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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.
Ah, so Flanagan isn’t completely clueless, I thought to myself before reading the next sentence and the rest of the absurd column, which goes on to note that Juno was pregnant and shamed because she had “a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy.” Well, that's half true. The real problem with this “single sexual experience” is that it seems to have been a completely unprotected “single sexual experience.” When watching the movie, we see Juno drop her undies on the floor and approach the “sweet, well-intentioned” naked boy sitting on an armchair. We see no discarded condom wrapper, hear no discussion of whether or not they are using protection, or are given any indication that birth control is used.
The obvious solution to prevent teen girls from becoming pregnant, then, is that we need more honest discussions about teen sexuality and safe sex. Common sense. Instead, Flanagan claims that the best way to prevent teen girls from becoming pregnant is that we should travel back in time and adopt more repressive standards for our own good:
... girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected — in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
See, if Caitlin Flanagan had to live in Victorian times, I suspect she would be less enamored of the “protection” they offered girls. She might find that repression, fear, and ignorance prevented some teen pregnancy in middle-class, white girls, but that the system failed enormous numbers of poor women. She also might discover that it led to crazed fear of all sexuality, contributed to the very double standards of sex that she claims to dislike, and was overall incredibly dangerous and counterproductive.
The truth is that if we really want to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, both of which increased in the US last year for the first time in nearly a decade, we need comprehensive sex education, not Victorian era “protection.” Even if teens do not chose to become sexually active, it is a fact that most people will have sex at some point in their lives. Comprehensive sex education prepares girls – and boys – to make healthy and safe choices that will protect them for years. (With comprehensive sex ed, we can also reduce the need for abortions – something Flanagan dramatized as causing “grown women” to weep “bitterly after abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were.” Just a friendly reminder that Victorian pablum doesn’t magically prevent grown women from unwanted pregnancies, either.)
What others are blogging about “Sex and the Teenage Girl:”
- Feminism Stabs Itself in the Back by Kim Zigfield at Publius
