I thought the time had passed when emotionally vulnerable young women were called out and excoriated by men… for having loved a man– and become pregnant with new life…. and without having first stood before a someone who said words that sealed under the laws of the state, what is called marriage contract.
I haven’t commented on Bristol Palin and her mother Governor Palin, and her father Todd Palin, and the rest of their children, although I did write at TMV about Trig, the older Palin’s most recently born little guy… and here, about some of the challenges to being a woman in political slams.
But I have followed Bristol’s carrying of new life inside her own body, watched the tenderness with which she, still pregnant, carried around and loved on her new brother Trig… saw how her mother instinct appears perfectly risen.
As a mother of grown daughters, as a grandmother, watching all attacks against the Palin children and being helpless to stop the moraine of media attacks… first on Trig when he was brand new born ( oh who’s baby is he really? the gossip hissed about on the net and in MSM), now on young Bristol Palin beginning at age 17 (Oooo, unwed mother, oooo she’s a slut, oooo she dares to ‘parade around’ in public), and now on Willow Palin, 14 years old (worthy of rape by a sport’s figure, with Letterman now saying he meant Bristol, not Willow ought be the butt of his joke about being raped, as Bristol is of legal age—Letterman today said, he checked on Bristol’s legal age before he told the joke”…
All this has sickened my heart, and the heart of many many parents that I know personally, sickened the hearts of any one who loves children and knows it takes a long long time to become an adult… mostly settled by about age 40 or so. The state and federal government’s bars about many things are daft, including that people are old enough to be mature at age whatever. It’s a custom job, in my experience. Some are wiser than their years, others take a long time to coalesce.)
For nearly a year now, we’ve heard the deadly vipers that have risen out of the ground to attack Bristol in particular, whilst she was carrying and after she gave birth to her child as well… most attackers far older than she, old enough to be fathers, and grandfathers… all the more shame on them.
Most attackers, amongst other things, seemingly expecting Bristol, a child grown up in a small village, now having a child very early, even still, to have the experience and act in ways one might find as a fifty year old duff who went to University back in the last century.
The outright assumptions about Bristol’s character, heart and soul, are inhumane and grotesque. It is not true, it has never been true that a girl-woman who ‘opens her legs,’– as some put it– for a man… gets what she deserves. That trope not only degrades the female, it puts forth that males are exploiters without conscience. Saying the little guy has no conscience when hungry, doesn’t wash either. That infers that men are witless.
They’re not. Not even close.
But some, are apparently heartless. And use the young to make their hash marks publicly. Or to whip people up because firing up sexual gossip is exciting to the attackers.
Some like to be seen by others as making hay/ money/ gaining attention by literally hovering over the sexual and life-giving body of a girl they do not even know, have never had a meaningful conversation with. Just pouncing and raising the ‘whore flag’ and sitting back and enjoying ‘the action’ in response. That’s wrong.
It’s not just Letterman; his writers and he are only following an incredibly primitive strain that still lives in our culture like a despicable mutating virus… in part, the thinking goes like this:
a girl, a woman, having cared for a man and who has become pregnant by him, and is not in an adjudicated legal contract with him, and who gives birth to a child, whether or not the relationship has worked out, has somehow become a whore…
a woman who holds no morals, a woman whose heart, mind and body are worthy of being raped by other men, worthy of vulgar assertions on a daily basis, worthy of being spall from cheap gossip, worthy of taunting, mocking…
worthy of being– in the eyes of some men, and the women who support those denigrating views of another human—completely unworthy of being treated with decency, protection, and honor. Instead they move to cut her heart out. She deserves it after all. Look at what she did. Laid down with a man.
For attackers, there is no knowledge whatsoever about how Bristol, a young woman who carried a child under her heart and who is not married, loved this man, how she cared and carried hope in her young spirit, how they had planned their future together, what pressures others put on them positively and negatively, how heartbreaking and frightened and desperate matters became as some hopes broke apart, what scars were laid down by that alone.
No more scar tissue was needed. But the attackers have made life-long lacerations, needlessly slashing at the young Bristol and Levi, both. And these young deserved it because ‘they went on TV.’
What outrage that she/they go on television trying to tell truth about abstinence and other matters that all boy-men and girl-women struggle with so. How dare she/they say, do, be, act– perfectly or imperfectly– any of these.
The young ‘asked for it, they did, see? By going on TV!’
This is, in significant part, the subtext of the attacker’s defense… the most addled defense of all.
Most of us just regular people have serious challenges in our lives with regard to health, finances, aging parents, political encroachments in our back yards, fears for our loved ones. It just cannot be that outrage over a girl-child who the attackers are not even related to, have never met, do not know except for flashes of edited media, ought rouse us all to carry faggots to the burning place in the village square.
Surely there are other matters that rise far higher than joining in humiliating others.
There will be much blathering about today about Letterman’s ‘explaining-apology’ and the Palin family’s acceptance which is gracious-righteous and also drags in the kitchen sink, among other things. I say, let it remain as it is now. Let it be done.
For… Letterman by his original meant-to-be-comedic comment, to his credit in an odd way, let show above ground the longing toward vulgarity that has been sliming and creeping around behind the scenes in our less than conscious layer of culture, regarding Bristol Palin … and more so, far far more so– any girl, any woman who dares to lie with a man… and become pregnant.
His ‘comedic comment’ flensed open that putrid bag of slander: the first erroneous assumption being that a girl or woman in such circumstance will now lay with anyone. The second erroneous assumption is that maybe if you call her out, hound her, harass her, publicly shame her, debase her enough, attack her sense of human selfhood, maybe she who is such a slut, will lay with you too. At least in fantasy. The third assumption, being that since she is such trash, she is worthy of being raped without conscience.
All that is sick. Sicker than sick. Bristol Palin is young. Younger than her years for many reasons, and now, believe me, not because her mother is a governor, but because of who has harmed her, publicly bound her and dragged her out in their own wooden wagon made of sticks, attempting to strip her down and tie her to the post, and every day in the media, every day, light the fire to burn her.
I refuse. A lot of us refuse. Let’s just set a bar. Than Shwe, the butcher of Burma is currently attempting to put Aung San Suu Kyi (Nobel Peace Prize awardee for raising a democracy in corrupt Burma, which Than Shwe overthrew with violence) in prison where with her delicate health she will surely perish…
Compare that to the gossip knitted up daily over a young mother from Alaska… the news of Bristol on any day, is only a coming of age story of a young woman growing up.
Neither woman ought perish, nor be defamed, or hounded, nor accused pettily and unjustly, nor punished, nor humiliated by those who want to lord over. Are Bristol and Aung equals? Yes. They are innocent human beings with hearts and souls. And neither and none ought be held out as piñatas for propaganda’s sake or for public incitement or lathered up arousal.
Neither and none, not woman, not man, not child.
No one.
It is inhumane.
CODA
disclosure: when 18 years old, I think I can justly say, I walked in Bristol’s shoes, too. But, also, abandoned and betrayed on all sides instead of loving family remaining near. Some of the worst were the after-midnight phone calls from men and boys (word had gotten round the men’s gossip-trunk lines in the small town I grew up in, population 600… and the men and boy-men, likkered up with courage, I think now, night after night dialed my number while my baby in utero and I were sleeping) name-calling, disparaging with acid words my heart, my very soul, and inviting themselves over to (vulgar word) me since I ‘wanted it so bad.’
I cannot tell you how their words and intents made ashes of what was left of my heart, how I prayed to be protected by someone, anyone. The Palin family has done the opposite of what was considered ‘the only path’ for young pregnant unmarried women back then, the one they ‘deserved’: Shun them, harm them, abandon them, prey upon them.
I keep thinking someday, maybe, I will receive several hand-written notes in the mail, for the men who made the night-calls knew my name back then, even though I did not know who they were as they called anonymously. In my heart’s imagination, the notes would say something like this… ‘I am so sorry to have harmed you. I know I did wrong, for I now have children of my own and I can see how when you cried out into the phone, ‘My child is blessed, stop, go away,’ I now know that is true that your having a child was blessed, not wrong,, that you were in your own difficult time, and I made it far worse, hit you hard just for fun, you who were already down for the count, and I beg your forgiveness on my unknowing mind and heart of long ago.’
Something like that. Something that could mediate a little bit the ache that remains from those late night phone calls, the sniggering of neighbor boys, the scraps of paper pushed into my mailbox in the middle of the night, saying words that no one ought ever say to another, or else feel dehumanized themselves.
No conciliatory notes have arrived yet, but those slashings and beating downs by male strangers remain in my memory, healed as dense scar tissue now… after all these years… 45 years later to be exact.
But, honestly? a little part of me still has a candle lit for maybe a kind note or two to arrive… my tiny shred of a dream … I shelter it, in part, because I know that no man who has torn into an innocent girl or woman who is already in desperate circumstances that way, can look at himself in the mirror and say ‘I am a good person.’
I think reconciliation can in these cases, work both ways. I would be made happy to help pour heart back to what was once heartless. Maybe someday, some one or more of the night-strangers who attacked, would too.