Even though no one can get the terminology correct, journalists love writing about infertility. And now, the article du jour has become critiquing fertility storylines in the cinema. After all, if you're going to stretch the arm wide, you can draw in films as diverse as Juno, Baby Mama, and Then She Found Me.

If there is one thing I wish I had the power to do, it is the ability to force people to live by their stated convictions. I think that this actually cuts across the entire length of the political spectrum, as there are many people who claim to be liberal or feminists who undermine equality and fairness, but of course, my interest in this is most piqued by conservative women. If all individuals actually had to practice what they preach, I am curious how quickly their messages would change. On Sunday, I read a fascinating column in the New York Times by one of my favorite hypocrites, Caitlin Flanagan (she of the “all women should quit their jobs and be stay-at-home moms just like me except that I have a job as a writer and a full-time child care provider who cleans up after my vomiting child while I stand in the doorway giving encouragement” claim to fame), about teen pregnancy. Bracing myself, I began reading ”Sex and the Teenage Girl”, and was surprised to find myself nodding to Flangan’s assertion that in the movie Juno (which I loved): …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.

The last movie I saw in 2007 was Juno, a heart-warming comedy about a quirky teenage girl who winds up pregnant after having sex with her geeky best friend/true love. (OK, technically, Juno was the second to last movie I saw in 2007, as I caught Invincible - the true story of a down-on-his-luck Philly bartender who winds up playing for the Philadelphia Eagles after an open try out – which I also enjoyed, but that’s not the point.) Juno stars Ellen Page as Juno and Micheal Cera as the geek, a role he also played in the summer hit comedy,Superbad, which followed on the heels of Knocked Up, another movie about hooking up with geeks. I adored Juno (it’s one of the most humane movies I’ve seen in ages), and while I suspect I’d find Knocked Up and Superbad as uproariously funny as everyone else seemed to, I never made it to either of those films. Geeky guy hooks up or tries to hook up with hot chicks? Yeah, I’ve seen that movie about a zillion times before. I’ll catch the yucks on pay-per-view at some point.