Edit Note: I do not in the very slightest approve of slut-shaming or of the use of that terminology in relation to any women, much less little girls like these. I am as disgusted as any and all right-thinking people are that the term must be used in the same sentence as any children. This post was written six months ago, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have titled it something else. As it stands, the lesson is learned, and I appreciate that some of you made your concerns known to me.
Get ready to feel your upper lip curl so hard it’ll require surgery and advanced prosthetics to get it put right again. A few days ago, a snide, hoity-toity politician’s aide decided it’d be totally awesome and hilare to publicly humiliate the President’s daughters because she didn’t quite like how they’d dressed or behaved during a speech.
Of course the aide is Republican. Of course. Did we even have to wonder? It’s not even surprising that the person doing the shaming and clothes-policing is a woman. But this incident tells us quite a bit about both Christianity and the Jesus Party–stuff they really should not want us to know.
Here’s the background: The President gave a speech on the day before Thanksgiving with his two daughters, Sasha and Malia (who are 13 and 16 years old) standing nearby, in which he pardoned a turkey. Note for foreigners: That’s a very traditional thing that the President of the United States does every year. The turkey that’d been destined for his personal table gets a pardon and a new lease on life, unlike the cases of way-too-many prisoners on Death Row whose questionable convictions seem mysteriously unable to be resolved. No, instead of doing something useful, Americans want instead to see our President solemnly pardon one turkey. It’s a ridiculously stupid notion in a country replete with ridiculously stupid notions, and most of us can’t believe we live in a world where once a year the most powerful person in our entire country, the person who controls bombs and armies and can write sweeping legislation controlling and influencing the lives of hundreds of millions of people, pardons one single fucking turkey–a bird whose intelligence increases exponentially with cooking time.
Not all turkeys, mind you. Just the one his family was going to eat. The act ranks in meaningfulness somewhere around me declaring that the pink stain on my bathtub drain is a natural part of the ecosystem that cannot be tampered with and getting my entire state declared a natural wetlands preserve as a consequence.
But the idea’s been percolating for like the last 150 years and it has caught on, so here we are in 2014-almost-2015 with the leader of one of the world’s superpowers solemnly pardoning a large game bird before a holiday that was itself started largely to commemorate the slaughter of indigenous non-white people.
So shockingly, his daughters acted a little playful while their dad, a Harvard-educated lawyer who probably wonders more with every passing year why he has to do something this idiotic, tried to make this traditional, customary-but-ridiculous duty of his sound a little less ridiculous. I can’t really blame them at all for seeming a little past-this and over-that while he was talking. Gawker loved their reaction, writing of the video, “Not even the pomp and ritual of the White House can overcome the most powerful force known to man: TEEN CONTEMPT.”
But because Sasha and Malia are the children of a Democrat (and a powerful black man, no less), and because they had the audacity to behave in a way that the Republican!Jesus modesty police didn’t like, one of that tribe’s self-elected police tried to slam them into the ground.
Enter Elizabeth Lauten, who was at the time the communications director for Representative Steve Fincher (R-TN) (unsurprisingly, he’s considered quite corrupt). Ms. Lauten is according to this link a proud member of socially approved quasi-religious groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution (that’s a women’s volunteer/service organization that only accepts members who can prove they’re descended from someone who fought in the American Revolutionary War; their motto is God, Home, and Country) and the Junior League. And yes, she is a Christian. Very Christian. Again, like we had to wonder. Her Twitter account, DCGOPGirl (side note: “GIRL”?), trumpets that she “loves GOD”–capitalized like that for extra-dextra mega-wega super-duper Jesusification.
In a now-famous Facebook post, Ms. Lauten took the President’s daughters to task for how they dressed and acted during their father’s ridiculous turkey-pardoning ritual. Here’s what her Facebook post said:
“Dear Sasha and Malia, I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play. Then again your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the “good role model” department. Nevertheless, stretch yourself. Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at the bar. And certainly don’t make faces during televised, public events.”
We don’t need to mention that Ms. Lauten isn’t actually talking to the daughters of the President of the United States. She’s actually playing to her audience, who will (she hopes) cluck and nod approvingly and get that little burst of smug self-righteousness that comes of being in the right and condemning someone who is perceived to be in the wrong. She loftily hits all the correct Republican talking points here, one after another, with the ease and practice of someone who’s been snide and condemnatory her entire life. If you’re looking for a single ounce of humanity, compassion, or empathy out of her, you are looking in the wrong place because this post was not meant to inspire or teach but to use the bodies of innocent little girls to attack someone she hates.
And she does it because everything in her culture–everything in her religious ideology–tells her that this kind of attack works to cow and humiliate women, especially very young women.
Her nattering sounds every little bit like a proto-“Princeton Mom” and the snarky, disturbingly-controlling Kim Hall, who wrote “FYI (if you’re a teenage girl),” which we’ve covered here (but also don’t miss this awesome examination of it). Ms. Lauten joins other luminaries such as Bindi Irwin, teenaged daughter of the “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, who is making a name for herself by body-shaming and policing young women, as well as legions of Christian leaders, who are totally convinced that the whole world would be better and everything would go back to the way it was if very young girls would only wear more clothes. Any time a Christian dares say, as this brave fellow does, that “purity culture” doesn’t actually produce purity but rather control and abuse, you know that the comments will quickly be flooded with people who are deeply invested in the idea that policing and controlling young women’s clothing choices will somehow, at some point, magically begin to produce young women who don’t ever have unapproved sex and somehow, by some unknown means, stop the flood of rapes occurring in our nation.
Christian culture faces a huge irony here: they claim to be de-sexualizing young women and showing them more respect than the secular world does, but they’re trying to do so by sexualizing them and showing them way less respect than the secular world does. By policing the clothing choices of young women, they tell those young women repeatedly that they are responsible for the reactions of boys and men to their bodies–sexual threats to those boys and men’s purity no matter what they do. Even very young girls are not immune to this policing. While researching Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) for an earlier post, I ran across these cartoons from their materials that sexualize even the bodies of young girls. And the result of this culture is that when–not if–women and girls are raped, then you know who the parents and communities involved will be siding with every single time; there are too many examples to list here, but if you want to see what this kind of sickening victim-blaming and predator-sheltering looks like, head into the comments on this piece about the latest young rapist who got caught to see what his mother and her friends are making of the arrest (I’m going to warn you right now that she’s a grand-master of rationalization and that she and her friends are horrible people–and evangelical Christians, of course). In this kind of culture, in this environment, Sasha and Malia are too young to meaningfully consent to sex any more than they meaningfully consented to be living in the White House, but their bodies are still fodder for the war that fundagelicals wage upon a society that is rapidly drifting out of their control, and just as Christians police each other’s clothing choices to keep them dancing and guessing and–most of all–contained, these particular children, even though they are the children of the most powerful person in the country, are not immune to being whittled down to size by these busybodies.
(What’s really goofy is that neither child is wearing anything especially controversial; even as a Pentecostal I’d have been hard-pressed to see the issue. I genuinely believe that Ms. Lauten is exaggerating her opinion to get a higher rise out of her audience–not that it’s her business what someone else wears anyway, but she really wants it to be her business, so that’s why I’m mentioning it.)
And in a classic case of “It’s OK If You’re Republican,” Ms. Lauten herself is distinctly living in a glass house while she throws stones–as well acting like she herself is without sin as she hurls those zingers. Here’s a simply fascinating piece detailing her own “class” as a young person, depicting her partying down: holding a beer bottle firmly aloft in her mouth like she’s fellating it, and wearing a low-cut, cheap-looking, clingy, revealing dress. And of course she’s got an arrest record–for shoplifting from a department store, that very most classy of young Christian ladies’ activities. According to a mis-Tweet she did last summer on her boss’ account, she also loves beach music and having sex, those two equally quintessentially-Christian behaviors for unmarried young women.
Needless to say, non-Republicans went haywire, especially on Twitter, where the reactions came fast and furious. But I’m sure it was a huge surprise to Ms. Lauten that even her own side condemned her post. Sarah Palin may totally bristle about her kids’ atrocious behavior being used against her, but nobody ever accused Republicans of consistency. I can’t blame her for expecting her party to have her back on this one. Still, the Republican National Committee has termed her remarks “inappropriate and insensitive,” and it doesn’t look like anybody in her party’s laughing–at least aloud–at what she wrote.
Elizabeth Lauten has resigned and apologized to Sasha and Malia. But even her apology contains the dogwhistles and Christianese necessary to situate her, as a woman, well below men in the hierarchies of both her political party and her religion:
“I reacted to an article and quickly judged the two young ladies in a way that I would never have wanted to be judged myself as a teenager,” Lauten wrote. “After many hours of prayer, talking to my parents and re-reading my words online, I can see more clearly how hurtful my words were. Please know that these judgmental feelings truly have no place in my heart.”
And we’ll walk those through too now:
* She prayed because as a Christian, she can’t possibly make any moves without asking her magical invisible friend to tell her what to do. Of course, this same god didn’t think to tell her not to insult, slut-shame, and sexualize a pair of underaged girls who were, incidentally, the daughters of the (ostensibly at least) most powerful person in the entire United States. But apparently now that the damage is done he’ll happily share with her all about how she did everything wrong. Is her god totally incompetent or is she just a raging hypocrite using religion to sneak out of repercussions for her behavior? Or both?
* She talked to her Mommy and Daddy. How the fuck old is this woman? I had to really dig, but apparently in the year 2000 she was 17, which we know because that is when she got arrested for shoplifting (to which I say again: CLASS-EH!). So she’s past 30 and still has to talk to her fucking parents to figure out right and wrong. What happened to Christian kids getting instilled with morals to last a lifetime? What happened to training up a child the way she should go? Is this really what Christian parents expect–kids who, well into their thirties, still need advice about whether it’s okay to be slut-shaming and bullying the grand-boss’ teen daughters? I hate to blame her parents for being incompetent because I firmly believe that a 30something person is old enough to take a little responsibility for herself… but she is after all in the party of personal responsibility and still unable to manage the trick in her own personal life. Doesn’t bode well, does it?
* Re-reading her own words online took third place. Taking her own accounting of her own behaviors and words came after deferring to her magical invisible friend and her (hopefully dismayed) Mommy and Daddy.
Congratulations, Christianity! You’ve produced a woman who, in her 30s, sexualizes and bullies teenaged girls, then can’t take a single bit of responsibility for her own actions and has to talk to her parents and deity to figure out if she’s done something wrong and takes–by her own accounting–literally hours to come to a conclusion. Is this the kind of person you really wanted, Christianity? Because that’s the kind of person you’ve got.
Indeed, Elizabeth Lauten makes a great poster child for everything wrong with modern Christian culture: hypocritical, cruel, petty, nasty, judgmental, callous, controlling, snide, and misogynistic–and sorry that they get caught. In this story, we actually get a really good overview of everything wrong not only with that brand of Christianity, but also with the political party that has become all but synonymous with it.
The real wonder is that the leaders of those sorts of Christians are still dumbfounded and confused about why young people have had enough of their shit. We’re going to look next at one of those groups and what their stunning conclusions and suggestions are. I hope you’ll join me.
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Related must-read:
Ten Women I Have Been Warned Against Becoming.