Although Knocked Up Was Sexist...

This disparity is on display in a whole series of recent comedies, from School of Rock to High Fidelity. It's also powerfully familiar to anyone who follows the so-called Mommy Wars. In that proliferating literature of family friction, women's lives seem to shrink to a series of pragmatic decisions about achieving balance, while men are concerned with domestic stuff only to the degree that they choose to be. In this regard, Knocked Up is in keeping with the zeitgeist: If, as Heigl delicately put it, the movie is a "little sexist," that is because it is the natural product of a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don't know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do, whether they're free-associating brilliantly with their friends, or lazily absorbed in video games. (The trope cuts both ways, of course: It allows men to be comedic geniuses, but it also means that husbands get portrayed right and left as childish dopes.) Just glance at a book like The Bitch in the House, where female essayists portray their male partners as slouches who don't get the job done until they're given a to-do list.

Stories about boys who have more fun than girls go back to Wendy and Peter Pan. But there was a time when romantic comedies, as Denby points out, were more egalitarian in their assignment of playfulness. These days, romantic comedies routinely depict a loss of some essential autonomy for the man, and a lesson in "balance" for the woman. A culture that assigns all that weight to what "men" and "women" want only makes it more difficult for couples to establish their own fruitful ratio of intimacy to privacy. The best moments in Knocked Up are those that suggest the world doesn't have to be this way—that of course women can possess playful inner lives too. There aren't quite enough of them. You leave feeling that what poor Debbie—and Alison—really wants is not a husband who knows to bring home pink cupcakes for a birthday party, but a culture that grants them the same indulgent latitude their partners get: the luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible. Slacker, starring a woman. Barring that, of course, there's Juno, the story of a knocked-up girl from her own irreverent perspective—written, as it happens, by a female scriptwriter—now playing in a theater near you.

Enlightenment: that's what I want too. That's why my last serious relationship ended, so long ago, I think. I didn't always want to have to be the responsible one. It's taxing. Now I'm much less responsible (seeming), so others hopefully won't ask me to be constantly on top of things. That's not my job. At work as a lab tech it is, maybe, but if you're at home and have a significant other it should not just be your job. Bollocks to that.