Back to my last addition to the topic, and Ierne's response, I can see your perspective, Ierne, but I _think_ Morrison is coming at it from a slightly different direction: my gut says that she's being intentionally a little flip with this reporter's careful, middle-class platitudes about teenaged motherhood, in order to try get us to stop seeing teenaged pregnancy as ONLY and INEVITABLY a disaster, and the girl who gives birth at a young age as 1) inherently incapable, probably downright harmful as a mother, and 2) used up, useless goods, inevitable "drain" on society. I sense that she sees something akin to the "love the sinner, hate the sin" line there.
I also see her response as coming out of a long tradition in the US of an institutionalized view of female-headed, black families as being "pathological." I think she's just trying to say: look, part of the reason we see teenaged parenting as such a horrible thing is because the economics of parenting for women has been determined on the basis of a career cycle defined by Western, capitalist, masculine assumptions. You get "established" financially first and then have children. So meanwhile we have 40 year old women desperate to have the child, jumping off the corrporate ladder . . .
There's a mess out there, and teenage sexuality is a very easy target for dealing with our anxieties and "impotence" (heh) in the face of this messed up system. Bodies come of age. At a fairly young age, increasingly. So, fine, I certainly agree that 12 year old girls should not be having heterosexual intercourse, for health reasons. And yes by all means lets give young women access to fabulous educations, to realistic, imaginative visions of themselves in any number of adult lives, livelihoods. But adults need to confront our own sense of grief at the passing of youth more directly rather than using young persons as sex toys. Communal sexual education and physicality--coming-of-age rites that involve adults and children in loving relationships that are carefully worked out in community, not in the head of the adult... that's the direction I see as more valid.
But I've been thinking about how much the normative heterosexist, couple-based family is based on capitalistic structures--the way housing, for example, is architecturally and economically structured on a single-family model--so that I more and more think these questions of sexuality are tied completely with the capitalistic system. That's why I find that Morrison text so interesting, because it does end on the challenge: why can't we just give people money? |
