The Sniper's Tower
The “fertility film”: a conservative trend in Hollywood?
There was a moment in the tumultuous wake of Juno, Waitress, and Knocked Up when it looked like the abortion movie was going to become a genre. Fortunately, it seems that Hollywood’s interest in pregnancy has expanded, and we are now in the season of the “fertility film” (Baby Mama, Smart People, Then She Found Me). This is good news for the conservative movie-goer for whom the question “Should I carry my baby to term?” is far less interesting than “What happens to my world when I do?”
If conservatives are happy, there’s money to be won betting that someone at Mother Jones isn’t, and in this case it’s Alissa Quart, who wonders if such an unequivocally rosy view of motherhood is good for women:
. . . the truth is that these films are rather conservative at heart; their entanglements all end far more neatly than their real life counterparts. Teen Juno’s existence fractures into ironic shards with her surrogacy, true, but then Juno gives her infant to an elegant single mom for adoption and all is well. In her fertility film, Helen Hunt’s later life motherhood may have led to uncomfortable issues about biological kinship, but these disruptions are then corrected by motherhood. Same goes for Parker in hers, where her strange romance is relieved of its indie-film angst by the birth of twins. [...] All of these films end with a love object, a baby that is superior in the eyes of many women than a man would be. In these films, the baby represents eternity and the possibility of absolute devotion. It’s a relationship that, unlike romantic love or marriage, female viewers are thought to believe in without sarcasm.
I’m not sure why Quart is unhappy about the move towards seeing mother- and fatherhood as redemptive, given that it moves us away from trying to charge romantic relationships with the burden of making overgrown adolescents man up (which was always a bad bet on our part). Movies are full of men who start out juvenile, sullen, self-absorbed, or humorless, only to fall into relationships with women who offer a promise of salvation. I’m not sure why; confrontation with the responsibilities of fatherhood seems to have more raw valence than “love of a good woman.”
Take Smart People, one of Quart’s “fertility flicks”: when Dennis Quaid finally decides that he’s ready to grow up, he signals his maturity by asking Sarah Jessica Parker to take him back. In an uncharitable reading, he’s now saddled her with the responsibility of building a romantic relationship magical enough to save his soul. At best, she’s the merit badge he gets for his redemption.
This is why the rise of the “fertility flick” is a good thing. No matter how much of a long shot it was, getting the girl isn’t miraculous enough to redeem anyone. Is Hollywood beginning to recognize that participating in the creation of a new life might be?
The sad state of American feminism: a great Mother’s Day gift!
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in a tailspin; Phyllis Schlafly is getting an honorary degree from a prestigious university; even the painfully hip Juno has given the Left’s picture of abortion as “just a choice” a thumbs-down. Such hard times for feminism leave us with one question: who’s bringing the keg?
Perhaps it is uncharitable to dance on feminism’s grave today; I’m sure that some feminists are also mothers who would appreciate the chance to enjoy their special day in peace. However, while the saints who raised us are enjoying breakfast in bed, conservatives should take the holiday to consider how best to spend the political capital that the flailing feminist Left has handed us.
There’s no reason to turn back the clock completely. “Feminine,” like “humane” or “radical,” is an idea that’s in constant flux. Some of feminism’s advances are worth keeping, but only those advances that have contributed to the gradual and organic evolution of femininity, not to its radical transformation or destruction (which are the same thing).
However, as anti-feminist lines go, “If a woman wants to stay home with the kids, she shouldn’t be criticized for it” is too modest; it sidesteps the fundamental question of whether being a woman is more or less incidental than having blonde hair or not liking green beans, and instead makes a bee-line for freedom of unstigmatized choice—very liberal territory.
If we believe that conforming to femininity is every woman’s responsibility in the same way that conforming to manliness is every man’s, conservatives (especially conservative women) shouldn’t be shy about saying so. A lifelong adventure of discovering what femininity means is both more daring and more fulfilling than granting oneself (thoroughly illusory) freedom from one of humanity’s most important and universal traditions, just as ”it is not free love but the vow that is daring.” This shouldn’t be a hard idea to sell, given that lots of people from every point on the political spectrum have rejected both “feminism as the elimination of female and male as cultural categories” and ”feminism as arbitrary tribal loyalty.”
Maybe today is a good day to give feminists a hard time, if only to remind them that “motherhood” is a very different thing from “parenting,” and something altogether higher.
When conservatives impute relativism to their opponents, it is usually a straw man. An instance when this wasn’t the case: this past Saturday’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the State Department says the US is unlikely to sign—although Barack Obama has declared his support for it. One heading from the CRPD’s website is only nine words, but says it all: Disability Resides in the Society not in the Person. Under this heading is the bullet point “A child with an intellectual disability might have difficulties going to school due to the attitudes of teachers, school boards and possibly parents who are unable to adapt to students with different learning capacities.”
Unlike the twentieth century, when issues relevant to disability were scattered under broader topics like education, health care, and veterans affairs, the twenty-first century has seen the disabled population turn into a bona fide special interest and pose the Left and Right with the task of developing comprehensive positions on disability as such. This is a good development, and only partly because, if the UN is any indication, the Left is bound to handle the task poorly.
The UN’s endorsement of the “social construction” theory of disability might seem to flatter those with handicaps, but consider: in the ideal world that the CRPD is working towards, no handicapped person would ever be inconvenienced by his condition, employers would be perfectly indifferent to disability in their hiring practices, and public services would accommodate every special need. In short, their goal is to make disability essentially invisible. Anyone who holds this vision as his ideal either believes that the fragility of the human body is actually eradicable—in other words, that men are gods or will be soon—or believes that human fragility is so terrifying that we must make every conceivable effort to avoid confronting it.
Far better to say that disabled Americans should be able to hold jobs, attend schools, and take part in their religious and social communities, but that this is emphatically not the same as saying that their lives should resemble as nearly as possible the lives of the ”temporarily able-bodied.”
Conservatives have always held that, while death is terrible, avoidance of death can be carried to immoral and cowardly lengths (this New Atlantis article puts the point well). If the same kind of balance between acknowledgment of suffering and courage in the face of it can be struck in our attitude towards disability, conservatism could pick up ground on the issue of bioethics and set the terms for a political conversation that is only just beginning. It would be a shame if this were the only headline to include the words ‘McCain’ and ‘disability’ this election cycle.
The rush to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of 1968 (good round-ups here and here) indicates the strange reverence modern Leftists feel for that halcyon year when men were men and boys were violent Marxist radicals. As unsettling as it is to imagine that there are people who think The Dreamers looks like a fun way to spend a summer, this swell of nostalgia only underlines why even the Left should try to undo the legacy of ‘68.
While it’s true that the SDS-Yippie-Weather Underground axis in America accomplished few of their concrete goals — the French, at least, did get Henri Langlois hired back — there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a purely rhetorical revolution except, possibly, that young conservatives are usually bad at it. (From Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right: “...twenty-two YAF members occupied the headquarters of the Resistance, an antiwar group in Boston. Inside, eight members of the Resistance ‘reacted violently to the liberation. One member called the Black Panthers...constantly harassed the press...[and] in a final rage, stomped on the California grapes brought by the YAF as a snack.’” Ouch.) The real problem with a rosy collective memory of ‘68 is its effect on America’s understanding of “the youth” and their role in politics.
Thinking of the twenty-something demographic as a perpetual political vanguard is dangerous, and not just because it puts our future in the hands of the least wise and most radical. It frames cultural history as a sequence of battles between two sides: one bright, idealistic, and free-thinking, the other fearful, reactionary, and destined to lose. In this picture of history, it is understandable that older generations should resist cultural changes because, as remnants of an passing era, they could not be expected to understand the youth agenda. Because their resistance is based on prejudice, they cannot be persuaded to see the merits of something like second-wave feminism or Mad Pride. This fatalism saves the youth the trouble of explaining themselves—they have only to assert their youth to be placed on the right side of history.
Thinking of history as one long march of progress is bad enough, but thinking of this progress as the gradual elimination of all constraints, stigmas, constructs and prejudices by each new and boldly open-minded generation is worse. Whether young people are always more liberal than their elders or not, it is still dangerous to imagine that the next generation of liberals — or conservatives, for that matter — should be defined by the ideas they had when they were in their twenties, uncorrected by the resistance of their elders.
William Deresiewicz has called literary criticism “a profession that is losing its will to live.” Faculties are shrinking, professors are warning students away from graduate school, and the twenty-first century has yet to produce a public intellectual of Harold Bloom or George Steiner’s stature. In short, university English departments are in crisis. It must be Tuesday.
Whether English departments are teaching the right books is, as always, up for debate, but the fact that they are emptying is not. Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life, has seconded Deresiewicz’s observation that universities are teaching undergraduates with more of an eye to future employability than to the meaning of life, a set of priorities that has been unkind to humanities departments. The canon wars have cooled down, but the question is not “Who won?” but “Who cares?”
The Blame Relativism First choir has good instincts—political correctness is destructive, novelty is an idle pursuit—but setting conservatism’s rhetorical sights on moral and cultural relativism only returns attention to a topic with which liberals in academia are, for the most part, bored. The battles of Closing of the American Mind have faded and new ones arisen, and in this round of the fight apologists like Kronman pose a greater danger to their side than overzealous multiculturalists. To spend so much energy explaining why literature and philosophy are worth four years’ study indicates some anxiety about the answer. After all, business and engineering professors rarely take the time to justify their departments; they assume their students understand that a high salary is directly correlated with ability to purchase goods and services. The benefits of literature and philosophy are less material, but men no more need to be convinced that wisdom is desirable than that love is, or power, or happiness. To presume that students need to be talked into believing literature matters supposes that this is an open question, when really neither side of the canon wars ever doubted that literature was important enough to be worth the fight.
If the problem with literature and philosophy departments is that they no longer occupy themselves with big questions, better that Deresiewicz and Kronman should use their expertise in the humanities to offer new and compelling answers than that they should reinforce their profession’s crisis of confidence by addressing their arguments to a small, skeptical minority. As any writing seminar will teach you, “Show, don’t tell.”
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