As a childless person, many feelings are aroused by Facebook’s annual floods of back-to-school photos but sadness is not one of them.
I am not entirely childfree by choice. Of the many madnesses I indulged in during lockdown, perhaps the greatest was restarting IVF fertility treatment I had begun and abandoned a few years before. Maybe it was the sudden unasked-for break in work to think about my life’s broader trajectory, maybe a broader existential terror provoked by an immediate global threat to human existence.
My partner and I masked-up and made the same pilgrimage as an increasing number of Australian families through pandemic silence from home to clinic, and I was dosed, scraped, checked and injected until my hopes soared in the sky and then came crashing down. And then came crashing down again. And again. Then I was too old for treatment. Then the futile treatment stopped. After the final failed round, yes, I did cry all the way home in the car.
To be fair, it’s hard to hold it together when you’re going through something so intimate and private and personal that simultaneously involves you being pantsless and splayed before a parade of clinicians for months of your life. Disappointment is also more brutal when it’s shared so completely with the person you most love. Add to this the hormonal cyclones of treatment that make you feel as if you are having every pre-menstrual day of your life all at once and – in my case, like an idiot – the worldwide disease catastrophe raging outside. A few tears are understandable … but, sweet friends, hardly permanent.
The strangest wake of my failed IVF was, while I’m reconciled to it, I’ve become aware of a polite but unspoken social expectation that couldn’t possibly be. There’s been a hesitation among friends to raise their own pregnancy news with me. A friend who took her impending-birth talk out of our group chat from a tender – but misplaced – kindness. A very close pal actually apologising to me that his partner’s IVF had worked and a baby was imminent. “But I’m thrilled …” I said, confused – and I remembered this specific chat the other day, when I remarked how lovely all the back-to-school photos were and my parenting friends seemed genuinely surprised.
It’s been said before, but we are a strange, sandwiched generation, Generation X. Our instincts may be those of the modern liberalism – I mean, we built it – but I wonder whether our frameworks are more the hangups of our pre-liberal parents than we realise. In the patriarchal, restricted and desperately sexist world that came before, one can imagine that a woman without children may have been a object of concerned pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that beyond partnership and parenthood there weren’t so many other fulfilling experiences for women on offer. Our biological destiny isn’t to reproduce – remember? It’s just to die, and find ways to meaningfully occupy our time before we do.
From my own experience, let me reassure the anxious that not having kids becomes like not getting a wanted job or a place at art school, or the sudden death of someone close, or being dumped by someone you saw a future with. Life-changing, sure – but not defining, not all-consuming.
This reality can’t be repeated enough, given the relentless online onslaught from a sad and angry manosphere, and their AI-generated insistence that the only happiness for women relies on having as many kids as possible. Their fawning over recently crowned, eight-childrened “Miss America” neatly elides acknowledging that the opportunities offered to that woman to self-actualise – reminder, as a beauty queen – are not universally available.
Alas, we can no longer comfort ourselves that the fantasising menboys and the poster girls they choose represent an ineffective, marginal movement. Simplistic, emotional and manipulative, their relentless messaging exerts increasing influence over the impressionable minds of western boys. Extraordinary research recently published in the Financial Times identifies an unprecedented ideological gender divide opening between young men and women. While girls have embraced feminism’s offer of social equality, diversity and breadth of opportunity, aggressive beliefs in church-children-kitchen gender roles for women are emerging in their male contemporaries. What does the future look like? Stormy … and for young women, should the trends continue, potentially dangerous.
There are countermeasures available, of course – and one of these, I’d suggest, is embracing active roles for the childless and childfree in the broad community of family and friends that actually helps people with kids raise their children – especially in scenarios where dual careers, other care commitments and ongoing economic demands so fiercely squeeze any parents’ time. Meaningful, personal connection to the diversity of lives lived positively reinforces a better and more compelling argument against gender roles than the manosphere could ever counteract.
Yet there’s another powerful – and more difficult – option, too … and that’s to drop the old gender hangups in ourselves.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
