Malia Obama Was Caught Drinking Underage, And That's Not A Problem

I'm sure at this point we've all seen the picture, and all the tabloid shock-value headlines. To make a long, dramatic story short, someone acquired a photo of Malia Obama, Former President Barack Obama's daughter, drinking a bottle of Rosè poolside with her friends, and the media decided to make it a big deal.

The reason this is trending? Malia is only 20 (but turns 21 in July, just a few months away).

This is honestly such an absurd thing for political pundits to be giving attention to, and a hypocritical one as well. First of all, no one drinking underage gets on national news for it, like, ever, but because it's the daughter of a president (who isn't even in office anymore, might I add), Malia is a national headline and being demonized for it.

It's not like she was caught in a cornfield shooting straight vodka alone (and even if she was, why would it matter?), instead, she was sipping from an $80 bottle of Rosè that she was sharing with her friends while sitting by a pool. Sounds pretty classy if you ask me.

Malia isn't the first former president's child to get caught doing illegal things, there's a long history of demonizing the children of politicians, but the media is acting as if everyone before her has been an abnormal teenager/young adult and conformed strictly to every societal norm.

And yet, Malia seems to be the one that's normal. You would be hard-pressed to find a 20-year-old college student that doesn't drink at least occasionally. Alcohol and college go hand-in-hand almost a little too frequently in today's society, with the majority of binge drinkers being college students, and yet when one just so happens to be a president's daughter, she is expected to have never touched a drop in her life? Sounds fishy to me.

The media is demonizing Malia Obama for drinking wine at 20, but defended Brett Kavanaugh for being accused of rape during a night he was too drunk to remember when he was 17 and still in high school. They are treating a responsible adult casually sipping on wine worse than they did someone who got blackout drunk and may have raped someone when he was a teenager. Let that sink in.

Malia Obama is 20 years old. She's an adult, she is her own person, she is attending Harvard, and yet the media is treating her as if she's some unruly teen actress going through a crisis (which is another problematic media behavior), for simply enjoying some wine with her pals. She deserves better than this, she deserves to be left alone.