‘The Kids Are Alright’ stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a married lesbian couple raising two teenagers. Their identity as a family unit is challenged when the kids contact and befriend their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), and then further challenged when Moore’s character starts humping him. This film has taken some criticism from both sides of the spectrum, with some charging that it is not a positive portrayal of lesbians, and others asserting that it glorifies the lifestyle. Both sides are wrong.
What makes this film good is that it provides the audience with a funny and sometimes moving portrait of what I think most people might consider an alternative lifestyle without pushing an agenda. It’s sad that many moviegoers want to simply have their own belief systems affirmed, rather than be presented with a complex portrayal that may challenge some of their beliefs and perhaps affirm others. Any movie that provides insight into how others live without forcing an agenda is worth seeing, so I recommend this film which is now playing at E Street Cinema.
One bit of insight I gleaned from this movie is the pressure on same-sex couples who are raising children. When a heterosexual couple raises a kid who turns out to be a complete mess, some blame the parents and some don’t. But if a same-sex couple has a kid who becomes a delinquent, it is an indictment on an entire lifestyle, and that’s not really fair. This movie demonstrates how both moms, Bening in particular, tend to overcompensate and smother, but essentially they are just both being motherly.
The film also bravely addresses the role of the sperm donor and takes on two important social issues. While a sperm donor can hardly be considered a parent, blood is blood, and kids are going to be curious about their blood ties and should be allowed to explore them. The second is what role a male should fill in this type of relationship. Moore’s affair with the sperm donor serves as a metaphor for the need of some kind of male presence within this family unit.
The issue of a male presence in the lives of children is hardly unique to lesbian couples, and there are plenty of examples where it does not seem to have much of an impact on a child. But there are some examples to the contrary, the best are from the world of sports. We see these incredibly strong, dynamic men like Terrell Owens and LeBron James, who on the surface epitomize classic manliness. Yet, their behavior, their need to be the center of attention and the belief that they can do no wrong, makes these men seem oddly effeminate. It’s not a pejorative, moms traditionally affirm how special and unique their child is. Dad is there to put a foot in your ass when you fail to meet an obligation, and these men never had that.
Overall, good movie and it does address these issues and others very well, and I think affirms the authenticity and legitimacy of a family with two moms.
The age old male view that women are too picky has been taken to a whole new level after research found the female reproductive system may be rejecting sperm it doesn’t find good enough to create a pregnancy.
University of Adelaide Professor Sarah Robertson, who is leading the research, says tests discovered that females have an in-built quality control system, that assesses if the male partner is quality enough to invest her reproductive energy in.
“Part of this whole process is it’s a way of the female body evaluating whether the time is right and whether this particular partner is the right one to conceive a pregnancy with.
“Some women have higher thresholds to responding to this signalling pathway. It might be that with one partner they’re having more trouble than they might with another partner.
“What we understand is that there is a partner-specific component to this. Some combinations of men and women might not be compatible and it’s possible that the immune systems of some women aren’t responding correctly to their partner’s triggering molecules.
In the past, blame has generally been put with the woman if a couple is struggling to conceive and the man has healthy sperm.
But Professor Robertson says her findings show there may be another element to it and with further research there may be tests and treatments later down the track.
The research has primarily been on mice and pigs, but Professor Robertson says there is some indication that it will have the same or similar effect on human females.
“We’ve discovered that there are signalling molecules in the seminal fluid, so that after coitus when that fluid travels from the male to the female reproductive tissues it activates gene expression changes and also changes in the female immune system that increase the likelihood of a pregnancy occurring,” she said.
“At the moment we’ve done lots of work on mice and pigs and we’ve done a little bit of work with human cells and we’ve found if we put seminal fluid on cells in vitro that we get the same kind of changes in human cells.
Professor Robertson says this discovery could be extremely important from an evolutionary perspective, because it means the female body has the ability to decide when the time is right to fall pregnant.
The University of Adelaide research team is looking for female volunteers from 18-40 who have had a tubal ligation, but are in a stable, sexually active relationship.
A woman’s body may be unconsciously selective about sperm, allowing some men’s to progress to pregnancy but killing off the chances of less suitable matches, an Australian researcher said Wednesday.
University of Adelaide professor Sarah Robertson said her research suggested that sperm contains “signalling molecules” that activate immunity changes in a woman so her body accepts it.
But some apparently healthy sperm failed to activate these changes, leading to the suggestion that the female system can be “choosy” about its biological mate, she said.
“It’s rather like a two-way dance,” Robertson said.
“The male provides information that increases the chances of conception and progression to pregnancy, but the female body has a quality control system which needs convincing that his sperm is compatible.
“That’s where the dance can go wrong with some couples – if the male signals are not strong enough, or if the female system is too ‘choosy’.”
Robertson said sperm was more likely to fail if the woman had not previously been exposed to that man’s semen for at least three months.
“We used to think that if a couple couldn’t get pregnant, and the man’s semen test was normal, the problem lay with the woman. But it appears this is not always the case,” Robertson said.
The researchers plan to continue their work, which they hope will lead to improved treatments for infertility and miscarriages. – AFP
New York, Jun 23 (THAINDIAN NEWS) BeautifulPeople.com has launched a controversial virtual sperm bank. According to Sky News, they have launched the egg and sperm bank for people who want beautiful children.
BeautifulPeople.com has always opened its doors and membership to people who are beautiful. However they have been deluged with demands for the sperm and eggs of the pretty people, so they had no option but to give in to popular demand and create a virtual egg and sperm bank. However they are facing a lot of ridicule and criticism from a number of quarters for this step.
The founder of the website Robert Hintze said that, “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”
The owners of the website also added that they think that every parent would want to have a pretty child, if they had the choice, hence they implemented the idea. However the idea is not without its critics. Dr. David King who belongs to the watchdog group Human Genetics Alert says that this idea is “dangerous for our society.”
AFP – Hormone replacement therapy and lifestyle choices do not boost the risk of breast cancer associated with a dozen common genetic mutations, according to a study published Wednesday.
Factors such as hormone treatment, alcohol consumption, obesity and giving birth to a first child later in life have all been linked to a higher risk of breast cancer.
A number of common genetic variations also correlate with the disease, albeit weakly.
Earlier research suggested that combining the two types of risk factors could amplify the overall danger, but results were inconclusive.
To help tease apart genetic and non-genetic influences, scientists led by Ruth Travis at the University of Oxford examined the medical histories of some 17,350 women, 7,160 of whom had developed breast cancer.
All of the participants provided blood samples for genetic testing and information on lifestyle habits. Most of the women were post-menopausal.
The researchers looked for 12 variants in the women’s DNA known to boost the danger of cancer.
They also measured 10 environmental risk factors: age at puberty, number of births, age at first birth, breastfeeding, menopausal status, age at menopause, use of hormone therapy, body fat, height and alcohol intake.
Surprisingly, none of the 120 possible match-ups between a single genetic variant and a behavioural or body-type risk factor showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk.
“There was no convincing evidence for gene-environment interaction,” the researchers concluded.
The study did not cover data on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which have a far stronger association to breast cancer than the other genetic variants examined but are much rarer.
“Genes account for only a small proportion of breast cancers for most women and for most women the main risk remains the lifestyle factors,” said Oxford’s Jane Green, a co-author of the study.