Friday, October 26, 2007

WKYN: We Kid You Not
hmm. i have to check this out. but not right now because i'm late for drinks!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok, you and I are going to have to do some co-blogging on this whole "child free" thing, I tell you what.

Delia Christina said...

that sounds really scary to me.

bitchphd said...

Really? Boo!

No, I'm seriously curious about it.

Delia Christina said...

i went on there to check it out but, while i can totally call myself Childfree, they seemed a little...angry.
i'm sure there are really interesting ideological underpinnings to being childless on purpose, but i didn't find it there.

of course, i didn't really hang out there all that much. they called babies 'loaves.'

that's just mean.

bitchphd said...

Yeah, my experience of online Childfreepers is that they're not what you might think--folks who don't want kids of their own and are trying to raise awareness that it's really okay not to want to have lots of babies. Mostly they seem like kinda selfish assholes who hate kids.

Which is too bad, because the "it's really okay not to want to have babies" argument does need to be made.

Delia Christina said...

for me, it really was a very conscious, deliberate decision.

up until 5 or 6 years ago, i had been neutral about having children. i thought, 'if it happened, it happened.' of course, i also thought of childbearing in very traditional terms: it had to happen in a coupled context. being a single mother never ever crossed my mind.

but then i became more and more aware of all the pro-baby language around me and it started to make me angry and frustrated.

i became more aware of stories from some of my friends meeting resistance from doctors when my unmarried and childfree friends asked about being fitted for an IUD; i heard stories of over the top family pressure exerted on women to start families when those same families showed absolutely no interest in what these women did professionally; and then seeing the growth of pop culture's obsession with celebrity 'bumps' - ugh. all this just coalesced into an offensive ball of pro-baby bullshit.

but what really put me over the edge was working in the corporate world, meeting young women who all but assumed that i was like them - just bursting to breed. every month there was an engagement party, a baby shower, a visiting baby, a cooing session over various baby pictures, and lunch conversations about how 'working was okay but i really just want to get married and have kids.' it was like a freaking cult.

that's when i stopped being neutral. i decided that participating in all that wasn't for me.

you know, i actually could write about this in a longer post.