"The Kids Are Alright"...But the Parents Are A Mess

Lisa Cholodenko's latest film "The Kids Are Alright" (2010) has received glowing reviews, including New York Times' A.O. Scott's coveted status as a "critic's pick." It is indeed a fine piece of work but as a symptom of the Zeitgeist, it makes me utterly despondent.

Reader beware: if you haven't seen the film and care about suspense, read a real reviewer, someone who knows better than to reveal key plot details. This is for people who've seen the film or who like to know what they're getting into (or avoiding).

As the trailer suggests, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have raised two children to whom they each gave birth, respectively, from the sperm of the same donor (Mark Ruffalo). The kids are teenagers, one is leaving for college, and "Dad" is suddenly on the scene, and connecting with Jules in a way that poor Nic never has and never will. (Paul and Jules have passionate sex; Jules and Nic seem to have done nothing but hold hands for years and years.)

Worse, there was nothing else that seemed meaningful between them except the responsibilities of parenting.

A lawyer was among the friends with whom I saw the film. Over hot dogs (with and without meat) and beer on a fabulous Manhattan patio the size of Nic's and Jules' SUV, he disagreed with this assessment and said that they shared a connection. Evidence of this was the story they told in response to Paul's (Ruffalo's) question about how they met. But that particular story was really a portrait of two forlorn people whose meeting-story had been told so many times it was drained of emotion or meaning, a worn out touchstone for a romance that was never more than the aspiration for romance based on insidious films like Cholodenko's (but hopefully those films had plots that depicted actual romance).

Someone else who approved of the film's message replied that marriage's magic was not always apparent to the outsider.

True enough. But this is a drama, not a documentary.

(It really bothers me when educated people talk about the secret, private lives of fictional characters, mostly because it's a symptom of the primitive intuitions that persist when it comes to narrative, a low-level of common sense intolerable in any other field.)

Anything we see or do not see in "The Kids Are Alright" is because Cholodenko made a choice. If she wanted to show a hidden connection between Nic and Jules, she was free to do just that. Sure, it was a tight budget but it doesn't cost less to shoot constant fuming anger, frustration, and despair than empathy and joy. In the film Cholodenko co-wrote and directed, she made a choice to celebrate a relationship between two people who were unable to bring happiness to the other, and who kept disappointing these expectations, making matters worse.

Charity Scribner, a comparative literature professor at CUNY, agreed that the film showed nothing redeeming in the relationship between the moms, and then made the brilliant point that she thought this was Cholodenko's intention. After all, Charity said, the title is "The Kids Are Alight." Cholodenko is making an incisive observation about generations, Charity suggested. The lesbian moms reproduced the same suburban pain and suffering they were taught in their own homes. The teleology of their remaining together merely represented a culture for which they were they last forbears. Their own children, who were the film's primary conduits of light and possibility, were now free to do something different, something better, something meaningful, something honest and fun.

Charity's partner disagreed and said the film really was about two people just sticking it out.

Alas, having read the interviews with Cholodenko, it appears that while Charity's film was brilliant, her partner was correct; Cholodenko's intentions really were banal and reactionary.

If you google "Cholodenko intervew," portions of which seem to be channeling James Dobson and Phyllis Schlafly, you'll see what I mean.

The moral of Cholodenko's film, at least according to Cholodenko, is: who cares about anything except the fact that they stay together? Isn't that what families are for? In Cholodenko's film, the country's 50 per cent divorce rate is the talismanic enemy, not a symptom of a painful, archaic institution that Cholodenko reveals as stifling desire, sex, and connection.

The problem with the film is that the relationship between the moms is hollow, miserable, depressing and without any redeemable qualities, save that they raised two children who are alright. Jules at one point gives an impassioned speech affirming the relationship, but the reason she gives is that they've stuck together. Outside of raising two children, Nic and Jule's relationship's only alleged virtue is a tautology: it is good they are together because they are together. (If you stick to the plot, raising two children together is not going to be enough once the kids graduate, yet it is clear that Jules and Nic will disappoint each other until death do they part.)

The upshot is a major victory for conservatives, on whose behalf Cholodenko has made the following blow for same-sex marriage: lesbians are not like any other happy couple but like any other miserable, melancholic couple who cling to each other out of fear not love. Go Prop 8!

Barney Frank Sells out for Job in Clinton Administration: Insider Revelation

On April 24, 2007 Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did something he's done before, introduce a bill that would "prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender," HR 2015.

The "gender identity" language would help transgendered employees battle discrimination, but it's important for other reasons as well. Including "gender identity" is the only way to make sure sex discrimination laws, including sexual harassment laws, will apply to gays and lesbians. Courts previously have confined application of sexual harassment to different-sex scenarios. Stipulating that "gender identity" should not affect the interpretation of employment protections will protect men from sexual harassment from male bosses, and women from female bosses. Analyses by the LAMDA Legal Defense Fund also suggest that removing "gender identity" would allow employers to fire people on the basis of their being "too effeminate" or "too mannish."

On September 27, 2007, Rep. Frank did something that he appears not to have done before, introduce a competing bill that sells out gays and lesbians by removing the "gender identity" language, HR 3685.

The LGBT community is furious with Frank. According to an October 18, 2007 article in the Bay Area Reporter, "More than 200 LGBT groups around the nation have, in the past 10 days, signed onto a letter to House leaders asking them to 'oppose any substitute legislation that leaves part of our community behind.'"

The question is why did Rep. Frank do this? Frank's explanation: "We do not have the votes to pass the bill with transgender."

But no one who knows anything about Washington politics believes Frank. Indeed Frank himself admits that his proposed bill, even if it passes in both houses, will not become a law until a Democrat wins the presidency. So why is Frank really pushing Congress to pass a law that is being actively opposed by the constituencies in whose name he is acting?

Insiders have an explanation, and it's not a pretty one. According to a source who works with many of these LGBT groups, Frank and others are pressing Nancy Pelosi and Senate colleagues for a vote on a bill without "gender identity" protections at the insistence of presidential candidate and bully Senator Hillary Clinton. In exchange for helping her with this, word is that Frank's been assured a position in her administration.

Why would Hillary want this so badly? Getting the weakened bill on the Senate floor gives Clinton something she can vote for to bolster her substantively weak LGBT credentials and loosen some spare change and good will in the LGBT community. Getting Frank to lose the "gender identity" language in a bill that will not become law allows Clinton to appeal to the mainstream's sense of fairness in the workplace without allowing the Right to scare the general public by suggesting Clinton wants to protect fairies and other people with a gender imagination.

The most hopeful scenario in these cynical dealings is that perhaps after Clinton is elected and the Democrats have an even stronger grip on Congress, and perhaps after Frank receives a cabinet post and other muscle, the administration will push for a real bill that will be really signed, one that includes the "gender identity" language.

Review of "Methods of Adoption: Eliminating Genetic Privilege"

The good thing about feminist and queer theory in the academy is that there is overwhelming consensus on most issues: legal equality and respect for differences of sex, gender, sexual orientation, genitalia, marital status, parental status, and a variety of combinations of the above are rightly beyond the pale of debate.

The bad thing about feminist and queer theory in the academy is that the university thrives on originality and controversy. This may lead scholars to raise concerns that have already been addressed, or create pseudo-lacunae that they can fill.

In a recent review, Debra Satz challenges claims I make in an essay "Methods of Adoption: Eliminating Genetic Privilege," published in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (2005) edited by Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt.

Sat asks questions of positions I develop based on work by Martha Fineman's Neutered Mother (1995): contemplating a reproductive species whose offspring have a long period of dependence, what is the best decision rule for deciding on their custody? My argument is that the pregnant mother is the only figure with the prerogative to make this initial decision at birth, and that she can choose either to put the child up for adoption, raise her by herself, or contract with others, including other parent(s) to raise the child until the child reaches the age of 21. Paternal sperm-donors (via penises or other methods) are eligible for the mother to choose as kinship partners, but do not have independent claim to custody rights, on account of the silliness of awarding custody based on intercourse, as well as their failure to create their DNA. (Awarding custody rights based on ejaculating semen alone would be like giving a Pulitzer prize to the person delivering the newspaper.)

My essay repeatedly states that such people would not be excluded from being a parent, but that ejaculating sperm itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to give one the right to make initial custody determinations, and that the unique sacrifices of a nine month pregnancy do earn this right for gestational mothers.

The review by Satz is frustrating because I thought I anticipated the objections she voices, and responded to them. Below are Satz's comments and the portions of the original essay she overlooks, minus references and notes, which copying and pasting could not accommodate. My essay in its entirety is here. You decide!

Satz writes:

Does biology matter at all to family bonds? To the rights of parents or children? Many of the contributors to Adoption Matters argue that the family should be conceived of as a voluntary association, entirely based on choice and liberal contract. Drucilla Cornell (2005) and Jacqueline Stevens (2005), for example, argue that parents should enter into relationships with one another by contract and that the state should not privilege one form of family over another. Stevens further argues that all parents should contract (or adopt) children independently of their biological relationship. This would put families formed through biological ties on equal terms with families formed through nonbiological ties; all families would be based on norms of contract and consent.

Adoption raises important questions about the applicability of a choice model when applied to the family, about the role of genetic ties in making individuals into parents, and about the nature of our obligations to children. Consider that in a typical contract two or more parties consent to undertake some transaction or activity. When we turn to evaluate a contract, the idea of "between consenting parties" is crucial in guiding our intuitions. Moreover, in our evaluation of the contract we will often need to look further than the contracting parties to see if there are significant consequences for parties that are not prima facie involved in the agreement at all.

As I argue above, no infant or small child can be party to any parenting agreement. Further, we must keep in mind that the child is the most vulnerable party affected by the parenting contract: small children are utterly dependent on their caretakers and could not survive without them. There is also reason to suppose (although I will not argue this here) that children require some amount of continuity of caretaking. These considerations suggest that we should limit freedom of the contracting parties. Of course, if we press on these considerations too much we might wind up with very little freedom for parents—back in the Orwellian world of parental licensing, with invasive scrutiny of parents' capabilities and motives. Cornell (2005) importantly constrains her contract model: she argues that although parents should contract for custody, once they have consented they must assume custodial responsibility for the rest of the child's life. Cornell's argument implicitly accepts the idea that we have obligations for others that do not depend on our ongoing consent. At the very least, our freedom to exit the contract is constrained by the interests of the child. If we accept Cornell's model of families in which parenting responsibilities flow from the interests of the child, the question still remains as to whether or not the initial obligation to parent arises only from an act of will.

I had written:

The objectives guiding the following proposals arc as follows:
1. To provide children with resources and caretakers who can attend to
their physical, emotional, and intellectual needs.
2. To make viable long-term relations between a child and a child's caregivers.
3. To allocate the privileges and responsibilities of child care equitably,
and, as a corollary to this, to recognize the special relation of pregnant mothers to the children they bear.
4. To ensure that laws designed for the micro level resonate positively
in broader social discourses.

The policies offered below in pursuit of these objectives are of course not immune to violation, just as current family laws may be disobeyed. However, because these alternatives are much more flexible than rules giving rise to our current child-rearing roles, they are far less likely to be broken. They are also conducive to inviting people to participate in forming families through a range of encounters, not just sexual ones, and therefore may enrich other relations by allowing for this potential to develop, while at the same time lessening the pressure on sexual ones.

No single item below should be considered in isolation from the others .
1. The government should provide health services to everyone, including
reproductive health services.
2. The government should make child-care services available to all parents.
3. Every child has one mother, the person who gave birth to him or her.
4. Every child shall have one or more parents. For purposes of legal custody, a parent is someone, including a mother, who adopts a child alone or in a group of two or more.
5. The adoption is valid until the child is twenty-one years of age.
6. The mother is responsible for finding one or more parents to raise
her child within three months of birth. She fulfills this responsibility either by (a) signing an enforceable contract with the state acknowledging that she is adopting the child by herself; or (b) by forming a larger group to legally adopt the child; or (c) by finding another adult or group that will sign this contract; or (d) by requesting that an officially sanctioned adoption agency perform these activities. No
money other than incidental fees can be exchanged for the purpose
of executing adoption contracts.
7. All adoption contracts will require minimum adult commitments to
child care.
8. Marriage is a purely private activity, receiving no recognition as a legal status by any government agency.

Taken together, the above proposals would directly accomplish the rather mundane objectives mentioned, the goals of which differ not much if at all from those offered by mainstream and even conservative commentators on the family. One would be hard pressed to find the critic advocating family policy designed to increase children's chances of being malnourished, unsafe, and stupid. The major difference between the present framework for family policies and the one used to develop the above recommendations is that the latter does not attempt to meet its objectives
through mediated, confusing, and unfounded religious aims or genetic fantasies.
....
Cornell says parenting contracts should be for life. While such ties over life are definitely something to aim for, it seems very important to make sure the rules governing child rearing are narrowly tailored to the task. People can survive and flourish even if their parental units break up after they are twenty-one; this may not true for children who are younger. I selected twenty-one as a possible threshold, because that is is the age when most people in developed countries finish their formal education. The number is based on the belief that parents should commit to making education a financial possibility for their children. I am not sure that this is really right. Perhaps the state should guarantee funding for her education, or perhaps the interest of the child in an education beyond high school does not outweigh the parents' desire to cease what may well be uncomfortable relations among each other or with the child by that time. That is, as a social value as well as a utilitarian one, we can imagine a calculus that gives heavy weight to family stability, whatever form that family takes, but does not ignore tensions that arise inn any social setting, especially such a demanding one as the family, tensions that themselves make for an unhappy home.

From a child's point of view, the need for the family to be stable and nurturing decreases over time. While of course one prefers those caring for children to be always on good terms, a child's survival depends less on this over time. Conceptually, then, there is a point at which considerations of parental discord trump the interest of the child . That point will depend on the particularities of the situation. None of this requires that families dissolve their emotional and other ties; it merely ends their legal responsibilities, and even here the agreements may be revisited with a new contract.

Satz writes:

Arguments such as those by Stevens and others in Adoption Matters certainly provide a needed corrective to the tendency of our society to engage in gene fetishism. But how compelling are they on their own? What of the mother who is lackadaisical about her pregnancy while the father concerns himself with the health of the growing fetus and makes preparations for its birth?
What of a woman who is a gestational surrogate for another woman? Suppose that a woman who objects to abortion on religious grounds carries a child to term. Why does her gestation establish a claim to motherhood in the absence of any desire to have a child? Against the view that fathers have no parental rights, it might be argued that men may engage in procreation explicitly with the intent of assuming a caretaking role with their child. Having and raising children is central to the life that many men as well as women want. Even if genes alone do not give rise to rights, why can't a preconception commitment to shoulder the responsibilities associated with parenting give rise to some parental claims?14 A man can be involved in and take responsibility for even a newborn infant. He may have had long-standing relations with the mother, shared in her life over decades, and actively planned for the arrival of the child. Or he may have simply coerced her into sex. Perhaps biology and a demonstrated commitment to nurture can establish a father's claim to have the opportunity to maintain a tie with his genetic offspring. The problem with proposals like Stevens's is that they run the risk of locking women and men into traditional gender roles, wherein women by default must assume primary parenting responsibility for the newborn child. These observations show, I think, that we cannot define parental rights without taking into account the needs of children for secure ties with their caregivers (which probably means giving biology some weight) and evaluating the extent of the reciprocity, care, and responsibility intended and shown by adult caregivers.

I had written:

Birth mothers contribute intensive,constant, long-term labor to reproduction that fathers do not. However, Locke believes that fathers can make up for this by making sure to provide for their children economically and, equally importantly, taking a strong role in ensuring their education. Importantly, Locke offers no language at
all to suggest he thinks women are incapable of providing these themselves--
e .g., canards about only men being strong enough to earn money or smart enough to teach. Rather, he presents these masculine stereotypes of breadwinner and teacher as those compensatory to men's inability to give birth and their desire to reciprocate for the life they have been given. While Locke himself makes these arguments to say that at minimum women have equal rights to parental authority to those of men, he
seems to hint at more far-reaching implications, and surely we can extend those today. If Locke is right—-that sperm itself does not give men any rights to the fetus—and if custody decisions must be made at birth, then the only person who has earned the prerogative to initiate these is the pregnant mother, a subject position inadequately represented in present law.

Cornell and other feminists who want to challenge the potentially restrictive
sex-role implications that might follow from such an emphasis on the specificity of pregnancy would probably respond that although only birth mothers are pregnant, nothing about this act precludes establishing pregnancy's equivalences with other activities, say, contributing money or time in child-raising. Indeed Cornell makes just this point, turning around the Lockean position outlined above by using the fact of such compensations as evidence there is nothing so special about pregnancy.
But are these apt comparisons? Is it sensible to consider pregnancy as just one more form of nurturance, one that is equivalent to, for instance, driving a child to soccer practice or saving money for her college education?

The felicity of such analogies depends on whether we agree that the risks, excruciating pain, and uninterrupted dedication to the physical task of pregnancy can be equated with the cumulative labors invested in other life-sustaining enterprises, such as contributing food, shelter, and other goods and emotional attentions to an infant and child.

Pregnancy as Sui Generis
A further objection to equating pregnancy with financial support alone
is that the equivalence seems to call forth the idea of blood money that offends common sensibilities in other contexts. lf we take offense at flesh as collateral for money (Shakespeare 1965), then perhaps we should also take offense at the Lockean offer of fathers paving for education and providing inheritances as a way of paying off the debt that sons owe their mothers, for in that situation a woman 's flesh is literally being taken from her, in exchange for financial consideration given her child (as payment of debt for one's own birth) (Locke 1988, I . 55 and passim). Pregnancy involves one's entire body being at the beck and call of another human organism twenty-four hours a day for several months. And pregnancy entails a non-negligible risk of death. Some commentators have pointed out the relative safety of the abortion procedure in contrast to giving birth as a basis for invoking Good Samaritan laws as the grounds kw abortion rights. But analogies to hypothetical Good Samaritan laws for organ donors—suggesting that criminalizing abortion would b e
like requiring kidney transplants of unwilling donors—do not hold, for reasons that are somewhat revealing. Not only do current medical ethics not require such sacrifices, the norm is that they would not allow them, as pregnancies threaten the donor's life, require huge amounts of forbearance and hardship, and are physically intrusive. Our medical ethics guidelines seek to shelter individuals from such sacrifices and are especially cautious in the area of financial remuneration.
The point is not that a sexualized body should never be regarded in terms of labor power, one feminist critique of prostitution, but rather, that the very particular harms and risks expected of pregnant women are so enormous that no liberal society would allow this, that pregnancy itself would be rejected altogether by the same principle that liberals forbid slavery, even as a so-called choice-—a practice with which women 's reproductive choice activists have sometimes, quite aptly, analogized unwanted pregnancies. The very arguments distinguishing the condition of pregnancy for purposes of abortion rights arguments resonate in calls for acknowledging the condition of pregnancy as one that entails special legal recognition. While it is unconstitutional for states to allow even mutually consensual slavery, and it is on against all norms of medical ethics to expect one individual to put her life at risk to preserve another, there is no discussion of legislation to protect women from the potential harms of pregnancy.

The dangers of pregnancy notwithstanding, the U .S. Department of Health and Human Services has not invoked the Hippocratic Oath's maxim of "First Do No Harm" as grounds for prohibiting pregnancy, which suggests that this is an act that really is sui generis. Unlike Cornell, my own objection to Fineman's "Mother/Child" dyad is not based on its wrongly excluding people from the category, but on it wrongly including those as "mothers " who do not labor to bear children. Current laws wrongly instill a dichotomy between genetic and adoptive parents and also fail to distinguish the contributions of' a woman's pregnancy to the life of her child, raising the question of new laws that would remedy these fables and lacunae.

No doubt Satz and others can find flaws in the arguments that privilege the pregnant mother as the default person who makes an initial custody decision but these should be stated, as opposed to Satz ignoring these points altogether. The lackadaisical pregnant mother every bit as much as the fastidious one risks her life through pregnancy. If Satz dislikes the principle of risk, pain and labor behind the decision rule I argue for, or if she thinks it is possible to for a "lackadaisical mother" to avoid these during pregnancy, then it would be great to hear why this is the case.

Pink Pistol Whipping Lesbians

Heard about this one from my friend Lisa Duggan, Director of the American Studies Program at NYU and primo observer of all things pink and lesbian, who sent a few queer theory professors a link to a Bill O'Reilly segment on "Lesbian Gangs."

After viewing it, someone on the list wrote: "At last! My long cherished hope that the moral panics around race, gender, and sexuality would just get it over with and converge
one stable scapegoat has at long last been realized!!"

As I was watching it, my girlfriend said it looked like a "Daily Show" spoof, and indeed it does, all these earnest middle aged guys talking about the lesbian threat in tones usually reserved for Al Qaeda. Turns out that among other inventions, revealed and linked on a well-documented posting about this by Jeff Hoard here, O'Reilly used a montage of footage from a youtube video of a "chick fight" over a man and a few other lies and exaggerations to make it seem that, just as he'd feared all along, lesbians have finally resorted to guns to win converts.

One sentiment popping up all over the blogosphere is a "wishful thinking" sentiment: if ONLY there were lesbian avengers, so to speak. For instance, Chris Dykstra writes: "I am ready to be a foot-soldier in a lesbian gang! Choose me! Me! Me! Me!" Fear of violence focuses attention. Following 9-11 sales of the Koran immediately quintupled and Penguin had to airlift copies into the U.S. to keep up with demand. A reporter for the Boston Globe wrote on October 5, 2001, "Interest in Islam - a religion that was largely unknown to many Americans before Sept. 11 - is suddenly pervasive. Today, Oprah Winfrey is dedicating her television talk show to the topic 'Islam 101.'"

Alas, the lesbian gangs and Al Qaeda are far less violent and becoming more legitimate than the ones being run under the flag of the United States. Maybe Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are right about one thing: when the U.S. is militarily defeated in the Middle East it will lose its ideological stature there as well. And not a second too soon. This is by no means to say that the other gangs waiting in the wings are an improvement, but that a world without U.S. hegemony is better than one with it.