However, of course I know the basic plot of Juno: teen girl gets pregnant and decides to have the baby so it can be adopted. Aw. Of course, the other path the movie could have taken - and the one I'm going to wildly guess happens more often in real life - is that Juno could have had an abortion. OMG THE A WORD! But anyway, I do recall some feminists talking about the movie and lamenting that, once again, abortion was basically treated like Voldemort, if Voldemort was, you know...a medical procedure. And that some anti-choice people thought the movie was just lovely and see? You stupid cruel bitches, look how nice it is to carry and give birth to a baby you don't want IN THE FUCKING MOVIES WHERE EVERYTHING IS FAKE.
So anyway. Today I came across this interview with Page in The Guardian. The whole thing is pretty great, but the main passage making me want to hug her and thank her and give her cupcakes is this:
Oh, listen to my pro-choice heart go pitter-pat! This is the stuff that feminists have been saying for YEARS but most of us don't have the same platform or level of popularity that someone like Page does. And while there are certainly other feminist celebrities, more often you hear women in music and Hollywood backing away from the term and the politics, because ew, right? Feminism. Ick.How did you feel about the controversy aroused by your role in Juno?
I was like, you know what? You all need to calm down. People are so black and white about this. Because she kept the baby everybody said the film was against abortion. But if she'd had an abortion everybody would have been like, "Oh my God". I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what's funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don't love abortion but I want women to be able to choose and I don't want white dudes in an office being able to make laws on things like this. I mean what are we going to do – go back to clothes hangers?
When she says that saying you are pro-choice makes people think you are "pro-abortion", she seriously hits the bulls-eye. I've heard the term "pro-abortion" bandied about by anti-choicers many times, as though anyone who supports a woman's reproductive freedom is just SALIVATING over the thought that said woman might have an abortion, and oh pleeeeeease please have an abortion because we just love them so much, we CAN'T GET ENOUGH!
No. As Page says, it's not about wanting to have an abortion, it's about wanting the choice should you need to make it. And that choice should be made by the woman facing it, not by random strangers - who, as she says, are mostly white dudes, ahem ahem STUPAK - who, as far as I can tell, just might be salivating over the thought of going back to the days of clothes hangers that Page mentions. Oooh, I know, that's so mean of me to say, but hey - wanting to punish women as the total sluts they are for getting pregnant is the anti-choice shtick, so forcing women into a dangerous back alley procedure would fit in well with that twisted fucknut way of thinking.
And I do not doubt for a moment that she's right, that if this movie had been about a teen girl getting pregnant and deciding to get an abortion, and what that whole process is like, people would have been fucking scandalized. How DARE they make a nice and not-completely-shit-talking movie about abortion! Why...it's like they think it's NOT totally evil or something! Anti-choicers would have picketed outside theaters and written miles of freaked-out text about how appalling and inappropriate it was to portray abortion as something normal.
The funny thing is, even though celebrities are fairly far from what "normal" is for most of us, they can help so much with "normalizing" things. Why else do we see random celebrities selling products in commercials and print ads? Because advertisers know that when we see that, we think "Hey, if Celebrity I Like
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