Summer is the slow season for teacher sex scandals. For obvious reasons, there are fewer teachers arrested for having sex with students during vacation months when kids aren’t in school. Yet the courts are still in session, and the trials and hearings continue:
A former Alabama high school teacher and cheerleading coach accused of having an affair with a teenage boy was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison.
In May, Jennifer McNeill, 39, pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree rape and one count of second-degree sodomy.
McNeill said in court that she was sorry for what she had done, adding, ’I’ve lost so much… I’ve learned my lesson.’ . . .
Judge John Bush, who handed down the sentence this morning, called the defendant’s actions ‘absolutely abhorrent,’ adding that as a figure of authority she had betrayed the trust of the community, Al.com reported.
The victim’s mother also spoke in court, saying that not a day goes by that her son does not pay for what happened between him and McNeill — a long-time family friend and a Sunday school teacher. . . .
McNeill, a married sixth-grade teacher from Thorsby, was arrested last year and originally charged with six counts of rape and two counts of sodomy of a juvenile male — some of the alleged encounters took place on school grounds.
McNeill’s illicit romance with her friend’s son lasted from April 2012 to June 2013, during which time the lovers had sexual intercourse at least six times and on two occasions engaged in oral sex.
Let’s ask a few questions. In recent years, we have read case after case like this, in which female teachers are accused of illegal sex with underage students. At the same time, however, feminists have spent decades promoting theories in which male sexuality is condemned as inherently oppressive to women, where even heterosexual relationships between consenting adults are impugned as oppressive because of “male domination” and “male supremacy” within a partiarchal society. But where are the feminists addressing these sex crimes involving female predators like Jennifer McNeill?
How is it that popular feminist columnists like Jessica Valenti and Amanda Marcotte, who have been often willing to claim that there is “rape culture” which implicates all men in sexual violence against women, have nothing to say about predatory sex crimes when the perpetrators are women? Why aren’t the Women’s Studies professors and academic proponents of “gender theory” publishing journal articles and books that explain female sexual predators from the perspective of feminist ideology?
Isn’t it a reasonable suspicion that the reason feminists have noting to say about deviant sex crimes committed by women is that these crimes contradict everything feminism teaches about men, women and sex? Isn’t this collective silence from feminists really a guilty expression of shameful embarrassment, a tacit admission that feminism’s ideology of sex — i.e., anti-male theories that theorize women as victims whose oppression is rooted in collective inequalities of power — does not comport with reality?
There are facts which cannot be explained by feminist theory. When forced to choose between facts and theory, feminists will ignore the facts. They aren’t merely anti-male. They’re anti-truth.
and has since split into two spinoff series, Beyond The Frontier and The Lost Stars. I spent a few days this week with 
and 
, in which the legendary Admiral “Black Jack” Geary leads his weary fleet home through systems full of hostile aliens and Syndics seemingly determined to carry on the war with plausible deniability, only to find Alliance politics may prove at least as deadly as the genocidal aliens. I don’t want to give the impression that these are simple space operas; there are a mess of subplots and complications that in the hands of a lesser author (or lazier editor) could have bloated these books into doorstop size. As it is, they’re tightly written tales that will keep you engaged, yet at the same time qualify as fairly light reading.
, on the other hand…not so much. This is a novel that wears its libertarian colors on its sleeve, which was pretty much guaranteed from the get-go since the struggle between the socialist rulers of Coyote’s biggest colony and the refugees from the Alabama who fled into the forests to escape them takes up most of the book. Steele does a good job allowing his characters to tell the story from their own, individual perspectives, and does a better job of it than in the original 
, for what my opinion is worth.
, he wrote a chilling little Cold War psychological thriller, 
. In a different future from ours, the Cold War has turned hot, and to keep the war machine running, the US Navy has taken to stealing oil from the Eastern Bloc with submarine tugs – but the last twenty subtugs have all been lost. Ensign John Ramsey of BuPsych is put aboard the Fenian Ram as the electronics officer to find out if there’s an East Bloc sleeper agent in the crew, or something else betraying the subtugs. Herbert does an outstanding job conveying the claustrophobic nature of submarine operations, played out in an environment where not only the enemy, but the sea itself is trying to kill you. Most of Herbert’s novels I can take or leave, but I think 
is EVEN BETTER, and I say this as someone who, as you know, has a complete distaste for the whole zombie apocalypse genre. Perhaps this is because 
and 
aren’t so much about the zombies as they are about how a ragged band of survivors, stiffened by a handful of military personnel, adapt, react and overcome despite the problems presented by the ad hoc nature of the “Navy” and “Marine” forces, and the arguably deranged teenage women leading those forces. Contains extremely graphic descriptions of zombie (and human) deaths, royalty, horrible ethical dilemmas, porn stars (well, the next best thing), spec ops legends in deep cover, royalty, massive maternity issues, ballistic missile submarines, Gurkhas, and Dutch Marines. Does not contain: dull moments, frothing about GLBTWTFBBQ issues, or anything else likely to get this book a Nebula nomination. Highly recommended if you like zombie stories, carnage a la John Ringo, or just plain good action.
