The mommy trap

Eventually, your female friends 8211; the ones who married late and retained youthful obsessions with Yo La Tengo and graphic art books until forty 8211; may shock you by having children. This year, at least, they have cinematic alter egos; those millennium Mary Tyler Moores, Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt have left their cosmos and canned laughter behind and gotten knocked up onscreen too. In the process, they have created a new genre: The Fertility Film.

But are the new fertility film stars actually feminists? The heroines of this year8217;s conception flicks Smart People, Baby Mama, and Then She Found Me, as well as recent hits Juno, Knocked Up, and the brilliant-but-forgotten Happy Endings mostly procreated with someone of questionable character8230; Fertility films8217; inbuilt conflicts are considerably more pungent than their younger chick flick selves. In each film, there are bawling infants born into inconvenient, unhappy unions or to women alone, recovering from awful relationships8230; Does that make the storyline less, or more, feminist? After all, the women in the new fertility films are presented as having children not so as to please a social norm. Rather, they do so out of what one social critic has dubbed 8220;maternal desire.8221;

But the truth is that these films are rather conservative at heart8230; But fertility films are a popular choice this year as they offer a sunset-and-rainbows kind of Hollywood schmaltz that other films cannot. All of these films end with a love object, a baby that is superior in the eyes of many women than a man would be. In these films, the baby represents eternity and the possibility of absolute devotion. It8217;s a relationship that, unlike romantic love or marriage, female viewers are thought to believe in without sarcasm.

Excerpted from Alissa Quart8217;s 8216;When chick flicks get knocked up8217; in the latest Mother Jones