As a childless person, many feelings are evoked by the annual flood of back-to-school photos on Facebook, but sadness is not one of them.
I am not completely childfree by choice. Of the many madnesses I indulged in during lockdown, perhaps the biggest was restarting the IVF fertility treatment I had started and stopped a few years earlier. Perhaps it was the sudden, uninvited interruption from work to reflect on the broader trajectory of my life, perhaps a broader existential terror brought on by an immediate global threat to human existence.
My partner and I wore a mask and made the same pilgrimage as an increasing number of Australian families through pandemic silence from home to clinic, and I was dosed, scraped, monitored, and injected until my hopes soared to the sky and then collapsed. And then it collapsed again. And again. Then I was too old for treatment. Then the useless treatment stopped. After the last failed lap, yes, I cried in the car all the way home.
To be honest, it’s hard to keep it together when you’re experiencing something so intimate, private, and personal that simultaneously involves standing pantsless and spread-eagled in front of a parade of doctors for months on end. Disappointment is also more brutal when it is shared so fully with the person you love most. Add to that the hormonal treatment cyclones that make you feel like you’re experiencing every premenstrual day of your life at once and – in my case, like an idiot – the global disease catastrophe raging outside. A few tears are understandable… but, dear friends, hardly lasting.
The strangest consequence of my failed IVF was that, as I came to terms with it, I became aware of a polite but unspoken social expectation that couldn’t possibly be true. There is a hesitation among friends to discuss their own pregnancy news with me. A friend who took her speech about the upcoming birth from our group chat out of a tender – but misplaced – kindness. A very good friend who apologized to me that his partner’s IVF had worked and that a baby was imminent. “But I’m happy…” I said, confused – and I remembered this particular conversation recently, when I commented on how beautiful all the back-to-school photos were and my parenting friends seemed genuinely surprised.
It’s been said before, but we are a strange, wedged generation, Generation pre-liberal parents. than we realise. In the patriarchal, limited and desperately sexist world of the past, you can imagine that a woman without children might have been an object of anxious pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that there was more than just partnership and parenthood existed. there weren’t that many other fulfilling experiences available to women. Our biological destiny is not to reproduce – remember? It’s just dying and finding ways to spend our time meaningfully before we do.
From my own experience, I can reassure the fear that not having children will be like not getting a coveted job or a place at art school, or the sudden death of a loved one, or being dumped by someone with whom you have a future. saw. Life-changing, certainly – but not defining, not all-consuming.
This reality cannot be reiterated enough, given the relentless online onslaught of a sad and angry manosphere, and their AI-generated insistence that women’s only happiness depends on having as many children as possible. Their crawling over newly crowned, “Miss America” with eight children neatly omits the recognition that the opportunities afforded to that woman to realize herself – as a reminder, as a beauty queen – are not universally available.
Sadly, we can no longer console ourselves with the fact that the fantasizing man-boys and the poster girls they choose represent an ineffective, fringe movement. Their brutal messages are simplistic, emotional and manipulative, exerting increasing influence on the impressionable minds of Western boys. Extraordinary research recently published in the Financial Times shows that this is an unprecedented situation ideological gender gap opening between young men and women. While girls have embraced feminism’s offerings of social equality, diversity and broad opportunity, aggressive views on church-children-kitchen gender roles for women are emerging among their male contemporaries. What does the future look like? Stormy… and for young women, if trends continue, potentially dangerous.
There are, of course, countermeasures available – and one of them, I think, is embracing an active role for the childless and childless in the broad community of family and friends that actually helps people with children raise their children – especially in scenarios where double careers, other care obligations and ongoing economic demands place so much pressure on parents’ time. A meaningful, personal connection to the diversity of lives lived in a positive way strengthens a better and more compelling argument against gender roles than the manosphere could ever counter.
But there is another powerful – and more difficult – option… and that is letting go of the old gender issues within ourselves.