Hopeless: Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg in “Celeste and Jesse Forever” — where Jesse refuses to mature until he gets a different woman pregnant. (AP)
How can we get men to grow up?
In the new film “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” Jesse (Andy Samberg) is some kind of installation artist who sits in his room eating chips and watching reruns of old Olympics. His successful ex-wife Celeste (Rashida Jones) explains to her girlfriend that she divorced Jesse because he’s immature.
She believes that the father of her as-yet-unborn children should “own a pair of dress shoes and a car.” Not exactly a high bar for a woman who launched her own marketing firm in Los Angeles.
Celeste isn’t the most likable of characters, but it’s easy to understand her position. If only she had stuck to her guns. Instead she remains in love with Jesse after their divorce, letting him live in his studio in the back of their house and even going out with him as if they are still together.
But another woman does make Jesse grow up — the old-fashioned way. She gets pregnant and he steps up to the plate, starting to work harder and worry about whether he’ll be a good father.
Cinema déjà vu: In Judd Apatow’s 2007 film “Knocked Up,” Seth Rogin’s character is ultimately pushed out of his partially employed, pot-infused life after he gets a girl pregnant during a one-night stand. Hugh Grant also played this part, albeit a slightly classier version, in the 1995 movie “Nine Months.”
With the age of marriage climbing higher and higher and professional women starting to leave their male peers in the dust when it comes to educational attainment and income, elite women are simply treating men like “boy toys” — and men have little incentive to act like anything more.
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin offers a picture of life among the successful women of Harvard and Yale. They take home the men they think will be the most fun in bed and do everything they can to avoid getting into a serious relationship for fear it will derail their careers.
Even further down the food chain, Rosin reports, undergraduates at a large Midwestern university tell researchers that they don’t want real commitment. “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it, so instead they opt for a lighter hookup.”
Rosin celebrates these developments, explaining that “feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture.” This is progress?
Let’s assume that these young women are actually happy with their hookups — and anyone who has spent a lot of time with 20-something women should be skeptical — the problem with this scenario is that most of these women want to get married and have children eventually.
“I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good,” one young woman explains.
Um . . . just who are they going to settle down with? Are these men going to magically turn into marriage material?
The hookup culture means they don’t take women out on dates — or even treat them particularly well. They don’t have to impress women with stable jobs or clean apartments or even a consistent level of sobriety. Who’d want to marry them?
Some will say that the idea that women have to domesticate men is a throwback to another era. Why is it our responsibility? But if women don’t, who will?
In this feminist fairy tale, the princesses seem content to keep kissing frogs. And the frogs keep watching Spike TV on their lily pads with no motivation to become princes.
Getting pregnant isn’t the most advisable way to force men to become adults. After all, there is a good chance that the video-game-playing slacker will remain the video-game playing slacker even after his girlfriend has a baby. But women may soon run out of better options.