THE movie ³Juno² is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides
to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the
most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment
when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in
disappointment and says, ³I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to
say when.²
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.
Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a
sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and
public shame.
In the movie, the moment passes. Juno finds a yuppie couple eager for
a baby, and when the woman tries to entice her with the promise of an open
adoption, the girl shakes her head adamantly: ³Canıt we just kick it old
school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know,
like Moses in the reeds.²
Itıs a hilarious moment, and the sentiment turns out to be genuine.
The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their
carefree adolescence, the baby safely in the hands of his rapturous and
responsible new mother all but forgotten. Because Iım old enough now that
teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question
during the film wasnıt ³What would I do in that situation?² but ³What would I
do if my daughter were in that situation?²), the last scene brought tears to my
eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy,
unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.
And thatıs why ³Juno² is a fairy tale. As any woman who has ever
chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby
whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an
abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and
frightening procedure, and for some adolescent girls it constitutes part of
their first gynecological exam. I know grown women whoıve wept bitterly after
abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were. How much harder are these
procedures for girls, whose moral and emotional universe is just taking shape?
Even the much-discussed pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears
reveals the rudely unfair toll that a few minutes of pleasure can exact on a
girl. The very fact that the gossip magazines are still debating the
identity of the father proves again that the burden of sex is the womanıs to
bear. He has a chance to maintain his privacy, but if she becomes pregnant by
mistake, soon all the world will know.
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
³however prudish and uptightı the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep
commitment to girls.²
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?
Biology is destiny, and the brutally unfair outcome that adolescent
sexuality can produce will never change. Twenty years ago, I taught high school
in a town near New Orleans. There was a girlsı bathroom next to my classroom,
which was more convenient for me than the faculty one on the other side of
campus. In the last stall, carved deeply into the metal box reserved for used
sanitary napkins, was the single word ³Please.²
Whoever had written it had taken a long time; the word was etched so
deeply into the metal that she must have worked on it over several days, hiding
in there on hall passes or study breaks, desperate. I never knew who wrote it,
or when, but I always knew exactly what that anonymous girl meant. When I
looked out over the girls moving through the hallways between classes, I
wondered if she was among them, and I hoped that her prayer had been answered.
Caitlin Flanagan, the author of ³To Hell With All That,² is working on a book about the emotional lives of pubescent girls.
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