Juno lays bare a “bitterly unfair truth of sexuality,” says Caitlin Flanagan in yesterday’s New York Times : “Female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine.”
On our website last week , I argued that Juno is far from your average teen-comedy fairy tale: Juno shows the hard facts of adolescent pregnancy, and it is effective precisely because the viewer—female or male— can begin to imagine the consequences of what Flanagan smoothly terms “desire.”
She raises some very good points: “Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood”; “Surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost”; and, of course, the age-old observation that there is a double standard for male and female sexuality. Men might suffer privately and psychologically from an “unplanned pregnancy”; women also suffer publicly and physically.
Victorian-era parents recognized these dangers, and hush-hush prudishness was their reaction. Today, says Flanagan, our reaction to the “brutally unfair outcome [of] adolescent sexuality” is different:
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?
Flanagan takes it for granted that the answer is Yes . But, in her assessment, freedom from the “trauma of pregnancy” and its psychological aftermath is the only consideration. Maybe just maybe, though, sexual liberation involves more than divorcing ourselves from the hard consequences of sex. Maybe it also requires liberation from the root causes, so that our young women have the strength to respect themselves—to value their bodily and emotional integrity—even when men and society do not.
Sexual liberation is a good thing. But we’ll never get it from the fairy tale of free love.
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