Childfree and The Media

Pandemian has a funny article up about being childfree and dealing with the media.  She says that when it comes to the childfree, the media :

"want gentle, unthreatening women, ones who work hard in a caring job and love other people's children but have, with long, drawn out agonizing, decided not to have their own. Those who are, please note carefully, not selfish, pleasure-seeking or otherwise uppity in any fashion and certainly not those who will make their vast childbearing readership in the slightest bit uncomfortable about their own choices. I, sterilised at twenty, openly hostile to the cult of motherhood and prone to wet myself with primal fear whenever I find myself in the pregnancy test aisle of Boots must have my sharp corners rounded, must be sweetened for general consumption"

All I can say is that this most definitely rings a bell.  I was, and notionally still am, the chair of Kidding Aside - The British Childfree Association.  While, at the moment this means about as much as being king of nowhere, there was a time when that involved doing quite a bit of media.  In fact, I took the chair job largely because I was happy to do media and, at the time, was a grad student and so could do media without having to take time off work.

The bulk of the encounters I had with the media were as follows :

Them : "Hi, I'm X from Y magazine... we're looking to do a piece on being childfree"
Me : "Great... how can I help you?"
Them : "You can put me in contact with a woman, or preferably a couple who are willing to have their photo taken."
Me : "well... I can answer any questions you might have."
Them : "No, we're just looking for someone to put in a photoshoot"
Me " Grrrr... I'll ask but I'm not making any promises" (or in one case more recently) "It's not as though I'm a childfree pimp and have these people living in bedsits".

In my experience, the media has no interest in the issues surrounding childfreedom (such as the fact that childfree people regularly work longer hours, for less pay and pay more tax than parents in identical jobs) but rather saw the whole thing as a bit of a freak show for closed-minded middle-aged women who would be astonished to hear that, actually, not everyone wants to have kids.

The first encounter I had with Woman's Hour was when they wanted someone to come on the show either that morning or for a pre-recorded piece that would be done later that day.  Either way, it was a rush-job and I would have had to have done it that day or not at all.  Or so I thought.

Them : "So is it you that does the media?"
Me : "Yes, I can do it today if you want"
Them : "There aren't any women?"
Me : "Not if you're wanting people for today.  Give me 10 days or so and I might be able to find someone but otherwise it's me"
Them : "We really wanted a woman as it's show policy to favour female guests and the person you'll be speaking against is a man."
Me : "Well tough..."

I didn't really say that but I made it clear that if they wanted the job doing now it would be me or nobody.  I think they preferred nobody.  This also highlights another interesting aspect of the way the media deals with issue-based politics.  By and large, the media want you available TODAY.  Not tomorrow, or next week, but NOW.  This is because they operate on incredibly short deadlines but one of the results of it is that it's practically impossible to do proper media unless you have someone whose job it is to do media.  Immediately this means that only certain issues and certain viewpoints get reported.  One of my more memorable encounters was with, I think, The Daily Express.

Them : "so... how was the group founded?"
Me : "Blah Blah, message board.  Blah blah online.  Blah Blah divided the jobs up."
Them : "So you were there when the group was founded?"
Me : "Yes, there was another guy there too and some women"
Them : "There isn't someone female who'd do media is there?"
Me : "No"
Them : "Well... are there any other female members?"
Me : "Yes, of course... our membership is mostly female actually"
Them : "Would it be okay if we said that one of those female members was the chair and that they'd founded the organisation on their own?"
Me : "So you want me to lie and airbrush myself and the other male members founding and non-founding out of the organisation's history for the sake of a story?"
Them : "Yes".

I can kind of understand the problem.  If a woman says that she doesn't want to have children then she's going against her nature as a child-producer and it's assumed that the decision was a careful one.  However, if a male says that he doesn't want kids then he's an immature manchild.  It doesn't matter if you're speaking out of a principle or if you're pointing out that actually, there are loads of queer people who are childless and thereby affected by laws aimed at "making life easier" for families.  Ultimately the media only wants to hear certain messages from certain kinds of people.  Which is at least as interesting as the question as to why people wouldn't want to have kids, which is pretty fucking dull when you think about it.

Comments

[liam]

Not sure I agree with the comparison with men who do not want kids. Is such a relativist approach right for starters? I am 38 and have no kids. For the past two years my family have been hassling me about being childless.

This argument belongs to another age. It's a bit like watching some modern equal opportunity documentary where the director has to rely on some film clip from the 1940s showing the woman do turgid housework....clichéd and not relevant. Indeed the only time we get to be dragged into these arguments is when some hyper-sensitive media type raises the issue.

For me I am more interested in the fact that in Longsight, Manchester there are women working in sweatshop conditions for les than the minimum wage.

I suspect that feminism is of benefit only to the the middle classes.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think feminism is of benefit to all women.

I also think that feminism is like environmentalism... it's something the middle classes can buy into without actually needing to do anything and without needing to be all that well informed. It's a lifestyle.

So Woman's Hour et al do features on how some people actually choose not to have children while the real issues slip by uncommented upon. The main reason why I became so disenchanted with childfree activism was that it was never more than a human interest story for the media.

The Blair years saw tens of thousands of adults slip below the poverty line because the government wanted to help "poor children". This helping poor children frequently materialised as tax cuts and credits that extended well into what anyone would call the middle classes. So, under the guise of helping poor ickle children, Blair not only did nothing to help tens of thousands slip below the poverty line, he even increased the tax burden on them while lightening it for middle class people with kids.

but it's much easier to paint the issue as "some women don't want kids" but you couldn't possibly have a man talking about that could you?

[Jacob Martin]

Books like About A Boy by Nick Hornby address the male response to child rearing. Still haven't finished it, but it's a good read on the issue.

Currently I have no idea whether I could cope with child rearing, but would like to support child adoption, and may have children on my own in the future.

I support people's right to be childless, but when I am directly labelled a contributor to overpopulation for merely entertaining the notion of having kids, I feel uncomfortable. It is not so much an issue of whether people should have children or not for me, it's how people who do/do not have children treat each other for their choices. My Uncle and Aunt are childless, and they're great people who don't judge me for thinking about having children. I think one of the main hurdles of the media coverage of childless activism will be the motives for childlessness and how childless people view others who do have kids. Childless couples would be entirely likeable by most people if they did not agressively lecture people who do not yet know whether to have children or not about why having children is bad and the reasons behind their arguments.

What I don't like is how the media expects couples to have children, even if they don't want to or could not cope with having children in their lives, but at the same time, if I decided to have children, I would not want to have to defend myself for my choice, as childless couples would want the same rights.