WOW, the backlash is back, or did it ever leave? In the form of “comedies” no less.

Wow. You went to see this? I can look at the poster for this & tell it’s going to suck. And that’s just because Matthew Perry is in it. Never mind what it’s actually ABOUT.

Well, I wasn’t under any illusions that I would enjoy it.  It was purely for research.

Wasn’t their a fertility doctor somewhere that used his own sperm to impregnate all of his patients, maybe they could just make a movies about that guy.

Girls should not be exposed to cinematic depictions of misogyny.  Boys, however, get extra butter on their popcorn w/ every ticket purchased.

YOu know, if you are going to recommend one gender or the other not see a movie on the grounds that it contains hateful misogyny, it ought to be the boys who are told to stay home.

“Aniston’s character decides to have a baby with a sperm donor, only to have a friend (Bateman) swap the anonymous sample with his own as he is secretly in love with her.”

Okay, ew.

The sad thing is, you probably could make a cute romantic comedy with a guy who’s secretly in love with his friend volunteer to donate sperm for her and have her accept the offer.  You’d still run into some weird patriarchal stuff, but at least you wouldn’t have the creepy rape overtones.

I think this is symptomatic of the “last years idea” issue with Hollywood.  Since movies take a couple of years to develop, film, produce, and distribute, “hot-button topics” movies tend to lag behind popular sentiment…at least I hope so.

I don’t know if the backlash ever left either. But I do recall that Peggy Sue at least considered the possibility that early marriage was a mistake by showing up at her high school reunion divorced from the man who knocked her up at 17. So maybe there was five minutes in the 80’s when some filmmaker thought teen pregnancy wasn’t such a good idea.

Maybe monkeys will fly out of Aniston’s butt at some point in the movie.

I love the modifier “in the movie”, with its implication that while it is possible that monkeys will fly out of Ms. Aniston’s butt in real life, we are forced to concede that it is wildly improbable that it will happen in the film.

Wow, and I somehow thought that Michelle Trachtenberg and Matthew Perry were signs that this movie might have some redeeming value, or at least just be goofy.

Well, I was thinking that it was possible onscreen, due to CGI, but unlikely.

And, btw, am i the only one baffled by the American tendency to treat high school as the single most important, pivotal and significant part of your life?  American film especially obsessively focuses on that one, short, four-year period of our lives.  Why?  Because the people who make movies are essentially adolescents?  Or because they audiences are?????

Kids have become sort of like religion in some circles, at least I have heard several ads sponsored by the ad council where a guy is talking about how if it wasn’t for his kids he “probably wouldn’t be here now” or I heard one yesterday where a women ws talking about how being pregnant was going to help her quit smoking.  The fact is kids ad stress to your life and probably make things more difficult but people want to pretend they can “save your life.  Much the same way christians want to pretend religion can save their life.

These movies seem to exploit the myth that kids are going to make their life better, when in reality that is not the case.

Billingham:

You never saw Serving Sara, did you? It could have been a funny movie, but watching Cedric the Entertainer and Vincent Pastore play black and Italian stereotypes to the hilt (not to mention lines from Perry like “Wopalong Cassidy”) made it painfully cringy.

And, btw, am i the only one baffled by the American tendency to treat high school as the single most important, pivotal and significant part of your life?  American film especially obsessively focuses on that one, short, four-year period of our lives.  Why?  Because the people who make movies are essentially adolescents?  Or because they audiences are?????

Could it be that it’s the last truly universal rite of passage in our culture?  Not everyone goes to college, not everyone gets married, not everyone has kids, and the circumstances of first jobs vary wildly.  Almost everyone goes to HS, though, and everyone is significantly shaped by the experience - four years is a long time at that age, and they’re four years of signficant change, growth, and personality-solidifying.  That makes it a cultural reference that they can be confident everyone will get.

Also, I think teens are appealing as protagonists.  Partly because of their physical attractiveness (no braces, zits, awkwardness or goofy styles here - this is hollywood!), but also because they’re at a stage where they have enough knowledge, power, and independence to get themselves and others in serious trouble, but they don’t have the full power of adults.  They are active forces, but still vulnerable.  A plot-friendly situation. 

Oh, yeah.  And because they answer to both of your questions is yes.

hp’s answer is good, too.

Or because they audiences are?????

This.  Teenagers watch a lot of movies.

More charitably- High School is one of the few, and more importantly, one of the chronologically last relatively universal experiences in American culture.  Most people attended high school, but after that people’s experience gets more variegated.  Some people go to college, some get jobs, some join the military, etc. If you’re trying to make a movie with broad appeal, setting it in high school has to look like a good option.

High school sucked.  I was never so glad to finally finish something so I could put it behind me (or at least try) and never look back.  I graduated in 1978, and have purposefully missed every single class reunion, even though I’ve lived in the same area since graduation.  And no, I don’t have any “class spirit” and never did…

I saw ads for “17 Again” and just assumed that it was going to be 2 hours of thinly-disguised pedophilia fantasies.  I’m not surprised that the actual product isn’t any better.

It’s becoming clear that the “outrage” over the supposed “pregnancy pact” several months ago really stemmed from one of two sources:

1. The pregancies were supposedly entered into volutarily and on purpose (i.e. it was something girls wanted, instead of an accident to punish the girls).

2. The men involved were not invoked as a solution to the problem (i.e. the girls were going to survive as a village of women, without being owned by anyone).

That Aniston movie summary is freaking scary.

And, btw, am i the only one baffled by the American tendency to treat high school as the single most important, pivotal and significant part of your life?  American film especially obsessively focuses on that one, short, four-year period of our lives.

Also: This.

I’m American and even I don’t get it. I’m thinking it’s a “lowest common denominator” thing. Everyone (well, nearly) went to school, so maybe they’ll come to this movie! If they made a movie about being a plumber, maybe engineers wouldn’t go to see it. Or something. I think it’s stupid, but marketing was never my strength, I guess.

Kids have become sort of like religion in some circles, at least I have heard several ads sponsored by the ad council where a guy is talking about how if it wasn’t for his kids he “probably wouldn’t be here now” or I heard one yesterday where a women ws talking about how being pregnant was going to help her quit smoking.  The fact is kids ad stress to your life and probably make things more difficult but people want to pretend they can “save your life.  Much the same way christians want to pretend religion can save their life.

This, absolutely.  I have two kids and I love them dearly.  But I wouldn’t ever say that they’ve “saved my life” or really, have even made my life objectively better or made me happier.  I’d certainly be further along in my chosen career if I didn’t have to wait for the youngest to start kindergarten before going back to school myself, I’d sleep more and have more sex.  I’d be much less stressed and less annoyed.  That isn’t to say that I wish I didn’t have them, because I don’t.  Usually (although talk to me when the 3 year old wants to be tucked in for the 10th time and I’m trying to read a book in peace, I’ll probably have a different answer).  But while I wouldn’t trade them for anything and I’m fairly content with my life and my family, let’s not pretend that being a parent is all sunshine and roses, either.

That said, some people do find getting pregnant unexpectedly or having children to be good motivators to clean up their lives and get their shit together.  It certainly happened this way for my sister.  Still not sunshine and roses, though.

So the movie is tripe… I am shocked…...........
Face it if you were 17 again most men would be fucking machines!!! I would also be wearing two condoms just to make sure I didn’t become a dad…

Face it if you were 17 again most men would be fucking machines!!! I would also be wearing two condoms just to make sure I didn’t become a dad…

Of course, the friction between the two condoms would make a tear significantly more likely and in fact, make you more likely to become a dad, but thanks for airing your fantasies about fucking teenagers.

Yeah, Nix(x((x))) is considerate that way.

Why?  Because the people who make movies are essentially adolescents?  Or because they audiences are?????

The latter.  Because your target audience hasn’t been alive long enough to realize that this “new” movie has the same hackneyed plot they’ve been recycling since the dawn of film.

Of course, the friction between the two condoms would make a tear significantly more likely and in fact, make you more likely to become a dad, but thanks for airing your fantasies about fucking teenagers.

Lulwhat?  Are you suggesting that you didn’t have fantasies about high school / college aged girls?  I remember going through high school with my hormones bouncing off the walls.  I don’t know any guy that didn’t.  What was wrong with you?

Zif, there’s the existence of and the need to share, the latter which was the official source of the criticism.

Zifnab, I think the point was that hopefully you don’t have those fantasies now.

Face it if you were 17 again most men would be fucking machines!!!

I think you have misunderstood Nixxx: he wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but assuming that you would be having intercourse with mechanical objects.  (There were quite a number of early marriages between young lotharios and their Coke machines at my school, but, hey, we were a fairly traditional bunch)

<blockquote>.....Aniston’s character decides to have a baby with a sperm donor, only to have a friend (Bateman) swap the anonymous sample with his own as he is secretly in love with her.<?blockquote>

THAT ALL MY CHILDREN!!!

Liza was separated/divorced from Adam, who wanted her back.  She wanted a child so asked her buddy Jake to be sperm-daddy.  Adam bought the fertility clinic, swapped samples, so that Liza’s baby was his.

Liza and Jake got a little cozy, even though they said they wouldn’t, but eventually Adam won Liza back.  Liza wishes that Colby, her daughter could have been more than just Adam’s adopted daughter.  Adam admits what he did…and more soap opera hilarity ensues!

What?  I hadn’t been out of college long and I still followed the story.  It’s not like you need to tune in more than once a month…soap operas move very slowly.

Relevence, besides outing myself as a former geek?  One of my first big bulletin-board (pre-blogs) debates was over whether or not this was rape.  I came down on “no” since she would have been completely unaware of the violation if Adam hadn’t blabbed.  It was very different from the date rapes of friends, and it seemed to belittle them by calling switching a vial, which can happen by accident, rape.

Now I don’t agree.  It’s still a different class of assault, but it’s still something.  And it’s really gross to see that a couple decades later this type of “Is it rape if I do this?  Is it rape if she doesn’t remember it?” crap is still considered entertainment.

When are we going to get back to the point where people can have abortions in the movies or on TV again?  B/c even if it looks like someone might be choosing that option, then they have a miscarriage first, b/c only the worst of sluts has an abortion.

Oh shit.  Well, thanks for the warning, now I will have to talk to my niece, because this is exactly the kind of stupid piece of shit my sister-in-law will take her to see.

What Caren said re the switched sperm scenario.  A loathsome act of violation is or should be a crime, but it requires its own name.  Inaccurately labelling it with the name of another kind of loathsome act of violation doesn’t make the act any worse or any better, it just means that you need a more accurate word.

IIRC “The Baster” is based on a David Sedaris story.

Zifnab, I think the point was that hopefully you don’t have those fantasies now.

Dude, whatever.  There was this girl named Jessica in my Calculus class…  :-p

In all seriousness, the 18-24 year old range of girls is never going to stop being hot, no matter how old you get.  That’s like saying babies stop being adorable or old people stop smelling funny.

@ Amanda:  In this movie, is the 17-again-dude beset by slutty teenage women throwing themselves at him?  I’m wondering if they’re trying to milk comedy out of the premise that the adult man within knows he’d be doing something wrong.

With all due respect, Zifnab, fuck off.

<blockquote>Aniston’s character decides to have a baby with a sperm donor, only to have a friend (Bateman) swap the anonymous sample with his own as he is secretly in love with her</blockuote>

Isn’t there a word for using a woman’s genitals without her consent or knowledge for your own personal benefit?  If only I could think of that word…

Personally, I’d like to see a movie where a guy offers his sperm to a woman that he secretly likes, and she accepts it.  Then the man realizes that having a baby isn’t the way to make a relationship work, and they both become close friends but find other partners to love.

I have to believe that the act from which “The Baster” derives its plot is supposed to be self-evidently loathsome and creepy, and not something from which wacky! hijinks! ensue!  I just can’t imagine it being played for Big Laffs.

Keep in mind the “teenagers” in this film are Efron who is 21, Trachtenberg who is 23 and Hunter Parrish who is 22.

I now have a serious friendcrush on Elizabeth Banks.  I wanna get a drink and discuss inappropriate lust objects with her.

Speaking of which, Zifnab seems to be suffering from filter disease.  Pandagon is not the same as hanging with your bros.

The Baster plot has spawned at least one made-for-TV movie and Criminal Intent (the first episode with Alicia Witt). Both times, it was pretty much portrayed as the creepy act it is, but the one based on the true story was worse IMO because the fetility doc was found out because his dadpaste wasn’t up to snuff and caused lazy eye syndrome in something like half the kids.

From the review:

[...]it’s no surprise that Scarlet doesn’t get the chance to revisit her past and tell her boyfriend to put on a condom.

Women can never, ever regret having kids. Once they’re there, that’s IT. You gotta love ‘em and if you don’t then smile and keep your damn mouth shut. Or, if you must bitch then you have to modify your statement with “I love my kids, don’t get me wrong, they’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me but…”

This struck me when I was watching Knocked Up and both couples were at the restaurant and Seth Rogen is joking to Katherine Heigel about taking the Deloren [sp] back in time to make sure he puts on a condom. Heigel’s character never actually agreed with it, which, would make sense as it seemed neither one wanted to be in the situation, she just sat at the table and fumed and got all huffy at HIM for even thinking about it. When, probably in reality that would have been a giant “Fuck yeah. If I could go back in time I never would’ve even fucked you!” (or, you know, if it’d been remotely real she probably would’ve had an abortion post haste).

I feel the same situation would happen here. No one wants to hurt the kids feelings (“Yeah, really, if I could go back in time and have your father put on a condom, which would result in you never existing, oh hells yeah I’d do it!”) and no one wants to admit that having kids might not be the bestest thing to happen to everybody EVER.

As someone pointed out above, we’re obsessed with children, especially white children, and having them is still the status quo and there’s a lot of influence to keep it that way.

Isn’t there a word for using a woman’s genitals without her consent or knowledge for your own personal benefit?  If only I could think of that word…

Well, it’s dead creepy, but I’d hesitate to call it that.  It would be like the difference between being embezzled and being mugged (with GBH).

it’s no surprise that Scarlet doesn’t get the chance to revisit her past and tell her boyfriend to put on a condom.

Women can never, ever regret having kids. Once they’re there, that’s IT. You gotta love ‘em and if you don’t then smile and keep your damn mouth shut. Or, if you must bitch then you have to modify your statement with “I love my kids, don’t get me wrong, they’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me but…”

That’s because we have to believe that women only have sex to have children.  If society found out that some women don’t have kids at all, and a lot of women don’t want kids right now, but they’re still having sex, we’d have to admit that women might actually (gasp!) like sex!  That would surely cause some problems for rape apologists and rape culture in general.  Also, if having baybeez isn’t the ultimate, fantastic, lifelong goal of all women, then it’s much harder to use that as an excuse to discriminate against them.

“the 18-24 year old range of girls” - Zifnab

Nice CYA.

Nice CYA.

ZOMG!  12 year olds R SO HAWT!  Better?

I just think its a silly conversation to have when you want to argue from the position that young girls are NOT attractive.  You want to talk demographically?  Culturally?  Biologically?  We can argue that “Are teenagers physically appealing” from any number of angles.  You want to split hairs and declare 18-year-olds too young?  How about 19-year-olds?  21-year-olds?  What’s the magic number for you so I can conform to your personal standards.  :-p

If you’re really dead set on playing the “Ura Perv!” card, go right ahead.  I just think you’re being ridiculous.

You remember Matthew McConaghey’s character in Dazed and Confused?  Remember what a creep he came off as?

You:  “In all seriousness, the 18-24 year old range of girls is never going to stop being hot, no matter how old you get.”

MMcC:  “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Zinfab,
Stop digging, man. Seriously, just let it go.

Oh boy, movie thread!

(Well, Pandagon ate my longer comment and I didn’t save it.  I’ll try to restate it:)

The universality of high school doesn’t adequately explain its popularity as a Hollywood movie theme.  Other countries have schools, yes?  So why don’t they obsessively make films about them?  Or do they, but they’re so bad we never hear of them here in the US? 

I think its nostalgia, the obsession with an idealized past- yet another part of the generally conservative bent of Hollywood.  The sub-genre of “adult gets a do-over of high school” especially so: 17 Again, 18 Again, Peggy Sue Got Married, Back to the Future, Freaky Friday and its recent remake.  These are all about redemption of past mistakes and are clearly aimed at older generations wishing for the opportunity to undo mistakes.  A fantasy of a time before our lives became constrained by our uninformed and foolish choices.

The problem with nostalgia: it’s false.  I’m remembering one film of the ‘80s that was wildly popular among people my age but our parents didn’t much care for: “The Breakfast Club.”  It really wasn’t that great of a movie to be honest, but its main idea was that high school was basically pointless and dumb no matter what social class or clique you belonged to.  That resonates with actual high school students, but it’s not a celebration of that age at all so older folks seeking a fond remembrance of innocent youth were turned off.

Though the fact of high school is pretty much universal, the experience of it is clearly not.  For some, it was the best time of their lives, adult pleasures without the responsibility, optimism for a future filled with boundless potential, when all that mattered was who was dating whom.  Big fans of, say, Clueless, I’m guessing.  For others it was a long nightmare of stupidity and cruelty from which we couldn’t wait to escape.  More like Welcome to the Dollhouse.

I don’t know if the backlash ever left either. But I do recall that Peggy Sue at least considered the possibility that early marriage was a mistake by showing up at her high school reunion divorced from the man who knocked her up at 17. So maybe there was five minutes in the 80’s when some filmmaker thought teen pregnancy wasn’t such a good idea.

Indeed.  It looks like the backlash today is stronger than ever.  Remember Fast Times at Ridgemont High?  It’s been discussed here before: the main female character has sex for the first time with a guy who’s a creep.  She knows he’s a creep, but she wants sex for its own sake and does so.  She gets pregnant and has an abortion.  Her decision is never questioned by the film or any of its characters: it is presented as the obvious and sensible choice.  Her older brother is completely and unconditionally supportive.  She is never shamed or degraded or otherwise punished for either the sex or the abortion and if anything it is all treated as a coming-of-age experience that leaves her a wiser and better person.  And the whole thing is treated as a side story, just part of the process of growing up.

That movie could not be made in Hollywood today.

Personally, I’d like to see a movie where a guy offers his sperm to a woman that he secretly likes, and she accepts it.  Then the man realizes that having a baby isn’t the way to make a relationship work, and they both become close friends but find other partners to love.

That kind of reminds me of Happy Endings.  There’s something of a similar side story going on there involving a gay male couple donating sperm to their closest friends, a lesbian couple.  Issues of trust, honesty, possessiveness, and identity come into play here, as throughout the movie’s many storylines.  I can’t recommend that movie enough.

Ugh… so disappointing, Jason Bateman was so good in Arrested Development.

Zinfab,

When several people on the board are telling you that you are creeping them out, you might want to think about that, preferably quietly for awhile.

When you notice that your posts are starting from the assumption that your sexual tastes are the same as everyone else, you might want to look into that.

When you are on a feminist board and you find yourself posting comments that are being labeled as sexist and inappropriate, you might want to stop.

And when you are, as an older male, reminding all the young women out there that their bodies are HAWT to you, you might consider that vocalizing those feelings publicly might make those people uncmfortable, because you are a Creepy Old Guy, okay?

Seriously, if you have…fantasies…keep them to yourself, please.

IIRC “The Baster” is based on a David Sedaris story.

Wrong Greek—it’s Jeffrey Eugenides, I’m quite sure. And though it’s been a while since I read about this movie, I believe it was meant to be an unsympathetic/black comedy view of the sperm donor in question in the story, which makes the move to “wacky romance” for the film (apparently) all the more disturbing.

Sympathetic Magic:

1)  If you’ve got the boy and the ring, everything else will follow from that.

2)  If you can play house, all you have to do is shut your eyes and think about Kansas and soon you’ll find you’re living like Blake Carrington.

3)  If you stick pins in an image of your enemy, your enemy actually will suffer.

4)  If you declare that a certain security is to be sold at a certain price, the security will actually be worth that much.

5)  If you can’t handle it yourself, the Lord will take care of you.

6)  If you print money, the money will be worth something.

7)  If you build it, they will come.

Oh, yeah, and:

8)  Go for it! Have a kid when you’re 18. Throw another one in for good measure right after and you’ll get a nice house, deck and hammock included, your baby mama apparently won’t need to work, your kids will eventually have iPods and get into Georgetown and the person you picked (when you were 17) is actually your soulmate…

Zifnab, I am making fun of you becase you keep talking about high school girls and “young” girls, but then when mentioning an age range you give numbers that put a “girl” past high school age and into… adulthood.  If you are actually attracted to young girls, own it.

Zac Effron is so lame he makes my 13 and 11 year old make retching sounds by his mere appearance on a billboard.

Think about that - the target age audience is repelled by his pseudo!

8) Go for it! Have a kid when you’re 18. Throw another one in for good measure right after and you’ll get a nice house, deck and hammock included, your baby mama apparently won’t need to work, your kids will eventually have iPods and get into Georgetown and the person you picked (when you were 17) is actually your soulmate…

On that note - this.

RobW, Sushi No Gakuseisays: Her decision is never questioned by the film or any of its characters: it is presented as the obvious and sensible choice….And the whole thing is treated as a side story, just part of the process of growing up.

What is so crazy is that this girl’s choice is more likely to be the actual choice of most HS girls today, not the idea of marrying and settling into happy parenthood like the nonsense in Knocked Up or other crapfests.  It’s pretty clear to most real-life teens, particularly the middle/upper class portrayed in these films that starting a family at age 17 is not a good idea.

I don’t know if the backlash ever left either. But I do recall that Peggy Sue at least considered the possibility that early marriage was a mistake by showing up at her high school reunion divorced from the man who knocked her up at 17. So maybe there was five minutes in the 80’s when some filmmaker thought teen pregnancy wasn’t such a good idea.

But she was impregnated in the early ‘60s where birth control wasn’t exactly standard issue, and abortion was still illegal.  I always thought the movie was more just examining the choices people make and wasn’t meant to make a morality judgment one way or another.  When she was sent back, she was determined not to make the same mistakes, and not necessarily by avoiding sex (at the beginning of the movie, she freaks her boyfriend out by trying to initiate it), just by not getting pregnant.

Wrong Greek—it’s Jeffrey Eugenides, I’m quite sure.

@ annejumps:  That’s right.  Whoops.  I’m holding out hope that the resulting movie is cringe-comedy rather than laff-riot; wackiness just seems completely tonally unsuitable.

Aniston’s character decides to have a baby with a sperm donor, only to have a friend (Bateman) swap the anonymous sample with his own as he is secretly in love with her.

Ew ew ew ew ew. I’m sorry but I don’t think that’s love. If he was in love with her, he’d do what thousands of other men who have fallen in love with women who are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or already mothers do: decide whether he is willing to be a dad to her kids. Lots of men decide they are okay with that; some don’t, and end the relationship. This character is saying he absolutely can’t deal with the idea of her having a child that’s not his, and moreover, she must have his child for him to love HER.

I need a shower. EW.

I can tell this movie is fucked up just by looking at the poster.

Because 99.9% of guys don’t look anything like that when they’re 17. Twenty-three? Yeah. But not at 17.

“Dawson’s casting” strikes again!

Why do high school movies do so well?

I agree with the answers given already about its being a common experience for most of the viewers and the people in them being pretty (the girls, for instance, are Zifnab-fuckable). 

Plus, they allow for a degree of stereotyping (geek, stoner, jock, nerd, cheerleader) that goes beyond even the average for adults in Hollywood stereotype-land.  It’s the RL version of “put a dwarf, an elf, a hobbit and a human in a room together.” 

MikeEss:  “High school sucked.  I was never so glad to finally finish something so I could put it behind me (or at least try) and never look back.  I graduated in 1978, and have purposefully missed every single class reunion, even though I’ve lived in the same area since graduation.  And no, I don’t have any “class spirit” and never did…”

My husband is the same way; he went to an all-boys’ Catholic military school, which was a multiplication of horrors.  I didn’t have it so bad, my school was pretty nice if whitebread, I had friends of different ages in different schools and was always of an independent nature, anyway.  If you didn’t spend your time in high school putting people in boxes, you won’t care much about those movies, and if you had difficulty getting out of boxes that the box-stuffers put you in, they’re actually repugnant.

On that note - this.

Oh well…bad taste is universal, like bad judgement.  I think it’s supersucky that we seem to be able to identify it (bad taste/judgement) only in the forms in which it emanates from the trailer parks and not in the forms in which it makes itself manifest in the boardrooms and on the runways. 

That’s why I made up my list: I wanted to show that wishful think tends to prevail in very high as well as in very low places.  Girls who have kids they can’t afford aren’t the only kind of stupid girls there are; men who encourage them to do that aren’t the only kind of creepy men there are; and in any case, the underlying disease which informs the symptomatology pervades the whole of the societal superstructure from the sub-basements to the penthouses.  (As above, so below.)  If you were to translate the genetic code of the virus into English, you might come up with a statement something like this: “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.”  Bah.  It sounds good, but bah.

(The pun is intentional, by the way, because while the misperception which renders this meme vendable applies to reproductive issues, they’re definitely not the only issues to which it attaches itself.  This is a glitch which is capable of screwing things up on multiple fronts.  It’s worse than the flu.)

The saddest thing about conservatism these days is that, while conservatism once served as a specific against just this kind of thinking*, it has long since lost that function.  Conservatism is negative by nature, and the function of conservatism is to serve as a speedbump or even as a roadblock to progessive big schemes.  But it’s a bore always being the guy who ruins everybody’s day by raising objections to the next comprehensive plan for the furtherance of human happiness, and it’s no wonder the righties ultimately got sick of the rôle.  Their solution was to foster and to offer up their own set of big schemes, which, since they were concocted by people who had theretofore made it a point of pride that they refused on principle to think in global terms and because they were (also) concocted by people who were trying to dominate an arena unfamiliar to them, crashed and burned—predictably—with as big a whumph and a bwomph as any leftie jerry-rig that ever was.**

Now that we’re all living in the wreckage that’s left after the collision, the one thing I’m certain of is that it isn’t proletarian champagne wishes and caviar dreams which have been to blame.  The tendency to throw money at a situation (spinsterhood; debt) in the hope and expectation that money will make it better (because money is manna) doesn’t merely sprout from very deep down, it descends from very high up.  (Nor is it an exclusive property of the left, whatever the righties say.)  Ours is a nation which, as I type, is in the process of elevating the capacity to generate money (the symbol) over the capacity to manufacture goods (the substance).  The British girl from the trailer park is making a mistake, sure.  But Obama’s finance people are in the midst of instituting the same mistake in another form.  The moral of the story being, I suppose, that there’s always more than enough boneheadedness to go around.  With which observation I will close, since I notice that I’m in danger of wandering from my point.

(Am I aware that “If you can concieve it you can achieve it” sound an awful lot like the Obama trademark slogan?  Yes I am, yes I am, yes I am.)

*It was never that reliable of an antigen, but let that pass for now.

**I’m not speaking here of the motivations of conservative leaders, which were always strictly corporate, but of the considerations which acted upon and which still move the grunts, the foot soldiers, the base.

catgirl @ 02:59:

I do agree that enforced pregnancy is tightly bound up with phobia about female sexuality. This is also Amanda’s interpretation of choice for a lot of the conservative pressures facing young women, and as far as reproductive health goes I think that it’s a very strong thesis.

But I also think that there is something less sophisticated going on specifically in the locus of preaching the joys of motherhood, and the dogmatic way in which we see motherhood as always being a net positive and never something to regret. It’s to do with created wants.

If no one ever advertised, oh I don’t know, SUVs at us, it would probably not occur to most of us to want one. Big car, difficult to park, expensive to maintain… Who needs it, right? But run a successful ad campaign tying it emotionally to an intangible value that people hold dear - freedom, security, masculinity, whatevs - and all of a sudden people are flocking to spend their money on something which is basically a pain in the ass.[1]

It’s basically the same with kids. You get one, and wham - no time, no sleep, no sex, no money. Who needs ‘em? So the want has to be created, and this mythology of contented motherhood is how it’s done. The government doesn’t quite run ads imploring women to use their ovens to bake the future generation of tax payers, but something does have to be done, because once a society has devolved so far down the route of individualism, it becomes really hard to reconcile something as selfless as having kids with the prevailing ideology of self-actualisation. Marketing motherhood is a must if we’re not to die out.

Which of course explains this movie, and things like the recent “women should marry young” article Amanda wrote about perfectly - it’s way easier to sell shit to kids. Grownups don’t get a toy in McDonald’s, do they.

That the manufactured orthodoxy of natural and blissful motherhood is then used to discriminate against the women who’ve fallen victim to it[2] is just the filthy fucked up catch-22 of misogyny, but I do see it as more of a happy accident (for capitalists who need to segment the workforce into more and less exploited categories in order to make unity and dialogue between workers harder, and weaken their collective bargaining power).

—-

[1] Note to SUV owners: it’s an example, OK? Let’s not rat-hole into a car argument thread. PLEASE.
[2] I know some women go into it with their eyes open and are genuinely happy to be mothers despite the hardships - but a lot of women have kids simply because that’s what you do. Sad but true.

The previews for this film make it look like simply a silly comedy. At least with “Twilight” there was an abstinence-fantasist book out there first, to warn people what it was.

I wouldn’t be so hasty about condemning The Baster.  I have not read Jeffrey Eugenides’ story, but I have read his two novels, and I cannot imagine that he wrote any such misogynist tripe as 17 Again or Knocked Up.  Of course, the movie could still be an abomination, even if the story isn’t.  Personally, I’m reserving judgment.  Eugenides may have found Jason Bateman’s character’s action as objectionable as you do.  BTW, if you haven’t read Eugenides’ Middlesex, by all means do.

“The Baster plot has spawned at least one made-for-TV movie and Criminal Intent (the first episode with Alicia Witt). Both times, it was pretty much portrayed as the creepy act it is, but the one based on the true story was worse IMO because the fetility doc was found out because his dadpaste wasn’t up to snuff and caused lazy eye syndrome in something like half the kids.”

It was an “X-Files” episode, too. People noticed when a series of babies were born with vestigial tales, which the creeper doctor apparently had the gene for.

RobW, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”‘s abortion subplot was actually better than that. She had had sex for the first time with the older guy and then got pregnant when she slept with Damone.