...is arbitrary. There is no guarantee that each human being reaches his potential to make the wisest decisions for himself at 18, 16, 21. Some people need many years of the experience of trial and error to make the best decisions. Some are more wise at an early age.

I think the idea that the LW Inherently 'damaged' her student by entering into a physical relationship is hysterical and prudish, ignoring as it does the vast potential for individual differences in maturity, intelligence and sophistication. On it's face this situation can easily be dismissed as older person taking advantage of younger person, but who among us cannot remember what it was like to be 18, totally beyond the emotional and psychological purview of our parents. At that age I saw myself as an adult, and the decison as to whom I slept with as inelocutably mine. Hindsight being 20-20, I was right, as I was a mature 18-year-old. This isn't true for every 18-year-old but the possibility certainly cannot be denied.

The automatic condemnation of the LW on the bais of the age difference alone dismisses the essential individuality, needs and desires of the student. Maybe some 18 year olds are unable to properly discern if an older paramour is really 'good' for them or not; but does the ability to most correctly make that judgement really/always change with age? How many of the letters written to Cary are by 20-somethings, 30-somethings, 40-somethings and 50-somethings who are making decisions with what seems to be staggeringly bad judgement, as though they had simply sprung from the womb yesterday, with no esxperience, education, or resources of maturity to guide them?

For reasons of social condemnation and the commensurate personal and professional penalties alone, the LW should probably back off from this relationship - but I say that only because of the teacher-former student variable. Were she a manager at McDonald's, and he a customer, we might be snide about the age difference (for our own personal reasons more than any true overarching 'morality) but the whiff of authoritorial malfeasance would not be present. Then it becomes a matter of the maturity, needs, and motivations of two individuals. Certainly it is possible for an 18 year old to be more mature than a 30 year old; certainly it is possible for a 30 year old to be more naive than an 18 year old. Pacal said "The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing" and this is at least as true (whether you are 18, 28 or 80) as the assumptions dictating the age of consent in our society today.

They aren't inherent trade-offs. There is plenty of room for reasonable grooming and studying hard. And doing so is not succumbing to pressure to 'be all, do all"" as Ms. Clark-Flory opines.

Women put this anxious pressure on themselves. If all girls eschewed the effort to be 'hot like a celebrity' and just settled for looking cute and attractive, guess what - the boys will not stay away from them in droves. Girls hold the power to set the rules of the dating game but undermine themselves by descending into vicious competitions that raise the bar for 'success' to ridiculous heights, and lower the bar for other accomplishments.

I was chatting with my boyfriend recently about what constitutes a 'good body'. More women should do this. I was amazed at the broad inclusiveness of his comments. And when it came to cellulite I had to laugh out loud. "No guy cares about cellulite if you have an otherwise shapely body with some tone to it," he said. He further clarified that in all his 40 years he had never once heard a guy make a remark, negative or otherwise, about cellulilte.

Now - open a fashion rag. Any one of them. Ads for curing cellulite! False editorials that, with poisonous sweetness, urge women to '"to accept yourself for your inner beauty! But oh hey by the way here are the best exercises, the latest diet, the tanning tricks, the newest miracle cream to get rid of that ugly cellulite we've airbrushed off all of the models in the mag".

Too many women put a majority of their resources into competing for men when the truth is, if every girl in every bar next Friday was showing zero skin, wearing turtlenecks, guys would still talk to them and show an interest. The only person putting 'pressure' on women is the advertisers.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the day men feel too much pressure from Maxim, GQ and Esquire to be 'hot' and 'successful'. The editorial content in those mags is about 10% urging men to think about maximizing what they already have (which most already believe - correctly - is plenty good enough) rather than improving or changing it, and about 90% what are the neat things out there - restaurants, booze, cigars, cars, athletic gear, politicians, the occasional celebrity and yes, women - that they mind want to spend an idle half hour or so reading about. You know, for entertainment purposes. Then they forget all about it and go back to thinking they're just fine in last night's t-shirt and jeans and last year's hair cut and the same old unimproved, unadorned face they've had all their life, and focus on how their interests or skills or knowledge can be used to best succeed or at least entertain themselves. And none of this requires bellyaching that they feel so much 'pressure' to be attractive and smart. They understand, as women cannot seem to, that the two things are about as intrinsic to being happy as having arms AND legs, no need to break out in a sweat about it.