‘Yes, They’re Both Available’: Exactly What Did Scott Brown Mean By That?

posted at 2:53 pm on January 24, 2010 by The Other McCain
[ Family ]   

“I want to thank Ayla and Arianna for their help as well. And just in case: Anyone who’s watching throughout the country . . . yes, they’re both available.”
– Scott Brown

Ayla Brown of Wrentham died of embarrassment Tuesday night. She was 21.
– Boston Herald

OK, let’s go ahead and grant that this was the textbook definition of “cringe-worthy.” It’s only January, but if anybody’s going to challenge the new Republican Senator-elect for honors as Most Embarrassing Dad of 2010, they’ll have to come up with a real doozy.

Embarrassment aside, however, there was no call whatsoever for Alan Colmes to accuse Brown of “pimping out his daughters.” And the ultimate defense of Brown’s nationally-televised Election Night proclamation is this: It’s true.

Both of Brown’s daughters, Ayla and Arianna, are single and over 18. They are indeed “available” . . . for marriage. As my Sicilian friend Da Tech Guy says:

Anybody from any Italian family would have seen the remark for what it was.

In an earlier era, it might also have been said that Scott Brown’s daughters are “eligible” or “marriageable.” But one consequence of the decline of marriage in our culture is that when a father proudly points out that he has two lovely daughters of marrying age, it induces the nudge-nudge reaction: “Available . . . for what?”

Part of what’s going on here, of course, is what The Boss calls “The Left’s Palinization of the Brown Family,” a pattern of the Democrat/MSM axis trying to make a “scandal” of anything and everything involving prominent Republicans. Whether it’s Scott Brown’s daughters in bikinis or his wife Gail rockin’ a bikini in an old music video — or Brown himself looking hunkalicious as Cosmo‘s “Sexiest Man” of 1982 — the MSM expect America to be shocked! shocked! to discover that conservatives aren’t born wearing three-piece suits.

The MSM want to trap conservatives in a sort of sexual Catch-22. On the one hand, Republicans are derided for being uptight, button-down, repressed, puritanical hypocrites. On the other hand, if any Republican makes any public acknowledgement of the sexual dimension of human life, the media censors throw a fit of Victorian indignation as if the Comstock Laws were still in force.

This is the Left’s prudish double-standard: Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd made “waitress sandwiches,” Bill Clinton shagged interns in the Oval Office and John Edwards put his mistress/baby-mama on the campaign payroll. But if a Republican’s daughter is photographed in a bikini, that’s a scandal.

As for dads encouraging their daughters to marry, I’m in total agreement with Scott Brown. He and I are almost exactly the same age, which means we are both eyewitness survivors of the worst excesses of the Sexual Revolution. No one under 40 can possibly imagine how wretchedly out-of-control things became in the 1970s and early ’80s, post-Roe v. Wade and pre-AIDS. All I can say is, it’s a good thing they didn’t have phone-cams and YouTube back in the day.

Having survived all that, and reflecting soberly on the experience with the belated wisdom of fatherhood, I’m retro-traditional with a vengeance. And I’m thinking Scott Brown is like me: He would hunt down and strangle with his bare hands any guy who mistreated his daughter.

 Like all retro-traditional Dads, Scott Brown wants to see his girls honorably and happily married, rather than “out there” exposed to the moral hazards of the singles scene, overcrowded with unworthy passive-aggressive beta males. IYKWIMAITYD. However much we may have cringed at Brown’s “they’re both available” remark, most conservatives recognized it as good-natured parental joshing:

That is something my dad would do. In fact, he’s done a lot worse than that. I don’t care much, and I’m sure his daughters don’t, either. If your dad speaks in public (mine’s a preacher), you kinda get used to being poked at that way. People need to lighten up.

Amen!

UPDATE: Professor Donald Douglas observes the counterintuitive fact that chicks dig old-fashioned guys.

UPDATE II: Remember Jackie Seal, the 17-year-old who pwnd Norah O’Donnell? She totally understands Scott Brown:

Typical dad. Nothing insane about it.

Jackie Seal: American Hero!

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