Being Babies

Says it all

Look, you need to explain something to me. Why in the fuck is it that we, as a society, are still - still! - discussing women who choose not to have children? Twice lately I have seen big features written by women in national papers explaining why they they've not spawned and the trouble they have when this comes up in conversation. 

Excuse me? Do you think that we, as both a nation and a species, could stop lobbing rocks at the sun for a mo and find something more bloody interesting to talk about? I dunno, the humanitarian crisis in Syria or the social destruction being waged on Britain by the Tories. Anything actually. Anything other than this mouldy fucking chestnut. 

Is it really still such an issue that women choose to not reproduce? That they employ their ability to make intelligent personal decisions? That they allow themselves to experience a life made up of career success, foreign adventures or just plain peace and quiet? Because every time a woman is pushed into explaining her decision to not explode a child from her vag what she is really doing is justifying that she is of some worth beyond being a walking womb. It's as bleakly offensive as a grope from a drunk in a pub. Each is as objectifying as the other.

You know by now that I have spawned to the tune of Kraken Junior, for stunningly complicated reasons that arose from a staggeringly bizarre situation. Yet, until that point I was a woman who had decided to never have kids. I was also a woman who had to explain this basic choice to every fucker who wondered why, at the age of 36, I still wasn't up to my neck in nappies. Christ, how I remember the bewildered stares of people when I told them that I preferred world travel and lazy Sunday mornings to being screamed at by an 8lb shitting machine. The reactions I received made me wonder if I'd actually admitted to some strange sexual fetish or an urge to chuck myself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. 

Problem is that I never heard anyone discussing why men decide to take careers over kids. Or why men travel the world when they could be watching Peppa fucking Pig instead. No one ever turned to Conjugal Kraken and asked him why he didn't want kids. They'd ask me instead, goggle eyed, as if the freakish decision was mine alone because, God forbid, that a male brain could be involved in such an irrational decision. 

So if we want to genuinely become the progressive society that we already think we are we need to stop giving a shit about what women decide to do with the tennis-ball sized organ that nestles low in their bellies. And we need to start regarding 50 per cent of the population as more than just incubators for the human fucking race. 

So let's cross our fingers for some sense, is it? Oh, and while we're at it let's just accept that sometimes women cross their legs too.