Let’s hope this young journo doesn’t look back on this piece with regret.
Throughout 2018, I literally had recurring dreams where I would find out I was pregnant. Part of me blames Kylie – I often watch her content before going to sleep. Stormi is ridiculously cute. Part of me also blames my 26-year-old uterus’ own increasingly vocal biological agenda.
Having a baby right now doesn’t square with my career ambitions or financial reality. And, yet, Kylie has somehow hacked my brain into thinking having my own little Stormi right now is exactly what I want.
So far so biology or another woman’s fault. But wait, surely we can blame men for something?
Oh yes:
Patriarchal societies have a vested interest in making motherhood look like the ultimate utopic end goal women should prioritise above all else. This keeps women feeling “bad” if they can’t have or don’t want kids and naturalises their role as “caregivers” in society, thus helping to keep them from accruing the same influence as men in other domains like business, law, politics and culture.
Wait, what?
You’ve just admitted that your uterus is shouting at you to have a baby but somehow that’s duh patriarchy?
Men keep you feeling “bad” for not having a baby? Do women have any agency in this decision?
Bueller? Anyone?
Bill’s Opinion
Listen, Natasha Gillezeau, if your career was so important to you that you’d put your instinctive desires to give birth on hold, one would hope that it would have paid off by now.
As it is, you’re being paid a pretty crappy salary (you are on the books, right, and not just a freelancer?) working for a company that is very much in decline even for an industry that is in decline in general.
Mr Scientist puts it more eloquently:
No Natasha, if you want a baby and you’ve found the right person to have one with, chuck the contraception away and get on with it.
Finally, the financial reason you mention, which I assume will be something along the lines of, “we’re only renting a small apartment“, is just an excuse. Kids don’t give a stuff whether you’ve got a mortgage or a rental contract.
She wants to be a single mom. Apart from the sperm part she doesn’t want any male involvement with her child. Having a male partner to lean on financially and otherwise is grounds for shredding her fem card.
This.
I suspect she’s swallowed the intersectional pill and won’t wake up to reality until it’s too late to have a child.
I seem to be increasingly meeting lots of women with this problem. Obviously, I’m meeting them in the office, not socially, as they don’t have to attend school or sports events like the rest of us.
I don’t think there is much mileage in trying to link the concepts in this miserable piece to a real person called Natasha Gillezeau. She has chosen to work on a treadmill where you have to turn out pieces by the yard which generate clicks. There are certain hackneyed themes which (on a rainy Tuesday morning, after a second coffee) seem to do the trick. Ticking biological clocks; anxieties regarding jobs and their relative status; glamorous celebrities; and (of course) The Patriarchy. These are standard tropes which will get other bored women in similar offices clicking and skimming before they get back to the spreadsheets and that boring sales report.
Next week she’ll do a piece on having lots of gay male friends, what to say to her best friend who is considering transitioning, and whether career women in their late twenties can still do drugs. None of it is real.
Jeez Sam V you’re no fun. Of course it’s clickbait copy editor bullshit. But I’m also bored so I’ll take the bait:
accruing the same influence as men in other domains like business, law, politics and culture
Ignoring that women already have out-sized influence in those domains, what she and her ilk fail to consider is to what end do all these vile men accrue all this “influence” (she means money). True to form she forgets there are two sides to the civilization thing: caregiving AND provisioning. It would be one thing if men earned their fortunes then went fishing and drinking with their friends all day, I guess, but somehow all that “influence” ends up providing for the women and children of their life. In a welfare state much of it goes to other peoples’ women and children.
Once again these children haven’t considered the implications of their own “utopic end goal women should prioritise above all else”. If men are sad that they cannot be caregivers and react accordingly, and if women bravely take up the provider role, women like our copy editor NPC would have no choice but to accrue influence, lest they are left “feeling sad” that no man will choose them.