Crossing the Line: Young Girls and Older Men and David Letterman

How far can one go and still be funny, particularly in regards to teenage girls and older men? That's the question being asked about David Letterman. If you've been under a rock, David Letterman made a joke about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin attending a Yankee game with Rudy Giuliani.

On his Tuesday night show last week, Letterman said, "One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez."

Letterman also made reference to Eliot Spitzer and Palin's daughter. Spitzer was the NY governor who resigned when it was revealed he had contracted services of a high-priced prostitution ring. Further, Letterman characterized governor Palin as affecting a "slutty flight attendant look." Why focus on Palin's looks and not her accomplishments? Why focus on Palin and her daughters' attractiveness and sexual availability to men? Does Letterman treat male politicians similarly?

Letterman contends it was a misunderstanding: He meant the joke to be about Palin's 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, and not her 14-year-old daughter Willow. He did not name which daughter he was referring to, but it was Willow and not Bristol who was attending the game.

Is it really better to suggest an 18-year-old girl having a quickie with a 33-year-old not-yet-divorced man than a 14-year-old doing the same thing? Did Letterman imagine what kind of ridicule either girl would face on Wednesday before their peers? Bristol did give birth to a child. She is an unwed mother, however, Bristol Palin has worked with the national campaign to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancy in which she asks teens to abstain from sex and in May 2009 she was named the Teen Abstinence Ambassador for the teen pregnancy prevention organization, Candie's Foundation. It seems she is trying to re-direct her life, something that Letterman's cheap shot fails to acknowledge.

David Letterman is 62. He has a son who was born in 2003.  One can't imagine that he would want his son to become the fodder for jokes about his sexual behavior when he reaches 14 or 18. It must be painful for Sarah Palin to hear her daughter(s) made the subject of crude male humor just as it must have been painful for Bill and Hilary Clinton to hear Chelsea's appearance disparaged by Rush Limbaugh when she was 13 as NOW points out.  Limbaugh called Chelsea the "White House dog."

Young girls as targets for male attention has been a topic for plays and movies. In theater, there have been at least three attempts to bring "Lolita" to stage. In 1971 Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry attempted to make a musical called, "Lolita, My Love," but the show closed before it made it to New York. In 1982, Edward Albee wrote a non-musical adaptation that was a critical failure. In 2003, another non-musical version was produced in London.

"Lolita" has, of course, made it to the silver screen more successfully.  In 1962 it was directed by Stanley Kubrick with James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon. More recently, Jeremy Irons starred in the 1997 adaptation. "Lolita" is a question of interpretation: Is the story about a middle-aged man corrupting and stealing a girl's childhood or a man being corrupted by a manipulative nymphet. There is also something vaguely creepy about the movie, "Manhattan," where the protagonist, Isaac, played by Woody Allen, has an affair with a 17-year-old but that was viewed as art. Allen was 44 when "Manhattan" came out and played Isaac as 42. Mariel Hemingway was 18 when the movie came out.

What is the difference between 14 and 18? For the pedophile who has been grooming his victim, the concept of statutory rape. This kind of relationship is portrayed in Paula Vogel's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning  "How I Learned to Drive." A production with Molly Ringwald and Brian Kerwin was produced at the Mark Taper Forum. The play centers around Li'l Bit who is a child of the 1960s, part of a large family that includes her mother, grandmother, grandfather and her Uncle Peck. Peck begins to teach Li'l Bit to drive when she is 11 and uses that time to molest her. Peck is the only person who supports Li'l Bit's determination to get  college education, but Peck also wants to have sex with her when she turns 18. Although Li'l Bit refuses, she also ends up dropping out of college and the only time she truly feels free is when she is driving. Is Li'l Bit empowered or a girl who lost her childhood?

In real life, we've heard about people who wait for girls and because they are famous, their acts seem to be excused by others, mostly because the perpetrator is famous. Think of MacKenzie Phillips, whose father taught her to use drugs at 18 and who was aggressively seduced the same year by her father's friend, Mick Jagger, who told her, "I've been waiting to do this since you were ten years old."

In another play, "The Vagina Monologues," a girl is raped by her father's friend at age 10 and later seduced by a woman (first portrayed as happening at age 13 and in later performances at 16) in the segment entitled "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could."

In the play "How I Learned to Drive" and "The Vagina Monologues" the women do not emerge unscathed by these encounters with predatory older men. Some pundits have wagered that Letterman will actually benefit in this controversy, gaining in the ratings war against Conan O'Brien. Is Letterman milking the situation or does he really not understand what he did?

Letterman only partially apologized at first and even now, he feels his great mistake is not specifying that the daughter he meant was a legal 18. Letterman's kind of comedy is outdated. Women should not be denigrated on the basis of their appearance. A woman should not characterized as promiscuous because she was involved in a long-term relationship with one person and had a child as was Bristol.  Prominent Hollywood stars such as Goldie Hawn and Angeline Jolie have had children without the benefit of marriage. Would Letterman similarly joke about Hawn or Jolie having quickies with Rodriguez or Spitzer? I don't think so. Letterman also has had a child out of wedlock. Palin did not take him to task for his hypocrisy and wouldn't any mother whose daughter or son had been made sport of by a much older, more powerful celebrity on national television,  want to keep that child away from him? 

Maybe what we need is not another male comedian hosting a late night show, but a woman, who isn't addicted to plastic surgery, behind the desk for a change.