Since you guys pounded auto mod because you're incapable of reading the sidebar, this needed to be added.

Rule #6 : No examples from fiction or lyrics

Fiction, pop songs, daytime television freakshows, and reality tv do not present useful examples of typical human behaviour, and thus cannot be learned from.

Discussion of overarching popular culture themes, however, is on-topic and makes for an interesting analysis of the shifts in cultural thinking.

Use of fiction or other controlled narratives (reality tv, etc) should only be used as an example of the author's psychology, not the character's.

So if you haven't seen this movie, you aren't missing much. I consider this movie essentially unwatchable for anyone who has actually made peace with the content here and isn't "using it as a toolbox." There's a couple good lines, some good acting and a masterclass in how you can have a movie take place in a car for an hour and a half and actually get someone to watch it.

The setup

A married construction manager with a family leaves one of the largest "pours" his company has ever done after 9 years on the job after a last minute phone call from a one night stand who is prematurely going into labor.

He decides to hand the job over to a young, inexperienced worker who he has faith in and calls his wife to say he'll be home the next morning because he knocked up a 42 year old woman from a one night stand. This goes as you'd predict and he is quickly fired from his job and his wife has a breakdown, calls her sister and tells him to never return to her house.

The whole time, anyone watching this movie is obviously trying to figure out in their head how he's going to unfuck his whole life.

He manages to coach the pour from the drive and he's close to the hospital as she gives birth. The post wall one night stand calls and asks if he'll be there. He reassures her that he will in fact be there.

The punch line

And then, the movie ends.

For those of you already unplugged, you might be asking yourself what?

What can we learn from this?

If society valued the nuclear family, the movie would have made little sense and had poor ratings. This movie makes a lot of sense to heavily conditioned men and irresponsible or idealistic women.

The reason why the movie did well at all, which is actually saying quite a lot given the challenge of how it was filmed, is because the ending punchline resonates with the cultural demographic of movie watchers.

The idea of a man leaving his family, with his own children, to go tend to a 42 year old woman giving birth from a one night stand makes more sense than the obvious, amoral pragmatic decision to tell her "wow, that sucks" and hang up when that phone call came.

To show up and give her a little bit of instruction of how she should handle herself so she gets the point. Will every woman get this point? No. Do 100% of men reading this last part understand what I'm saying? No. But this stands.

More or less, the median man could not and would not do this, because they use their "morality" as a buffer to rationalize away their own weakness despite the overwhelming obvious point here that he owes this woman nothing.

Now there is some backpacking here, a somewhat irrelevant plot point here is the I'm not my dad trope, in which his dead father posthumously appears in the backseat of his vehicle, so he can berate him as "the reason." Vowing to never be like him. Reference Rollo here.

This is of course, an indication of widespread male conditioning that men "own up to their mistakes" as the movie puts it. But truly, this is men embracing the concept of single mother with a penis. The deadbeat father being the new modern day villain. While absolving her of any complicity.

Surely, plenty of moral types find this post in bad taste. Poking at their blue pill sensibilities, to be captain save a ho, or a ho's assurance that a man be there as a sort of giant inflatable "life net" when her behavior catches up to her.

Let's be honest here. If a woman doesn't want to get pregnant, the options are there for her. We can listen to all these ridiculous complaints about sensitivities to this type or that type of birth control, but ultimately, a woman in the United States has enough birth control options available to her to manage this.

And in fact, in this movie, she admits she was actually trying when she admits "she has no-one and this is her last chance of having something happy in her life."

From this we can assume the writer's decision to write this into the script meant that it seemed plausible, and the demographic felt this as well, that her trying to get pregnant without his knowledge did not preclude him from his duty.

This deference to the weak, reckless 42 year old woman, who this man really owes nothing, is the forged iron that is used to sledge hammer the viewer over the head with their own ill formed self-congratulatory conceptualization of virtue in regards to sexual conflict.

It is a sign of widespread weakness in the ego of men and the entitlements women hold.

The movie leaves the average viewer with a feeling of a man "doing the right thing." When from all objective analysis we can only come to the conclusion that he lit himself on fire to keep someone else warm.

Cowards and the weak love the axiom "if you're not ready for a baby, you're not ready to have sex." It absolves women of responsibility and places it solely on a man's shoulder. Of course you'd say that if you could ultimately terminate any pregnancy, with 100.00% congruence to your own wishes, so long as you're prompt and intellectually capable enough to navigate the process of abortion. And of course you'd say such a thing if you were certain any man you did this to would show up or submit to the court system.

When we speak of frame, this is what we speak of.

Men and women adopting the frame that they are responsible for some idiotic 42 year old woman's idiotic life hail mary.

Reject the psychological schema that this movie is placed on, because it is the box used to imprison you. The tools you need are simple.

A while back, a user lamented that they were crestfallen when they failed to perform with a one night stand. He berated himself and wondered how he "couldn't get hard." Clearly, he felt it was his duty to be turned on, when obviously, it's a woman's job to be attractive enough for a man to be turned on and to be part of that process. His failure to understand this became immediately clear to him, and I hope it will with any man who believes they owe anything to this metaphorical woman after reading the explanation of how this is framed below.

In order to set frame in any scenario, the overarching truth must be stronger than any perception someone can sell you. And so in this case, we have some truths and from that, we can understand how to manage the frame.

Any woman would expect, unless it is explicitly stated before hand, that no man is interested in having a child with her unless they have discussed such a matter.

1. That is, the default expectation is that a pregnancy is unwanted.

2. Sufficient birth control options and knowledge are available to make such pregnancy prevention not only easy, but convenient.

3. You can only force someone through the legal system so long as they are willing to behave in ways that are legal. So long as they are willing to "play the game."

Therefor we can conclude that any woman who gets pregnant from a one night stand has done so for her own reasons or because she's grossly negligent. Given the idea that by default a pregnancy would be wanted is absurd, it would follow that an expectation to support her in such an event would be a form of entitlement.

"You knew I wasn't interested in having a child and were negligent. Handle it, and I will support you if you choose to terminate and respect your wishes if you choose not to. But outside of that, do not ever list my name on any paper or contact me again. Are we clear?"

The most troubling part of this is that I know plenty of posters on here will sneer at this while trying to sell other users on their purple pill manifesto on how they will be the silverback patriarch of their church circle, or lift their way into the top 1% so such amoral behavior will never need to be considered in their perfect plan to the girl who is different, being as they are the "nice guy with an edge."

The truth of the matter being, if you don't understand this or are not capable of it, then you are not ready for a family.

And we can learn that from some shitty movie that rests entirely on the fact that this plot is "virtuous," not idiotic.