Bristol goes Bazaar

Oh, the sins of the Mother are most definitely visited on the kids. Most definitely.

There's no other particularly legitimate reason for so many people to react so viciously toward little Bristol "Red Carpet" Palin and her $30,000 public speaking fee.

Oh, wait......

No, actually I'm going to take the "In defense of Bristol" stance on this one. After reading this article in this month's Harper's Bazaar, I see nothing but a pretty honest kid who loves her son, was justifiably horrified to find out she was knocked up, and has the benefit of a famous mother and an infamous baby-daddy (or is it infamous mother, famous baby-daddy?) to allow her some creative financial leverage that most other teen moms would kill for.

In college, a friend and I used to play this "game" of sorts where we'd imagine we were unexpectedly pregnant and then visualize having to sit our familes down and tell them - then we'd delight in writhing around, imaging how miserable that would be (for a couple of 18 year-old church girls in a Nazarene college dorm it was worse than the threat of cancer. See: the movie "Saved" and the "Please let it be cancer, please let it be cancer, please let it be cancer" pre-preganancy-test-chanting. Too true, too true. Also see: the fact that our freshman girls dorm was referred to as the Virgin Vault and men were only permitted "on deck" 2 hours a week.....we'd had the fear of God struck into us when it came to sex).

So, for all of the critics spewing self-righteous amounts of "you shoulda used a condom, idiot" sentiment in Bristol's direction, I'd like to walk us all through "A Church Girl's Guide to Not Getting Knocked up" in the hope that we can better understand how this happened and why Palin Lite isn't such a horrible person for admitting she was humiliated through the entire process.

It's true that we received some form of sex ed in the classroom from a pretty young age. But, we can look back at the D.A.R.E program and see how well a lot of programatic indoctrination really sticks when you start kids too young and don't provide a lot of practical advice to back up rote facts...It's all a little too theoretical. And that "one week a year" health class bit where your teacher rolls condoms on bananas and explains again what an erection is and we all giggle and blush and loathe that the teacher is so anatomically frank? Well, that's all very practical as well, but is duly filed away back in the part of a Church Girl's brain reserved for "things she won't need to worry about until she's married," and that's that.

Sure, Church Girl had a discussion or two with her mom about the birds and the bees back in the day with ingenious visual desciptions of puzzle pieces and references to "Days of Our Lives" characters Patch and Kayla (remember them?) and mention of "the dangly things" boys have which made Church Girl giggle to no end, and Church Girl understands that under no circumstances is she to tangle with those dangly things before she gets married, so again - this is all very theoretical and not anything she actually needs to worry about.

This idea sticks pretty firmly, in fact, and well into the high school years Church Girl is pretty decently convinced that lightning would absolutely strike her dead if she were ever to end up in a pants-off situation, because if nothing else, she's well aware of the fact that God sees everything. Everything.

There's also that small matter of the fact that in this context, even raising the question of birth control would be tantamount to standing up on the family's kitchen table during dinner and announcing that she intends to sleep her way through the entire JV football team.

Church girls have no need for The Pill, of course, because Church Girls have no need for the dangly thing.

This is all very simple.

It also means that there's a good chance she's never going to be in posession of such a thing as a condom should she ever unexpectedly find herself doing what she never planned on doing until she was good and hitched, so there's that sort of two-fold problem. One: asking about protection is a very uncomfortable, taboo, off-limits subject in Church Girl's family. Two: having such a topic be off-limits virtually guarantees she'll end up wholly unprepared should the unexpected Patch & Kayla moment arrive.

So, really, it's actually perfectly conceivable (pun. intended.) that a girl, such as one Bristol Palin, brought up in an exceptionally conservative environment could have been told  "No, don't you ever do that" right up until the point where she found herself actually having sex, and she is, at that point, too terrified of punishment and repercussions to bring up the subject with her parents, and -- in some cases -- even her friends.

Good thing it takes two to make a baby. In the event the girl doesn't have the birth control, stands to reason the guy can save the day.

Oh.

Levi Johnston didn't have any condoms, either? Well, we could give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he, too, was brought up in a similarly conservative environment where a certain amount of fear kept him from being comfortable talking about being prepared to protect himself and his girl from a baby. In that case, it's a little silly to condemn the poor girl so openly while not pinning equal culpability on the Mister. Which is what's been happening in the blogs. All judgement is on her for being "ready for sex but not ready for the consequences."

I'll say this much: somewhere in the vicinity of 6 acquaintances from this Church Girl's high school days ended up with babies before graduation. One of those girls was a school acquaintance. The other 5 or so: other Church Girls.

My take on the situation is this: while it's biologically indisputable that the only 100%, guaranteed, signed, sealed, delivered way to say baby- and STI-free is NOT to have sex, there's another discussion we need to be prepared to have in conjunction with that abstinance conversation. We need to be comfortable admitting that, try as we might to protect our Church Girls from sex until the ol' marriage bed, there's still that chance that they won't make it to that finish line. AND, if they don't, they need to have access to what it takes to prevent the baby. Sex is one thing. Motherhood: an entirely separate trip.

I don't know what the Palinette abstinance stump speech reads like, but if I were the one collecting $30,000 per engagement, I'd probably want my platform to be very practical - to be very honest - to say something we haven't all heard a million times before. To be frank about the fact that it's not enough to say "don't have sex," that it needs to be accompanied with the realistically compassionate companion message that, "if you do, please be prepared to protect yourself from pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections." Would have saved a lot of Church Girls a lot of surprises.

And as far as the folks that are ripping on this kid for being very honest about the fact that the entire process has been mortifying, at times humiliating, that she was devastated: hearing that is not going to damage her son. Being loved, cared for, looked after, nurtured, and having his mother AROUND, that's going to more than cancel out the honest truth that she WASN'T prepared to become a mother. No kid, once old enough to understand they were a "surprise" to say the least is going to feel any less loved in the face of that recognition. Just glad they've got a mom who loves them. Simple.

Anyway - check out the article - I think she manages to sound pretty balanced given everything she and her family have been drug through in the past several years. And particularly balanced given her lunatic mother. Well played, Little Palin, well played.