abuse or the sordid grades-for-sex practice of lecherous professors.

With that said, we can safely say that schoolgirls are right up there with supermodels and contortionists when it comes to firing up men’s imaginations.

On the flip side, there are men who proudly recount how their teachers were more than kind enough to facilitate their (for the boys who became men, not the teachers) first-ever hands-on demonstration of sex education. For the record, the men who underwent this special tutoring didn’t seem emotionally scarred or traumatized by the event. In fact, they relished it. Years later, a few of these teacher’s pets develop a fascination for role-playing. One need not employ Calculus to figure out what roles these men want themselves and their partners to play. Apparently, being initiated by one’s teacher is some sort of sought-after memorabilia (if you can call it that) for men.

Ironically, the common perception is that a lot more boys than girls don’t do too well in school. Prior to my attempt to dissect the roots of The Teacher’s Pet Phenomenon, I always thought it was because boys had short attention spans and because they had lots of pissing contests to compete in. But if they were indeed having more fun with the teachers after school hours, I can’t blame them. All serious studying and no sexual hooky makes Junior a very dull boy.