Free Republic

Is another taboo about to be broken? A British professor who has been studying pupil-teacher relationships for 25 years concludes sexual contact between them should not necessarily be criminal conduct – in fact, she says, they can be positive experiences. Prof. Pat Sikes Pat Sikes of the University of Sheffield was seduced by her history teacher at the age of 14 and later became his wife. Now she has written "Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Female Pupils and Male Teachers Fall In Love." It contends classroom affairs are more common than is usually imagined. She writes that expressions of...

We can usually sympathize with one or another party to a dispute: one is usually more in the right—or less in the wrong—than the other. But with the breakdown of accepted conventions, it increasingly happens that neither side arouses our sympathies. Take a recent case in Sweden, where a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up. The mother of the children found herself...

THE troubled English National Opera plans to sing for its survival with the world premiere of a new opera about lesbian lovers that features nudity and sex. ENO, which is only now emerging from a period of deficits of millions of pounds, is pinning hopes on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, an operatic adaptation of the 1972 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the cult German director. The all-female production tells the story of a fashion designer, von Kant, who develops a crush on Karin, one of her models. It also portrays von Kant’s mistress/slave relationship with her mute...