Sooooo it’s been a painfully long time since I’ve been able to bust out ye ol’ computadora for some good old fashioned ranting.  I have about 70 rants chilling on the backburner, festering into unhealthy nonproductive poop.  And nobody likes nonproductive poop.  So here we go!  Alkaseltzer for the soul.

So as I was watching this holiday season’s classic family movies (aka thePotter and theNarnia), I noticed the trailer for the upcoming 3d movie, Mars Needs Moms, featuring the “uncanny valley” of creepily unattractive human simulations.  (They are just too close to human…so close that they look really off and unsavory.)  Anyway, the movie seems silly enough, good voice actors, chuckleworthy jokes, but man—I really hope that the trailer just completely dumbed down the movie premise.  Seriously?  Mars needs moms?  On one hand, yes, let’s give a big round of applause to mothers everywhere, who are generally awesome and constantly juggle 10,000 things.  In particular let’s take our hats off to the belittled “housewife” role that many deride: from what I’ve learned in the past 2 weeks after putting on my Big Girl Pant(suit)s and living on my own, being an adult is HARD, what with all the cooking and hygiene and….it just never ends.  A person who can do all that AND raise kids?!  Dude I already killed my thriving parsley plant within a mere 5 days.  Keeping something alive for 18 years until it goes off to college?! Unfathomable. 

So sure, praising mothers is theoretically a nice aspect of the movie.  And I’m a sucker for alternate reality, my-life-would-suck-without-you-and-I-can-only-realize-this-through-supernatural-intervention-or-alien-abduction tv shows/movies.  But errr can we also discuss the 10 bajillion issues with this?!

1. Let’s not perpetuate the myth that women are the only people who can raise children.  This hurts both women and men.  Sadly it’s a self-reinforcing myth: if we keep pushing this, will we ever completely break away from the idea that “the woman’s place is in the home” and that the man’s place is outside of it?  If men can’t raise kids, then women will never be free to leave the house to seek other professional opportunities.  I believe that feminism is having the freedom to choose, and being a stay-at-home mom or a career woman (or both! this is no longer a true dichotomy) is a life choice individual to every woman.  Additionally, men should have the freedom to make the same life choice without becoming socially emasculated. 

2. Why are fathers completely left out of the child-rearing equation??  Interestingly, I was talking with my sister the other day about how there is no male word equivalent of the word “maternal.”  If you want to say that a man has characteristics that predispose him to be a great father (which is a grand compliment), calling him “paternal” wouldn’t necessarily feel accurate.  ”Paternal” seems almost negative—just think of the word “paternalistic.”  It evokes the idea of being controlling, not nurturing.  Erf, shouldn’t it be socially acceptable for “manly men” to also be nurturing caregivers by now?!  Instead, whenever a man is portrayed in the media as the primary caretaker of his own children, he is called “Mister Mom,” or the premise is labeled a novel “role reversal.”  (I swear I read a tv article 2 months ago that still used these terms).  But it’s not like we don’t already have a concept to describe “Mister Moms”—oh yeah, remember dads?  Why can’t we just call them dads?!  In order to have a well-rounded definition of masculinity, we need to have the bizarre concept of the “nurturing father” become socially mainstream.  (I think Phil on Modern Family is helping this cause). 

3. There’s a scene in the trailer when the son is on Mars searching for his mom, and he stops to ask some Martians if they have seen her.  In an attempt to describe his mother in simple terms that the Martians might understand, he says, “you know, my mom, she feeds me, vacuums the house?”  Ahhhh it’s nice to see that gender roles have really changed.  Mother=maid.  Good breakdown of what a mother is, buddy! 

In summation: both women and men are much more than this movie premise gives us credit for.  On its face, it seems that the movie is celebrating women, yay!  But it’s also stomping them into their place.  And in a way, it’s stomping men into their place as well: as non-fathers.  Ahh I think we all deserve better than this by now, eh?  

rant by Liz (wearing her Big Girl Rantpants while watching the Chronicles of Narnia)

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p.s. - I hope I wildly misinterpreted this entire movie and that it’s secretly awesome.