Knocked Up, Juno, and the Costs of Conformity
At the end of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay on Knocked Up, she casts Juno in a favorable light.
The best moments in Knocked Up are those that suggest the world doesn’t have to be this way—that of course women can possess playful inner lives too. There aren’t quite enough of them. You leave feeling that what poor Debbie—and Alison—really wants is not a husband who knows to bring home pink cupcakes for a birthday party, but a culture that grants them the same indulgent latitude their partners get: the luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible. Slacker, starring a woman. Barring that, of course, there’s Juno, the story of a knocked-up girl from her own irreverent perspective—written, as it happens, by a female scriptwriter—now playing in a theater near you.
The truth is, I suspect, simpler than that. Juno, an excellent movie, is about a non-conformist. Debbie and Alison, the principal female characters in Knocked Up, are conformists. I should stress that there is nothing wrong with conformism. Non-conformists are, of course, a source of creativity and excitement. But flourishing civilizations exist because most of us follow a broad set of social rules most of the time. The demands of child-rearing cut sharply against the footloose, fancy-free existence of the non-conformist. Of course there are small minorities who unschool their children, and who live off the grid. Others selectively embrace those parts of the bohemian ethos that are most compatible with bourgeois success, and they tend to present themselves as non-conformists, though of course they tend to be exactly the opposite.
As for Juno MacGuff’s winning non-conformist, note that tt is relatively easy to be a non-conformist at age 16, particularly when you are, like Juno, well-loved by parents and friends. To be sure, becoming pregnant introduced all kinds of complications. But because Juno was committed to having her child and giving the child up for adoption, there was no pressure to conform for the sake of creating some kind of stable family life. But what if she were 26? Granted, she could at that age spurn Paulie Bleeker and head to the wilds of Alaska where she’d survive in an abandoned VW bus. Or, less dramatically, she could try to make her own non-conformist way in the world, with a baby at her hip as she played hacky sack and smoked the doob with her cronies. That would be wry and amusing and creative and playful. But one suspects that the imperatives of caring for a small child would induce Juno and Paulie alike into some kind of conformity, which is to say into some kind of tragic and difficult choices.
It is true that one can lead a creative and playful life while also raising a brood of small children, but this requires a lot of sacrifices or a lot of outsourcing of household production. That is, creativity and playfulness is a kind of luxury, which is one of the many sad things about our incomplete transition to an economics of abundance. That’s why I’m so obsessed with the future and with the idea of democratizing play and creativity. I think of it as moving from a joyless to a joyful economy, to put it as cheesily as possible. But we haven’t reached that point, and having children continues to represent an important and valuable sacrifice.
By that I mean, flatly, that my mother would have led a far more interesting life had my sisters and I never been born: for one thing, she would have pursued the education she deserved. The same goes for my father, to a lesser extent. Moreover, I don’t doubt that my father and possibly one of my sisters would have died had it not been for the extraordinary, perhaps unreasonable sacrifices my mother made on their behalf. And rest assured that she is not a conformist by nature. Maybe she ought to have slacked off and let us fend for ourselves. I frankly think she never should’ve gotten married, certainly not at 21. Obviously this is hard to say: I’m glad I’m alive, and my mother is, as cloying and teeth-gnashing as this likely sounds, the person I respect and admire and crave the approval of most. This, incidentally, is the biographical reason I believe we ought to have some kind of G.I. Bill for primary caregivers, and it’s why I am in deep sympathy with certain strains of feminism.
But the fact remains that these are the real and wrenching choices a lot of women, particularly working-class and immigrant women, face. More affluent women face them to a lesser extent. Pretending otherwise is to propagandize for procreation! I for one am not in the pocket of the Maclaren empire. Keep in mind that I’m saying this as someone who sympathizes with pro-natalism: even I won’t tell women and men that they can still be beatnik hepcats while raising children. The grups who attempt to do so, again, are insulated by a layer of money and family support that few people can reasonably expect.
So of course people like me who expect to lead creative and playful lives react against the notion that having children will make us defensive, anxiety-ridden, and perhaps even humorless at times. But chances are we will.
My own solution, if it ever comes to that, will involve unschooling and getting as far away from the achievementocracy as possible. The solution to any false choice is to pick up stakes. But this means resigning yourself to the knowledge that children can’t be happy and built for professional success at the same time.
I’d like to add that Olivia Thirlby will soon become one of the most celebrated actors in America.
I think that’s bunk, on a number of levels.
One: playfullness and non-conformism and pure joy often occur in child-rearing if women enjoy their children and have a decent amount of money to care for them. This might not encompass being tragically hip and posing about for status. But it does encompass what mammals are hard-wired to do: raise children.
It’s true that the tragically hip deny biology. But it has it’s habits of not being denied for long. Of course if the tragically hip all delay/deny having children society degenerates into “Idiocracy.”
Secondly, we have enough data on hand to see the folly of too much Welfare-statism. Over 50% of British births are illegitimate. The figures according to the 2006 Census for Black Women is 70% nationally (in America), and 90% in the Urban areas. This is disaster.
Too much wealth, too little consequences for stupid choices, leaves a society in crisis. With Yobs and Chavs and “Clockwork Orange” style street brutality and decaying workforces. With aging populations and no children to care for them, collapse of economies.
If anything smart, intelligent women ought to be encouraged to have children in their early-mid twenties when they are most fertile, suffer the fewest birth defects, and have the most energy to care for children. And be allowed back into the work force when children are capable of being on their own for limited periods of time (age 11-12 or so). From a personal note I’d imagine play with one’s child is more rewarding than preparing a report on bathroom fixture production for Kohler in the Western Region Q1. Which will be forgotten as soon as it’s written.
Biology is what it is. Women in their early/mid twenties have a much easier time having children than those in the thirties. And declines in fertility are exponential not linear. Your mother probably had a far easier time of it physically caring for your family at 22 than she would at say, 42. Hollywood stars give people the wrong impression — all real childcare for them of course is done by illiterate nannies here illegally from Guatemala (only sort of kidding there).
What’s interesting about Juno is the message: don’t have kids too early (Juno) or too late (the Jennifer Garner character).
— Jim Rockford · Dec 14, 11:21 PM · #
I really deeply wish I could share a story with you, Reihan, one which, in addition to being as moving as perhaps any I’ve read, demonstrates better than I could say my exact opinions on parenting. It’s available here but you need to be a subscriber to Harpers magazine to read it. It’s a short story called “The Duchess and the Smugs” by Pamela Frankau. It was later developed into a section of a (sadly inferior) novel by the author. It’s fantastic.
I’ve been trying to write a gloss of what exactly the story says (and says to me) and have been failing…. Suffice is to say that I find the harm-prevention model of parenting to be a disaster for kids, and one that leaves them utterly unprepared for the harms that eventually, inevitably affect them. I’ll try to explain better what I mean later.
— Freddie · Dec 15, 02:14 AM · #
The other worry is that once you become a parent, you’ll become crazy not just in ways that make you unhappy, but that also make your kids unhappy. What if, all of a sudden, business school sounds like just the thing for the tots? I really worry about this—well, not business school, I suppose, but that I’ll be less willing to let my (hypothetical!) kids do their own thing than my parents were with me.
— Justin · Dec 15, 06:03 AM · #
Say no to a GI Bill for primary caregivers.
When a woman chooses to have children, or to keep them instead of putting them up for adoption, she believes that she will benefit. Otherwise, why would she do it? There is no harm to recompense with a GI Bill.
It’s rather presumptuous of you to rate other people’s lives as “uninteresting.” You seem to be committing the economic fallacy called Intrinsic Value.
— Jeff · Dec 16, 11:24 PM · #
“You seem to be committing the economic fallacy called Intrinsic Value.”
You seem to be committing the fallacy of living life according to ECON bullshit.
— Freddie · Dec 16, 11:30 PM · #
I think the original point was that MEN get to be slackers, but the women they live with do not. If having a child involves X quantity of responsibility, and the man does considerably less than half of X, then the woman ends up doing more than half or the rest remains undone. (The expression “picking up the slack” comes to mind.) If what the man is doing instead of his share of X is, in fact, charming and desirable, shouldn’t the woman get to do some of it too? Family support includes partners as well as the families we come from.
— M.C. · Dec 17, 04:23 PM · #
Provocative post Reihan, and I’ve thought the same about my own mother, but one thing I’ve found is that being a parent has actually given me more opportunities to be creative and nonconformist than I had before, admittedly though perhaps not in a way that is particularly interesting to folks like you. Before my daughter was born I was just one of tens of thousands of movie-going, law-practicing, baseball game attending, indie-rock playing and listening, craftbrew drinking, after work-running twenty-somethings in a committed relationship. In my neighborhood in DC, literally the picture of conformity. <p>
Now, though, I am likely the only indie-rock band-playing-in, hockey playing, cloth diaper-changing and scrubbing with an old toothbrush, churchgoing, crunchy-con twenty-something husband and father in the entire D.C. area. All of a sudden, I’ve become a complete bucker of the status quo. And I have to be way more creative, clever, and inventive trying to be a halfway decent father and husband than I ever had to be to be a garden-variety DC twenty-something.
— hugo · Dec 17, 07:38 PM · #
Freddie wrote, “You seem to be committing the fallacy of living life according to ECON bullshit.”
Eh. A little light on reasons, but I’ll bite.
OK, what’s the harm from parenting? What needs to be recompensed?
— Jeff · Dec 18, 08:37 AM · #
Women want to conform to what other women are doing and they want other women to conform to what they are doing.
— Steve Sailer · Dec 19, 12:21 AM · #