In its fashioning of teens into parents, 16 and Pregnant tells its stars’ stories along stereotypical gender lines.  Mary Beltrán has blogged about MTV’s spin-off teen-parenting show Teen Mom, writing that the show glosses over important race and class dynamics in its attempts to neatly package teen parenting. This is certainly true of 16 and Pregnant which shows class disparities but does not dwell on them, features a predominately white cast, and delivers its after-school-special style messages about safe sex and dating violence at key moments in its carefully edited, glossy narrative.  In addition, 16 and Pregnant shapes its teen drama into the dad-goes-to-work-and-mom-stays-home story held aloft as symbolic of the American dream.  At the same time, the show’s moms and dads openly question this narrative, making 16 and Pregnant a clear lens through which to view the changing role of fathers in our culture and the emerging ways mothers negotiate choice and childrearing.

Since the 1970s, a particular ideology has governed parenting practices and policies in the U.S.  This ideology can be dubbed “the ideology of intensive mothering,” a term coined by sociologist Sharon Hays in her 1998 book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Intensive mothering argues that the intense, time-consuming, and expensive work of parenting must be valued above the market and performed in the home by a parent (mother).  The unspoken assumption is, of course, that this carework is supported by the paid labor of another parent (father). Jordan cried to the camera after her son came home from the hospital that her boyfriend’s constant fleeing of her grandmother’s home to go to school and work made her feel alone, and her struggle with the isolation of stay-at-home motherhood called into question the principles of this ideology.  Jennifer, by contrast, found a safe haven in her parents’ house.  When she abandoned at-home parenting, she found herself and her sons abandoned roadside, expelled from her boyfriend’s speeding car, rescued by her own mother whose large, red minivan skidding to the highway’s edge became a symbol of Jennifer’s domestic salvation.

Season 3’s first 2 episodes brought up other topics that are sure to appear again as more teens debut: birth control discourse, infant feeding debates, teen sexuality, contested notions of fatherhood, mothers’ freedom to move between home and the outside world. 16 and Pregnant gives us glimpses of teens trying to negotiate parenthood as their very roles are changing, as parenting ideologies unquestioned for decades are renegotiated in larger social conversations, and as our appetite for reality rags-to-riches stories grows sharper with every spin-off.

After weeks of  controversy and speculation, Focus on the Family’s 30-second Super bowl spot featuring Heisman Trophy-winner Tim Tebow was as decidedly uncontroversial as CBS claimed it would be.

In the ad, mom Pam Tebow flashes a baby picture of her quarterback son and calls him her miracle baby.  In one version of the ad, Tim Tebow tackles his mother; another version of the ad has Tim walk calmly into the frame and hug his mother.

Neither ad says anything about abortion, mentions any pro-life or pro-choice buzzwords, or features anything but a mother and a son mugging happily for the camera.  Text at the end of the spots, however, directs viewers to www.focusonthefamily.com, where we can discover the rest of the Tebow story.

It is here, on the conservative, pro-life, Christian website that abortion and buzzwords abound.  Jim Daly, the organization’s president, begins his interview with Pam and Bob Tebow by arguing that 30 seconds is not enough time to tell the whole Tebow story, and yet the details of Pam Tebow’s fifth pregnancy have been thoroughly rehashed in the weeks leading up to the big game.  Thirty seconds was enough, in this case, because the viewing audience came to the ad knowing the details of Pam’s high-risk pregnancy, her doctor’s urging to abort her pregnancy to save her own life, and Pam’s decision to carry her pregnancy to term.  The Super Bowl ad, then, functioned as an enthymeme, relying upon the audience to provide necessary premises that enabled the spot to make its pro-life argument.

Focus on the Family’s Tebow interview makes standard pro-life arguments. Pam goes over the details of her pregnancy again, sidestepping the pro-choice ideograph “choice” by noting that she had no “decision” to make regarding her pregnancy when her doctor suggested abortion.  Her reproductive decisions, Pam asserts, were made by God.  Neatly conferring personhood on fetuses, Pam and Bob refer to her pregnancy as Tim and “him” throughout their retelling, and they obscure any middle ground pro-choice and pro-life rhetors may have carved by claiming that even the potential loss of a woman’s life does not necessitate abortion.  Near the end of the interview, when asked what he would say to a “girl” carrying an unplanned pregnancy, Bob Tebow looks into the camera and pleads, “Don’t kill your baby.”

This message is reinforced by several links that appear beside and underneath the interview. Viewers can visit the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association or the Tim Tebow Foundation, but it is Focus on the Family’s own links that are most explicit.  A box labeled “Know Your Options” plugs pregnancy help centers that promise to help pregnant women with “pregnancy and abortion related issues,” including The Morning After Pill. Clicking on the hypertext “Morning After Pill” brings up another box that urges readers to avoid taking large doses of hormones and notes that the MAP may in fact cause abortion, if you believe that life begins at fertilization.  Another box labeled “Be a Voice for Life,” reveals that these pregnancy help centers save the lives of “pre-born babies” (to borrow a term from Daly’s Tebow interview) by offering ultrasounds to pregnant women.  The pro-life camp’s most powerful rhetorical weapon has long been images of fetuses, and Focus on the Family is counting on images of flickering heart beats to expose the woeful inadequacy of “choice.”

Yahoo sports blogger Jay Busbee claims that the Tebow spot will revolutionize Super Bowl ads, opening the door for special interest groups to appeal to a captive beer-and-buffalo-wing-addled audience.  I am not sure this is true.  Not only does this ad not contribute anything new to the abortion debate, it asks a little too much of its viewers.  For the ad to be effective, we have to know the backstory, and we have to be willing to visit the website.  Otherwise, we’re left with the bland “Celebrate Family.  Celebrate Life” tag line.  Maybe that’s the banality the organization was trying to peddle in the first place, a slogan that makes us feel warm and fuzzy when pull out our checkbooks.

On Saturday night, 23 year-old Caressa Cameron became Miss America 2010, earning $50,000 in scholarship money, a really big crown, and an even bigger anachronistic title.

As a feminist, I have to admit that I am happy to see that the pageant itself is not the spectacle it used to be, pleased that it has moved from network TV to cable, glad that its audience has dwindled, satisfied that the lovely Miss A may no longer be our cultural ideal.  As a former small town beauty queen who demolished a 7-girl-long kick line with one false swing of my sequined Ked, however, I remain nostalgic for her relevance, entranced by her ability to strut to the music clad only in a black bikini and sparkly stiletto strappy sandals, stunned by her brand of feminine grotesque that is matched only by the leering, hyper masculinity of the pageant’s co-emcees.  That part of me, the part that relished the weight of the dime store tiara the reigning Miss Marigold slammed atop my own rigid coif, believed Saved by the Bell alum and pageant emcee A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez will always be A.C. Slater to me) when he assured viewers that the evening gown competition was more than a fashion show.  The evening gown competition, he intoned, was just another way for these accomplished young women to reveal their strengths.

And reveal they did– their breasts, their backs, the tops of their toned thighs, along with their ambitions.  During the talent competition, for example, eventual first-runner-up Miss California performed ballet while a pop-up box onscreen told at-home viewers that she dreamed of becoming a pediatric heart surgeon.  This was one of many incongruous moments of the night.  Others included last year’s queen in a camouflage evening gown; home video images of the contestants as round, beribboned girls introducing each shellacked, disciplined woman’s 90-second talent spot; cleavage baring, swimsuit wearing women blowing tearful kisses to their shiny-eyed daddies; the Miss America organization offering the largest amount of scholarship money to women while asking them to hula dance across the stage to earn it.

In her book The Most Beautiful Girl in the World Sarah Banet-Weiser contends that the Miss America pageant performs important cultural work, linking up notions of ideal womanhood to rhetorics of nationalism and citizenship.  Miss America becomes a particular kind of universal citizen, one defined by gender, femininity, and her  status as a single woman, publicly chaperoned through the brief twilight between her tenure in her parents’ house and her eventual arrival at Mrs. America-dom.  Indeed, Slater’s Lopez’s discussion of outgoing Miss A Katie Stam’s year of accomplishments culminated in his announcement of her recent engagement.  Stam flashed a right-hand sparkler at the crowd and flung her arms over head, a triumphant victory for pronatalism and compulsory heterosexuality.

Banet-Weiser points out that contestants not only engage in self-surveillance, they also turn a judgmental eye on each other.  The 2010 pageant dramatized both of these gazes.  Not only did MTV confessional-style videos of the contestants detailing their fears of wardrobe malfunctions and critiquing their own beauty and personality quirks accompany their walks down the aisle, but the women (always called girls by pageant emcees) were invited to sit onstage in open judgment of the finalists, and their own votes– in a Survivor-style twist– chose the 15th semifinalist.

For me, devouring the spectacle from the solace of my sofa,  contestants used these moments of judgment to confront and return the audience’s gaze, resisting hegemonic simplifications of themselves even as they fashioned their own images for consumption.  But that could be the old beauty queen in me borrowing the feminist’s vocabulary.  As the new Miss A took her first wobbling walk as queen, crushing the heck out of her lavish roses, I wondered has the Miss America pageant overstayed its cultural welcome?