Hetero and male is out. Homo and female is in. Or so the fear goes.
Ah, summertime, a season of sun-dappled beaches… and artificial insemination movies? The arrival of The Back-up Plan, The Kids Are All Right and the forthcoming The Switch indicates more than a minor rustling of cultural anxiety. By gesturing towards a certain kind of independence for women – that they can bypass romantic partnerships with men when having babies – while still limiting their characters to many of the reductive romantic comedy conventions, these films illustrate the conflicted state of feminism, masculinism, and the couple in the 21st century.
Yet, The Kids Are All Right – scheduled for an October release in Britain – marches to a slightly different beat. The real inconvenient truth of our time is not climate change but the confusion that comes with shifting gender roles. Thanks to these sexual category adjustments, we now live in a time when the Atlantic can publish an article entitled "The End of Men" that charts women's social ascendancy, even as much of the same old sexism is circulating; a time that some label post-feminist, while others say there is still so much work to be done.
Summer films are generally thought to be silly and escapist – and sperm donor flicks certainly offer the goofy quotient. But they struggle to deliver the escapism because they inevitably come up against a masculine "hysteria" about men's end – or, more precisely, the fear that all ladies now need is their seed. This is especially true of movies that deal with reproductive technology as it relates to lesbian partnership, as in the case of The Kids Are All Right.
It's important to note that a whiff of male inadequacy hovers around the whole process: although there are many situations in which AI is used (including on farm animals), the main function it serves is to a) supplement a heterosexual relationship in which the male is infertile; or b) in scenarios where there isn't a man in the picture to begin with. This places it firmly in the insecurity zone of the psychic map of masculinity. These films foreground and dramatise a psychologically and biologically horrifying prospect for men – the fragmentation of their manhood both literally and figuratively. Their masculine presence is no longer required and the semen that comes with it can just be harvested from their bodies and used by others in a way that neither benefits nor includes them.
It's not surprising that, for the sake of male egos everywhere, these movies appear to pitch a kind of sexual self-service situation for the ladies, but then subsequently revoke that offer. Although they threaten to take the men out of the mix altogether, they ultimately ease up on that threat.
Clearly, the recent surge of reproductive technology has raised the spectre of the abolition of men being "men" and women being "women", particularly in their having standard baby-making relations. Given the romantic intricacies of this age of metrosexuality, retrosexuality, and the advancement of women, gay rights and same-sex marriage, social change has to be acknowledged and assimilated to some degree. The Kids Are All Right is revolutionary in that it highlights a real – as in, flawed but clearly functional – example of successful same-sex coupledom and recognises an alternative type of motherhood in a country whose president doesn't believe in it, and where there have been a number of efforts to define matrimony as strictly hetero, such as the recently overturned Proposition 8.
Like The Back-up Plan and The Switch, The Kids Are All Right does insert a man between the two women, in a last-ditch attempt to repair the image of male sexual fragmentation, but unlike them, it also takes him out in the end. That is a ringing final verdict on same-sex love, and by extension, on the viability of women living full lives without men.