All right, class, as you may know, we occasionally like to slice a hunk of raw, intellectual meat off of the electrical side of beef that is the Internet, toss it your way, and watch you scrap over it while we drink a beer. Today's juicy morsel comes to us via the New York Times and author Caitlin Flanagan, and is a reaction to the hit indie adoption comedy Juno.
The movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”
Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.
OK, you know what, we're gonna skip past some of this, since basically it reminds us that despite the comedy in Juno, teenage pregnancy is a serious, potentially terrible thing, which (despite our being a product of it), we totally agree with. What we really wanted to talk about was this:
Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?
Now, we don't for a second think that either the Times or Flanagan is recommending a return to Victorian times. (Although that might explain this.) But it's still a provocative question. So, what do you guys think? Is it just a pipe dream to assume that young girls can ever truly be sexually liberated, considering that they will almost certainly bear the brunt of any unintended consequences? Or, to perhaps put it another way, will we ever be able to say with 100% confidence that those unintended consequences have been eradicated?
Have at it in the comments, and remember to play nice!
(And yes, for those of you playing at home, this post ties together three separate threads that have cropped up on the blog in recent days. Gold star for you!)