American mothers raise their daughters to be whores

Today’s New York Post has a longish piece on the Natalee Holloway case, focussing on Natalee’s mother Beth Twitty’s crusade to find out what happened to her daughter, an effort in which, Post writer Maureen Callahan says, Beth Twitty was too aggressive and ended up insulting the Aruban authorities and alienating the people of Aruba, hurting the effort to get at the truth.

As I was reading the article, I thought: After her daughter’s death, Beth Twitty had all this intense, no-holds-barred energy to solve the case—relentlessly confronting Aruban officials, going on television repeatedly to tell the public about it, blaming the entire island of Aruba for their lax police procedures; but before her daughter’s death, Beth Twitty had zero energy to wonder whether it was a good idea to send her daughter with 123 other high school seniors to a Caribbean island for no other purpose than to drink and have sex for four days.

Also today, a friend tells me about an article in the current Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan, born in 1961, about how when she was in her teens in the late 1970s her mother repeatedly told her that if she wanted to have sex with a boy, she should just do it. Flanagan then tells about a true incident she read about in which a high school girl was discovered fellating several boys in a high school bathroom. As Flanagan points out, the sexual liberation-promoting mothers of her mother’s generation would be shocked at such behavior by young middle class girls, not realizing or acknowledging that it is the inevitable result of their own teaching.

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David B. writes:

You wrote:

After her daughter’s death, Beth Twitty had all this intense, no-holds-barred energy to solve the case—relentlessly confronting Aruban officials, going on television repeatedly to tell the public about it, blaming the entire island of Aruba for their lax police procedures; but before her daughter’s death, Beth Twitty had zero energy to wonder whether it was a good idea to send her daughter with 123 other high school seniors to a Caribbean island for no other purpose than to drink and have sex for four days.

I have seen Beth Twitty on TV many times. I never saw her warn parents not to send their children to places like Aruba. None, and I mean none, of the TV talking heads do either. I’m sure Twitty still thinks it was a Neat Idea.

LA replies:

So Greta van Susteren—she the plain-faced tribune of the common American man and woman—spent years trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Natalee Holloway, and never suggested that vacations on island paradises for barely chaperoned groups of high school students are not a good idea, and that in this case such a vacation liberated wildly irresponsible behavior on Natalee’s part that was instrumental in her death?

David replies:

No, van Susteren never raised the question of the danger facing young women in a serious and comprehensive way. Some years ago, when Dan Abrams had a show on MSNBC, he said that young women should not be drunk and alone on a street after midnight. Several of the female TV talking heads ripped him for it. Greta van Susteren, as far as I know, did not tell young women to go out and get drunk as some of them did.

David B. continues:

They would call this “blaming the victim.”

Mike writes:

I know you’ve been on about this before, but here are thanks from one reader who abhors the mainstream depiction of these stories. I would never suggest that any of these young women “deserved” to die, but every time I hear of a “missing white girl” story I can’t help but assume that the parents were extremely negligent. Our press loves to pretend that these events are “random” and “unpredictable,” but those of us with clear minds see them for what they are: sex tourism gone bad. Western parents who sacrifice their daughters on the altar of political correctness should be reviled, not pitied. This is yet another unfortunate result of our society’s extension of adolescence—we act as if, due solely to a girl’s age, her caretakers are no longer responsible for her safety. If any of these atrocities had been to a 12 or even 15-year-old girl, the parents would be considered much more culpable for the result.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2010 07:45 PM | Send