"17 Again" Pushes Sexist Abstinence Message

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check. Posted May 4, 2009.

Like most abstinence-only materials, the movie is incoherent.  On one hand, we're supposed to cheer Michael's successful attempts at preserving his teenage daughter's virginity, on the grounds that she needs to go to college (as if these two goals are mutually exclusive).  But most of the movie is about how the protagonist and his wife made the best decision of their lives in having unprotected sex and forgoing college for marriage before they could vote.  It's not surprising.  Most abstinence-only programs put nominal effort in highlighting the value of avoiding pregnancy in your adolescence, but as the Bristol Palin situation demonstrated, the anti-choice right lines right up to cheer for teenagers who choose pregnancy and marriage over higher education.

As you can imagine when dealing with a movie pushing right wing attitudes about sex, sexism comes right along. Dargis was right about the misogyny.  Even though Leslie Mann's character comes across as much less a harpy as she did in "Knocked Up"  (she has to, or we can't root for their happy ending), the rest of the movie bundles up some ugly assumptions about women.  There are good girls (who are virgins or happy teenage mothers) and every other woman is a horror show, a slut and a monster all rolled into one.  Michael's female coworkers are all bimbos who get promoted over him, because of their sluttiness.  The wife's friend is a slut who has the crazy idea that divorced women should feel free to date, even if they have children.  And of course, you have the "slutty" teenage girls who pursue young men, who are presumed to be broken and stupid besides.  And even though we're told that Michael's daughter is smart and has a future, we see no evidence of this, and only know that she's a bad girl with bad taste in men, and she's only redeemed by keeping her cherry intact.  Even then, her whole performance of sexual desire is treated as grotesque in and of itself, which fits with the rest of the film's horror at assertive female sexuality.

But I must take issue with Dargis's pronouncement that girls particularly are cautioned.  Boys need this kind of vicious stereotyping of women and shaming of female sexual desire even less than girls do.  If they're straight, they're going to have to deal with female sexuality without thinking it turns women into monsters, at least if they want healthy relationships.  In this movie, it seems the only way a woman can have sex and be respectable afterwards is if she gets pregnant right away.

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Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.