Friday, November 13, 2009

In defense of Carrie Prejean

Renee at Womanist Musings is absolutely 100% right and 0% wrong. Shaming Carrie Prejean, beauty queen or not, right-wing-tool or not; for a solo sex tape is hypocritical on the part of the left who are criticizing her.
First of all, by making a video of herself masturbating, Carrie is promoting a health body image for young women in the sense that it's okay to touch your vagina, but is also helping (whether she knows it or not) promote safer sex for teens. Believe it or not, abstinence is only one of the ways to prevent, with 100% certainty, unplanned pregnancies. Mutual masturbation is another method. Especially if you're separated by a video screen.
Is Carrie Prejean a hypocrit on this subject herself? I don't know. The only thing I've heard her moralizing about is gay marriage. I've never heard her say anything about teen sex, or masturbation. Is she a bad person? No. Is she dumb? Maybe. But neither of those are even remotely relevant to this issue here.
We've all been teenagers at some point, and while some of us had better self-control, or different ideas about what was an appropriate exchange between a 17-year-old girl and the object of her affection, it's no one's place to condemn Ms. Prejean for this. It's bad enough that her mom was in the room when the video was shown as a means of getting her to back down. It's even worse that Carrie Prejean's 15 minute fame-timer seems to be stuck on 14:49. But do we, on the left, really need to sink so low as to continue to make this an issue? Not just an issue of shaming an allegedly dumb, allegedly biggoted beauty queen, but an issue of hypocricy.
I make it my mission to enrich the lives of women. Now, keeping her in the news may be enriching Carrie Prejean, but what kind of a message is it sending to young women? Think about that before you go moralizing about this whole incident. And if that doesn't work for you, imagine what you would feel like if something explicit you shared with a boyfriend or girlfriend at the age of 17 was suddenly all over the internet. We've all done something like this, so shut the hell up and get back to running around like your hair is on fire on other issues... like the economy. Carrie Prejean didn't do anything wrong.

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