Detailed Analysis

These lyrics, from The Police's 'Don't Stand So Close To Me,' deal with a deeply mature and troubling subject: a teacher's mutual sexual tension with an underage female student ('this girl is half his age'). The content includes strong sexual innuendo ('inside him, there's longing,' 'she wants him so badly,' 'knows what she wants to be'), suggestions of grooming behavior (offering her a warm car at a wet bus stop), and an explicit reference to Nabokov's 'Lolita,' a novel about pedophilia and predatory obsession. While there is no explicit profanity or graphic sexual description, the themes of teacher-student attraction, implied statutory impropriety, and the romanticization of an inappropriate and illegal relationship make this decidedly mature content. The song does present the situation with some moral ambiguity and tension (the chorus functions as a warning), but the subject matter — an adult's sexual longing for a minor student — is inherently mature and potentially disturbing.

Themes

Read more about this analysis and how we do it »

Lyrics