Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Mackenzie Phillips, an actress and daughter of Mamas and the Papas singer John Phillips. Mackenzie said that her father raped her and eventually their relationship became "consensual".

While it's hard to imagine anything other than Stockholm syndrome, a comparison she herself makes, it does raise some important issues like how power is used and abused, how rape and incest perpetrators get away with their crimes, and can psychologically manipulate their victims, etc. Many people might ask why she continued this relationship long into adulthood.

If we believe Mackenzie (her father died in 2001) this is a clear-cut case. This is not something that anyone could claim is a fuzzy area: her father had been giving her drugs since she was ten and started raping her at 19 when she was passed out because he was jealous that she was getting married. So the fact that she talked about these issue in her book and with Oprah should be a good opportunity for a dialog about these issues.

So the blogosphere must be talking a lot about psychology and real-world implications of all this, right? No.

Alex Leo, an editor at the Huff-po was too busy tripping over itself scolding them for committing "incest", which, aside from missing the point, kind of implies both of them were to blame. Salon, says that the "larger question Mackenzie's story raises" is how can things like this be prevented? Oh, no: "whether it's ever possible for father-daughter incest to be consensual when both parties are adults." Well, okay, Salon, lets say hypothetically, yes, it's possible. I think we can agree that in the US, this has happened maybe, lets say, 1000 times (I'm being generous). Is that really the big picture? No, that's trivializing the big picture with academic and irrelevant blather.

Meanwhile, Popwatch at Entertainment Weekly wags their finger at Mackenzie for being materialistic and shallow because of her story of sleeping with Mick Jagger and because of how hard she was pushing her book. Pot? Kettle? That's enough tabloid for me.

So, what is the big picture? According to Alison Rose Levy in her excellent blog post, it's abuse, and understanding how and why Mackenzie stayed in the abusive relationship and began to understand it as "consensual." I agree, and I'm glad some people can stand back and see the real big picture, and understand Mackenzie as a human being in the correct context rather than trivialize her experience as an academic test of whether or not incest could hypothetically be consensual. Who cares if it never is?

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