Blue blind spots

Non-evangelical Americans were puzzled as to why Bristol Palin’s pregnancy caused so little distress among evangelicals, so it was only a matter of time until someone in the chattering classes tried to explain the matter. Margaret Talbot’s article on the subject in the New Yorker, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” is an intriguing stab in the direction of an answer, but its brief, shallow treatment of the question left me dissatisfied.

It’s always seemed to me that right-wing-appeasing liberals of the Hilary Clinton ilk, who think they can find common ground with anti-abortionists in the goal of reducing teen pregnancy, were not only wrong to concede that abortion is a “tragedy,” but also wrong in the assumption of common ground on teen pregnancy. (This showed, I think, the same tin ear for both effective politics and integrity that Hilary exhibited in thinking she could get universal healthcare if she just made enough compromises with the insurance industry, and that Bill showed in just about every issue he ever addressed.)

Here’s what I’ve always suspected: Reducing teen pregnancy isn’t a goal of the religious right. Their reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy suggests I’m right. Religious conservatives aren’t horrified by sex before marriage or sex by teens (in fact, your mainstream liberals may be more uncomfortable with teenage sex). In fact, teen pregnancy is actually more good than bad, in the religious right worldview. More (white) babies is good, but, more important, girls having babies young, as long as they get married—and within a conservative social framework pregnancy can push women into marriage--helps keep women disempowered and under the control of men. The bedrock of religious right ideology is gender hierarchy. Sex, even teen sex, isn’t bad, as long as it’s controlled by men (or boys) and women pay the price for it. (For more evidence that this is so, check out The Girls Who Went Away and my review of it.)

All this makes sense of the various phenomena Talbot describes. Liberals may be as much—or even more—uncomfortable with teen sex as religious conservatives, but liberal culture has absorbed the assumption that women deserve independent lives and careers. Having babies young, in this you’re-on-your-ownership society that lacks either strong government supports for mothers or strong extended family supports, is an economic and personal disaster. These are such fundamental assumptions of liberal culture as to be invisible to most liberals and centrists, which is why they assume without evidence that the religious right must share their goal of reducing teen pregnancy. The liberal worldview on these matters is a muddle—motivated half by a moral impulse, namely feminism's call for the equality of half the world, which it can’t quite yet really own, and half by economic rationality. Whereas the conservative worldview is pure, principled, and coherent (though of course it runs counter both to economic reality in the 21st century and to the great arc of history in favor of the principle of equality).

Pregnancy and punishment

In a taste of things to come in the general election, the right-wing has pounced on remarks Barack Obama made about teen pregnancy. Here’s what Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Pennsylvania last weekend:

"I’ve got two daughters; 9 years old and 6 years old,” Obama said. “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.

According to the Carpetbagger Report, Sean Hannity, a correspondent for Pat Robertson’s TV show, Hugh Hewitt, and some right-wing blogs are attacking Obama for suggesting that having a baby is “punishment.”

As a pregnant woman (now for the second time), let me school Hannity and Co.: Pregnancy is seriously intense, a takeover of one’s body by an alien being. If you want to be pregnant, it’s a miracle. If you don’t, it’s akin to a nine-month-long rape. And then there’s the child at the end of it. Absolutely, being forced to bear a child unwillingly is a punishment, indeed a life sentence.

Here’s to Obama for seeing this truth and speaking about it. Still, I don’t care for his assumption that getting pregnant as a teenager must be the result of a “mistake.” If he means it would have to result from some error in using birth control, he’s just wrong on the facts. No method of birth control is fail-safe. If he means the mistake was having sex—and given his use of code words about teaching “values and morals” I have to assume that’s what he did mean—I think he’s wrong too, in a deeper way. I don’t see sex as immoral. I see the hatred of the body, and of bodily pleasure, especially of the female body and female pleasure, that underlies most preaching of chastity as a far bigger moral failing than exploring bodily pleasure, even as a teenager. Sure, there are lots of pitfalls to teen sex, high on the list being the risks it poses to girls from misogynist boys, a misogynist culture, and, oh yeah, the difficulty of obtaining birth control and abortion thanks to right-wingers like Hannity and Co.

Fairness to Obama requires noting that he wasn't primarily talking about abortion. He was responding to a question about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.

Sluts talk back

Priceless: The Colorado state rep who called teenage mothers “sluts” and urged that they be shamed and sent away was forced to eat crow at a school for teen mothers (thanks to Feministing for flagging it). When he visited the Florence Crittenton School, Larry Liston actually apologized to the students, saying, “I uttered a word which I regret and I apologized for. It's a word I don't use. Scout's honor. I never use it"—uh, yeah, except for that very public time he did use it.

Not sure if this means he’ll change any of his policy positions, but still.

Ironically, the Florence Crittenton Association originally provided homes for “fallen” and “wayward” women—i.e. unwed and pregnant—and, especially during the ‘40s through the ‘60’s these homes were among the places where “girls who went away” were sent to hide their shame (and their families’) and then give up their babies for adoption (exactly what Liston seemed to be advocating in his original speech). By the early ‘70s, thanks to the women’s movement, Roe, and the rising acceptance of unwed motherhood, the demand for these homes had largely evaporated, and they began closing or being transformed into schools like the one Liston visited. I love it that girls at a Crittenton school faced Liston down—poetic justice. Some things really do progress.

(Although about some things we still have trouble being honest: If you google Florence Crittenton, you’ll find plenty of info on the history of their homes, but nothing noting that girls there were pushed to give up their babies in circumstances when they had little opportunity to refuse. I know this only because of reading “The Girls Who Went Away.”)

I Heart Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt has come through for me again: Just when I’m feeling utterly alone in my convictions, she says just what I’d been feeling in funny, clear-headed terms. Thank you, Katha, for pouring cold water on the Juno love fest.

I’ve now seen the movie, and I can say it’s beautifully made, with, as everyone has been saying, terrific acting, especially by its star. But I came home from watching it queasy and distraught. The movie’s a morass of bad faith. It’s so well done that it anticipates and deflects every criticism. Find its creaking stereotypes of adoptive parents as rich, uptight yuppies, or of high-achieving women as rigid, anal-retentive icebergs, offensive? Sensitive acting by Jennifer Garner as the adoptive mother so humanizes her one-dimensional character that your criticism seems pedantic. Think there’s a certain sexism in that one-dimensionality? Turn the charming adoptive dad into a juvenile creep by the end, the adoptive mother and Juno into allies, and the adoptive mother finally into a single mom. (Sorry if I just gave too much away.) Think Juno’s parents shouldn’t be cooperating in the idea that their daughter is unworthy of her baby? Give the stepmother a funny, heroic scene in which she dresses down the ultrasound tech for sneering at her daughter. Think the central premise that a person can give up her baby and live happily ever after is a lie? The movie gives us one scene in which Juno cries wordlessly after giving birth. So, see, the movie gets it.

It was a weird sensation watching this movie while seven months pregnant, feeling my baby twitch in my belly through scenes in which characters touch Juno’s belly and feel her baby’s kicks. I watched this slight girl go through the arduous and transformative experience of birth just as I had for the first time not so long ago and will again in a few months. I know absolutely, in my belly, if I know anything at all, that no one could go through such an experience, give up her baby, and come away unscarred, perhaps fatally.

Precisely because I’m so near her in experience, I found Juno inscrutable. Why she did such a thing is a question the movie doesn’t answer (although I found the information given at the very beginning of the movie that her own mother had abandoned her plausible and important). It was not so much with her, as a fellow pregnant woman, but with her parents, as a fellow parent, that I identified. I felt enraged by them (yes, I know this is fiction). What kind of people allow their grandchild to be given away? What kind of people collaborate in letting their daughter suffer the loss of a child? The cycle begun with the mother who abandoned Juno continues through the generations.

In a letter to the Nation responding to Pollitt’s column on Juno, a reader who works in inner-city schools defended adoption as “a viable alternative to teen motherhood,” and bemoaned the tendency of the community not to agree. “When I suggested adoption to a guidance counselor, she replied, “We don’t do this in our community.” Good for them. That is, if as I presume, what she meant is that instead family and community step in to help parent teens’ babies, as is a common pattern in the African-American community and indeed around the world. America would do well to look to these communities for an adoption model that does not involve sundering family bonds or erasing birth mothers.

Juno’s ending implies that Juno and her boyfriend will live happily in love ever after. But here’s the true story as I imagine it unfolding: Someday the boy will say or suggest that Juno abandoned their baby and Juno will think the same of herself, and how can a love survive that?

At its heart, this movie, despite its strong, idiosyncratic female lead, all its nuanced acting, and its ostensible focus on teen pregnancy, is a conventional love story. The boy is what matters, not the baby. How Juno feels about the boy, not how she feels about herself, her parents, or her baby, is the only important thing. And that is the ultimate destructive lie at the heart of this film. It is the basic lie of sexism.

Send the sluts away

The more things change…this comes my way (thanks, Feministing) from the enlightened state of Colorado:

A state lawmaker used a derogatory term Wednesday to describe unmarried teen parents as sexually promiscuous and complained that society condones premarital sex.
"In my parents' day and age, (unmarried teen parents) were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are," Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. "There was at least a sense of shame."
Liston continued: "There's no sense of shame today. Society condones it ... I think it's wrong. They're sluts…"

I think of all the girls who were indeed sent away a generation ago, shunned and disappeared, and I shiver at how easily those days could be repeated. It makes me want to grab hold of my daughter and tell her I’ll never send her away and that I’ll keep bad men like Liston far away from her.

Liston did follow “they’re sluts” by saying “And I don't mean just the women. I mean the men, too." Like that shows he’s not a misogynist. Hah—the boys were never sent away. Although come to think of that crazy fundamentalist Mormon group that still practices polygamy and whose practice of ousting many of its young men was covered in the New York Times, if you take misogyny far enough you start having to treat not only your girls as disposable but your boys too.

I think we all owe Liston a thank you. I do appreciate it when misogynist right-wingers show their fangs and clue us in to what's really at stake.

Lest readers from Colorado feel smeared, I will confess that a state legislator from my state once spoke in favor of a bill to make English the official state language by saying, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us.” Right-o. Learn Aramaic, buddy, if you're going to live in this state.