Alyssa Zinger is a 23 year-old woman out of the Tampa area, who purportedly (she’s not yet convicted) posed as a 14 year-old girl online to meet boys, and then end up sexually assaulting them, including often filming it and taking photos — which is how she was caught. It seems like this case involves five to seven boys, and currently she’s denied bond.
Zinger was not a teacher and lured these boys via TikTok and Snapchat, but it’s part of a scaled trend recently whereby older females lure younger boys for sex.
This behavior is unfortunately nothing new and goes all the way up the “mom tree,” if you will:
I think there are a couple of things that need to be stated here, all-in:
There is a prevailing societal mentality that a young boy cannot be “abused” by a woman, as the young boy would enjoy it: This is based on years of movies like The Graduate and even American Pie, or the lesser-known Secret of My Success. Plus: porn. The thing is, a 14 year-old boy might enjoy sleeping with a 30 year-old woman. I can’t really remember myself at age 14, but that seems like it would track as something that might seem cool at the time. However, it’s still illegal, and laws need to mean something — and, beyond that, a 14 year-old boy isn’t rational and brain-developed enough to truly consent to all this properly, and it’s quite likely going to f*ck up his future sexual and relational history in some way, if not many ways.
Why do these women do it? This is the $1M question, and the answers vary deeply. I think the answer we default to most is “abused themselves,” and that might be the main answer in many examples. Beyond that one, I think often there’s a thrill of conquest, maybe young men are associated with virility at some level, you can “teach” them, you can be “their first,” and maybe some women just like the adolescent male body type. Zinger was not married, or I saw no reports of this, but a lot of times these women are newly married or newly moms, which brings up a whole different can of worms. Like, you got the husband and the kid(s) — supposedly major markers of female success — and your first idea is to run out and sleep with a 14 year-old boy? That’s confusing. There’s some deep pathology here, absolutely.
Is it happening more now than before? It’s hard to measure whether it’s truly happening more, although some indices in that first link above about female teachers claim that law enforcement does think it’s happening more. If I had to guess at a reason for “more underage abuse” in 2023–2024, maybe I’d go with a general erosion of social skills, context, and morality in the aftermath of COVID? I could be off there.
4. Should we talk about porn’s role in all of this? Indeed, we probably should. There are entire subsections of porn that glorify younger man, older woman. In fact, about 9–10 years ago I saw an article somewhere that the most-searched-for “professions” in porn were like nurse, teacher, etc… stepmom … all basically female roles of “guidance.” That all says nothing good about men and where they’re finding comfort and joy, but I do think the fact that we (a) get obsessed with these stories and (b) think it’s “not really abuse” all come back to the porn problem.
What else you got?