When Daddy Likes To Watch

As sexual morality shifts with technology, do we need to adjust laws at all?

Let’s start with this video and then dive deeper:

So, what happened here was you had a married couple outside of Tampa. The allegation is that Sascha (the male) forced a 16 year-old boy to have sex with Alyssa (the wife) while he watched. Notably, this has been a porn narrative for about three decades, often involving stepsons and the like. However, 16 is still a minor, so they were charged.

The incident happened in March. I believe legal authorities learned about it in April. Sascha, who was a lieutenant firefighter, was placed on admin leave in late May. The couple just recently began appearing in court.

Both face three counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor.

Let's unpack this a little bit:

1. Some outlets report this was the first time the 16 year-old had interacted with them, but most report they knew him before. That’s only logical. Why would a late-30s couple without kids (insofar as we know) know a 16 year-old boy? They obviously met and groomed him. My far-away guess would be that he wanted to be a firefighter and met Sascha through some program.

2. The easiest way to look at this and dismiss it is to say they are perverts, and that's probably right. I assume they will both do some time, get out, and go on their merry way. It might be eight years, might be less. We’ll see.

3. I think the “quiet part out loud” on this one is probably they were looking for some kink, and she had told her husband she wanted to try a younger man, and he found this aspiring firefighter, and it worked.

4. There is a narrative that 16 year-old boys cannot be traumatized by this kind of stuff, because they’re little horndogs and the opportunity to sleep with a 37 year-old woman is awesome. That’s wrong. I think you very easily could be traumatized by this, and that’s backed up by years of research and interviews with sex crimes prosecutors.

My question here is: if this kid was maybe 22 months older, we probably wouldn’t consider this a crime. We still might think it’s gross as hell, but we wouldn’t consider it officially a crime.

So, should we downshift some of the consent laws?

My immediate answer is “no.” That seems bad. If you downshifted them, I would say 16 would be the lowest number.

But then, sometimes, I think of an experience I had in summer 2018 on a boat in western New York. Don’t worry, it’s not gross and doesn’t involve minors.

One of my buddies on a guys trip had been with someone for three years, and they had recently broken up. He was 38. For his job, he was traveling to a lot of universities, and he was often hooking up with 21- and 22-year-old women. Almost all the guys on this trip had been married over a decade and had kids, so they were weirdly asking him questions about the sexual mores and proclivities of young women in 2018.

My friend told us, “They seem to grow up faster now … they’re more willing to experiment … some told me they’ve been sexually active since 14.”

While that could probably be said of any era of human history, it does feel like the modern era has:

• Unlimited access to porn

• People texting and sharing random illicit content in MS/HS

• Cyber-bullying

• Instagram influencers who border on sexual deviancy all the time

• An uptick in female teachers sleeping with students

I think a lot of current 16 year-olds are very aware of this stuff. Should this case above still be prosecuted? Yes. Will this kid potentially be traumatized? Yes. But if kids are growing up hyper-fast sexually, should we consider that at all?

A final note on this case. Think about all the things that needed to happen for this incident to occur:

• Wife had to convey to husband that she wanted young action

• Husband had to find the kid

• Grooming had to commence

• The kid’s parents had to be comfortable enough with the couple that they were OK with the kid hanging out with them (or the parents were absentee)

• The couple had to set a specific night for the lure

• The parents of the kid had to be OK with the kid being over at their house at some point without anyone else

• The kid had to consent to whatever happened

There are so many times this could have been stopped or questioned. That’s a big part of this discourse as well. Brings me back to this: do we let parents off the hook for too much?

What’s your take on this case and evolving sexual morality?