How To Prevent Abortions: Stop Pretending Teenagers Don't Have Sex

Yesterday I was part of a Constitution Day celebration at the University of Connecticut - Storrs, in which three of us from the academic, activist and policy world were asked to focus on the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment ninety years ago. In one way or another, we all took the opportunity to connect women's votes to a discussion of what it means for women to be full citizens, with equal rights to men across lines of class, race and region. One of the speakers, a founder of Shoreline Women's Liberation, made the argument that debates over hot button social issues like abortion have become so polarized that, as feminists, we are left with few options about how to resolve them through rational debate. Inevitably, then, they become the stuff of power politics and embed themselves as wedge issues, allowing legislatures in places where conservatives dominate -- Oklahoma, for example -- to pass laws which effectively make women into second-class citizens by taking control of their bodies.

What this activist suggested was that we feminists must begin to reform political discourse by acknowledging other people's moral and ethical concerns as legitimate even if we disagree profoundly with the factual basis of those concerns or the policy measures that our opponents advocate. I would agree with this. Increasingly, feminists are tacitly acknowledging that abortion is an ethical offense to some people when they argue for increased access to pregnancy prevention as an alternative to abortion. This also dovetails with safer sex agendas originally promoted by GLBTQ activists that are increasingly mainstream and also controversial: the distribution of condoms in public schools, the broader availability of birth control, and instruction on how to use these technologies to control reproduction.

What can hamper the prevention of pregnancy through education, of course, is the belief of many social conservatives that parents should be -- and can be -- in complete control of their children's bodies, and that the public interest is co-terminus with the desire of parents to keep their children ignorant of the facts of human sexuality if they so choose. In recent history, this has led to sex education programs that do not educate the young about sex. Abstinence-only programs (begun in the Reagan years, and supported by the Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations) not only emphasize, but are exclusively limited to, instruction about why the young must avoid sex (or at least intercourse) until they are married and in a position to raise children. A study of 2,800 teenage girls recently released by the Centers for Disease Control reveals that, although 97% reported having had sex education in school, only 2/3 had been instructed in how to prevent pregnancy with birth control. As one summary of the CDC report notes, "Lessons about saying no and STDs were more common than instruction on how to use a condom or other birth control....Overall, about two-thirds of teens got birth control instruction by the end of high school — about 62 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls." By the end of high school is, of course, about six years too late: according to the nonprofit Connect With Kids, by the ninth grade 34% of kids have already had intercourse. And if you are loving those numbers, try these: according to Science Daily, "by age 12, 12 percent of students had already engaged in vaginal sex, 7.9 percent in oral sex, 6.5 percent in anal sex and 4 percent in all three types of intercourse."

So here's what I am offering as a compromise position. I won't give up the right to a safe abortion. However, I will honor and respect the belief that "life" begins at conception (even though I don't accept it) if my opposite number honors my belief that sex education ought to tell the full truth about sex and reproductive choice, making those choices real through the availability of birth control and insisting that both boys and girls are equally responsible for safer sex practices and the prevention of unwanted pregnancies. In this vein, another panelist on my Constitution Day panel noted that all innovations in birth control, except for condom use and the Big Snip, can only be implemented by women. Decades after the sexual revolution, large numbers of adults continue to assume that girls are responsible for "it," not boys. Think about it: when you imagine your average heterosexual teen couple on the brink of doing the nasty do you imagine: a) her saying no; b) him saying no; c) a chorus of two saying no; d) a group of teens of any gender talking about how much happier and better their lives are without sexual activity?

The logic of abstinence education is, of course, that keeping teens ignorant of sex makes them safer (interestingly, some of the same people would argue that teaching teens how to use and care for guns makes guns safer, a position with which I would agree.) In culture wars logic all sex, whether hetero- or homosex, is "an infectious idea," as one scholar has put it. If you talk to the young about sex it will make them sexual, a patently absurd proposition if I have ever heard one, but a popular one in certain circles all the same. One of the scariest things I ever heard about teen sex was in a student paper in which I asked students to interview someone else about their experience in sex education. A gay man from Oklahoma City interviewed his best friend from high school, a woman who told him she was "still a virgin" and so was her boyfriend. Both were committed Christians, who wanted to remain "pure" until their wedding night. How did this work in practice? As the interview continued, it turned out that they had been having unprotected anal sex for three years, which she found painful and scary, but a good strategy to help them both wait for marriage.

Now you might argue from this example that the problem with abstinence education is that it doesn't go far enough: "Say no to that -- and that -- and that. And, oh yes, there is that." Perhaps that is so, but I doubt it: teenagers are remarkably creative in finding ways to do what they want without formally breaking the rules; hiding it when they do break the rules; and elaborating justifications for doing things you forgot to make a rule about.

And just in case you think telling students something causes them to learn it, ask any college teacher how many times they have announced their regular office hours, how many places they have written them down, and how many students -- every week -- come up after class and say "When can I come see you?"

One Of The Down Sides To The New Media

Is receiving messages from pimps. For example, I just received the following message on Skype:

European and American women are too arrogant for you? Are you looking for a sweet lady that will be caring and understanding? Then you came to the right place- here you can find a Russian lady that will love you with all her heart. Can't find a queen to rule your heart? How about beautiful Russian ladies that have royal blood and royal look? Here you can find hundreds of portfolios of these fine women of any age for every taste. Please excuse us if you are not interested.

I am not interested, it's true, but should I excuse you if I find this message a violation of my privacy? Then there are the people who claim to be following me on Twitter, a great many of whom also turn out to be sex professionals. Those of you who are my Facebook friends may recall that this is not the only kind of advertising that repels me, but there is a theme: any ad that assumes something about my body I find offensive. This is a fairly large category, I'm afraid: ads that assume I am wrinkled, fat, not fat but morbidly concerned about my weight anyway, have yellow teeth are all boundary-crossing from my point of view. On Facebook, you can remove your gender entirely, which I have done: the IQ of the ads goes way up. I am now invited to participate in political campaigns, participate in intellectual events and buy books.

Shows you what Facebook thinks of women, no?

Yahoo mail, on the other hand, gives me only two choices: male and female. So I switched to male. Sidebar ads where stomach fat pulsated in and out were suddenly replaced by muscle building products that will kill me, financial instruments that will bankrupt me and concerns about my -- errr, male member (which I do not have, so these ads are of considerably less concern than the ones that suggest conventional forms of female body anxiety.)

But the messages from sex professionals bother me, I would have to say, because it seems like a remarkably impersonal marketing format for that particular product. In addition, solicitations like the one above play to the crassest forms of sexism, articulating non-American women as more "naturally gendered" -- pliable, obedient, and not "ruined" by feminism. While I don't think regulation of speech is the answer, I wish these services would allow each user, and each advertiser, to register. Thus one could choose to be contacted, or not, by sex professionals, as one could in any other media.

Readers?

On Behalf Of All Wimmin: An Open Letter To Steve Jobs About The iPad

Dear Steve Jobs,

For months I have been looking forward to the release of Apple's new tablet computer, as I look forward to every new product released by your company. I have put off buying a Kindle, even though all of my friends have them; or even speaking to my sister about her beloved Sony Reader, for fear that I will become so envious that I will have to go into therapy about why she gets everything nice even though she is the youngest. So imagine my dismay when I heard that you were naming this new product the iPad.

Now, this ill-chosen, sexist name did not immediately make me think of a menstrual pad, but since other women have begun to make this obvious connection between a personal computer and a personal hygiene device, I have not been able to get over how crushed and mortified I am. I don't know if you have ever tried to write something on a menstrual pad, but believe me, it is not easy: the pen sticks constantly, little bits of fluff stick to the point, and there is really no room for more than a paragraph anyway. And because I loathe my body completely, well, anything that makes me think of vaginas or menstruation disturbs the creative process. I can't even imagine taking the iPad into a faculty or department meeting. There I would be, trying to work on curriculum or responding to the latest dictat about the budget, and thinking vagina, vagina, vagina. How can I work in an environment where I am being sexually harassed by my own computer?

What is worse is that I have now begun to imagine all your products, formerly beautiful to me, as the gross, sexualized items you have secretly intended them to be all along. It's so upsetting I can't tell you.

For example, there is the iPod, which makes me think of seed pods, which makes me think of testicles. Ee-yew.

Or the iBook, which makes me think of the Book, which makes me think of Leviticus, which inevitably leads to thoughts of bestiality. Double ee-yew!

You see the problem, I am sure. As a committed and long term feminist, I have learned many things about the condition of women from the kinds of critique that are being aimed at this new product of yours: I have learned about patriarchy, the ownership of my own body, and the work that gender does to distribute power in society. This latest insight -- that a personal computer could fix in my mind, indelibly, visions of menstrual pads and vaginal walls at their most unattractive has been more distressing than I can say. On the other hand, hearing from my sisters everywhere on this matter has also been a critical step in what it might mean to move to the next level of consciousness as a feminist. I intend to spend the rest of the day writing manufacturers of bed pads, pads of paper, paddles, paddleboards, paddle wheels, padlocks and pad thai noodles, demanding that they immediately remove their products from the market and rename them, or face a feminist boycott of unprecedented proportions.

Sure, I have other things to do. But feminism is a commitment that goes beyond the self to our responsibility for a collective sisterhood. Since the battles for equal pay and women's right to the integrity of her own body are already won it is time to address the oppressive patriarchal impulse behind the naming of consumer items that is holding women back and shaming them in the workplace.

Thank you for your attention,

The Tenured Radical

Towards A Theory Of Scandal; Or, How To Become Client 9

On The Good Wife, actress Julianna Margulies
assumes an iconic stance as Alicia Florrick.

Laura Kipnis, How to Become A Scandal:  Adventures in Bad Behavior. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. 208 pp. Bibliography, no index. Illustrations.

Client 9:  The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Alex Gibney: 2010).  Now in general release, and available on some cable systems.

One of our favorite shows chez Radical is The Good Wife (Tuesday nights at 10 EST on your local CBS affiliate or online.) I have always liked Julianna Margulies:  I liked her last series, Canterbury's Law, which got canceled after six episodes in 2008 because of the writer's strike.  She appears to have emerged from that complex show having found her niche as a TV attorney. Margulies' fundamental interiority as an actress is a perfect comment on some of the dilemmas of modern heterosexuality, marriage and parenting for professional women.  By this I mean that every move she makes on The Good Wife is a negotiation between Alicia Florrick the person, Alicia Florrick the mother, and Alicia Florrick, the "good wife" who needs to remain married to her ruthless, sexy pol of a husband until and unless she decides to leave him on her own terms.  Reflecting a theme of contemporary political culture, the husband is disgraced Illinois State's Attorney Peter Florrick, who has been derailed and jailed in a corruption scandal (perhaps a frame-up) that came to light because he had taken to visiting prostitutes.   Debuting on September 22, 2009, The Good Wife followed as closely as was humanly possible on the March 2008 resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose arrangements with the ladies managed by the Emperor's Club VIP, a high-end call service, had also been uncovered as part of a routine federal investigation of money transfers.

Whoa. "Routine?"  If you believe that, implies Alex Gibney, producer of Client 9, a documentary about the Spitzer case, there is a bridge in Brooklyn waiting under your Christmas tree.  Gibney's side of the story is that it was Wall Street that went after Eliot Spitzer.  Powerful financial interests wanted revenge for prior investigations that had uncovered the tip of the iceberg of what we now know was a plan to drain as much money out of the economy and into their own pockets that they could.  The prostitutes are a detail.

"Routine?"  The prostitutes a mere detail? Please. Can you hear Laura Kipnis, the media scholar and author of How To Become A Scandal, laughing?  It's sex scandals that are routine, and politics are the detail.  Strangely, in her newest book, Kipnis features a picture of Spitzer and his wife Silda Wall Spitzer (striking the Margulies pose) in the introduction, refers to him, but never names him, as if it isn't even necessary to do so.  Politicians who scandalize us are routine because we are them, and they are us:  what fills in the space between us is that we all know that the only difference between us and them is that "we" haven't been uncovered yet.

Well, some of we, anyway.  I've been a scandal at least twice, and the only reason more of you don't know about these colorful episodes is that I occupy quite a small stage in the theater of the world.  But that is Kipnis's point:  we are all a scandal waiting to happen.  There's no difference between the ordinary, run of the mill folk who are out there pointing and judging and the ones who are up at the podium with cameras flashing in their puffed, weepy faces (Spitzer's "good wife" didn't weep but looked like she had literally vacated her body some hours prior to the press conference.)  Such unexpected events as the uptight Eliot, a close political ally for a variety of feminist groups dedicated to ending commercial sex, turning out to be an afficianado of pay to play occur in a changed cultural atmosphere in which  "our internal cringe meters... shrill more and more frequently these days, given people’s predilection for confessing their grubby secrets to passing strangers or even complete strangers….it’s like a national compulsion.” Ordinary as it is, watching Spitzer’s press conference was “like watching someone swallow a hand grenade in real time, which obviously didn’t impede anyone’s enjoyment of the event,” Kipnis writes. (3-5) 

Yes.  But that same well-crafted phrase --"swallowing a hand grenade in real time" -- might have also accurately described my experience as a child watching Edward Kennedy's post-Chappaquiddick press conference in July 1969. Two critical differences in these scandals stand out.  In the Spitzer case, although he had broken the law by paying for sex and violating the Mann Act, no one died; and in the Kennedy case, no one resigned from office -- even though somebody died, and died a pretty gruesome death. So what was the big deal about Spitzer? Client 9 answers this question by arguing that exposing Spitzer could only have been the handiwork of powerful capitalists Ken Langone, the Director of the New York Stock Exchange, and Hank Greenberg, president of the insurance giant AIG. Both of these men had been in prolonged litigation with New York State over how they did business while Spitzer was Attorney General and had sworn revenge.

Worse than the investigations was Spitzer's refusal to kowtow to the financial industry, and its vision of what the economic rules should be.  According interviews with Langone and Greenberg, had Spitzer not interfered, the great economic crash would never have happened.  According to Spitzer, who was also interviewed for the film, and others who worked for him, these men selfishly destroyed the world of finance for their personal gain and went after Spitzer for trying to stop them.  The addition of Joe Bruno, the powerful Republican State Assembly leader, adds an important emphasis to this:  in addition to being Dudley Doright, Spitzer was aggressive, nasty, uncompromising, rude and completely undeferential to men who were accustomed to receiving deference at all times.

Both Client 9 and How To Become A Scandal argue that there is something far more important going on here than the public's response to people who shtup out of schul, or any one politician getting caught in an illegal sex act.  As Kipnis notes, scandals represent a form of knowledge production that has been surprisingly resistant to complex analysis:  although watching the humiliation of others “may be our national spectator sport…we lack any real theory of scandal.” (7)   She doesn't exactly give us a theory in the end:  instead, we get a series of delightful stories about ordinary people who become celebrities (and vice-versa) as they enter their names into the Book of Humiliation.  In “The Lovelorn Astronaut,” we are reminded of the NASA love triangle in which an accomplished female officer drove over 900 miles in a diaper to kidnap, and perhaps kill, another astronaut's new squeeze.  Here we see Kipnis at her finest, asking the questions you wish you had thought of and published:  "what’s an adult in diapers but someone whose self-management skills have critically failed?” and "how can you possibly know in advance what lengths you are capable of, in extremis or otherwise?”  Here, we get close to what a theory of scandal might look like:  “In short," she argues, "simply having a body is the first step on the road to being a scandal.” (35-41)

The other essays, the last of which is on the uncanny resemblance between Oprah Winfrey and fake-o memoirist James Frey (unnecessarily underlined when Kipnis points out that the last syllable of Oprah's last name in "-frey") are less well focused, demonstrating not that Kipnis herself is failing, but simply that some scandals are more fun than others.  No one, in the other essays, offers the opportunities for analyzing the centrality of pee and poo to national culture that the great little detail of the astronaut's soiled diapers permits.  The Linda Tripp essay is a slightly expanded version of an earlier piece that appeared in Lisa Duggan and Lauren Berlant's 2001 collection on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal:  if you haven't read it, it's worth a look.  Perhaps the best part about these essays is that they continue a series of themes originally explored in her masterpiece (in my view) Against Love:  A Polemic  (2003), where Kipnis argues that love -- or the illusion of love -- ultimately degrades and humiliates all of us and, through its single-minded obsessions, produces a crazy, alternate reality that catches up with all of its victims someday.

Photo Cred

Client 9 is not about love at all -- it is about hate, money, and fucking.  It is about being good and being stupid. It is about how two understandable human impulses came together in one (not as) powerful (as he needed to be) man:  the desire to do good and the desire to get down and dirty with women he didn't know who had very large racks.  What the movie doesn't tell you is that really, both impulses were the same. Eliot Spitzer had a deep need to act out his persona as a Big Swinging Dick, both in public and in private.  Both led to his downfall.

This causes me to wonder whether we don't need two theories of scandal:  one that is expressly political and feminist (in which the wife the politician needs to challenge him intellectually is not the "wife" that offers parallel opportunities for dominance in the sack); and one that is still feminist, but  for ordinary folks like the rest of us.  This latter theory might call on the political, but not rely on the political arena for its significance.  This would point us to one explanation of why we don't see political women confessing to various private misdeeds while a sedated hubby watches from stage left; and how it is that so many non-celebrities are so confused about what they have done when their secret betrayals become public entertainment.  Kipnis provides a promising theory for the political -- that scandal "is a way of organizing the collectivity's hatred"(195) -- but for the latter she leaves only a set of impressions that we are left to organize on our own.

In turn, Client 9 runs the conspiracy theory in a way that left me impatient about the amount of evidence left on the table that doesn't get any analysis.  My favorite quote of the film is a giggly woman who served jail time for running and profiting from the Emperor's Club VIP:  "When you are sending a girl for $30,000 overnight, it doesn't feel like prostitution!" she burbles, putting visual scare quotes around the final word.  No, I guess it doesn't: just like securitizing bad mortgages didn't feel like theft! These portions of the film made me want much more from it:  since what Emperor's Club was doing was, in fact, prostitution, I'm curious as to what activity it did feel like to the people who were involved with it.

Similarly, Spitzer, who was interviewed for the documentary, is open and lively when talking about his Wall Street investigations; he becomes shut down and wooden when we get to the sex scandal.  Why does Spitzer think he risked everything in an obsession for expensive prostitutes?  Why does he think he did not know he was risking everything?  The Luv Guv has little to say about this except that he was bad, it was wrong, he deserved what he got (I sense a really nasty couples' therapist lurking in the background.)  This makes the business of high-end prostitution a tantalizing theme from another angle. It provides a tangible link between Spitzer and Wall Street (several procurers who are interviewed for the film claim that it was the vast amount of money in the go-go bull market that made their own businesses possible) and reveals Spitzer as the same, in at least one respect, as the financiers he despises.  One even imagines Spitzer's and Greenberg's wicks dipping in the same well.  It could have happened!

Me, I'm turning to The Good Wife for theory.  Sometimes I think that only fiction allows us to imagine what happens after the scandal to the people who didn't do anything but have to live with it anyway:  to the wife who stays, to the children who have to live the story that their parents and the political handlers have written for them, and to everyone who picks up the pieces.  Kipnis and Gibney aren't really interested in this, and who can blame them?  But if there is a theory of scandal, it includes the bit players as well as the stars.

This Is My Weapon, This Is My Gun: A Gay Primer For Worried Straights In The Military

"Simply because you're near me, I'm in the mood for love!" Credit.

This is my rifle, this is my gun;
One is for fighting, one is for fun.
-- The Rifleman's Creed, 1941

Want to know whether repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is good policy?  Why listen to the generals or the Secretary of Defense?  Go ask an expert -- an 18 year-old boy in South Carolina.

In today's Grey Lady, James Dao goes to Jacksonville, South Carolina to do just that.  Although a few young soldiers offered indifferent or positive responses to the question, "Would you want to share a foxhole with one?" (another version of, "Would you want your daughter to marry one?") others are worried.  Among the memorable quotes are:

From an 18 year-old soldier who says he is socially comfortable with gays: “They won’t hold up well in combat."

From a 22 year-old soldier who has served a tour in Afghanistan: "Coming from a combat unit, I know that in Afghanistan we’re packed in a sardine can....There’s no doubt in my mind that openly gay Marines can serve, it’s just different in a combat unit. Maybe they should just take the same route they take with females and stick them [in] noncombat units.”

From a 19 year-old soldier who is happy to serve in combat with gay men: “Showers will be awkward.”

From an 18 year-old soldier: “Being gay means you are kind of girly. The Marines are, you know, macho.”  Ain't that the truth, Ruth:  especially macho are the Marines who are already playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with each other at off-base parties.  That's what makes it so sexy.

Part of what I find amusing about this, and perversely cute, is the absolute certainty of many young men that they are infinitely and universally attractive; and that they spark desires in others that cannot be reined in.  In this scenario, gay male soldiers are simply an addition to the already substantial female population that thinks they are hot, hot, hot.

Anyone who is a college teacher knows that there is a substantial population of athletes (and guys who look like athletes but are too lazy to go out for a team) who, once the weather warms up, spend hours in prominent campus locations, stripped to the waist, six packs a-rippling, playing wiffle ball or some other pseudo-sport.  Why?  Because they know they look so good and they are dying to share it.  Oh yeah, this has a dark side too, but at its most benign, it is a core feature of a certain kind of masculinity.

And don't you think it's interesting that Dao  interviewed no women for this article?  What do you think that was about?  Enquiring minds want to know.

Interviewing worried straight people is not, however, a good data set to base a transition to the post-DADT military on.  So here are some positive steps I would like to forward to Secretary Gates.

In each service, pick out an all-gay platoon, an all-straight platoon, and a mixed gay/straight platoon.  Send them all to Ranger School and see how many in each platoon come back with Ranger tabs.  The platoon that comes back with the most soldiers in tabs wins.  I'm putting my money on the gays:  we are incredible overachievers. 

Put lesbians in combat.  If gay men are girly, it is another well-known fact that lesbians are mannish, right?  I'm thinking while we are waiting for the gay guys to man up in non-combat related jobs, we can fill in the gaps with lesbians who are definitely not going to sexually abuse men in those tight little foxholes.  Think Joan of Arc.  Furthermore, after a tour with some super-star dykes, I guarantee some of these straight men will be combing the ranks for gay soldiers who won't be kicking their a$$es nonstop.

Gently break it to the straight boys that it seems to be them who are "looking" in the shower.  I mean, how do they know that anyone is looking in the shower, or become experts about what is behind the look?  I rest my case.  Boys will be boys.  They always look at each other, when they are not looking at themselves.

Gay men are not women.  I'm just saying.  And by the way-- what if they were? Lose the sexism before some female Marine comes along to kick your a$$.

Young men are in a constant state of arousal no matter what.  This is simply a fact.  If you see a guy walking past you with an erection, don't take it personally.  Look to your own short arm and make sure it's in its holster. 

Any erection that arrives while the body attached to it is under fire, or about to be under fire, is likely to be a source of mirth rather than a threat to the sexual safety of others.  I mean, seriously. 

Homosex and heterosex are not actual differences.   It is a fiction that straights and gays are actually different kinds of people.  Furthermore, there is no difference between what men and men; men and women; and women and women do in bed, and there is no difference between homosexual and heterosexual desire that wasn't invented by some doctor, psychiatrist or cleric.  It's all sex, there are appropriate and inappropriate venues for having sex, and people agree and disagree about what they are regardless of whether they are bent homo or bent hetero. 

Military people are overwhelmingly religious.  Make a list of the crazy $hit that folks say about GLBT people, hand it out to all the chaplains, and get them to work with homophobic soldiers on it.  While you are at it, get the chaplains to stop saying crazy $hit about gay and lesbian people as if it were actually coming straight from God.  Jesus would serve happily with a gay man.  I am absolutely certain of this (and come to think of it, Jesus looks a little girly in most pictures.)  But on a more practical note, since one of my closest kindred spirits is a Christian conservative straight woman (whose son is on the brink of deploying) I would say that one of the finest features of our friendship is that although we have differences on some core issues, we don't say the kind of crazy $hit to each other that is the lingua franca of our different constituencies.  This, in turn, I would like to think, promotes genuine tolerance (as opposed to the fake-y hypocritical tolerance) in both of us towards the attitudes represented by other.  This form of tolerance then becomes a bridge to sympathetic understanding, transformation, respect and deep friendship.

And now, to reinforce distinctions that are already well-known to any grunt who has gone through basic training, a performance of the Rifleman's Creed from Full Metal Jacket (1987).

The Radical Culture Corner Corner: Sex, Lies and Videotape Edition

We at chez Radical went to Black Swan last night, by far the most over-rated movie of the season.  You know you are really in trouble as a movie viewer when the character you like the most is the predator ballet master who just swaps in one prima for another, asserting that ballet skills are all well and good, but what really makes you a star is getting in touch with your inner f**k-bunny.  "Go home and touch yourself," he advises the Natalie Portman character, after a particularly uninspiring rehearsal.  Ho-kay!

Trying to come down off the dreadful high of that movie, I turned to the New York Times Magazine and found myself literally dumbstruck for the next half hour at the story of how Melanie Thernstrom solved the heartbreak of childlessness after five rounds of infertility treatments.  She and her husband bought some ova, had them fertilized with his sperm, hired two other women to carry the embryos to term, and now they have (wait for it) "twiblings."  There are many things to shriek about in this piece.  Here's a taste:

After our son, Kieran, was born, the hospital set up something called a supplemental nursing system by taping a tube to my breast so that the baby could suck to get the first milk — the caramel-thick colostrum — that Melissa expressed.


When the nurse put Kieran on my breast to feed, I was in a daze of ecstasy and so focused on the astonishing strength of his newborn fingers curled around mine, I hardly noticed. But by the time he was hungry again, I was coming out of the trance and wondered about whether this feeding system made sense.


The nurse urged me to stick with it. “We don’t want you to feel like you can’t nurse,” she said. I suddenly felt cross. Did she really think I couldn’t handle the reality that my body was not producing milk after it didn’t give birth to my baby? I knew she was trying to be supportive, but her concern made me feel diminished, as if she thought the truth of my infertility were unbearable (yet so easily disguised with plastic tubing). I looked down at my breasts, and they looked awfully small, whereas Melissa’s were enormous, dripping with fecundity, like a relic of a fertility goddess. I ditched the tube.


Please, read the whole story yourself.  It's just insane. 

The answer to childlessness is, of course, that if you have enough money in America you can do anything you want, but if you are poor you can't.  Like get an abortion.  But now everyone who gets an abortion is not just responsible for moral decline, but also for the fact that people like Thernstrom have to go out and make complicated arrangements to buy babies rather than just go to the BabyMart.  Ross Douthat (don't you just want to say Douche Hat?) follows up today on the editorial page with a plaintive appeal on behalf of the unborn and grave concerns that TV and media representations about unwanted pregnancy, in which the situation is almost uniformly resolved by the baby being carried to term, is covering up the reality that abortion is all too common in America.  Only four out of five pregnancies are carried to term, he laments, and no one knows it because of feel-good stories like Juno (in which a teenager gives birth, gives the baby away to a couple of her choice, and then returns to her life as if it never happened) and Madmen (in which the ever-luscious Joanie is pregnant by a man other than her husband and plans to pass it off next season as her old man's baby.)

So what is deceitfully good about these media fictions, you understand, is not just that the embryos will get to grow up into real fetuses and live, a ridiculously uncommon scenario in a country where we wade through fetuses just to get to the bus stop. It is that one woman will suppress the fact that she ever had a baby, and need massive amounts of therapy later; and a second woman is planning to live the rest of her life lying to her child and it's two fathers.

Douthat then goes on to lament the effects of the Pill, which cause women to "forget" to have babies until too late, and argue that it is just too bad that Thernstrom had to go through all those in vitro treatments, and then resort to renting other women's bodies to have babies for her, because if those selfish women who she does not know would just stop having abortions, she could have had their babies instead.

This idiocy reminds me of those economists and policymakers who think that if 500 men become unemployed in a Kansas City meat packing plant and a box factory opens outside Savannah that has 500 jobs, you should be able to just swap the unemployed workers into the new jobs.  Therefore, unemployment benefits are a bad idea because it will de-incentivize those fellas in Kansas City to take the box factory jobs.

Click here for the economists who won the Nobel prize for arguing persuasively that this is a stupid idea, as opposed to the rest of us who instinctively thought it was a stupid idea but couldn't say why.