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A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:
This is perhaps the least surprising finding of social science to date: "Rates
of births to teenage mothers are strongly predicted by conservative
religious beliefs, even after controlling for differences in income and
rates of abortion." In 2008 the larger public got a taste of what
watchers of the social conservative movement have known for a long
time, which is that they've quietly started to celebrate teenage
motherhood. When
Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston were trotted out as American heroes for
the Big Knock-Up during the Republican National Convention, that was a
wink and a nod to this growing enthusiasm in the Christian right ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The juicy bits from Levi Johnston's article in Vanity Fair are now online. The most talked-about excerpt is sure to be that Sarah Palin wanted to keep Bristol's pregnancy a secret ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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The Palin family's message machine seems to have gone haywire of late. Governor
Sarah has plastered on her serious face, forswearing this month's White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington to concentrate on the recession
in Alaska. She sent her husband to D.C. instead to hang with Greta Van Susteren
but say nothing to the cameras. At one WHCA post-party, former Palin
running-mate-in-law Meghan McCain seemed confused about how to deal with... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bristol Palin is partnering with the Candie's Foundation, a subset of the Candie's company, to promote "abstinence" as a way to "raise awareness" and "combat teen pregnancy." Never mind that one form of awareness, of course, is the awareness that pregnancy and STD rates often drop when teenagers are educated about birth control. Or that abstinence-only education doesn't seem... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, perhaps I should not have compared Elizabeth Cousins to Bristol Palin; Cousins never offered herself as a spokesperson for anything, except herself and her own experience. While I agree with you all about preventing teen pregnancy, Cousins' baby is already here. She should be commended for rising to the occasion, rather than roundly chastised. In addition, I don't think Bristol Palin's example paints a realistic picture of teen motherhood, and in fact could be accused of glamorizing it: She remains living in her mother's mansion with ample help from her wealthy family and a nationally televised platform. Sure, Levi embarrassed her, but I'd bet when at least some teens saw him on Tyra, they were swooningly jealous of Bristol having such a dreamy boyfriend.
Emily, at the end of the day, I think we're all products of our own environments. Elizabeth Cousins and Bristol Palin both come from peer groups where teen pregnancy is rampant and opportunities for the future are limited. I sincerely doubt the kind of teen who is watching multimedia presentations on the New York Times website would hear Cousins' story and say to herself, "Having a baby now sounds like a great idea!" She'd be the kind of teen who would be well aware at how much she had to lose.
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Jess, I actually prefer Bristol Palin as a poster girl for teen motherhood to the young woman in the New York Times you link to. If you're a teenage girl and you'd followed Bristol's saga, it might actually make you realize that getting pregnant in high school would pretty much ruin your life: the embarrassing attempt to tell your parents; the pressure to marry your boyfriend; the breakup with your boyfriend because he's an immature jerk; your boyfriend telling everyone about you; you having to spend all your time babysitting for your brother and your own kid—only it's not babysitting if it's your own kid. This New York Times piece, with its mostly happy narration and beatific photographs of mother and child sends the message that while teenage motherhood is hard, it's also doable and fulfilling, and the reward of an adorable child who loves you is enormous.
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As we try to craft the Platonic ideal of the teen sex talk, I have a few thoughts. Like Hanna, I’m all for mixed (or, to be more precise, layered) messages. I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical or unloving about delivering up a combo platter of threats and promises: Having sex in high school is a lousy idea (but if you’re really going to do it, make sure you use protection.) If you get pregnant in high school, your future is screwed six ways from Sunday (but if it happens anyway, I’ll stick by you whatever you choose to do.) After all, much of adult life functions on this kind of more-than-binary logic: For example, most marriages operate on the assumption that cheating is intolerable, but when infidelity does happen, it’s often worth working through the problem and staying together.
God knows Levi and Bristol could have used a bit more negative capability (the capacity to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time) as they embarked on their ill-considered journey toward parenthood. What’s most maddening in their press appearances is the way that, enabled by fatuous interviewers, they blur together their crappy decision-making with its, in some sense, happy outcome (a baby, even an unplanned one, is bound to be a source of joy.) I could have throttled Tyra Banks when she said to Levi, “If [Bristol] could wave a magic wand, she’d have preferred to wait ten years.” Magic wands are notoriously ineffective as a means of birth control. Like Jessica's mom, I’d rather arm my daughter with a stern warning, an implied promise, and a five-dollar box of condoms.
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Emily, Levi's interview with Tyra Banks yesterday may have been catnip for haters, but it was mostly just a sad, sordid business. In the clip below (via HuffPo), Levi is just a moose caught in headlights. His affect is a combination of uncomfortable and dim, and it seems like his sister Mercede is running the show (which may explain the choice of interviewers). When asked why he no longer sees Tripp as much as he wants to, Levi told Tyra, "I think [Bristol] and my sister have got in some fights, and I don't think she trusts my sister." While he remained mum for the second part of the show, Levi did say that he and Bristol didn't always use condoms and that Sarah Palin did not force him to propose—nor did she force him to get "Bristol" tattooed on his ring finger. If Levi's learned anything from this experience, it's not to get someone's name etched on himself. "I wouldn't recommend it," he said. Check out Levi and his family below, and pray that Levi chooses to pull back from the press (and chooses to use condoms consistently). He would benefit from an injection of normalcy in his life, even if Sarah Palin continues to be in the public eye.
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Could it really be that the Sarah Palin haters are getting exactly what they predicted in the aftermath of Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy? First Bristol and Levi Johnston called off the wedding. Now they are using the knives of his Tyra Banks appearance and her press release to slash each other. It's like I-told-you-so catnip. When Bristol did her interview with Greta after the baby's birth, I was on the side of seeing something real there. But this latest round is all tabloid parody, down to the high-road claim that Bristol is busy "advocating abstinence." Actually her crackup with Levi is a public service announcement about teen pregnancy.
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Speaking of Facebook, or at least the Facebook generation, Meghan McCain was on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, ostensibly to discuss her burgeoning feud with Ann Coulter. For those of you who missed it, Meghan McCain wrote an article for the Daily Beast called "My Beef With Ann Coulter." Her "beef" is that Ann Coulter "perpetuates negative stereotypes" of Republicans. Not exactly a revolutionary screed, as others have pointed out.
Meghan is trying valiantly to revive the image of the Republican Party, but like Bristol Palin before her, Meghan doesn't exactly have the political chops to do so. She freely admits that she doesn't really understand the financial crisis. What I don't understand is why the Republican Party can't find a smart young woman to represent their movement who does understand the recession. Perhaps someone without a political legacy! Anyway, John Cook at Gawker says that Meghan "made a fool of herself." While I think she was short on substance, I don't think Meghan looks like a fool. She's incredibly poised and camera-ready, and compared to Bristol she sounds like a rocket scientist. But, again: The bar is pretty low. Watch the clip below and tell me what you think.
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Hanna, I feel pretty much the same about Bristol Palin’s predicament as I felt about the Crihanna debacle. The baby beaus weren’t going to stay together anyway, so why stay together in the midst of such drama? At these young ages, there are no guarantees—and actuarial tables, if not common sense, would counsel against making puppy love permanent. Sure, Rihanna and Brown became the breadwinners for their older family members at 21 and 19, respectively (a whole different story), and the 18-year-old Palin became a “role model” before even leaving the province of underaged handle-chugging, but someone (um, you know, parents) should have reminded them: You are not adults.
So of course Levi isn't "hands on." We should applaud Palin—however belatedly, she came to the right decision. But why don’t we teach kids that it’s OK to break up? Give it two years, max—and if by then you’re over 25, split or get married. Seems clinical, but is it any worse than this surreal mythology of true romance that allows teens to tear at each others’ emotions until, one day, there are bruises—or a baby on board?
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We should have guessed it would end this way. Of course, Bristol and Levi have broken up. In America of 2009, stories that begin with the words pregnant and high school don't end in fairy-tale summer weddings. And I suppose if Bristol were going to become a poster girl for the Real Lives of Evangelicals, she might as well go all the way—pregnant at 17 and unmarried. In the semirespectable news stories that followed the tabloid stories, Bristol complained about people cashing in on her name and Levi complained about false Internet rumors. But those rumors were pegged to his own sister, according to Radar. Mercede, they reported, "says Bristol even told him that she hates him and, when she learned she was pregnant, wished the baby wasn't his."
"Bristol's just crazy," said Mercede. "That's the nicest way I can put it. She and Levi actually broke up a while ago!" Then she debunked the whole "hands-on" dad thing—a soundbite from the Greta Van Susteren interview of last month. "Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible for him. She tells him he can't take the baby to our house because she doesn't want him around 'white trash.' She treats him so badly!" (Wait until he applies for a state trooper job.)
Next on Jerry Springer, a Connecticut group is starting the first draft Sarah Palin group.
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Hi Abby, and welcome! You asked if I thought Bristol Palin "was going to present some kind of five-step plan outlining the ‘details of abstinence or safe sex' " in her interview with Greta Van Susteren. I never had any expectations of Bristol presenting any particular plans on anything—that is, until she explicitly told Van Susteren that she wants to be "an advocate against teen pregnancy." If she wants to take on this issue, then yes, I do think she needs to put forward some thoughts about how, exactly, to go about preventing the thing she's supposedly advocating against. You also asked, Abby, whether her mistake was "the sex part, the getting pregnant part, [or] the having the baby part." That's the same question I have of Bristol! I criticized Bristol earlier for her vague statement that she wished this had happened in 10 years. As Tina Morrison at the Kansas City Star astutely points out, "Pregnancy doesn't just ‘happen.' ... There are things leading up to it. Things you can control, such as how much wine you have with dinner, if your pants stay zipped, or whether or not to use a condom!" Right. So what, exactly, does Bristol wish she had waited on? Sex? Unprotected sex?
Lauren B.'s essay on abortion that Rachael found so appalling may have been a bit crass, but at least it made a point. Which is good: As a writer, she has a responsibility to say something substantive in her piece. As an 18-year-old mother—even one with a celebrity mom—Bristol has no such responsibility. She can go about motherhood as quietly as the media outlets allow (and they have been pretty quiet since Tripp's birth), and the public would have no right to demand that she use her situation to promote safe sex or abstinence education or a pro-life or pro-choice agenda. But Bristol made the decision to call herself an advocate. At that point, I think it's fair to expect a little more.
So what was her mistake? Saying she wants to be an advocate against teen pregnancy but dodging questions about abstinence and safe sex. Well, that and the obvious mistake, if it's true that she wants to break out from the shadow of her domineering mother: naming her child Tripp.
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Bristol, Bristol, Bristol—can we talk about Sarah Palin for a second, the public figure with whom we'll have to live for at least the next four years?
I thought her drop-in to Bristol's instant-classic Fox interview was creepy, domineering, and inappropriate. Greta Van Susteren established that doing the interview was Bristol's decision, and that she pointedly made it on her own: She didn't even tell Mom about it until the day before it happened. Agreeing to the interview—her first post-birth sit-down on national TV—had to be one of those major moments in late-adolescent life when a kid breaks off from his parents and dramatically establishes his authority to run on his own steam and do it alone. When I was 19, I unilaterally decided to move to Brussels and, for a reason I couldn't identify at the time, didn't tell my mother until after the plans were set in stone. She was upset, but she didn't buy a plane ticket and announce she was crashing my trip. That's what Sarah did by horning in on her daughter's interview. Even if Van Susteren asked Mom to come, she shouldn't have shown up.
And the way she showed up. Ick. Fast-forward to 8:20 in this segment. Sarah lumbers right into Bristol's frame and doesn't even sit down but rather hovers weirdly over Bristol, wearing a heavy coat, a bit like a subtly threatening mafia don. Obviously, any publicity Bristol gets complicates Sarah's already complex political image. But her responsibility as a mother was to stay clear of Bristol's moment, even if, as a (notoriously controlling) politician, she felt desperate to do damage control.
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Jessica, I don't think we're quite "piling on" Bristol Palin for either her interview or her teen pregnancy, but I do see quite a difference between Bristol and Rachael's examples of Lauren B. and Amy Richards. Lauren B. is a writer and Richards is an abortion rights advocate, and they both decided to make their stories public. Bristol, on the other hand, was thrust into the spotlight—had her mother not been running for vice president, the news that the governor of a noncontiguous state had a pregnant 17-year-old daughter likely would have escaped notice altogether or been acknowledged only in short news items. Bristol chose to do this interview, but she didn't choose to become a poster child for teen momhood in the first place. I applaud Richards and Lauren for frankly discussing their experiences with abortion, but, as I'm sure they would both agree, they offered themselves up for discussion and criticism—two things Bristol has certainly been subjected to without having the same opportunity to tell her story herself first.
I don't know what her primary motivation for the interview was—to fight misconceptions about being an uneducated high-school dropout, to piss off her mother, or to warn other girls against unprotected sex (her "abstinence or whatever" comment seemed to me like a veiled attempt to advocate for contraception without speaking the words). Perhaps she merely wanted an excuse to put on makeup and do something a little exciting after six weeks of mothering a newborn.
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I think Bristol's insistence that her pregnancy was her own choice is entirely consistent with the notion that her interview was a tacit rebellion, despite what Rachael thinks. Bristol was further asserting her independence by saying: "It doesn't matter what my mom's views are on it. It was my decision. And I wish people would realize that, too." As Rebecca Traister at Salon cannily points out, regardless of what Bristol's views on abortion are (and those are still unknown, thanks to Greta Van Susteren's softest of softball interviews), she's using the language of choice to describe her decisions. As Traister puts it, "Bristol's ability to make her own decision, without regard to her mom's views on the issue, is precisely the freedom for which reproductive rights activists fight, trying to ensure that no daughters surrender control of their bodies to their mothers or fathers or husbands or clergymen or governments."
And to Abby (hi Abby!)—I think choosing to do an interview on national TV was Bristol's only mistake. She had sex, she got pregnant, she dealt with the consequences. Seventeen-year-olds have been doing the same thing for eons. The idea that we're "piling on" Bristol by commenting on her nationally televised appearance is ridiculous. She's legally a grown woman and a mother. If Rachael can so harshly judge Lauren B. and Amy Richards for sharing the personal stories of their reproductive choices, I don't understand why we should be treating Bristol Palin with such a delicate hand.
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This is a guest post from Abigail Pilgrim, a writer in Washington, D.C. Welcome!
Samantha, were you really expecting that she was going to present some kind of five-step plan outlining the "details of abstinence or safe sex"? And Susannah, do you call her "astonishingly dim" because she got pregnant, because she's not as articulate as Obama, or what?
I personally loved Bristol's interview, not because she came across as a polished poster girl but because she presented some of the real feelings and questions that can too often go missing from the teen pregnancy debate. I didn't find anything immature about her sitting down with her parents and feeling terrified. But maybe it was just me and Bristol that have ever had that so-sick-I-can-barely-talk-but-I-know-I-have-to-tell-you feeling with my parents. I hope those kinds of confrontations happen more often than the cases that my sister (who's a nurse) tells me about of the teenage girls who show up at the hospital, find out they're pregnant, and then refuse to let the nurses inform their parents before they get an abortion. Speaking of which, does anyone else think it's crazy that girls get reproductive rights before they get their learner's permits? Are you really prepared to choose whether or not to have a baby if you're not even capable of choosing whether or not to change lanes on I-495? It's insane to me.
The main takeaway I had from Bristol's interview is that there's something twisted when culture is practically doing everything it can to encourage teens to have sex, but then when they do and someone gets pregnant, we all act completely horrified because they're obviously unprepared to be a parent.
Everyone seems to agree that she made a mistake. But what was her mistake? Was it the sex part, the getting pregnant part, the having the baby part, or maybe just the choosing to do an interview on national TV part?
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I'm afraid I have to agree that on the vapid-to-moving continuum, I’d put Bristol Palin’s interview a lot closer to the vapid side of the spectrum. It wasn’t just the likes and the ums; that’s standard-issue and I do it, too. But I don’t understand how someone who clearly wants to take on an advocacy role has given no thought at all to what it is she wants to advocate. As several of you have already noted, “wait 10 years” and “abstinence is not realistic” is just not a public service message. It’s confusing, if not totally contradictory. Now I don’t think I agree, Willa, that this is attention-seeking or career-planning on her part. Bristol mostly looks like she’d rather be pulling a dogsled through the tundra than giving this interview. I think she really does want her life to be an example to other teens. But since she doesn’t seem to know what her message is, the net effect seems to be completely unrealistic and chaotic. (“I take care of him all the time except when I’m at school"?!). And Gov. Palin’s glossy observation—that having a baby at 18 is very unfortunate but also very fortunate—only contributes to the sense that the only message here is: “Don’t do what I did. Unless you do.”
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Jessica wondered earlier why Bristol Palin would agree to do an interview at all, now that the feeding frenzy is largely over, and posited Bristol's telling her overbearing mama to step off. I buy that, but I think there's an even simpler reason she might have decided to sit down with Greta: She wants the attention. Bristol mentions a number of times that having a baby isn't at all "glamorous." That doesn't sound like news, but I think it might have been to Bristol. She repeats the insight a number of times, enough for it to seem like one of her big revelations about having a newborn. (It's also a nod to the insidious power of the same tabloids that Bristol dismisses as trash. Where else would one get the idea that glamour has anything to do with child-rearing except from watching the likes of Ashlee Simpson, Gwen Stefani, and Angelina do it in $500 dollar jeans?) Greta Van Susteren may not be glamorous like Vogue, but she's chic-er than nothing (or what most 18-year old mothers have access to).
I was also struck by how often Bristol talked about how having a career would make raising a baby easier. Keeping herself in the public eye is a pretty savvy, if yucky, career strategy. Being notorious has already proved to be a viable career option for some. If Bristol seems unlikely to follow in Paris' exact footsteps, she can at least use her fame as a springboard to something else, be it advocacy or handbags. But she's got to extend her 15 minutes in order for that move to work.