re: #570 buzzsawmonkey

Bristol’s pregnancy was made an issue for two reasons: first, the media love scandal; second, there is unrelenting hostility in liberal (i.e., media) circles towards any mention of the concept of abstinence.

Advocacy of abstinence is hated by the media because most of what the media purveys is sex; sex scandals as a substitute for news, rutting as a substitute for writing in popular entertainment. In addition, the position of “people should refrain from having sex until they are married,” the accepted default position of social mores prior to the late 1960s/early 1970s, has been taking a beating for the last 4 decades, to the point where you are considered a hopelessly naive fool—or worse, a square—for even suggesting it.

Abstinence is seen as “the troglodytic religious right position on sex,” i.e., something to be dismissed with contempt and without a second’s consideration. That the Palins are, in fact conservative and Christian was, to the media, a literally Heaven-sent opportunity to pound both conservatives and Christians by saying, “See? See? Even they can’t keep to their own standard! Hypocrites!”

Of course, even when abstinence was the social standard it was often honored more in the breach than in the observance, and people often got caught out in their failure to live up to the standard. Had Chelsea Clinton gotten pregnant out of wedlock, a media for which sex scandal is red meat would have surely been given a hard time. But the gleeful pile-on to which the Palins were subjected had a particularly nasty edge because it allowed people to jump on the Palins for having failed to live up to their own standards, which is always a huge comfort to people who have no standards at all.

Really good analysis.

One historical quibble - for most people abstinence until marriage wasn’t the default until the 19th c. Especially in rural areas, the ability to have kids was really important, so pregnant brides were more the norm than not. It became a social crisis post-industrial age. Too many young people were moving to the city, away from the protection of the small village awareness of what was going on when young people were “keeping company”. Normally, when a girl turned up pregnant, everyone in town knew who’s it was and if the boy wouldn’t step up to the plate, the rest of the men and the girl’s family would apply the pressure. Once people moved to town, that social system fell apart, but behavior didn’t change, so the rate of out of wedlock birth rose dramatically and became an issue.

Puritans in America had some similar ways of handling things. Women could and did sue for child support and “crying out” was legally binding. If an unmarried woman named the father during childbirth in front of witnesses, it was deemed undeniably true. There is a lot of testimony from women, particularly midwives, who were the general witnesses to childbirth and what was done/said.

Puritan culture was definitely not what it was stereotyped to be. It’s a really interesting era in history.