Strumpet Eye

by Molly Ivors

(At right: another shocked teenage mother)

You've really got to hand it to the Spears clan: it's not easy to time your family crises to coincide with a major thematic film release, but they've managed it. Gallons of ink have been spilled comparing Jamie Lynn to Juno, so I won't belabor the point. Would that Caitlin "Hey, Being a Housewife Is Easy When You Have a Staff!" Flanagan had shown such restraint.

Yes, MoDo has the day off, no doubt to get her roots done and her talons sharpened for the next round of primaries, but rather than leave the OpEd page without a vapid, judgmental, female columnist of Irish extraction, we get Flanagan.

Shorter Flanagan: women's lib is Teh Suxxor!!11!!

Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason 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.”

We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free — perhaps for the first time in history — from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex? (emphasis added)

So let me get this straight: because of a Hollywood film and a trashy small-c celebrity, it's time to lock girls back in the house? Oh, goody. If not for feminism, the Spears girls may well have been the Bronte girls. Good to know.

I'm actually not in disagreement with Flanagan's central assertion: that the onus of adolescent sex falls upon girls more heavily than boys. But, you know, there's shit we can do about that, Caitlin. We could allow Planned Parenthood into high schools. We could fully fund Gardasil shots. We could provide cheap birth control to young people. We could toss all this abstinence-only education (or, more justly, ignorance-only education) and talk to kids frankly about how they're feeling and how not to be stupid about it. We could provide cheap, accessible abortions when birth control fails. But since all those things are seen as "encouraging" sexual activity, we don't. And the results are predictable.

As Ellen Goodman noted in her thematically similar piece earlier this week, "teenage pregnancy rates have gone up for the first time since 1991... It's expected that 750,000 teenage girls will get pregnant this year. With, by the way, some help from boys. We've spent about $1 billion on the taxpayer scam known as abstinence-only education. And Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy, saying, 'I was in complete and total shock and so was he.'" For any thinking person, such a statement is an outrage, a complete failure of health education. Goodman confesses to feeling like a fuddy-duddy for resisting what she calls, following historian Stephanie Coontz, a "cultural compromise": "Social conservatives are backing off on the condemnation of single mothers. Social liberals are backing off on the idea that it's possible to have an abortion and not be ruined by it."

The latter must be the "abortion is icky" crowd Atrios talks about. But I haven't seen much sign of the former, I have to confess. I know a deeply religious man who was kicked off his church's governing council because two of his daughters became pregnant out of wedlock. How is that supportive? I know a young woman more or less forced to marry the father of her child as a price for getting material assistance from a church: now, at 22, she has three kids, no job, and the husband is struggling to manage community college and a meth problem. Sorry, but an abortion and getting the hell away from that guy would have served her much better. Even having the baby as a single mom would have been better. So no, I don't see much progress from social conservatives toward embracing single mothers.

The way I see it, the problem is not that we let girls out of the house and encourage them to compete freely with boys. That's a good thing. The problem is a social system which inculcates in young women the idea that their only value as a person is whether or not some dumbass teenage boy wants into their vagina. So many young women calculate their value as people by whether or not they're sexually desirable: it's the Bratz culture writ large. But the answer to that problem is not greater circumscription of their right to go to school and socialize: it's making sure that they know there's more to them than the contents of their uterus.

This neo-Taliban Victorian do-over is crap, and needs to be called out as such. Teenage girls don't get impregnated on their own. How about calling out the macho bullshit culture that tells boys to be selfish pricks who base their identities on the number of girls they fuck? Nah, that's just crazy talk.

UPDATE: Oh, dear. The wingnuts are at it.

The modern commitment to girls has amounted to little more than an effort to turn them into inferior androgynous evolutionary dead-ends. Fortunately for Mankind, the effort fails much more often than not.

Women simply cannot compete with men without being artificially and externally advantaged by government. This is as true in the boardroom as on the basketball court. It is biology, not bias, and explains why in that a time when women are better educated than men, they still can't manage achieve anything even remotely as significant as men regularly do.

Fuck. Off.

UPDATE II: Amanda says it far better than I.

Comments

[Hecate]

Sing it, Sister. You do this so v. well!

[Molly Ivors]

Hecate,
Thanks! You might want to take on that Vox Populi guy--I was too angry even to address it logically.

[iamcoyote]

they still can't manage achieve anything even remotely as significant as men regularly do.

Vox then pounded his chest and danced around the room, scratching an armpit, making oo-ooo-ooo monkey noises.*

*I'm assuming, since I didn't follow the link...

[iamcoyote]

Kickass post as always, btw! Thanks, Molly.

[Marcellina]

Nicely put, that the girl would have been better off even as a single mom than burdened with a meth-addicted husband for sake of...what? Appearances, I guess. Not hers, but the church's.

[DrDick]

Thank you for stating what should be painfully obvious to any thinking person, but which consistently escapes our public discourse. I would add to your list of things we as a society can do to alleviate this problem, I would add provide free daycare for school age girls with children. Not all girls are going to want or be comfortable with an abortion (and I am unwilling to say they should have one), even if I think that is probably the best alternative in most cases. Girls should have viable choices. I do not see many teenage boys having to drop out of school because they suddenly became fathers.

[low-tech cyclist]

iamcoyote - you didn't miss anything, other than one of the most idiotic comment threads of its length I've seen anywhere. (The intelligence of a comment thread tends to decrease with length. This one didn't waste any time.)

[Ramona Quimby]

I am disgusted by the tons of money thrown at the "ignorance-only" programs (I'm looking at you, Arlen Specter). They make kids so fearful of sex that I wonder how they will be sexually healthy as adults. Thanks, Bushies, an entire generation screwed (without condoms) by you.

[K. Ron Silkwood]

Pregnancy is usually evidence that they've been "doing it." Why don't we just stone girls if they can't keep their knees together?

[sions. Karen]

Thanks, especially for the slap at macho culture. I have two sons, and I really, really, really want them to wait to have sex until they get out of high school. (They have summer birthdays, so they'll only be 17 when they graduate.) I don't hate sex, I just think that it's an emotionaly complication kids that age don't need. I mentioned this to the parents of some of their friends, and the couple of conservatives in the group were appalled that I would even notice such things. Apparently girls need be terrified of sex and boys need to be left alone. Jeez.

[actor212]

Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?

Yup and yup.

It's called "education" and "parental involvement". Funny how neither of those seems to be in large supply from the right side of the aisle...

[flory]

Women simply cannot compete with men without being artificially and externally advantaged by government.

Lessee....I have my own business, my own home and healthy savings and retirment accounts.
I'm trying to remember where the 'government advantage' came in.

Methinks Mr. Vox is a man surpassed by women on a daily basis.

The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”

Of course they did. That's why a 'girl' was a complete failure as a 'woman' unless she managed to birth a boy or two. And we'll not even get into whose chromosomes control that little detail.

I don't think feminism means what Joan Jacobs Brumberg thinks it means.

[eRobin]

Excellent post. I'm going to print it out and ask both of my older kids (middle and high school) to read it.

I'll stand up for Jamie Lyn though. (trashy, small-c celebrity) There's talk that the real father is a man in his fifties and an exec on the show. In that case, she's a victim of some sick stuff. But even if the father is the kid, Whatshisname, "trashy" is hurtful.

[Herr Doktor Bimler]

“however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”
If that's a roundabout way of describing the extent of child prostitution in late-Victorian England, than I can't argue with her. And give them credit for raising the age of consent from 12 to 13, in 1875.

[bob]

All this stupidity about a biological function (to poorly quote Mr. Spock.) ONLY in post war America has teenage pregnancy been considered anything buy normal. Kids are HORNY. Horny as HELL. I was. You were. Your mom was and so was your grandma. Our infrastructure today makes it difficult for young parents, but having kids young and putting them to work on the farm is pretty traditional human social organization, right or wrong. We seem to be hard wired to want to have sex when we are young and attractive with others who are ALSO young and attractive. Shocking. Simply shocking.

[actor212]

Horny as HELL. I was. You were. Your mom was and so was your grandma.

Where did I put that brain soap?

[stickler]

I'm with the good Doktor Bimler. This idealization of Victorian attitudes toward "girls" is certifiably insane. The Victorian ideal of womanhood was one thing (creepy, if you actually know something about it, which I wonder if Joan Jacobs Brunberg does). But the reality of life for females in 19th century Western civilization -- especially those of lower-class origin, which was of course most of them -- was pretty awful. "Deep commitment to girls," my arse.

[Molly Ivors]

The Victorian ideal of womanhood was one thing (creepy, if you actually know something about it, which I wonder if Joan Jacobs Brunberg does).

You know the story of John Ruskin's marriage?

[Interrobang]

Hm, the Victorian "deep commitment to girls." Yeah, they were deeply committed to making sure that girls were kept selectively ignorant about a lot of things, trained specifically and narrowly in non-academic practical and/or ornamental skills (you never see a competent or capable woman in Victorian writing, only "accomplished" ones), and reminded constantly that they were property.

Here's a research project -- find out exactly how many different ways the government has benefitted Mr. Vox Day. I know specifically how it has benefitted me, but that has less to do with my being female than being a hard worker who was in the right place at the right time.

Molly -- What about John Ruskin's marriage?

[stickler]

Molly:

Yeah, I know about John Ruskin's marriage, but I sort of wish I didn't.

I also know about the British Public Health Acts which only imposed health-inspection requirements on prostitutes (not their clients). Thus addressing about 50% of the problem of venereal disease.

Like I said: the Victorians were deeply messed up on a bunch of different levels.

[dan mcenroe]

UPDATE II: Amanda says it far better than I.

I dunno about that. "Fuck off" pretty much sums it up.

[apishapa]

My son's ex-girlfriend scored 45 points in a basketball game. Not many boys at that school wanted to play aginst her. She played football one year, because we didn't have enough boys for a team. She did fine. She is now in college, halfway to being a doctor.

By the way her parents were illegal immigrants.

[Redshift]

Doncha just love wingnuts talking about how success in all arenas in a modern industrial society is determined by biology, despite the fact that on an evolutionary timescale, none of that stuff was a basis for selection?

I have this image of Australopithecus having staff meetings, and then it suddenly becomes clear why wingnuts think that's just the same as now...

[David Weisman]

Why did some fairly normal people agree to be interviewed by that guy?