Normal babies
“’Babies’ is not a haphazard collection of sentimental home videos. It’s an attentive consideration of how babies encounter, learn, and grow in the world. And it’s a provocative display of differences in their surroundings, families, personalities, and cultures. We’ve been conditioned to see a lot of familiar sights on the big screen. Babies are not one of them. When we do see babies on the big screen, they’re included as blasts of cuteness; as comic relief; or, as wisecracking, special-effects-enhanced, diaper-clad versions of grownups. This movie is a welcome relief: It shows us a world in which babies play an important role. That is to say — the real world. …
“Fortunately for moviegoers, ’Babies’ never turns into any kind of propaganda. Those who reduce the movie to some kind of pro-life ploy only reveal their own narrow-mindedness. This is a movie full of babies, pure and simple, and this addresses a significant deficiency for moviegoers. When was the last time you saw a film in which an infant was something more than comic relief, something better than a diaper-soiling inconvenience to adults? I can think of a few, but only a few.”
— Jeffrey Overstreet, writing on “Babies May Be This Year’s Most Important Movie,” on May 7 at Response
Weird science
“The burqa is ’abominable behavior’? Has [author Sam] Harris traveled to Afghanistan or rural Iran and asked women whether they would like to go out in public without a burqa? What responses did he receive? Gender-based dress codes inculcated at young ages become part of people’s cultural assumptions. Women in traditional areas of rural Iran or Afghanistan aren’t up in arms over their traditional form of dress. … Women in urban Iran want to be able to dress as they please and resent legally imposed dress codes, but guess what: they arrived at that desire entirely without the aid of any scientifically grounded system of morality, and Westerners have universally supported them … again without any need for a scientific grounding of morality. …
“I am a big believer in science. That’s why I think it shouldn’t attempt to generate knowledge in fields where it can’t generate knowledge. Science has been badly damaged, over the past century-plus, on those occasions when it has attempted to make claims in normative political arenas where it cannot justify those claims: Nazi racial ’science’ (projecting aesthetic and nationalist sentiments into biology), early ’criminology’ (of the phrenological variety), the ’science’ of marijuana-fiend drug abuse, and so forth. The wave of anti-scientific and anti-rationalist feeling that began in the ’60s came in reaction to attempts to misuse the mantle of science in service of moralistic claims. It doesn’t make any sense to repeat that episode.”
— Matt Steinglass, writing on “Giving science a bad name by pretending it can encompass morality” on May 10 at True Slant
Pill-quake
“One significant, and enduring, effect of The Pill on female sexual attitudes during the ’60s, was: ’Now we can have sex anytime we want, without the consequences. Hallelujah, let’s party!’ It remains this way. These days, nobody seems able to ’keep it in their pants’ or honor a commitment! …
“In stark contrast, a lack of sexual inhibitions, or as some call it, ’sexual freedom,’ has taken the caution and discernment out of choosing a sexual partner, which used to be the equivalent of choosing a life partner. Without a commitment, the trust and loyalty between couples of childbearing age is missing, and obviously leads to incidents of infidelity. No one seems immune. As a result of the example set by their elders, by the 1990s teenage sexual promiscuity — or hooking up — with multiple partners had become a common occurrence. …
“Seriously, folks, if an aging sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it’s gotta be pretty bad. In fact, it’s precisely because of the sexy image I’ve had that it’s important for me to speak up and say: Come on girls! Time to pull up our socks! We’re capable of so much better.”
— Raquel Welch, writing on “It’s sex o’clock in America,” on May 9 at CNN
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