Natalee Holloway and the whore/saint dichotomy

Maggie says:
Since I haven't had cable for a year, I mercifully missed the cable "news" onslaught about the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. You know, the cute blonde Alabaman with the lookalike mom who went missing in Aruba?

Enter "Primetime" the other night and me getting bored with one of the Olympic sports and intermittently tuning in. The interview was hyped as the first time Dutch teen Joran Van der Sloot spoke about being the last to see Natalee alive. This guy has some ethical issues, don't get me wrong. Namely, he says he left Natalee alone and drunk on a beach at three in the morning. Even the most block-headed frat boy knows that's just wrong. There's no telling what really happened that night, but my gut says this kid is scum but he didn't kill her, nor did his friends. I think she passed out on a beach and an evil person stumbled upon her, end of story.

But here's what bugs me: the crux of the ABC interview wasn't Van der Sloot's story, and isn't the "bombshell" detail that Natalee described her mother to Joran as "Hitler's sister." The problem for me is that ABC framed the story in such a way that "shocking details" of Natalee's sexual and drinking behavior became the pinnacle of the broadcast.

Among other things, Joran describes how drunk Natalee was that night, that she had him take a jello shot off her stomach while lying on the bar, that she wanted to have sex with him, that they made out on the beach, that they went pretty far with each other but didn't have sex because Joran didn't have a condom, and that Natalee talked the whole night about not wanting to go back to her hotel, to Alabama, and to her normal life.

The day after the ABC program, Natalee's mother appeared on television outraged not at the fact that her daughter supposedly described her as "Hitler's sister," but that Joran alleged that her daughter was a "loose wild child," according to her mother. In other words, this mother would rather have a daughter think she's a Nazi than for her to be sexually active. Her reaction is telling here, because it's all about gender politics.

Natalee was portrayed as a great student, a promising girl, a teen queen who got taken advantage of by Aruba's dark side. That both is and isn't true. Having good grades, a life plan, and being a good person are not incompatible with having fun at night, being a teenager in the truest sense of the word, and making some irresponsible choices. That's what teenagers do. But in the media's hype to tell a story of a perfect girl gone missing, the larger story they're telling is that perfect girls don't deserve to disappear. We're shocked by Joran's sex stories not because they're outrageous, but because perfect girls don't do those things. To every middle America cable TV-watcher who thought they were praying for the safe return of a blond, pure girl, they likely feel slapped in the face with the truth, that Natalee had too much to drink and let a guy put his hands in her pants.

We've got to get beyond the pure stereotypes we all obsess over. It's okay to pray for the safe return of a girl who had premarital sex. It's okay to hope a terrible person didn't murder a girl who also happened to be drunk. Those things don't matter. What matters are the disappearance and likely murder of a person, not the package used to tell the story. However "all-American" she is, however blonde, however smart, however nice, however "perfect," we should still hope for her safety in the same we do for the women of Juarez and the local murdered prostitute.

Getting beyond "but this girl could've been my daughter!" means recognizing that daughters do everything that Natalee did that night. And like daughters, this girl should be loved no less for it.

Technorati tag: natalee holloway