I am Jennifer Aniston's biggest un-fan, so I have no desire whatsoever to endure 100 minutes of her ditziness in The Switch. But Amanda's unilateral assertion regarding social conservatism felt like it shouldn't go unexplored. Amanda, you argue that if there's "one belief that drives social conservatism with regard to female sexuality, it's that women can't make good choices, and so their choices have to be made for them." I would vehemently disagree that conservatives think women are incapable of making a good choices or even want to make your choice for you—but I will agree 100 percent that the essence of social conservatism is that there is such a thing as a "good" choice.

It's also the best explanation I have for the increasing frustration social conservatives have been expressing lately—from Dr. Laura to Sarah Palin to Pamela Geller—who want to argue over the definition of what is "best" for society but can't start a debate with liberals who refuse to acknowledge that such a collective thing could exist, even at the expense of what may benefit and build community as a whole. Every debate seems to end with "You've offended me" or "Who are you tell me I'm wrong?" As if that should stop the presses. And in the case of female sexuality, it's hard for me to see how the majority of women and children are the winners in an individualistic culture that discourages traditional marriage, encourages promiscuity and divorce, and disparages feminity. What's best for the whole is a debate worth having, not silencing with self-preference as the end-all for every argument.

So if nothing else, at least The Switch is willing to at least take a head-on look at the reality of the consequences of our individualistic pursuit of happiness and take a stab at the antidote. Hopefully it can inspire its audience to do the same.

Tags: Dr. Laura, Jennifer Anniston, pamela geller, Sarah Palin, the switch

Willa Paskin takes Bill O'Reilly to task over his complaints about sperm-donation comedies, pointing out the various ways that the movies are actually quite reactionary. He should love these comedies, she argues, because the plots usually resolve by asserting the primacy of the father, and because the female leads aren't seeing a lot of sexytimes.  But she misses one more layer of extra-special reactionary politics in The Switch: the element of force.

If there's one belief that drives social conservatism with regard to female sexuality, it's that women can't make good choices, and so their choices have to be made for them. That's the argument underlying the panic over the hook-up culture (read: girls are too dumb to say no when they want to, so we have to say it for them), the hostility toward comprehensive sex education (if girls know their options, they may make choices we disapprove of), the move toward restricting abortion and contraception, the hostility toward single mothers, and all the knee-jerk anger—like Bill O'Reilly's—over any hint that women might have choices. Overt calls for coercion are common. When social conservatives attack social spending that they believe allows women to get away with being single, the implication is one of coercion—starve 'em out until they submit to a man. Then put on your concerned face and explain how it's for their own good.

With that in mind, you'd think that O'Reilly would love the concept behind The Switch.  Spoiler alert (thanks, Paskin), but Bateman's character, emboldened by drunkenness, overrules Aniston's character's life choices and is rewarded by taking his rightful place as her man.  Switching some other dude's sperm out for your own to get a woman pregnant who has rejected you (and having this be the catalyst for changing her mind) is about the most potent symbol I can think of for the belief that women don't know what they really want, so they have to be shown. With a little force, if necessary. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a way that you could get around this implication.

Photograph of Jennifer Aniston by Jason Merritt/Getty Images.

Tags: Bill O'Reilly, jason bateman, jennifer aniston, the switch

On Slate today, Joe Keohane has an amusing video slideshow about "how Hollywood makes beautiful actresses look working class" in order to secure Oscar nods. Keohane illustrates some of the sneakiest tropes of the "slumming actress subgenre"—fugly sweaters, messy hair, bad posture, a slack-jawed stare—with clips from films like The Good Girl and Monster's Ball.

Of course, it's no secret that frumping up is one of the easiest shortcuts to gaining Serious Acting Cred. (It's almost as good as a mental disability.) It can make viewers feel virtuous, which in turn casts a halo of nobility around the whole artistic project. But as Keohane's slideshow proves, it's a risky move; a badly-calibrated performance can easily turn ridiculous and be exposed as a grade-grubbing sham.

For me, these kinds of performances always make my brain a little itchy. Maybe there's an uncanny valley when it comes to lovely lady actresses going blue-collar? Keohane suggests that Charlize Theron in Monster and Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl manage to clear this hurdle; their strong performances "ultimately do credit to their parts." Do you agree? What's your favorite "slumming actress" role—either because it's so successful, or because it's so utterly unbelievable?

Tags: actresses, beauty, charlize theron, jennifer aniston, joe keohane, movies, oscars, Slate

More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this?

Thurman doesn't look particularly pacified in in the poster for her latest movie, but the film seems to have un-womaned her, putting her in the part of Manhattan mom, overwhelmed by the effort of caring for a pair of small children. Having kids doesn't necessarily have to reduce your life to nothing but dishes and alternate-side parking (even the Bride of Bill ends up with a 4-year-old), but you wouldn't know it from what's on view so far of Motherhood: The Movie.

The trailer plays like a He's Just Not That Into You-esque excuse to compile every clever moment from every good hipster mother rant of the last five years. But though the plot is vague, one thing is clear: Becoming a mother has sapped Uma Thurman of her energy, her sexuality, and her ability to get dressed before she leaves the house in the morning. She's surrounded by mothers who think they're better than she is, which really means they aren't, because they spend all their time competing while poor Uma is just busy parenting. There's a touch of mommy wars, a touch of gender wars, and an overall whiff of powerless incompetence, all in two short minutes. Didn't women once complain that the media depicted us as Superwoman, able to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and so forth? I suspect this character is a vegetarian.

I won't wholly indict the movie without seeing it, but so far Motherhood: The Movie makes me want to disown the word "mother" entirely. Can we not manage to procreate without losing the rest of our identity in the process?

Tags: motherhood, movies, parenting

Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids. And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just might be a failure of imagination as well.

If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it.

But Wild Things doesn’t exist in such a cultural universe. In fact, it exists in one that, in a few weeks, will deliver another movie to theaters based on a beloved children’s book about wild animals. Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, adapted from the Roald Dahl book, posits that walking, talking animals sound, think, and dress exactly like all the charmingly eccentric neurotics and big talkers that populate The Royal Tennenbaums (the fox of the title is a sloppier eater, at least). In other words, Spike Jonze and Wild Things screenwriter (and McSweeney's editor) Dave Eggers, Wes Anderson and his co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach, were given a chance to make movies about strange, weird creatures and chose instead to make movies about creatures who need Prozac. They took creatures that could be anything and decided they needed to be in therapy. They took creatures that could be from anywhere and transplanted them from a Woody Allen drama.

In fairness, I don’t know how you turn the teeth-gnashing, short-spoken brutes from the Sendak book into rich, deep characters worth paying attention to for an hour-and-a-half. But I refuse to believe that there is not some way to do so that does not foster the sneaking suspicion that, when the camera pans away, the wild things are debating the merits of organic produce and what happened to their misspent youths. Of course this movie doesn’t work for kids: It was written by adults who are so consumed with their own experiences they’ve forgotten how to use their imaginations to dream up something different.

Tags: dave eggers, movies, spike jonze, where the wild things are

The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it.

Marche argues that Twilight’s Bella falls for Edward because he’s “strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her”—just like why the straight girls at his high school lusted after gay dudes. But the common thread among the triumvirate of recent vampire hotties—Edward, True Blood’s Bill, and Buffy’s Angel—isn’t that they’re “strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by” the nonvamp women who love them. What they share is being hot, strong, and supremely protective. They lurk in shadows, lending a slaying hand when Buffy is outnumbered; avenging Sookie’s childhood molestation; stopping the car on a collision course with Bella. That seems just about as heteronormative a fantasy as you can get.

Marche’s argument continues:

Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That's what everybody wants, isn't it? Sex that's dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving.

OK, I guess all of that sounds good. But how is having sex with someone who could kill you with a hickey “nonthreatening”? In most modern vampire dramas, the vamps are exerting tremendous, nonstop self-control to keep from chomping the woman they love. Having sex with them is the ultimate risk. As they usually tell their soon-to-be-lover in hushed undead pillow talk, they worry that once they let go a little, they’ll lose control entirely. And that’s not a groundless fear—look what happened to Angel.

Marche goes on to claim that True Blood “connects vampirism to homosexuality explicitly.” His proof: the roadside sign in the opening credits that says “God hates fangs” and general talk of “mainstreaming” vamps. Well, that points to the “vampires as social outcasts” theme. But it seems a big leap to get from that to “vampire craze as proof that all girls want to schtup gay guys.” I see the vampires' fight for equal rights in True Blood as similar to the struggles of mutants in X-Men. But in X-Men, that mutant/non-mutant tension seems more a stand-in for the relationship between blacks and whites (with Xavier as MLK and Magneto as Malcolm X) than a gay/straight thing. So, would Marche also says that X-Men comic books popular with nerdy boys because all nerdy boys want to have sex with black men? Or something?

Tags: gay rights, movies, Race, TV, vampires

Willa, it’s funny that you view the Jenny-David relationship in An Education as unskeevy because she’s precocious. When I tried to understand why I wasn’t bothered by the 16-year-old dating a man twice her age, I came away with sort of the opposite answer.

This is one of those things I’ve tried to float in conversation before and it always ends with people silently avoiding eye contact (for the shy ones) or telling me I’m a perv (for the more outgoing), but I’ll try again: I kind of like the idea of the older, knowledgeable tutor type sleeping with his young, eager acolyte. When I learned in college about the relationships men like Socrates had with their attractive young male followers, I had a sense of—what? Nostalgia? It’s not envy; I certainly don’t want to sleep with every man who can teach me something. But I envy the relationship those Greeks had, back when terms like “statutory rape” didn’t exist. It strikes me as so perfectly symbiotic: The beautiful blank slate of a student takes knowledge from his wise and wizened mentor, and in exchange gives the joy of fresh enthusiasm. And sex. I won’t be so flip as to ask “What’s wrong with that?” (Obviously, there are many unpleasant examples of the Socrates figure taking advantage of someone vulnerable and non-consenting.) But I will say that, in its idealized form, doesn’t that sound kind of nice?

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape

Sam, I was not particularly skeeved by the relationship between the 16-year old protagonist of An Education and her older man. I’m still not, even in light of Roman Polanski, but he does make me think a little harder about why I’m not skeeved. The central question, to me, seems to be one of precociousness: Is precociousness always a put on? Or is it possible that some precocious kids, while certainly not as worldly as they seem to be, are as mature as they seem to be?

I think An Education wants us to believe the latter: Jenny, for all of her schooling, is unschooled about many aspects of adult life (sex and culture being the two big ones), but her preternatural self-possession is not just a put on. The girl’s all there. (When Jenny fights with her elders, particularly her teachers, she is simultaneously bratty and asking searing, hard questions. She is never a trifle.) David, the older man, provides her with the life experiences (sex seems to be almost the least of these—the others being Paris, music, night clubs, heartbreak) to match her precocity. An Education argues that a precocious girl who gains life experience becomes, in fact, a woman. I found this, at least in the specific case of the movie, to be persuasive.

The problem is just that the “life experiences,” in this film, come at no great price. Jenny is almost ruined, but she is not. Her path to Oxford took an enriching detour—it was not derailed. And this, well, lucky break allows us to overlook the flaw in Jenny’s precocity: However clever, well read, hard-working, and charming she is, she is also a hideous judge of character. David is a cad.

The movie makes a very simple move to make this flaw, the ultimate proof that Jenny really is a child, seem irrelevant: It makes all the adults having to do with the film, both Jenny’s parents and the audience, equally hideous at judging. Her parents are as taken with David as Jenny is. Jenny's falling for a charming, thieving, cheating liar is not a youthful mistake because it could just as easily have been an adult one. And if the audience is never quite as charmed by him, we are so taken with Jenny, with her intelligence and spunk, that we stop sizing up her mistakes. I think it's a credit to An Education that I wasn't skeeved. It didn't want me to be. But, if this movie were real life, I'd like to think I would be.

Tags: An Education, movies, Rape

An Education, which hits theatres today, is either really lucky or really unlucky about its release date. Coming on the heels of the Roman Polanski arrest, which stirred discussion over whether sex with a minor is ever OK, the movie’s plot line is particularly fraught. An absolutely adorable Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a 16-going-on-17-year-old student in 1961 England, who is courted by the much-older David, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

A piece about the film on ABC News today asks whether sex with a minor can be consensual, and pulls out a line Jenny’s teacher delivers to her, toward the end of the film: “You’re just a child.” It’s a line that screenwriter Nick Hornby now regrets, according to Mulligan, given the shadow the Polanski arrest has cast on the film. (Jenny and David do it, rather matter-of-factly, on her 17th birthday.)

But what was so powerful to me about An Education was how little you thought about the age difference between Jenny and David. She's legally a child, perhaps, but she fits in better intellectually and emotionally with David's crew than her peers. Her relationship with David was complex and totally messed up in a lot of ways, but age wasn’t the one that mattered—not to me, and not to any of the characters. For Jenny’s parents, it was enough that she be married and taken care of by a man with (bogus, as it turns out) hoity-toity academic credentials and money to spend on pampering their daughter—and, less nobly, them. For Jenny’s teachers, David was a threat solely based on how he’d affect her decisions about pursuing her own education. But that struggle between staying in school to work toward a meaningful career and letting herself be the darling accessory to her jet-setting man could just as easily have taken place were David a rich boy of her own age.

I saw a screening of the film before Polanski’s arrest had brought questions of statutory rape to the forefront of the news, so I wonder how seeing it now will color the way viewers judge Jenny and David’s relationship, particularly the sexual side. Will it still succeed in maintaining that Lolita-style distance that leaves you slightly skeeved out by how little you mind an older man is preying on a younger woman? Noreen and Willa, you saw it at the same time I did. Were you similarly un-skeeved?

Tags: movies, Rape

I went to Italy in 1987 disdainful of boys and scared of sex.

My disdain for boys dated back to high school. I went to an all-girls’ prep school and had the requisite crush on the football star, but when an actual boy showed actual interest in me, I was horrified.

I was the Jewish girl who would never lead a cheer, play field hockey, or be nominated as the May Queen. I wrote passionate, indignant, occasionally thoughtful opinion pieces for the school newspaper, which attracted the attention of a nice-looking, preppy rich boy who favored madras shorts and Ralph Lauren polos with the collar turned up. He had just broken up with the girl who led cheers, played field hockey and would definitely be nominated for May Queen.

The preppy rich boy asked me to the prom, and during the weeks leading up to the big event called me regularly, praising my latest Op-Eds. He told me that I was a locked door and he was the key. I didn’t like being compared to a door, and I didn’t like the subtle (or not so subtle) sexual reference. I felt like he was just buttering me up with all that talk about how smart I was, and I just wanted him to keep his key far from my lock.

On prom night he took me to the Liberty Memorial, presumably to see if he could steal a kiss. But my contempt for him must have been so palpable that he abandoned the idea, and me, as soon as we got to the dance hall.

I loosened up in college, but seemed to gravitate to a string of unavailable, uninterested, and unrequited loves. It was as if deep down I held a contempt towards men and sex, and had a complete ineptitude when it came to the rituals of dating.

The situation wasn’t helped by my choice of major, semiotics, which seemed only to confirm my suspicions towards sex. We watched movies like Psycho, how Hitchcock’s camera devoured the ripe body of Janet Leigh, how her sexuality and promiscuousness would ultimately lead to a terrible, bloody death in the shower. We learned about the gaze, the other, the objectification of women. Sex seemed a very sinister, shady business.

My semiotics professor encouraged me to take a semester abroad in Rome. Maybe he thought Rome would be the antidote to my overly analytical mind.

Indeed, Rome brought out in me a lack of criticalness that verged on derangement. From the Pantheon to the piazzas, I loved everything. And everybody seemed to love me. The men, that is. The men at the bakery, the men behind the bars, the men picking up the garbage. I walked the streets in my baggy jeans and sneakers, provoking whistles and wanton looks from swarthy men who seemed completely oblivious to the rail-thin Italian beauties who strode the cobblestone streets effortlessly in their spiked heels. For some reason, they preferred my limp brown hair and pale fleshy body. Suddenly, I was exotic.

And suddenly, they were all exotic, too. No longer did I turn up my nose at their supposed baseness and brashness, or think I was smarter, better and above it all. I was intrigued by everything. It was like one of those beautiful, languorous foreign films where nothing happens, but watching it you’re mesmerized, and every mundane word seems pregnant with meaning.

There was Ferdinando, who looked like an old-time movie star with his shiny black hair and deep brown eyes, his reserved manner, and quiet smile. When I discovered that he was a 41-year-old mailman who still lived with his parents, I was unfazed. There was Romolo, a blond-haired, blue-eyed stud who, if he lived in the states, would not have given me a second glance. When I discovered he was an unemployed drug addict, I decided to try my luck elsewhere, but didn’t hold it against him. There was Marco, the assistant director. He had deep blue eyes and long black hair and wore a black turtleneck underneath a stone-colored trench coat. When I learned he was engaged, I pretended I had no idea what fidanzata meant.

And then there was Fabrizio—a mechanic and a socialist with a fascination for the Sandinista rebels of Nicaragua. He would come to the wine bar where I hung out, dressed in his royal-blue coveralls that never showed a bit of grease or grime. He would never drink more than a single glass of red wine and never seemed to speak to anyone while he was there. When he finally got up the nerve to approach me, he began by saying that all Americans are obsessed with money. It was an odd way to pick up a girl, telling her she was materialistic and money-grubbing, but I told him that as a semiotics major I read a lot of Marx, so we really weren’t so far apart in our views.

For the next few weeks, Fabrizio and I would meet at the wine bar, have a glass of wine, then go off to dinner, movies, drives, and lots of make-out sessions in his beat-up Jeep, the floor of which had eroded so much you could see through to the street. Fabrizio was a gentleman in every way, paying for my meals and carrying my shoes as we walked along the beach and even acknowledging that some Americans weren’t capitalist pigs. He was attentive but not subservient, sweet but never cloying, and sexy without being scary.

I had come to Rome determined to visit all the major basilicas, see all the Caravaggios, cross all the bridges that traversed the Tiber, and walk along all the city’s winding roads. So as nice as my nights were with Fabrizio, it was time to move on.

The other men had seemed to understand that I was a young American student in Rome for a few short months who just wanted to have fun without obligations. Fabrizio didn’t. At first I simply avoided him by not going to the wine bar for a while. When I finally returned one night I found him standing outside, drinking whiskey from a lowball glass.

I gave him a contrite smile as I walked past him. I ordered my wine and talked with my friends, trying to ignore him but aware that he was staring at my back. After a few minutes he approached my group, but before he could say anything I turned and walked out the door. A minute later, he walked outside, and before I could walk away he said, “Mi tratti come un ogetto!”

I looked at him quizzically, having no idea what he was saying. So he repeated it: “Mi tratti come un ogetto!”

Tratti. That means treat. Ogetto? I was drawing a blank. “Ogetto?” I asked him.

“Ogetto!” he shouted. When I looked at him still confused, he said it again, this time holding up his glass and pointing to it. “Ogetto!” Then he walked away.

I turned to my friend. “I treat him like a glass?”

“No,” my friend said. “You treat him like an object.”

So there it was, the final word of my beautiful, languorous foreign film that was so pregnant with meaning.

Thanks to Fabrizio, I learned that sex, by its very nature, is not sinister or shady. It’s people like me who make it so.

Photograph of man by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: American student, Italy, movies, Ogetto, Rome