Bristol Palin's Paycheck - Take Two - UPDATED (4)

This topic has generated a fair amount of interest and has been reported widely. Most blogs and news outlets didn't comment very much on certain aspects of the Foundation and there's been only veiled references to the hypocrisy surrounding Bristol's paycheck: Teenage pregnancy pays well.

Candie's is not the only organization that has jumped on the Palin bandwagon. A lot of people are making money from what is now a recognized brand. We have to suffer Sarah Palin and some of her family (the whole family in the case of Sarah Palin's Alaska) making the news and being paid a lot of money for spouting conflicting messages. In Sarah Palin's case, the message is laced with poison and has resulted in some tragic consequences.

Back to Bristol Palin and the Candie's Foundation, what makes me critical of their position is the cynical exploitation of young people. If Candie's had limited themselves to selling female apparel using sex as a marketing tool, they would be just another company among many, doing the same thing. But they started a foundation that has a dishonest and cynical mission statement: To educate young people regarding sex, to warn them of the pitfalls of engaging in sex prematurely and the consequences of doing so. Candie's Foundation has grown since 2001 and have a decent amount of money in the bank. How much have they given in charitable grants in 2009? $35,000. Here are a couple of snapshots of their expenses in 2009:


This foundation looks more like a marketing outfit than a charity to me.

As for stating that Bristol Palin makes a profit from exploiting young people, yes, she does. When we look at the whole picture, what she really advocates is teenage pregnancy. The abstinence spiel is just playing hard to get. Candie's Foundation produced this PSA to pay lip service to safe sex:



Bristol Palin knows how hard it is to be a teen mom. It's hard, but hey, if it happens, you get to stomp on Dancing with the Stars, make the cover of glossy magazines, get to "act" in a show on ABC Family and get a quarter of a million dollars from a dodgy foundation. You'll be able to pay cash for one or more houses for yourself and your baby. So long as you promise to tell the world what a devastating mistake your baby is, so long as you tell the world you'll never have sex again (marketing two mistakes may be a bit harder, unless she goes for at least another eight mistakes or a very multiple one, to beat Kate Gosselin and the Octomom).



Bristol Palin's foray into acting drew my attention to another expenditure by the Candie's Foundation: $165,000 to ABC Family. I hope somebody will take a closer look at that.

The original post appears below. I would like to thank reader Trigmund Freud for obtaining the 990 form. Perseverance pays off!

I decided to feature the post again because, while some websites credited Palingates as being the first to publish the information, there was no link to the post and a lot of people are arriving on the blog through Google searches. It's easier to find the post if it's at the top.


Bristol Palin makes a nice profit from teenage sex


I received a document today, the form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax) of the Candie's Foundation for the year 2009. I don't think anybody else in the blogophere has this information so far...

Neil Cole, Chairman and CEO of Candie's and its parent company, Iconix, sees no contradiction in promoting their products through ads showing highly sexualized young people while simultaneously promoting abstinence via the Foundation.

He defends the contradiction: “Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby.”

In 2001, under fire from critics who accused him of dressing high-schoolers like tarts, he established the Candie’s Foundation, which fights teen pregnancy. In 2009 he introduced the foundation’s new teen ambassador, Bristol Palin.

The Candie's Foundation would have much more credibility if they promoted comprehensive sex education alongside the message that young people should consider whether they're ready to be sexually active. Instead, their mission statement on their 990 form reads:


They repeat the same drivel three times on the form.

Bristol Palin had devastating consequences from her teenage pregnancy. In 2009 she was paid a really devastating amount of money:


This amount is not final, as the 990 is not complete yet. Candie's requested an extention to present the data for their annual Event to Prevent, so Bristol may be due some further devastation.

The Candie's Foundation is the charitable arm of the purveyors of sexy attire for teenagers that uses soft porn to market their products. It's just a handy way to generate tax free money by pretending to be against teenage sex. They decided to cover all bases...



Bristol appears to have developed a convincing image, very, very relevant in the context of sexual abstinence.


Candies and Bristol Palin are well matched. Hypocrisy, greed and gratuitous exploitation of young women while delivering conflicting messages is a profitable bond between them.


UPDATE

Back in January 2010, a Candie's Foundation publicist put a foot in his mouth:

A publicist from the Candie's Foundation says that Bristol is not paid for her role as spokesperson but is compensated for travel and other expenses.

$262,500 is a LOT of travel!

(H/T to Curiouser11)

UPDATE 2

Kim Chatman just reminded me about the claims that Bristol was working her butt off at a doctor's office. According to that spin, Bristol had to get up at some ungodly hour to bathe Tripp, fix his breakfast and get ready to go to work.

Why bother, if she was being paid handsomely as a teenage pregnancy advocate? (I can't resist being sarcastic about Bristol being an abstinence advocate...).


UPDATE 3

Candie's Foundation had a different opinion of Bristol before they jumped on the Palin bandwagon... There was a controversy about this ad because USA Today would not print it, likely due to concern it would anger certain republican presidential and vice presidential candidates (and supporters). (H/T to LisanTx)



UPDATE 4

Here's an interesting video, made before Bristol Palin thought abstinence was a realistic alternative:



(H/T to maelewis)

The 990 return may be viewed and downloaded HERE.
Please read previous posts about Candies.

Bristol Palin makes a nice profit from teenage sex

I received a document today, the form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax) of the Candie's Foundation for the year 2009. I don't think anybody else in the blogophere has this information so far...

Neil Cole, Chairman and CEO of Candie's and its parent company, Iconix, sees no contradiction in promoting their products through ads showing highly sexualized young people while simultaneously promoting abstinence via the Foundation.

He defends the contradiction: “Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby.”

In 2001, under fire from critics who accused him of dressing high-schoolers like tarts, he established the Candie’s Foundation, which fights teen pregnancy. In 2009 he introduced the foundation’s new teen ambassador, Bristol Palin.

The Candie's Foundation would have much more credibility if they promoted comprehensive sex education alongside the message that young people should consider whether they're ready to be sexually active. Instead, their mission statement on their 990 form reads:


They repeat the same drivel three times on the form.

Bristol Palin had devastating consequences from her teenage pregnancy. In 2009 she was paid a really devastating amount of money:


This amount is not final, as the 990 is not complete yet. Candie's requested an extention to present the data for their annual Event to Prevent, so Bristol may be due some further devastation.

The Candie's Foundation is the charitable arm of the purveyors of sexy attire for teenagers that uses soft porn to market their products. It's just a handy way to generate tax free money by pretending to be against teenage sex. They decided to cover all bases...



Bristol appears to have developed a convincing image, very, very relevant in the context of sexual abstinence.


Candies and Bristol Palin are well matched. Hypocrisy, greed and gratuitous exploitation of young women while delivering conflicting messages is a profitable bond between them.


The 990 return may be viewed and downloaded HERE.
Please read previous posts about Candies.

Sex and Sarah Palin- Updated

Sarah Palin has the strange habit of drawing attention to her daughters. Scott Brown advertised his own daughters as being available, which was in very bad taste.

Sarah goes in the other direction, trying to portray her daughters as demure, innocent paragons of virtue. The effect is quite the opposite.

When all eyes were on her, Sarah Palin announced to the world that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol was 5 months pregnant to dispel rumours about her own faked pregnancy. Since then, all references to Bristol have involved something that makes everybody remember that she was having unprotected sex at a young age with an attractive chap who's now a "porn" star. The latest PR stunt focuses on Bristol's chastity, how her lost virginity is being restored because she's not going to have SEX until she gets married.

Bristol is also associated with Candies, a sexual abstinence organization that uses SEX to promote the abstinence message to gullible teenagers. All with her mother's blessing and encouragement.

Candies is not shy about using SEX to promote their products. It doesn't help teenagers remain abstinent, to say the least.




(Click on each picture to enlarge)


Last summer, Sarah and Todd Palin thought it was a good idea to link their 14-year-old daughter Willow to statutory rape. Statutory rape implies consent, albeit uninformed, so Willow became a willing sexual being, thanks to her parents lust for retaliation.

UPDATE

Midnightcajun reminded us about the gang rape threats against Willow and Bristol when the Palins lived in Juneau. Sarah wrote about it in "Going Rogue". Yes, the threats that went unreported to anybody in a position to take any action. It wasn't a simple reference to Sarah Palin's daughters and SEX. It was about extremely violent sex. There's no evidence that these threats actually took place. Maybe her story is true (highly unlikely), maybe she invented it to add a bit of drama to a very dull book, who knows? Either way, she's comes across as an incredibly irresponsible parent.

Piper has been filmed and photographed wearing high heels and make-up. The poor girl is still too young to become part of Sarah Palin's skewed sex agenda, but we're sure that in due course Piper will take her place alongside her sisters as a reluctant sex object.


Oprah said no one wants to hear about Bristol's sex life or the decisions she made regarding her sex life. As a matter of fact, no one was in the least bit interested in the sex lives of any of Sarah Palin's daughters until she put them out there to dispel "salacious rumours" or to get her revenge on a late night comedian for a joke that was blown out of all proportion. I suspect she was more upset about Letterman calling her a "slutty flight attendant" than the joke about Alex Rodriguez knocking up the other daughter.

Scott Brown's daughters are available, Sarah Palin's are not. But still... it's all about sex.

Sarah Palin uses SEX to sell herself and she uses it in connection to her daughters.

Either Sarah Palin has serious issues regarding sex, or she has decided that sex sells. Is there a better way to stay in the headlines and make a lot of money from gossip magazines?
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Sex, marketing and children

I'm not a prude and don't wish to preach morals to anybody, but I would like to explore this trend of sexualizing young girls to sell products.

The marketing of certain brands puts a lot of pressure on young impressionable girls who are still forming their views of the world around them. The pressure starts by targeting them when they're younger. Bratz, Barbie, make-over kits and numerous toys associated with TV stars find their way into the toy chests of girls aged six, seven and younger.

Children love to copy older siblings, cousins and adults around them. They play house, wear mom's clothes and shoes, love lipstick, nail varnish and a lot of glitter. That's normal.

But the aggressive marketing of unsuitable toys and other paraphernalia must put a lot of pressure on parents who don't wish to see their little girls grow up too fast.

Younger girls are not immune to Candie's marketing strategies. Having been primed by the bratz and the barbies, they are all too receptive to the glitter surrounding the pretty celebrities used in sexy ads aimed at the slightly older age group.

Candie's Foundation states that there's nothing wrong with being sexy, but you don't have to have sex. Young girls can look like they're ready and willing to have sex, but shouldn't actually do it.



Let's have a look at nature and the sexual behaviour of species less evolved than ours. There are mechanisms to indicate sexual maturity and readiness in the lower species. Outside certain times and in the absence of certain signs, sex simply doesn't happen.

Humans lack these clear indicators. They do exist, but are more subtle and not talked about outside science. So we have conventions, rules and taboos. They probably evolved through observation. Perhaps early humans didn't have certain taboos that exist today, but noticed that engaging in certain behaviours was not a good idea. It was noticed that the offspring of closely related people were weaker, prone to disease, etc. So incest became a no-no. Menstruation was a good guide to sexual maturity, so any girls too young to menstruate were left alone.

I'm just speculating, but I don't think I'm too far from the truth. In earlier civilized societies, it was the norm for girls to be married and bear children soon after their first period. We don't have to go too far back in time to observe this. People's life expectancy was lower, mother and infant mortality much higher than today, so the window of opportunity for reproduction was narrower.

As societies became more sophisticated and complex, so did the rules. Until not very long ago, women in Western societies were not educated. Depending on their social class, they were instructed in the gentle art of social intercourse and a few hobbies, and that was that. When they were ready for breeding, they were married into a suitable family, all in keeping with the social trends of the time. Women from the lower classes just worked and reproduced without higher aspirations.

Now, thanks to science, we live longer. Women of all classes fought long and hard to receive an education. In the second half of the last century, things started moving very fast in every respect. Technology moves forward faster than we can comprehend, there's a lot more social mobility, travel to far flung places became possible, the world changed.

We're still adapting and will have to continue to adapt to this changing world at a much accelerated pace.

Capitalism is a relatively new thing. It only came about during the Industrial Revolution. What a revolution it was! Things could be mass produced, a larger number of people had access to more and more goodies.

Of course, as technology advanced and competition escalated, marketing the goods became more aggressive. Social changes, such as the sexual revolution of the 60's, destroyed some barriers and today we have a marketing free-for-all.

Which brings us back to Candie's. We're not about to revert to marrying our daughters at the age of thirteen, but the manufacturers of teen products see nothing wrong in presenting this age group as sexual beings, with all the trappings of sexual readiness and availability. So they establish a foundation that states that it's OK to send out all the wrong signals, as long as the young sexily clad girls say "no".

Young men are not immune to these marketing campaigns either. But are they supposed to be stimulated by this barrage of images and then not act on any of their impulses?

Adolescence is confusing enough without all these mixed messages.

Throw religion into the mix, saying that sex is wrong, thererefore contraception is wrong, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Candie's chose to promote abstinence to redeem themselves for their marketing strategies. They couldn't promote proper sex education because they would have to admit that they see young girls as nothing more than sex objects.

As long as they say "Look but don't touch" they're in the clear. If they really had any interest in helping to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies, they would be fighting for comprehensive, honest sex education, in which case they would have to stop using sex to sell their products.

The many toys, clothes and make-up manufacturers that target our children by using sexy images in their relentless pursuit of higher profits are robbing our children of the best years of their lives. They blur the lines of what is age appropriate to swell their coffers.

What they do is not cute, not harmless and not honest. Our children and young people deserve some respect. They're not a "market", they are our future.



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Sex, lies and the Palins

Gail Collins wrote an excellent op-ed on the New York Times about Bristol Palin as a teen ambassador for the Candie's Foundation.

Neil Cole is the head of Candie's and sees no problem in promoting their sexy products through ads showing highly sexualized young people while promoting sexual abstinence at the same time, via the Candie's Foundation.

“Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby,” said Neil Cole.

A couple of years ago, under fire from critics who accused him of dressing high schoolers like tarts, he established the Candie’s Foundation, which fights teen pregnancy. And there he was on Wednesday introducing the foundation’s new teen ambassador, Bristol Palin.

...when it comes to combating teen pregnancy, the Palin family has done enough damage already. What worse message could you send to teenage girls than the one they delivered at the Republican convention: if your handsome but somewhat thuglike boyfriend gets you with child, he will clean up nicely, propose marriage, and show up at an important family event wearing a suit and holding your hand. At which point you will get a standing ovation.

Sarah Palin has said in the past that she opposes “explicit” sex education, which kind of sounds like ... sex education. And while encouraging kids to wait is obviously fine, the evidence is pretty clear that abstinence education is worse than useless.

The full article is worth reading, don't miss it.

The Candie's Foundation have a very mixed agenda, to say the least. In October 2008 they advertised one of their public service annoucements using a poster with images of Bristol and Levi next to Jamie Lynn Spears. Today Bristol is their ambassador for abstinence while Jamie's sister Britney takes care of the sexy clothes and shoes.

The marriage between an opportunistic business and a blatantly ambitious politician result in many confused children...


NYT op-ed
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Bristol Palin, sex and hypocrisy

In September 2008, Sarah Palin said she was proud of her 17 year old pregnant daughter Bristol.



In February 2009, Bristol told Greta Van Susteren that abstinence is not realistic at all.



In May 2009, Bristol Palin was announced as a Teen Ambassador for the Candie's Foundation. They run ads like these, promoting sexual abstinence until marriage.





Their website sells sexy t-shirts, saying you can be sexy without having sex.



The Candie's Foundation is the charitable arm of a clothes, shoes and fragrances company, aimed at teenagers and young people. This is how they sell their stuff.





I don't know how much exposure Bristol Palin had to any of these ads or if they had any influence in her decisions regarding her sexual behaviour. The fact is, she's now an ambassador for a foundation that preaches sexual abstinence, which is associated with a commercial venture that uses highly sexualized context in ads to sell their products to young people.

The Candie's Foundation would have much more credibility if they promoted sex education, safe sex and contraceptive methods alongside the message that young people should consider whether they're ready to be sexually active.

By having a narrow view of the subject and sending out contradictory messages, Candie's is shortchanging a lot of young people. Bristol Palin's story erodes the abstinence message even further.

But why bother to be consistent? Why do they have to worry about integrity and credibility? They're making a lot of money because sex sells, one way or the other, and their charity provides them with tax breaks...

Bristol Palin is a poster girl for hypocrisy.
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Bristol Palin and abstinence

Bristol Palin has been appointed as a Teen Ambassador for The Candie's Foundation.

I visited their website to see what it's all about. Yes, you guessed, it's all about abstinence. They have loads of links to other abstinence preaching websites.

I also did some searching to find out how effective abstinence is in preventing teenage pregnancies and what their model for sex education contains.

The misinformation out there is truly frightening. Some examples:


Many abstinence-only curricula contain false, misleading or distorted information:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person.”
• HIV can be spread via sweat and tears.
• Half of gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for HIV.
• Pregnancy can result from touching another person’s genitals.
• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.
• Women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide."
• As many as 10 percent of women who have an abortion become sterile.

A study conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services during the last Bush administration showed that teenagers who took abstinence-only classes were just as likely to have sex as those who didn't.

Other studies have shown that adolescents in abstinence-only programs were less likely to use contraception, perhaps because those programs emphasize only the failure rates of even the best methods.

I don't wish to discuss Bristol Palin's sexual behaviour, but I don't think she became a teenage mother by having sex only once and bingo, an accidental conception occurred. She's not the only teenager to be sexually active and by feeling guilty about engaging in sex, she was less likely to use protection, therefore more likely to get pregnant.

The combination of ignorance and guilt is the best way to ensure teenagers will become pregnant or contract sexually transmitted diseases.

Let's be realistic. Teenagers have sex. Abstinence only programs funded by the Bush administration didn't stop teenagers having sex, but left them woefully misinformed about their sexual health and wellbeing.

I believe Bristol is pushing her mother's agenda by becoming the poster girl for an abstinence only organisation. Bristol is living proof that these ideas don't work.

I would have a lot more respect for Bristol if she had joined Advocates for Youth, which have a much more honest and realistic approach to teenage sexual behaviour.

Story about sex education in Alaska
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