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.