Before we discuss the latest about Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks, let me first call your attention to a highly relevant illustration of how liberals use word games to manipulate public perception. In 1999, Maggie Gallagher produced a fascinating report entitled, The Age of Unwed Mothers: Is Teen Pregnancy the Problem?
What Gallagher’s report made clear was that the media had helped birth-control activists manufacture public concern over a “teenage pregnancy crisis” that did not actually exist. In point of fact, the birth rate for U.S. teenagers peaked during the 1950s — the Golden Age of Family Values — and has been declining ever since.
What had changed since the 1950s, Gallagher demonstrated, was not that more teenagers were getting pregnant (they weren’t) but that pregnant teenagers were no longer getting married. One of the sneaky little tricks by which public perception was manipulated, Gallagher noted, was by including births to 18- and 19-year-old women — young adults — in “teen pregnancy” statistics:
[T]he bulk of today’s teen pregnancy problem is less “children having children” than increasing numbers of young adult women having babies outside of marriage. The majority of unwed births in the United States today are to single women in their 20s — neither “children” nor “Murphy Browns.” Unwed teen moms account for over 30 percent of U.S. babies born outside of marriage. But unwed teen moms younger than 18 account for only 13 percent of babies born out of wedlock.
Thus, even arbitrarily confining our concern to mothers under 20, rising rates of teen births are being driven not primarily by minors, but by young women old enough to vote, sign contracts, and serve in the armed forces. Almost three-fifths of unwed teen births are to young adult women who are 18 and 19 years old.
Of course, it is true that a 19-year-old is a teenager, but this isn’t what most people think about when they hear crusaders talking about the need for educational programs to prevent “teen pregnancy.” No, that term conjures up visions of a pregnant 14- or 15-year-old, a mere school girl, probably from an impoverished family, at risk of becoming a high-school dropout dependent on welfare.
This emotional trigger is exactly what the birth-control/abortion/sex-education lobby intend to exploit to gain taxpayer-funded support for their programs and, if you oppose their projects, they will imply that you’re in favor of “kids having kids” — and never mind, of course, that many of these “kids” are 19-year-old women.
So now we return our attention to 19-year-old Miriam Weeks who, as “Belle Knox,” has been doing porn videos to pay her tuition at prestigious Duke University. William McGurn notes a detail:
Since the first headlines about the Duke University freshman making her way through college by making porn, we have learned many details about her life.
We’ve learned, for example, that being paid to have sex on camera is “freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.” . . .
Yet perhaps the most indecent detail in this tale is a tidbit about her university that has received almost no attention. It appears near the end of a profile that ran in The Chronicle — Duke’s student paper — which refers to her as “Lauren.” Here’s what it says:
“Lauren reached out to Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta. Moneta affirmed that the University’s policy was to be supportive of all student identities.”
Note: He didn’t say “supportive of all students.” He said “supportive of all student identities.”
When this reporter e-mailed Moneta to ask if his words mean Duke really makes no judgment on a student who has become a porn actress, Moneta replied that federal law and Duke policy preclude him from talking about a student’s case. But he didn’t take issue with the Chronicle characterization.
Neither does the young woman. Her name is Miriam Weeks, and in a recent CNN interview with Piers Morgan, she affirmed that Duke had been “very supportive” of her.
Read the rest at the New York Post. A detail of this “empowering” career that almost no one in the media has mentioned is that “Belle Knox” is being marketed at sites that specialize in “teen porn,” featuring barely legal girls whose appeal is their extreme youth.
No feminist or liberal seems to find this objectionable. Apparently, it’s OK for teenage girls to get paid to provide perverse entertainment for creeps, just as long as the girls don’t get pregnant.
Y’know, I’m almost tempted to take the Amtrak train to New York, just to get a story about the media mob scene we can expect when America’s new feminist icon appears at a public event.
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