Editor’s Note: The following column is a satire piece.

Reader, can someone please explain to me what happened to the old high school way of thinking about sex and relationships. What happened to the notion, which we had engraved in our social psyches from the day we first wiped the snot from our noses after our parents dropped us off at kindergarten until the day we stubbled bored across the graduation stage to get a piece of paper telling us we completed something that around 90 percent of high schoolers complete, that it’s weird dating out of your age group.

When you saw that senior guy dating a freshman girl, you didn’t think, “what a cute couple.” You would wonder why a senior, who was leaving in a year or less, was messing around with this little freshman. But you also felt bad for that poor girl who was either getting played for sex or was about to get cheated on when her boyfriend left for college because, hey, you don’t expect him to actually drink responsibly and stay faithful. It’s always one or the other, and it’s almost never the latter. 

If this had been kept in mind, maybe Matt Gaetz wouldn’t be facing sex trafficking charges and not have to defend himself for paying a 17-year-old girl to come with him to have sex with while he traveled the country doing drugs. As much as that sounds like the villain’s backstory in a Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson movie, it is very much a real situation that a U.S. representative has found himself in.

Now this is not the first sex scandal like this in politics and it definitely won’t be the last. If this is really the next generation of lawmakers, I would like to request a mulligan now. Though you really can’t be too surprised since this is a man who idolized a president that was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, probably one of the greatest traffickers and traumatizers in American history. I’m sure he thought if he could get Trump young girls again, maybe he’d start returning Gaetz calls. 

Since this has happened though, the Florida Department of Education (FDE) has said that it will incorporate Gaetz-inspired educational programs next school year. They are introducing a whole slew of social studies classes that teach women how to identify a potential creep and how to defend themselves from them. The hope is that these courses will give women the skills to survive an incident like this without having to worry the male students.

The FDE says that they know this problem stems from male behavior, but don’t want to detract from the experience of their male students. They hope to promote a safe, welcoming environment, but also recognize that “boys will be boys” and possibly traffic a high schooler. But if you take anything away from this let it be the following: whoever has a birthday on the same day Matt Gaetz gets arrested will forever win the Florida Man birthday challenge.