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It’s 2019 and women are still treated like walking wombs

Are you a woman without kids? Well, listen up please, a Man on the Internet has some questions for you. On Friday, Stefan Molyneux, a far-right media personality and self-appointed expert on reproductive health, tweeted: “Women get mostly infertile at 40, but live to be 80. Without a family, what are you going to do with those 40 long long years?” His tweet quickly went viral as women explained that what they definitely weren’t going to do with those 40 long long years is give a damn about Molyneux’s opinions.

While Molyneux may be a rightwing troll, his condescending views are by no means unusual. A fun thing about being a childfree woman in your 30s is that the entire world seems to feel entitled to comment on your reproductive choices and tell you that you’d better get on with things, you’re running out of time! The idea that a woman’s most important role in life is to bring forth offspring is still deeply engrained in society and there remains a huge amount of stigma and suspicion surrounding childfree women.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stefan Molyneux’s tweet insulting women who choose to be childfree has gone viral. Photograph: Jeremy Ng/EPA-EFE

It’s not particularly controversial for a man to say he doesn’t want children; people can get their heads around that. But women, we’re told, even if we profess to be ambivalent about kids, are biologically wired for motherhood. When British journalist Holly Brockwell tried to get sterilized in her 20s she couldn’t find a doctor who would agree to do the procedure. “I’ve probably put more thought into my decision not to have children than many people put into their decision to have them,” Brockwell wrote in a 2015 Guardian op-ed. Nevertheless, people kept on knowingly telling her she would change her mind. Brockwell didn’t change her mind and got her tubes tied at the age of 30 after, she tells me via Twitter direct message, “many, many doctor’s appointments pleading”. This she says, “was a waste of everyone’s time and energy, and in the meantime I got accidentally pregnant and had a traumatic miscarriage that could have been completely avoided if I’d just been listened to. I’m now 33, and tying my tubes is the best thing I ever did. Not a smidge of regret … I’m very happy.”

You don’t need to have children to have a happy, fulfilling life. That shouldn’t need to be said in 2019 but the constant pressure to procreate means that, unfortunately, it does. Indeed, there’s evidence that women are actually happier without kids. “The healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children,” Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science, told an audience at the Hay festival earlier this year. Dolan noted that traditional markers of measuring success, like marriage and children, no longer correlate with happiness. This is particularly true if you live somewhere like America, which loves fetuses, but is incredibly hostile to motherhood. Research shows that parents in America are significantly less happy than non-parents; this happiness gap is due to a dearth of family-friendly policies such as subsidized child care and paid sick leave.

After receiving a lot of flack for his tweet, Molyneaux doubled down on it and wrote: “WOMEN HAVE BEEN BULLIED BY PROPAGANDA INTO NOT HAVING CHILDREN. I’m just countering the narrative so younger women can be reminded of a real choice.” Quite the opposite is true of course. Women have been bullied into thinking we’ve got to race against our biological clocks and have children lest we regret it forever. It’s always worth being reminded, I think, that we can choose to ignore the tyranny of our “biological clocks” and reclaim our time.

Our women on the ground

Arab women are often portrayed as oppressed, silenced victims in the western media. So I’m ridiculously excited about Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World, a new anthology edited by the Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir that amplifies badass voices from the Arab world. “The Arab women journalists in this collection of essays take control of the narrative by telling their own stories about the region’s many conflicts and how they’ve affected them personally, without holding back,” Hankir told me. “Together, their stories demonstrate why it’s important to include more native voices in mainstream media newsrooms as we seek to better understand the region and its many nuances.”

India bans instant divorce

India’s parliament has criminalized the practice of “triple-talaq”, which allows a Muslim man to instantly divorce his wife by saying “talaq” (which means divorce in Arabic) three times. “This is a historic day, the injustice that was going on with Muslim women, India’s parliament has given them justice,” law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in Delhi. While the new law is certainly good news I have a feeling it may have been motivated by the Modi government’s rampant Islamophobia rather than a genuine concern for women.

Saudi Arabia relaxes guardianship laws

Huge news from Saudi Arabia, which has just revised its archaic laws and will let women travel without the permission of a male guardian. While this is a great step forward, please let’s not forget that a number of women’s rights activists who fought for this change are still detained without charge and have reportedly been subject to torture and sexual abuse.

Kids think bearded men are strong … but unattractive

“A new study suggests that, until they reach puberty, kids are strongly anti-beard – although children with bearded fathers did feel more warmly toward facial hair,” NPR reports.

The Republican party’s woman problem

Politico Playbook reports: “A fun stat that’s making its way around GOP circles: there are more men named Jim in the House than Republican women running for re-election.” Gee I wonder why there aren’t more women running to represent an incredibly misogynistic party?

The weird cult of ‘face gains’

“On fitness Instagram, men are obsessed with gaining muscle or losing weight in their face,” writes Hussein Kesvani for Mel magazine. Sadly it seems that the biggest gains we’re making when it comes to gender equality are around body image insecurity.