Single Working Womens Week – SWWAN

Hard to believe this could be happening in our modern world of population explosions… The government of Taiwan is allocating a ton of money and lowering restrictions on paying maternity leaves to urge more women to have kids. Apparently the country’s birthrate has declined to 1.1 kids per mom, and that’s lower than surrounding countries. The article partly attributes this to the fact that there, too, more young people are choosing to remain single–the phenomenon is not confined to the U.S.

Like the forego-the-birth-control, “be fruitful and multiply” philosophy of the Orthodox Jewish religion which makes it a “mitzvah” (good deed) to have lots of kids, and of the Roman Catholics (well, at least what used to be–for decades a certain percentage of Catholics are known to go “priest shopping” to find one with an open mind about birth control), the fact that many groups believe they need to populate the world (in many cases, specifically with their own kind) isn’t going away anytime soon.

Whoa. You know how when something hits you between the eyes you open them a little wider. Saw a movie lasta night called Loverboy, starring Kevin Bacon (though you have to struggle to recognize his character, and this is his debut as a director), Matt Dillon, jeepers-Sandra-Bullock, and especially Kyra Sedgwick (the filmmaker adores her with the camera throughout the movie). Review here.

This is a film that addresses powerfully and directly some of the issues we wrote about in a recent post here surrounding young single women deciding to have babies on their own. It addresses some things almost no one wants to think about in regard to this phenomenon–like could single mothers who have babies on their own get inappropriately attached to those kids and in their possessiveness keep them from having wholly healthy experiences. And it juxtaposes this examination with a fairly hard-hitting look at the other messy issue we’ve recently talked about: how having two parents doesn’t mean you’re going to raise an emotionally healthy kid. After all, in this film the devoted/possessive single mom was raised by two parents who adored each other.

It’s not a great movie. It’s a bit too focused on “ain’t Kyra beautiful.” And it’s kind of tragic, especially the ending. But it looks at some tough issues that we’re probably going to see more often as women increasingly choose to remain single and also to seek motherhood–and by the way as more married women delay motherhood and end up going for in-vitro fertilization, which often results in a passionate attachment on both parents’ parts to the child that’s finally born. So if you don’t want to look at those kinds of issues, don’t see the film.

But I guess I’d say the same thing about Bridges of Madison County, which addresses uncomfortable issues surrounding love and marriage and infidelity.