Wednesday, December 12, 2007 - Posts
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I thought of one Emily. Little Children -- smart woman cuts loose without regard for her responsibilities. Allows her child to gallivant with pedophiles as a result.
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Good question, Emily. The best example of a driven yet playful female character I can think of is Nikita in La Femme Nikita. She's a spy/assassin who's just as tough as the toughest guys, but what she really wants to do is put her gun away and goof off with her boyfriend. Also one example from TV: Starbuck from Battlestar Gallactica. She's a great pilot and also plays a mean game of poker (or whatever card game it is they play in space).
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Meghan's great lament about the humorless fate of the women in Knocked Up has me thinking: In what movies has Hollywood come through for us and provided what we might indeed want more of--women who are smart and also know how to play and cut loose? It's easier for me to come up with examples from the past--Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Audrey Hepburn--than from the present. Drew Barrymore? The Sex and the City gals? I feel like I should be able to do better than that. Hey Dana, or anyone else, help me out here.
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Juliet, your post on the Dutch couple who abandoned their adopted child is a nice bookend to this story I'd wanted to blog about: According to (also!) the Daily Mail, the world's oldest mother—she gave birth to her sons last year at 66—is seriously ill. Carmen Bousada , who apparently lied about her age to be eligible for IVF now faces the prospect of leaving her twin sons orphaned. She has no spouse or partner. The folks who criticized Bousada's decision to give birth last year are getting their "I told you so" moment early, and reigniting the big Wendy Wasserstein debate about single women who choose to have babies alone, later in life.
Frankly I don't know what it means to be too old to parent, or too culturally myopic to parent, or too selfish to parent. But your story of the Dutch parents has an extra layer of grossness to it, Juliet. Apparently the parents are "traumatized" and "in therapy" for their decision to ditch their 7-year-old daughter for not fitting in.
Oh barf. It's one thing to be hopelessly selfish but quite another to expect folks to pity you for it.
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Via the Daily Mail, a Dutch couple living abroad abandoned a 7-year-old South Korean girl that they had adopted as a baby. Apparently, the couple took in the girl after failing to conceive. Subsequently, they had two biological children, and then decided that their adopted child didn't "fit in" with their lifestyle—that she was struggling to adapt to their culture, and that they just couldn't take it anymore. Now the girl's in foster care in Hong Kong!
The Dutch couple's story just doesn't make any sense. The girl grew up with them, how could she fail to "adapt"? If I'm reading the story correctly, the couple's suggesting that the girl's innate South Korean-ness has made it impossible for them to care for her as a daughter.
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