Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Van Halen – "Hot for Teacher" (1984)


I got it bad, so bad
I'm hot for teacher

Emmanuel Macron – who was elected President of France on Sunday – knows exactly what David Lee Roth is talking about in today’s featured song.

The 39-year-old Macron has something in common with Donald Trump: neither man had held elective office prior to being elected president.  

But there are differences between the two presidents as well.  For example, Trump is 24 years older than his wife Melania, while Macron is 24 years younger than his wife Brigitte.

French President-elect Macron
with his mother wife
According to the Washington Post, the fact that Macron is young enough to be his wife’s son rather than old enough to be her father “delights many French women”:

“Why can’t we marry younger men? I date them all the time,” said [Martine] Bergossi, the stylish owner of Alternatives, a secondhand-couture shop in Paris, who prefers to leave her exact age to the imagination.

“It’s normal to see men with younger women,” she said. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”

I wonder if Mme. Bergossi was aware that President-elect Macron and his future wife met when he was a 15-year-old 10th-grader at a Catholic school in Amiens, France, and she was a 40-year-old teacher who was married and the mother of three – including a son who was in Emmanuel’s class.

He's hot for teacher!
From the Daily Mail:

[W]hen the teacher-student relationship burst into an affair, the scandal was talk of the town . . . .

“It was a huge scandal at the time,” [said] Benoit Delespierre, a local journalist who is close to [Brigitte’s] family . . . .

“People are opened-minded about love and sex in France.  But still it was a big deal.  She was married with three children and he was her pupil.  You can imagine what the other parents made of it all.”

Emmanuel Macron’s parents were aghast when they learned their teenaged son was canoodling with his married middle-aged teacher, but chose not to make a corrupting-a-minor complaint to local police.


(Why is the President-elect wearing a shirt in this photo?  Hiding his moobs?)

According to Anne Fulda, whose book, Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man, was published last month, Macron’s mother confronted Brigitte and begged her to leave her son alone – at least until he was 18.  But “Brigitte said she couldn't promise her anything,” according to Fulda.

Macron’s parents packed their boy off to an elite secondary school in Paris, hoping the separation would bring an end to Emmanuel’s dalliance with his teacher.  “You won’t get rid of me,” he told Brigitte before leaving.  “I will return and I will marry you.”

And marry her he did – some thirteen years after the relationship began, when he was 29 and she was a 54-year-old grandmother of seven.  (The French newspapers have run photos of him giving a bottle to the youngest of his step-grandchildren.) 

She's hot for student! 
Inquiring minds want to know one thing above all else about this story: how old Emmanuel was when he and Brigitte started bumping uglies.  But she’s not talking.  From the Daily Mail:

Brigitte has refused to reveal when the unlikely pair first became intimate, proclaiming it “our secret.”

“Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story.  That belongs to us.  That is our secret,” she said.

Why won’t she spill the beans?  Surely the statute of limitations has run by now.  

*     *     *     *     *

Do you think that the reaction to the Emmanuel-Brigitte relationship would have been a little different if he had been the 40-year-old married teacher and she had been the 15-year-old student?  (Or if both the student and the teacher had been male?)

Absotively posilutely!.  At least that would have been the case in the U.S. – the French might just say, “J’en ai rien à foutre.” 

*     *     *     *     *

“Hot for Teacher” was released on Van Halen’s 1984 album, 1984.

Here’s the “Hot for Teacher” music video, which features Norwegian model Lillian Müller, who was Playboy’s 1976 “Playmate of the Year.”  



Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

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