Virginia Rutter (the gal who brought us “Who Votes Their Gender?” the other week) took time out from writing college lectures to pen this excellent review of Juno from the perspective of a sex researcher. As you likely know by now, Juno was just nominated by the Academy for four Oscars, including Best Film, and Best Actress (Ellen Page). We’re bound to see a continued discussion of the issues the film raises in coming months, and here Virginia calls our attention to something other reviewers have overlooked: the way our culture talks about–or rather, doesn’t talk about–luuuvvv. -GWP

Can We Talk about Love, Please?

The movies are giving demographers, sociologists, and sex researchers a boost these days. Movies about unwanted pregnancy that eschew abortion, such as Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress, are giving gifted columnists (like Ellen Goodman and Carrie Rickey) a chance to contemplate where the culture stands with respect to unwanted pregnancy, early motherhood, and all things youthful, tawdry, and anxiety producing for those of us who consider ourselves grown ups now. Those kids are different from us grown ups, and the problems that they have are about the mechanics of sex, and the rules and practices around abortion, adoption, and teen delivery.

Meanwhile, it is Christmas in January for a sex researcher. There is a lot of important teen sex and unwanted pregnancy news out there, too. Abortion rates are down, Guttmacher reports. The fantasized link between teen pregnancy and poverty is screwy, as reported to the Council on Contemporary Families, and instead, poverty is caused by (who’d a thunk it?) the economy. Ouch. How unromantic.

But I don’t want to write about that, any more than I want to write my sociology lectures or finish my latest sex data analysis, right now. The cultural theme that Juno raised for a lot of commentators is whether we as a society are making sex and reproductive decisions look too easy and too simple.

Mind you, the main theme, focused on a woman’s body, seems to have crowded up some other ideas that matter. I have wondered why we haven’t detected a cultural story to be told here in this movie about the fact that:

1. Consequences of sex are a component of the plot in Juno, just as they are in Knocked Up; and

2. The boy, Paulie Bleeker (played by Michael Cera), though not as touched by the pregnancy crisis as the girl, Juno MacGuff (played by Ellen Page) remains a large focus of the unfolding story of the consequences of sex.

But, like I said, none of this grips me. You know what grips me? Love. And I’m convinced that we just don’t talk about it enough.
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The value and pleasure of Juno was that it was a story of love—where the kids sing to each other “you’re a part time lover and full time friend.” In the messy, dull, weird world of conformity and reticence that dominates high school relationships, Juno sweetly offers a story of shy, sweet, but steadfast friendship and romantic love.

Family love was there too. I was touched by the love and acceptance that the father showed his daughter, even as he was befuddled by her choices. I cheered at the loyalty portrayed by the stepmother when she dressed down the judgmental ultrasound operator. This is the kind of love we can live with, the kind of love that we need in order to live, survive, thrive, and just be good people. It isn’t “kill yourself love” like we get from movies like Titanic, which is the kind of love we are more likely to glamorize and talk about.

Cultural commentators, chief among them Stephanie Coontz, highlight the way in which marriage itself has been transformed from an institution based on commitment to an institution based on love. We’ve got a host of politicians who respond to this reality with hand-wringing about the loss of old-fashioned commitment. But we will do well to contemplate, elucidate, illustrate and talk about ways to love skillfully, kindly, and with compassion and acceptance that were illustrated in Juno. In the end, love—doable, realistic, everyday love–was the protective envelope (not marriage, not traditional values) that made us see that Juno the teen mother was going to be okay. In other words, love, done right, serves the kind of social purpose that commitment and traditional values do. And jeepers, the songs are so sweet when they are about love.

Since, despite my impulses, I have to keep working on my sociology lectures and my sex research, I have a nice little social science illustration for why love matters that brings us full circle to thinking about teen sex. In her research, Amy Schalet (UMass-Amherst) contrasted how teens and their parents in the United States think about and communicate about sexuality as compared to in The Netherlands. She found that Dutch parents and teens actually believe that young people can experience love, can be in love, and that love is an important prerequisite to sexual activity, while in the United States, parents are skeptical of their teenagers’ capacity to be in love, and instead keep expressing the view that boys and girls must be in some kind of antagonistic, sexual arms race. The lesson in Professor Schalet’s work: the age of first sex is higher and the rates of unwanted pregnancy and STDs are lower among Dutch versus American youth. Valuing love works. Don’t forget it.

I say, up with Juno! Up with love! Now, to write lectures and look at data.

Today, the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, has become Blog for Choice Day. Some poignant blogging going on around the blogosphere. Thought I’d share a few of the posts that have most caught my eye:

Gloria Feldt at Huffington Post, “I Am Roe”
Courtney Martin at Huffington Post, “Admitting the Complexities of Abortion”
Erica Jong at Huffington Post, “If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would Be a Sacrament”
Jill Filipovic, “10 Reasons to Support Reproductive Justice on Roe Day”
Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman at The Nation, “Long Roe to Hoe”
Susie Bright at Susie Bright’s Journal, “Anatomy of a Smushmortion”

Also:

The Guttmacher Institute’s newly released report finds that the U.S. abortion rate is the lowest it has been in more than three decades. Commentary by Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet, here.

Salon asked a number of feminists to talk about the court case that changed their lives, and why it matters more than ever. Read their responses here.

And the ever-wonderful Feministing will be blogging reproductive justice all day long.

Catherine Prendergast is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Ethnography of the University Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. She is the author of Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education, a book Gloria Ladson-Billings called “a breath of fresh air in what has been a very stale atmosphere.” As I think you’ll agree after reading Cathy’s post here, she’s also one of the freshest thinkers on the much-blogged topic of race in this race around. On top of that, she’s a dear friend of mine from graduate school and can twirl a mehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifan pirouette. Here’s Cathy:

Breaking up with Bill

Out of the ashes of the South Carolina Democratic debate, uninspiring in so many ways, I saw a glimmer of hope. It wasn’t in the CNN debate itself or the punditry afterwards, but rather in a related article on CNN’s website which saw the media monolith scarfing down a little humble pie. It seems that within minutes of running a story in which it was speculated whether black women in South Carolina would vote their race or vote their gender, CNN was barraged with angry emails decrying the characterization of black women and their “unique” dilemma. Black women weighed in with the obvious (though apparently not obvious to CNN) point that they might also have other options, including voting on (gasp!) the issues. Did CNN really imagine black women so dumb that they would only perceive two choices in front of them? “Pull this racist crap off” one angry reader responded. But perhaps the most revealing comment came from a white man who wrote “Since Edwards no longer officially exists, as a white male I face the same choice – either I vote my race (Clinton) or my gender (Obama).”

What did this man reveal? Whiteness, plain and simple. That state of being that is invisible and somehow transcendant, allowed to be raceless because it takes place against a continually racialized other. People have been quick lately to recall Toni Morrison’s description of Bill Clinton as our first black president. They’ve been less apt to recall her more substantial observation that white people have always resisted shifting the racializing gaze to themselves. Morrison, for a related reason, refuses to don the mantle of feminist writer just because she writes about women. She finds such labels suspicious: “No one says Solzhenitsyn is writing only about those Russians, I mean, what is the matter with him? Why doesn’t he write about Vermont?”

So when Bill Clinton, in speech the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, assured listeners that he could well understand why African-Americans would want to vote for the first “intelligent” African American presidential candidate they’ve ever had the chance to vote for, I cringed. Clinton may have been called our first black president, but he certainly was never called our first “intelligent” black president, which is why, of course, he never was black, and was never called white.

Since this is a blog honoring women writers, let me quote one of my favorites, whose words have been bouncing around in my head ever since this primary season began: Susan Sontag in the days after 9/11, when surrounded by those who asked “why us,” famously answered, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” What is going to make this current election different, if it is going to be different, is not the presence of a black (male) or (white) female candidate as front-runners for the first time. It will be the continued presence of all the extraordinary people who wrote speedily back to CNN, and in so many words, said, “Let’s by all means vote together. But let’s not be stupid together.” Here’s to those people. They point the way ahead.

Virginia Rutter, whose last post “Who Votes Their Gender?” traveled across the blogosphere far and near, will be reviewing Juno in this space later this week She’s one savvy lady, a helluva sex researcher, and an astute cultural observer too. Stay tuned.

Wrote he:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

Amen.

In response to Katka’s request, while I don’t yet have pix of Friday’s event, I DO have this one of my friend Andrea’s little girl Grace reading a book, taken at my apartment yesterday. A girl-write-now of the future!

I’m late to this one, but just read Michiko’s review of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary. (Thanks, Heather!). Michiko writes, referring to Hillary’s teary moment the other week,

The 24/7 replaying of that moment on cable television…reminds us how relentlessly Mrs. Clinton has been dissected, deconstructed and decoded over the years: by now her marriage, her hair, her pantsuits, her voice and her laugh have been more minutely anatomized than her voting record on Iraq, her (mis-)handling of health care during her husband’s administration or her stands on Iran, Social Security and immigration. This willful focus on the personal is underscored by “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary,” an intriguing but highly uneven anthology of reflections about Mrs. Clinton by a spectrum of well-known female writers.

Michiko criticizes the book by noting that in these authors’ essays, Hillary’s actual résumé and record are largely shoved to the side. I’m still reading the book, so not yet weighing in on that one, but it’s an interesting point (and one I keep blogging about here). A few of the contributors submitted comments for the Hillary forum I’ve put together for More magazine (going live soon!), and I’m attending a lunch soon in celebration of the book. Very much looking forward. Promise to report on it here.

Yes I did.

Being a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, I had very mixed feelings about going to see a movie in which a monster takes down our city. I’d seen that one before. But Marco, a lover of monster movies and a dude who goes with me to chick flicks, pleaded. And so I went.

Interesting discussed ensued on the way subway ride home. Marco reminded me that Godzilla came out in Japan 10 years after the bombing of Hiroshima. Does Cloverfield perform some kind of cultural work that has to do with the processing of the unimaginable in the American imagination? Is this movie, which puts the takedown of Manhattan back into the realm of horror fantasy, a wish for an earlier day, when such monstrous things only happened on the silver screen? Many are arguing, and I understand the point, that the movie is merely exploiting America’s trauma for dollars. But the cultural studies girl in me wonders if, in addition, there is something deeper going on.

Busy day over here in real space, and hence no time to post! You can catch me online however at HuffPo, where feminist philanthropist/pundit/all around wonder woman Jacki Zehner and I co-authored a post today (“The Confidence Man”) in response to the latest economic news delivered by the Bush administration. Our heads are pasted together, left. Our joint post begins like so:

Today’s announcement by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is but the latest effort by the current administration to downplay the severity of the current economic crisis. In the grand old American tradition of hucksterism, Paulson’s prescription is a sorely misleading sell….

Read more

Come one, come all!!!

(I publicly excuse my man Marco for not coming just this once, because I know how excited he is about seeing Cloverfield the day it premieres. He’s been talking about it for days.)