commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Pulchritude is a word you don’t hear much anymore. When I have heard it used it’s generally been in reference to “female pulchritude” which I always assumed meant “female physiognomy” or feminine physique, but in looking it up online it’s simple a middle English word derived from the Latin and it simply means “beautiful”. Or as one proponent of pulchritude put it, “My girlfriend is the most pulchritudinous woman in the woman in the world.”
However, after deep thought, it seems to me that pulchritude could be applied to both sexes not to mention transgender people. Thus, if a man and a woman make beautiful music together we could say that pulchritude is meeting pulchritude.
All of this is a roundabout and not very clever way of getting around to the fact that there seems to be an awful lot of pulchritude meeting pulchritude at American high schools these days, the only problem being that the pulchritudinous females are invariably rather attractive teachers generally ranging in age from 24 to 32 while the pulchritudinous dudes are always either 16 or 17. Every darned time this seems to result in somebody, generally the boy, letting the cat out of the bag. Then the teacher loses her job, gets arrested, is shamed and humiliated, and very likely goes to jail or prison.
It seems clear that no matter how wonderfully pulchritudinous the 16/17 year old boys appear in the eyes of the older women, it’s just not worth it, yet these these desiring ladies just don’t seem to be able to stop themselves.
Just today on Huff Crime News, there’s a story about Ashley Zehnder, a bespectacled 24-year-old biology teacher and assistant cheerleading coach at Pasadena High School Pasadena, Texas who faces a felony charge for having an improper relationship with an under-aged male member of the cheer squad, according to Click2Houston.com.
Oddly enough, Ashley appears to have inadvertently turned herself in by complaining to the school authorities about a naked selfie of herself that began circulating among the students. Oh Jesus, every time you take a nude picture of yourself with your cell phone and send it out into cyber-space you are taking one king-hell risk.
But the new “mature woman — younger fella” story I want to talk about briefly concerns the case of a rather interesting former Irish college hoopster and recently terminated high school basketball coach in NYC named Megan Mahoney. Andres Jauregui of Huffington Post writes:
A former basketball coach and gym teacher at a prestigious New York City high school faces statutory rape charges for her alleged sex abuse of a male student.
Megan Mahoney, 24, was arrested Monday for allegedly having regular sexual contact with the same 16-year-old student over a period of more than two months beginning in late October 2013, the Staten Island Advance reports.
Due to law enforcement’s habit of counting each discrete unlawful act as a separate charge, Mahoney faces 30 counts of statutory rape. According to the New York Post, court papers assert that Mahoney had sex with the teen “on numerous occasions, that is at least two times per week during the period.”
Just to make it worse, she’s also charged with four counts of “criminal sexual act” because of allegedly engaging in mutual oral sex with the boy “at least two times per month during said period.”
As a result of her impropriety, Mahoney has wrecked her career. She resigned from Moore Catholic High School in Staten Island, where she was a gym teacher and an assistant coach for the women’s basketball team.
According to the investigators, some of the illicit encounters occurred on school grounds. In August, in an interview with the New York Post, the boy stated that the relationship began after Mahoney allegedly approached him in the gym, struck up a conversation and offered to coach him in basketball.
“We would just drive around and [do it] in the car,” said the boy.
And as is sometimes the case, there’s another authority figure in the mix, Richard Postiglione, the Moore Catholic High School athletic director, who was investigated for allegedly failing to report sex abuse accusations against not only Mahoney but also another female teacher at the school.
Based on her pulchritude and strapping physiognomy, it is not surprising that Mahoney was a student athlete who played basketball at Wagner College and later at Fordham University before becoming a coach and P.E. teacher.
* * * * *
This one depresses me. Unlike the recent Louisiana sex-threesome-with-teen ladies, Shelley Dufresne and Rachel Respess, who although attractive look rather staged and neurotic 
to my experienced eye, Mahoney looks hale, hearty and like she’d be lots of fun to get to know. She looks like she was a battler on the court in the best Irish New York tradition, like she very likely gains and loses poundage regularly, and like she doesn’t mind the sun. In short, a “gamer” in every sense of the term.
So why has she also chosen to wreck her life? Sure, the pulchritudinous teen was undoubtedly attractive, at least to her eye, but so what? If we all had a dollar for every attractive kid roaming around around our high schools, we could all probably retire. Because this syndrome appears to be becoming more and more of a social problem, it seems steps need to be taken to keep the problem from arising in the first place. Young vibrant women like Megan Mahoney (or even the wan Ms. Dufresne and Ms. Rachel) should not be throwing their futures away over forbidden fruit. And why does this forbidden fruit seem to be so deucedly attractive to so many young female teachers? I don’t get it and can only shake my head in confusion…