Brainless By Choice

This is why you should never read anything. You’re having a lovely day, basking in the serenity of life, and then you go online, click on a link, and suddenly everything is ruined as your head erupts in a fireball of anger and frustration and generalised hatred towards your own species.

I don’t see why I should suffer alone, so here, read this article. It was published on a site called “Kidspot”, which I guess is for people who want to put children into pots. The header, as you see, reads, “It kills me when people say they don’t want kids”, but unfortunately this is just a figure of speech. Just below that, intriguingly, it says:

This powerful piece about how it feels to people struggling with infertility when they hear others rejecting kids, is a must-read.

This is intriguing because once you read the piece, you realise that the piece is not about that at all: in fact there’s barely a mention of “people struggling with infertility”. It’s actually just a piece about how dickheads find validation by telling the world that they’re dickheads. On the other hand, it definitely is powerful — better than a stomach pump.

So anyway, the author starts off with some general abuse of twentysomethings, which to a certain extent I’m on board with — because I’m not in my twenties, so I totally get that people who are suck. It’s an incredibly dull and predictable thing to write about, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. So far, so good.

They then go off about someone called Holly Brockwell, who apparently fought a four-year battle to be allowed to have her tubes tied. And I don’t mind that bit so much either, because while on the one hand I don’t care whether anyone has their tubes tied or not, on the other hand I don’t care whether anyone has their tubes tied or not. In other words, whatever decisions you make about your Fallopian region are fine with me, but if you’re going to stand on the roof shouting to the world about how special you are, you’re basically an annoying twat and you should stop it.

But then that’s the whole problem with the author of the Kids’ Pot article: they are correct that people who think they are special because of their reproductive preferences are rubbish; they’re just incorrect about thinking that they are one of the worst examples of that kind of person ever. This is what they (the “Kidspot editor” — I don’t know who they are) say about Holly Brockwell:

She’s treated her body like someone who got handed the 70 metre Bayeux Tapestry, realised they did’t have room for it in the bedroom of their current sharehouse, and set fire to it.

Then went to the media to brag about it.

To the people who wouldn’t mind owning the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s kind of offensive.

OK, firstly, you can play that game with anything. Someone can throw away half a packet of Twisties because they’re not hungry anymore, and you can say, “he treated that packet of Twisties like someone who got handed the Bayeux Tapestry…to the people who wouldn’t mind owning the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s kind of offensive.” Because hey, some people would’ve loved those Twisties, right?

The analogy falls down firstly because neither the Twisties, nor Ms Brockwell’s body, actually IS a priceless eleventh-century tapestry, and secondly because burning the Bayeux Tapestry prevents anyone else having it, whereas young Holly having her tubes tied doesn’t affect anyone else’s tubes one way or another. Oh, and thirdly, because c’mon, obviously this is bollocks.

Here’s a better analogy: she treated her body like someone who was asked if she would like her entire house painted purple, but didn’t like purple, so she said no I’d rather not. To people who wouldn’t mind a purple house, it’s kind of irrelevant.

Or an even better one: she treated her body like…her body.

And again, I don’t care about how Holly Brockwell treats her body, and if she wants to shut up about it I’ll warmly shake her hand. But she’s at least preferable to this Kids’ Pot knobwit. Here’s how the piece goes on:

When a childless person tells you they weren’t able to conceive, or that the right person never came along, it’s sad. It’s also human and relatable. But when a person tells you they didn’t have kids because they didn’t want them, it means something different altogether.

It means they couldn’t perceive a world in which they were inconvenienced. It means they thought doing the one thing their body was designed to do was less important than getting a night of uninterrupted sleep.

I don’t even know how you write those sentences without your own hands rising off the keyboard, slapping you in the face and telling you to fuck off. This is next-level commercial-grade bullshit. This is omnidirectionally obnoxious.

Firstly, “the one thing their body was designed to do”? Pull your head out of it, buddy. Our bodies “can” do things — they were not “designed” to do them. Example: you “can” write mind-blowingly awful op-eds on a stupid website. It doesn’t mean anybody designed you to. If they did, I’ll happily go to hell blaspheming against whoever it was.

But even if the human body was “designed” to have children, it sure as hell isn’t the “one thing” it was designed to do. Our bodies were also “designed” to run and jump and punch and kick and eat and drink and dance and fuck. Or rather, they weren’t designed to do any of those things, but were designed for them just as much as they were designed for child-bearing.

But further: couldn’t perceive a world in which they were inconvenienced? You unimaginable bag of crap. Like if you don’t have kids, everything in life will be smooth and trouble-free and you won’t ever do anything challenging or difficult. Like we have one choice in life: to have kids or not; and what we choose determines whether we are ever inconvenienced. Parenthood is the only contribution we can ever make, and the only possible obstacle we’ll ever have to surmount.

But further to that: a night of uninterrupted sleep? I’m assuming this author IS a parent, and if interrupted sleep is the only problem they’ve ever had, then — to stick to today’s theme of overwhelming judgmentalism — they are a really shitty one. Being a parent is a thousand jobs and a thousand irritations and a thousand awful creeping fears that you live with every day. Deciding to have children means deciding to take all of them on, without even really knowing what they are, and learning to navigate them one terrifying moment at a time. But to this “writer”, parenthood is just a really cute kind of insomnia. God knows who’s watching their kids.

This is the thing: people who slam the childless are always ripping into them for “selfishness”: you’re too self-obsessed to devote your time to another person; you should think of someone other than yourself; why can’t you give to the world, instead of taking all the time?

But here is a fact, for all you fact fans: selfishness needs a target. You can’t be “selfish” unless you are wilfully refusing to be “otherpeopleish”. In other words, deciding to have no children isn’t selfish, because the people you are theoretically being selfish towards don’t exist. Maybe you’re imagining a cloud with loads of unborn babies sitting on it, crying because their parents put their own uninterrupted sleep ahead of their right to exist, but that makes you a lunatic, not a paragon of charity.

What would be selfish would be creating a whole actual human being purely to satisfy societal expectations. For the sake of a status symbol, you’re not only inflicting all the pains of existence on an innocent person, but also all the pains of existence as the child of someone who didn’t really want children. What cruelty!

But Mr or Mrs Kids’ Pot is so preeningly narcissistic that they see children not as people but as tools with which to ameliorate existential angst.

For the rest of us, nature eventually plays a trick where it says “Guess what. You’re boring. You’ve travelled. Now it’s time to put your energy into the next generation.”

In fact, doesn’t happen to the rest of us. It happens to all of us, including Holly Brockwell. She doesn’t know it now, but over time her views will soften. She’ll become bored telling people of her brave decision over fashionable whisky cocktails.

Yeah. Maybe she will. Or maybe she won’t. I don’t know. You don’t know. How does someone grow to adulthood still believing that everyone is exactly the same? And more importantly, how does someone grow to adulthood actually caring that they don’t?

Seriously. If Holly Brockwell doesn’t have kids, why the hell do you care? How the hell does it hurt you? And if she ends up regretting it, well, that’s a shame. People have regrets. Nobody can do everything in life. We’ll all miss out on something. What kind of creep considers that a moral failing?

What kind of creep, in fact, writes something like this:

Then, she’ll meet a man who loves her, and with whom she can imagine setting up a home, and he’ll tell her the thing he wants most in the world is kids.

And, because getting your tubes tied is not the same as getting a dolphin tattoo on your ankle and vaguely regretting it later, she’ll have to tell him. I can’t have children because once upon a time I made the decision that I would never be able to. The man may hang around, although probably not, men are fickle like that, and she’ll become an aunty who’s loads of fun but doesn’t much fit in with the clubbing crowd anymore and actually doesn’t feel like another bloody trip to Thailand or New York or Melbourne…

Really?

REALLY? Now we’re at the point where we’re saying you need to have kids to catch a man, and somehow it’s the woman who doesn’t do that who’s selfish. Where being “an aunty who’s loads of fun” is the worst fate that can ever befall a woman. Also: “men are fickle” like that. Fuck you.

Fuck you and fuck anyone who wants to divide humanity into the righteous and the wicked based on their enthusiasm for parenthood. Some people want children. Some do not. That’s fine. If someone decides to have kids, it doesn’t hurt me, and if they decide not to have kids, it doesn’t hurt me to exactly the same extent. It doesn’t hurt you either. Stop pretending that it does, and let adult human beings make their own decisions about the best way to live their lives.

In other words, next time you’re tempted to write an article about sad it is to be childless by choice — or for that matter, how sad it is to have children — take a good look in the mirror, and resolve that from this day forward you will try to be less of a cockspank.

Then we’ll all be happier.