The Bristol Conundrum

This is a heavy one. A difficult one to gather my thoughts about, presenting a powerfully intense combination of both full support and utter disdain, and an extremely controversial situation…

Bristol's new book

Here’s the deal: Bristol Palin (oh yes, the teenage, abstinence-only touting, totally anti-everything that I stand for, daughter of Sarah Palin herself), has disclosed in her recently released book that her first time having sex, allegedly the event that led to her current motherhood, with Levi Johnston, is an event that she has no memory of. She tells of a camping trip that she went on with a group of friends and Levi (unbeknownst to her ultraconservative parents), and consumed more wine coolers than her tolerance for alcohol could handle. She describes waking up the next day not knowing that she had had sex with Levi and feeling distraught when she found out.

Hmm.

While Bristol is certainly a character that I loathe the idea of relating with on any level, her story is one that I cannot shake from my mind. The criticism against her out there (much of which she brings upon herself with her senseless hypocrisies and conservative evangelical viewpoints passed down from her incompetent mother, ahem, I digress) with regard to this issue, is that she is claiming to have been sexually assaulted as an attempt to gather up the pieces of her tainted reputation as a God-fearing, abstinent-until-married young woman. Dan Savage, a well-known sex columnist who I respect profoundly and follow avidly, speaks to this viewpoint, claiming that he does not believe her story is true, and for the first time Mr. Savage, I disagree with your position with regard to an important and controversial social issue.

I do not believe that Bristol is lying about this; in fact, my understanding is that she has never actually said that she was raped. She told Fox News that she is “not accusing Levi of rape” and nowhere in the book did she directly make that claim. Her book though, tells a story of a self-blaming survivor of sexual assault. In this victim-blaming society (i.e. “she shouldn’t have been there at that time”, “she shouldn’t have worn that outfit”, “she shouldn’t have had that much to drink”), blaming one’s self for the incident and not relating as a “victim of rape” are some of the most common characteristics of a survivor. And no matter the language she uses, the mass media has ascribed her a self-proclaimed rape victim, an undesirable label in our world, to say the least, as we can see in the way that this situation is being treated.

It is high time that we as a society start taking this issue very seriously. Why is it that so many of the high profile sexual assault situations in the news (Julian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Bristol, to name the most recent big news) tend to result in the intense and dramatic denigration of the accuser’s character in the mass media, while seriously questioning the accused is left up to the less mainstream media?

The reality is that in bringing a story like this to the public sphere, the accuser has much, much more to lose if the case is dismissed than the accused, as shown in the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissatou Diallo this past summer in New York City.

And worst of all, every time that a sexual assault situation is discredited in such a public way, we send the message to the millions of survivors out there that they should remain silent, and that speaking out will most likely lead to secondary victimization by institutions and individuals alike.

All of this is to say that when someone brings out a story like this (even someone part of the detestable Palin family), we must take pause and consider the story deeply, and certainly not dismiss it.

My next blahg entry will be a lighter one, I promise. J