Amy Benfer

The mall, insist mall operators, is private property, and as such, its owners can make any rules they like without consideration of their patrons’ constitutional right to free speech. Dress codes, which they claim are based on profiles of gang paraphernalia provided by local police departments and the FBI, are created, they say, as safety measures, not, as one critic of the Union Station Mall insists, as a thinly disguised method of “ethnic cleansing.”

A familiar question arises: Do clothes make the man? In this case, a legal query follows: Do clothes make the man dangerous? After decades in which so-called gangster fashion has borrowed from and infused the mainstream, we have entered an age in which kids imitate hip-hop stars imitating gangsters who often imitate gangsta rappers (who may or may not have anything to do with real gangsters). At this point, it is nearly impossible to say whether a particular item of apparel signifies anything at all. “Gang-related” clothing can look very much like clothing favored by African-American youth and the kids of all races who have picked up on the popularity of hip-hop fashion. It also can be the clothes of a someone ready to pick a fight at the mall.

So when is a fashion victim a security risk? The mall owners say that on their turf, they get to decide. But a growing number of complaints and lawsuits have been filed — by activist groups, the ACLU and individuals — that challenge the claim that malls are private. Even if a mall is considered private, with the same rights as entities like stores and restaurants, its owners cannot enforce rules that result in racial discrimination.

But the battle is not only legal, it is cultural as well: Even if a mall defends itself legally against a lawsuit, being publicly accused of racism can be a public relations disaster, not to mention economic suicide for a retail outlet whose profits depend on the goodwill of its community. Yet a mall can expect a similar dive in revenue if patrons are too afraid of potential violence to shop there.

In St. Louis, on the day after Nelly was asked to leave Union Station Mall, the local chapter of the National Action Network (NAN), an African-American activist network whose national chairman is the Rev. Al Sharpton, issued a “travel advisory” warning black shoppers to stay away from Union Station. The group has staged two protests so far — the first on May 7, followed by a second on May 20 — led by the Rev. Horace Sheffield III of the Michigan NAN, and Lizz Brown, a local radio personality. About 150 people, many wearing bandanas and do-rags, marched through the mall to protest the so-called anti-gang dress code, which they claim is really an “anti-black” dress code designed to keep African-Americans out of the mall.

And on the day of the first protest, Brown, later quoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, explicitly equated the dress code with pre-civil rights racial segregation: “Years ago this station had a sign outside that said, Whites Only,” she said. “They took down the sign, but they continued the policy.”

For its part, the Union Station management team claims in a recent press release that the policy is enforced without regard to “age, race, or economic standing.” They stop anyone — black, white, Asian, Latino, or famous musician — who violates the dress code, which the mall operators say was adopted after a security consultation with the St. Louis Police Department and the FBI. So far, said mall spokesperson Jennifer Jones, the code has resulted in an 11 percent increase in retail sales.

But Sheffield believes that whatever gains have been made by Union Station have come at the cost of its African-American customers. “The overall issue is that when you have urban gentrification, it often takes the form of ethnic cleansing,” he says. “They want to homogenize the space so that white upper-class patrons feel comfortable, by getting rid of the African-American patrons who frequented their businesses when times were bad.”

Whether malls are private or “quasi private-public” entities is the focus of much debate. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Lloyd vs. Tanner that shopping centers were considered private entities, and could therefore limit speech activities on their premises. But in a case eight years later, the court ruled that states could grant greater free-speech rights than those in the Constitution. The Supreme Court has not since ruled on a case that would overturn Lloyd vs. Tanner; but many state lawsuits over the past few years have attempted — sometimes successfully — to redefine shopping malls and restaurants as public spaces governed by constitutional law.

Denise Lieberman, legal director for the Missouri ACLU (which has not yet taken up the Union Station case), says there is an argument to be made that malls are the modern-day equivalent of town squares — places where all members of the community can gather. That argument may be bolstered by the fact that malls often advertise themselves as public spaces where the whole community can shop, eat and be entertained.

According to Lieberman and others at the ACLU, the presence of government offices — like a city police substation, or a post office — or the use of public funds for infrastructure in the building of a mall, also leaves shopping malls open to lawsuits alleging that they fail to grant patrons the right to free speech.

In fact, in 1998, the Missouri ACLU successfully secured a $40,000 settlement for an African-American teenager who claimed to have been illegally detained for more than two hours by security staff at the Northwest Plaza Shopping Center for violating an unwritten dress code by wearing a bandana around his leg. As part of the settlement, the mall also agreed to dismiss charges against 19 other shoppers who had been detained for dress code violations.

But other state courts have ruled that shopping malls are under no obligation to uphold free speech. The Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the Mall of America’s right to limit the speech of animal rights protesters this March, deeming the use of government money to build the mall’s infrastructure to be “irrelevant.”

Many more similar cases are pending. In New Mexico, the SWOP (Southwest Organizing Project) and the ACLU have filed a suit against three local malls, seeking to have dress codes abolished and to secure the right to picket and leaflet on mall property. These groups argue that the mall, which rents space to government agencies for public services such as voting booths and motor vehicle department offices, is a public entity.

It now appears that the NAN coalition will prepare a similar case against the Union Station Mall. Sheffield says that in their lawsuit they will argue that the Union Station Mall has received government funds but has failed to protect the First Amendment rights of its patrons.

But even private entities are not allowed to discriminate against patrons on the basis of race, and any group that can prove that a private entity is practicing systematic racial discrimination is likely to win in court, regardless of the company’s status as a public or private entity.

One such case is pending against Dick Clark’s Restaurants Inc., alleging that the management of one restaurant, located in a Philadelphia mall, attempted to get rid of African-American clientele (whom management allegedly referred to as the “Norristown element”) by firing black security guards, banning hip-hop music, raising drink prices, and enforcing a dress code — no baseball caps, football jerseys or Timberland boots — that prohibited fashions popular with local African-American youth.

Lawyers representing the fired security guards say that when they sent black and white customers into the restaurant, all of them dressed in apparel that violated the dress code, only the African-Americans were asked to leave. “We sent investigators in there, Caucasians, dressed in violation of the code, and nobody bothered them,” attorney Robert Adshead told the Philadephia Inquirer. “One sat under the sign that said what you couldn’t wear, and he was waited on the whole night.”

The claim by Union Station Mall management, and the operators of other malls across the country, that they enforce dress codes without regard to age or race, could be difficult to defend. “Whenever you build a profile on a person’s appearance, rather than their actions, you are in slippery territory,” says the ACLU’s Lieberman. “If your profile of appearance is skewed towards a cultural or a racial group, then that is racial profiling.”

But if the appearance of patrons is designed to imitate gang-bangers, and gang activity is what the mall seeks to eliminate, crisp debate quickly devolves into subjective sparring. Not only does the definition of “gang-related” clothing appear to differ from mall to mall, the willingness of management to talk about dress codes varies wildly. Some malls claim to have no rules but refuse to confirm the lack of rules. Some mall representatives say they don’t know if they have rules and don’t know how to find out if they do or not. Many malls have rules but refuse to describe them.

Told of the list of attire prohibited at Union Station Mall, Monica Davis, marketing manager for the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., says, “Holy cow, we don’t have anything like that here!” There are some rules, she says — minors under the age of 15 must be accompanied by an adult on Friday and Saturday nights — but the only item of clothing banned in the mall are masks, which are prohibited by a Bloomington city ordinance. “We react or respond to conduct, not dress,” says Davis, though she admits that gang violence in the mall and the outlying community is rarely a problem. “You can tell the rappers that they are welcome to come here.”

Managers at a handful of other malls were not as forthcoming as Davis. For the most part, they were uncomfortable explicitly stating policies on dress and how their security staffs identify potentially disruptive customers. For comparison, I called about a dozen malls across the country, randomly selected for geography (both coasts and the Midwest), location (urban and suburban), the affluence of the surrounding community (I also looked to see if their flagship stores were say, Saks and Neiman Marcus, or J.C. Penney and Sears) and their proximity to areas with frequent reported gang activity.

At the Beverly Center, an upscale mall located in Beverly Hills, a spokewoman expressed shock at the inclusiveness of the Union Station dress code. She said that she had never heard of anything like that at the Beverly Center, but she passed me on to public relations. Public relations refused to comment without first obtaining permission from the marketing department (who later passed me back to public relations). So there aren’t any publicly posted guidelines for conduct or dress? I asked. “I can’t comment on that.”

Eventually, I was allowed to speak with Mary Beth Bartlett, the head of Beverly Center security, who told me that the only dress code at Beverly Center is that shoes and shirts must be worn at all times. “Everything else is welcome,” she said. “We react specifically to behavior, not dress, and we absolutely do not profile our customers based on their clothing.”

The security guard at Tanforan Plaza in San Bruno, a suburb outside San Francisco (whose flagship stores are J.C. Penney, Target and Sears) also expressed shock at the wide range of the Union Station policy. At Tanforan there is an anti-gang policy, but it is more limited: You can’t congregate in groups larger than three, and you can’t “show off your colors,” which the guard defined as having a red or blue bandana, or a colored belt that hangs off the pants.

“But we won’t just stop anyone,” she said. “They have to look gang related.” How does one know if a patron is gang related? “We know,” she said. “The gangs in San Bruno have been here forever. We’re very familiar with them.” You mean you recognize their faces? Yes, she said. When I asked for her name, however, she said she couldn’t give it to me.

Defenders of dress codes like to give the impression that their codes are based on science. Many, like the Union Station Mall, claim that their profiles of potential gang members come straight from local law enforcement and the FBI. But if there are such profiles, the FBI is not aware of it.

Ken Neu, acting section director of the Violent Crime and Major Offenders Division at FBI headquarters, says that he is not aware that the FBI has published profiles for public dissemination. “If they are saying they got this information from the FBI, they probably mean that we may have taught a class or a symposium for local law enforcement,” says Neu.

Gang members who wish to advertise their affiliation do so in incredibly specific ways, and it would be next to impossible to compile a general profile that is relevant in every region, says Neu. And, as others have pointed out, gangster fashion goes through brief cycles — once gang members invent a style, it is quickly adopted by the mainstream, and the actual gang members move on to a new innovation, starting the cycle all over again.

Teenage boys are the group most often stopped for dress code violations in malls, but Neu warns, “It’s important not to confuse gang activity with juvenile delinquency. They are not the same thing. While there are often a few juveniles affiliated with a gang, the vast majority of gang members in the United States are not juveniles.”

Still, the danger from actual gang members is real, says Neu. “If you know you have two rival gangs in the neighborhood, you don’t want them to re-enact “West Side Story” in the middle of your mall.”

But it is really only the gang members themselves, and specialized law enforcement units assigned to keep track of them, who are most fluent in the code of the street. They may certainly react in a violent way to a rival gang’s signature styles, but those signs often are so subtle that they can be decoded only by other gangsters. In this way, dress codes may only speed up the gangster fashion cycle. Ban bandanas, and they’ll start tilting caps; ban caps and they’ll start pushing up sleeves and pant legs — the sartorial possibilities are endless, and the end of the cycle is nowhere in sight.

Which may be one reason that, while malls like Union Station and others are busy kicking out shoppers for “gang-related” clothing, some other urban malls take it for granted that their customers will not only dress like gangsters, but will also actually be gangsters. A Nexis search for mall dress codes over the past decade turned up several stories of malls, many located in areas with a fairly high level of gang activity, who have given up trying to police clothing and have gone back to simply policing conduct — even in response to actual gang violence in their mall.

In 1994, after a gang-related shooting at a mall in Fort Worth, Texas, the owners of several Tarrant County malls considered adopting an anti-gang dress code, but at least one director of public safety at those malls said that they dropped the code after five months, because it was impossible to distinguish between teens emulating gangster fashion, and actual gang members.

Interestingly, the confusion of mall managers, who insist that they are trying to protect patrons and profits, appears to be something that rapper Nelly understands. So far, he has refused to take part in the protest against Union Station. Through his publicist, Jane Higgins, he has said that he does not consider his treatment at the hands of Union Station security to have been racially motivated.

This equanimity has angered those who protested Nelly’s eviction from the mall — so much so that some have even called for a boycott of his music. Sheffield does not personally support the Nelly boycott, though he does feel that, as a role model for African-American youth, Nelly should stand up for their right to wear the fashions that he inspires.

“He was kicked out of the mall for his choice of apparel,” says Sheffield, “a kind of apparel that kids will choose to emulate because they see him wearing it, and may have to suffer the same consequences. He has a responsibility, if he is encouraging this kind of dress, to stand up against this policy.”

But responsibility is the crux of the whole argument — the responsibility of the mall to protect its patrons and tenants; the responsibility of the protesters and their lawyers to protect the Constitution and its tenets.

It’s possible that the best way to minimize the security risk and maximize the rights of customers and the profits of the malls is to ignore clothes and focus on conduct. Such a policy has been successful — not just for malls in areas far from gang territory, but for some in the middle of it.

For example, after rival gang members opened fire on each other in a West Covina, Calif., shopping mall in 1992, representatives from various nearby malls told the L.A. Times that it didn’t make sense to ban known gang members from their malls after the incident — unless they were explicitly seen engaging in criminal activity.

“If they’re walking through the mall — just that alone is not going to cause us to bother them,” said Glendale Police Sgt. Matt Wojnarowski, who worked in the police substation at the Glendale Galleria. “They need to buy clothes, too.”

Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.

Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.

Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”

Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant  — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”

Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.

While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”

Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?

Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”

Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?

“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.

Charlie, however, is the only person she knows who, from birth, has been able to understand both the universal language common to all classes, and the three distinct, class-based languages. This gives her often unwelcome insights (her neighbor’s racist rants about immigrants; the exact nature of the snubs she and her friends get from the Counsel girls at the prep school with the slippery marble steps). And like her 6-year-old sister’s ability to heal wounds, it is a talent, according to her parents, which will be fatal to their entire family if discovered.

With her voluptuous best friend, Brooklynn, Charlie frequents secret clubs, like one at which the hand stamp is embedded with hallucinogens and the comely youth of all classes mix freely. It is there that she meets “predatory,” silver-eyed Xander, “dangerously boyish and beautiful Max” — and hears and comprehends a language she has never heard before. Futuristic punk, medieval dynasties, social commentary, swashbuckling revolutionaries and a dash of magical powers combine to make this a swift, sequel-friendly read.

But what is “Teen Mom” really teaching us? And what does its popularity tell us about our current moment? 

The sober reality show has been a surprise hit for MTV, a channel that seemed one Jell-o shot away from a life-long coma, and heroines Catelynn, Maci, Farrah and Amber have graced the covers of tabloids all season long. (Maci’s back with her baby daddy! The details behind Farrah’s boyfriend’s tragic demise! Exclusive photos from Catelynn and Tyler’s tearful reunion with baby Carly!) Cynically speaking, the cast members of “Teen Mom” are nearly perfect lab specimens for a tabloid: They have youth, beauty and baby bumps. They also have exes, family drama, incarcerated parents, adorable toddlers — and, frankly, they need money. The show has caught on not only with MTV’s core teenage audience, but also with 20- and 30-something women. In an age when the American middle class is once again obsessed with perfectionism in parenting, some may be sucked in by the novelty of young mothers raising children with so few resources. Others are simply sucked in by the nonstop drama and soapiness.

These girls’ high visibility upends history. Teen mothers were always shoved to the back of the frame, often literally sent away, and certainly rarely given the spotlight. And those stories that are told are incomplete: Too often, tales of teen parents start and stop when one is 16 and pregnant, and neglect to tell the story of what it’s like to be 19 with a 3-year-old or 26 with a 10-year-old. “Teen Mom” goes further than most any show ever on television in documenting ordinary struggles of young parenthood.

This season alone, it showed us the ambivalence and embarrassment of Maci, a Tennessee girl from a middle-class family, as she asked her son’s father, Ryan, for child support, and took us into a riveting meeting with their mediator, in which they bargained for time with their son while Maci wept. Catelynn and Tyler — high school sweethearts from hard-drinking, hard-living parents who gave their daughter Carly up for adoption in hopes of creating a better life for her — might represent one of the most sympathetic portrayals of birth parents ever committed to film. They’re a graphic reminder that for the parents left behind, the grief doesn’t end when the baby leaves the frame, even when it feels like the right decision. One of the season’s most poignant moments was Tyler — a tough teenage boy who had cried over pictures of his daughter alone in his bedroom, who had a father in jail, who kept promising his girlfriend they would be better parents to their own children someday — sitting in a diner across from Brandon, the man who was what he most wanted to be: Carly’s father. And rather than detail his own pain, Tyler, in a lovely moment of empathy, asked Brandon what he had sacrificed to be a parent.

Then there is the on-again, off-again couple Amber and Gary, who have become the id of the series, confirming the worst stereotypes about teen parents. This season we saw portly, passive-aggressive Gary toy with the idea of leaving volatile Amber for another teen mom he met in the diaper aisle at Walmart; we saw screaming fights, one of which concluded with Gary taking the sheets off the bed, another that included a car chase with the baby on board; we watched Amber moving in with her new boyfriend, fresh from work release in jail; and finally, we saw Amber, who has been taking martial arts classes, beat Gary and kick him down the stairs. But the most haunting moment came when we saw their little girl, Leah, witnessing yet another fight between her parents, and telling her mom to be quiet — in just the same tone we’ve heard Amber use toward her all season long.

But if ever a documentary has been accused of distorting its subject matter, “Teen Mom” is it. The idea of tracking the experience of being a regular teen mom pretty much evaporates the second that mom is on the cover of OK! magazine. And the tabloid money does matter, in no small part, because one of the biggest arguments against teen parenting is that it creates poor families, and thus any realistic portrayal of teen parenthood must scrupulously follow the money: How much is it, and where is it coming from?

Three seasons in, it’s easy to become distracted by niggling details that may or may not reflect how much impact the show has had on each family’s personal finances and relationships: Why does Farrah spend so much time in the beauty shop? Why does she have a new Mac laptop? What make and model car are the girls driving? What part of town are they living in? I absolutely do not mean to imply that these girls, some of whom come from middle-class families, and all of whom support themselves to varying degrees through jobs and financial aid, are not entitled to support their families, or buy themselves hair cuts or computers. (Interestingly enough, the only mention we’ve seen of government assistance is when Farrah files for Social Security from her daughter’s dead father, and when she receives aid for day care, due not to her income, but to her mother’s domestic violence conviction). But if these families are meant to make a larger point about teen parents as a group, it profoundly matters to know not just if they are managing to survive, and eventually maybe thrive, but how. Yes, there are many different ways to succeed or fail as a teen parent, and very few have tried to ask the right questions. The answers can include school, family, jobs and good parenting. But once the options include “sell your family’s story to a tabloid,” you’ve pretty much polluted your sample.

Aside from the issue of who is paying for what, canny viewers may wonder just how much these families’ characters and images have been shaped by producers at a painstakingly edited show. This season, Maci and Farrah have seemed the most realistic and complicated characters, while Amber and Gary have started to look downright villainous. And it may be worth asking why Catelynn and Tyler, the only couple to release their child, seem consistently the most sympathetic characters in the show. Also, one wonders if the very act of exposing their lives before a national audience might have made all concerned more likely to solve their problems in the offices of counselors, mediators and therapists, and participate in therapeutic retreats — or to take it even further, to wonder whether many of those sessions would have happened at all without outside intervention.

Creator Morgan J. Freeman says he wants to capture these same girls and their families each year, not unlike Michael Apted’s “Up” series, a landmark of documentary filmmaking, in which British schoolchildren from different social classes, born in 1964, have been filmed every seven years since the age of 7. It is a laudable goal, and 21 years after giving birth to my daughter at age 16, I would dearly love to see a series that depicts all of the different ways these stories can turn out. But putting aside the ethical dilemmas, it becomes valid to ask: What are you documenting? Has the series already passed the tipping point after which they are no longer capturing the lives of teen moms, and instead are looking at the lives of young celebrities who happen to have young children?

We saw this with “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” which morphed gruesomely from a show about their family in which cameras happened to be present into a show about their family breaking up, thanks to the pressures of the cameras. The reality TV fame cycle is so well-established that one might speak of a series as having a half-life of sorts — the amount of time it takes for the show to go from publicly documenting people’s ordinary lives to documenting the private lives of public figures. In the case of “Jersey Shore,” it seemed like a matter of weeks.

Each season, with “Teen Mom,” it becomes more difficult to tease out the impact the show itself has had on the lives it depicts. After the episode in which Amber beat Gary aired, the producers were criticized for standing to the side during an incident of domestic violence (one also wonders if they would have done so had Gary been the one hitting Amber). But the most chilling moment was hearing Leah speak. Not merely because we could hear echoes of her mother’s words in her own, but because by hearing her speak, it forced us to scroll back and replay all the earlier scenes we had witnessed thus far from her childhood, and realize that she was no longer an infant. She is a real girl, who is old enough to understand the trouble her family is in, and we are watching it. It makes me wonder if reality TV, in a way, might be creating a whole mini-soccer-team of Mary Kate and Ashleys (minus the extravagant amount of cash), children who literally begin their lives on TV and stay there throughout infancy, childhood and maybe young adulthood. The further this series goes on, the more difficult it will be to separate what it is telling us about the lives of teen mothers from what it is telling us about the lives of parents and children who live under public scrutiny.

Apparently, the couple told Us Weekly before their own family, and Sarah Palin’s official response — “Bristol believes in redemption and forgiveness to a degree most of us struggle to put in practice in our daily lives” — might give a cynical reader reason to believe that Mama Grizzly is still caught up in that “struggle” bit. The Washington Post’s Reliable Source sees a ray of light in the announcement, however, and basically says: Who the hell else could they be with? “The two have shared a completely unique experience: Small town teens catapulted to worldwide fame through the convergence of an unplanned pregnancy and her mother’s overnight political ascendance.” But if being a co-conspirator in a media maelstrom were all it took to build a strong marriage, the Gosselins would be our most steady couple.

Bristol and Levi are just one of dozens of tabloid-ready couples whose lives we “know” far too much about. But the Gosselins and the Jolie-Pitts don’t have a family member who regularly flirts with running for the highest political office in our country. And thus we betcha whatever path their private lives take will eventually be served back to us as a political narrative demonstrating good Republican family values.

Before the unfortunate demise of their relationship, Bristol and Levi were more or less toeing the Republican Party line on unplanned pregnancy: Condemn the premarital sex, but offer redemption to those who go on to have the baby, get hitched and make a proper family (hence the shotgun engagement on the eve of the Republican Convention). During the Bush years, as you may remember, this philosophy formed the backbone of the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which started from the premise that two-parent families tended, statistically speaking, to make more money and provide more stable homes for children, and thus decreed that the best way to make poor, unstable single parents into stable, affluent families was to marry them off to one another.

But as it turns out, things didn’t quite work out the way they planned. Just last week, conveniently enough, Women’s eNews ran a feature by Julie Marsh that concluded that marriage isn’t exactly the magic pixie dust young parents are looking for. Yes, two-parent families may be, statistically speaking, more affluent than single-parent families, but married women also tend to be more educated in the first place. Encouraging poor parents with little education and few job prospects to better themselves by marrying each other just gives you a family headed by two poor, uneducated parents. Marriage might not hurt, but it is basically irrelevant: What that family needs is at least one person with a decent education and a good job. Plus, having money doesn’t guarantee a good relationship. As one young mother told Marsh, “You can have a man that got a lot of money and do you dirty and that’s not cool.”

There’s no rule that says young parents can’t have both: a good marriage to the parent of their child, in which they mutually support each other’s goals to finish school and/or come up with enough resources, economic and otherwise, to keep everyone reasonably happy and cared for. But in practice, all too often, when two people slap together an idealized family as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy, it just means that one or both partners (most often the mother) delay getting the education and work experience they need to support their family solo, a shaky proposition given that women who marry in their teens are much more likely to divorce.

How does this all apply to Bristol and Levi? People’s lives don’t willingly conform to statistical norms, so perhaps this particular marriage will turn out just fine. All those months of public vitriol might make an interesting addition to baby Tripp’s scrapbook (file under: Parents’ “youthful indiscretions”). Then again, it’s possible that in not choosing to marry when Bristol’s mother’s political ambitions were the virtual loaded gun over their heads, they came to a better-planned, more thoughtful decision to be together. One might also point out that the “problem” many government programs, rightly or wrongly, seek to fix isn’t necessarily young parents, but poor parents. And right now — thanks to speaking fees, tabloid interviews and skin mags — neither Bristol nor Levi is poor (though one presumes that the job security of “professional tabloid star” may turn out to be even more rickety than “child actor,” and one positively cackles wondering what rules govern the allowable behavior between an “abstinence educator” and the father of her child in the weeks leading up to her wedding). If nothing else, consider it an experiment in the impact a decent speaker’s fee can have on teen parenting.

Bristol and Levi’s lives, of course, are their own, and as private citizens, I wish them well. Still, there is no getting around the truth that their private choices will eventually be served back to us as political parable. While I’m no fan of one-size-fits-all prescriptions, I’m still of the mind that a college diploma and decent job skills are a much better guarantee of young family’s healthy future than a marriage license.

“Women are starting to get the message that mother’s milk is really important,” Nancy Mohrbacher, the author of “Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws,” tells Newsweek reporter Maria Dolan, an understatement of vast magnitudes. With studies that credit breast-feeding for virtually every good — it will make your child smarter! — and an inoculation against every ill — prevents cancer, ear infections and obesity! — it may be more accurate to say that women are “getting the message” that offering one’s child anything less is tantamount to just begging for an unhealthy kid with crappy SAT scores. But what about adoptive parents, gay male parents, and others who have trouble producing milk in house? “Just because he was adopted, my little one should not have to miss out on the antibodies and heath breast milk provides,” mother Sarah McNeil tells Dolan.

Parents like McNeil are fueling a boom in demand for the milk of others. Over the past decade, demand at milk banks — which accept human milk and screen for diseases, including HIV — has quadrupled. And those who can’t afford the milk bank’s prices — up to $3 an ounce, keeping in mind a baby can need up to 30 ounces each day — are turning to new, unregulated programs like the Milk Share website, which connects those who’ve got milk with those who need it, thanks to the miracles of ice and Fed Ex.

Although I come from a long line of women who breast-fed their babies, and have plenty of sympathy for those who can’t nurse their children for whatever reason, I have to admit the idea of helping oneself to the milk of others seemed to me to be, at first, a bit of overkill. Yes, breast milk is awesome stuff, and common sense would tell us that human milk is likely a better fit for human babies than milk from a cow or a legume, but the fine print of all those studies tells us repeatedly that it is nearly impossible to discern why, exactly, breast-fed babies tend to do better. Is it really some magical properties inherent to the chemical composition in the so-called liquid gold? Is it because babies tend to get more face time with mothers who are hauling around their food supply? Or is it because right now, breast-feeding is most fashionable with affluent, educated women? But most of all, I wondered just who was producing all that liquid gold: Could this be just another example of wealthier women helping themselves to the bodies of poor women?

After poking around a few of the websites mentioned in the article, I got some answers. The first American milk bank, according to this piece produced by La Leche League, was founded in Boston in 1911 and was staffed — surprise! — primarily by unwed mothers who were paid for their milk. Earlier “lactariums” in France also housed wet nurses and their children in hospitals. But today the Human Milk Bank of America accepts only donated milk and, according to its ethical guidelines, “does not condone, and in fact, questions the practice of buying and selling human milk as a commodity” — in part, out of worry that a woman might feel pressured to provide milk to others at the expense of her own infant (their fees cover only screening, handling and processing). More than 50 percent of the bank’s milk goes to doctors who use it to feed sick children, especially premature babies; babies with a medical prescription for breast milk typically covered by insurance companies. The Milk Share site also explicitly forbids paying cash for milk over and above the cost of packaging and shipment (the downside to its program is that the milk is not screened, and one has to trust that the donor prepared it properly).

In a fair and ethical world, breast milk would go first to the babies who need it most — those who are sick, premature or who have severe allergies to other milks. But providing more democratic access to breast milk for all children may be just a question of simplifying the logistics. One of Dolan’s sources points out that opening more centers would make milk significantly cheaper for all parents, as shipping costs are among the highest expense. In Brazil, according to La Leche League, more than 40 percent of all mothers donate to milk banks; their milk is collected at their homes on a weekly basis. The upside of the breast milk fetish may be that women who produce more milk than they need, or have extra stashed in the freezer, may prefer to see their milk go to another infant, rather than down the drain. There’s plenty of evidence that the milk is out there: According to La Leche League, a single advertisement asking for donations in a baby magazine generated more than 300 calls per day — so much that they had to warn potential donors not to get angry with overworked staff.