DEBRA LAFAVE GOING DOWN

The Florida teacher-babe accused of having sex with a middle-school boy, was supposed to get house arrest. But a judge this week ruled that the plea bargain was too much of a bargain. He ordered trial to begin on April 10.

The Ocala Star-Banner has the winner of this week's Missing The Obvious Award -- a story that says LaFave might be getting some slack because she's a woman:

Lafave's alleged victim of sexual assault was a 14-year-old boy.

That makes a difference in the coverage, said Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at St. Petersburg's Poynter Institute. The nonprofit institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, trains journalists.

"If all the details were the same . . . I doubt that we would generally see the same thing if the gender roles were reversed," Steele said.

The consequences likely would be greater for a man, said psychologist Thomas Plante, chair of the psychology department of Santa Clara University in California.

"If you switched the genders around in this case . . . we would be all over it. People would be terribly upset," he said. Instead, he added, "there's an attitude of 'boy, he got lucky.'"

Hello? Debra LaFave's physical attractiveness is the biggest key to any leniency here. Sex between LaFave and the teen boy might be viewed with much more disgust if she wasn't a babe. A babe with crazy eyes.