Let's Get Angry (and honest, but mostly angry)

I saw (or, well. Keep seeing) something rather tickling on TikTok. Girls—women, of all races, sexualities, ages, and creeds—were talking about children. More importantly, they were talking about not having them. This, as someone who has never, ever understood the appeal, is extremely relieving, and beyond validating. I don’t want kids. I have never wanted kids. People who want them who are my age make me sad. I hope I never change my mind. I hope I can look back on this period of my life with grace. And yet I hope age and time does not diminish what is instinctual in youth.

I am female. I am nineteen. I have so much potential and so much time. Children are beautiful, and good parents are a blessing—or maybe it’s the other way around, who fucking knows? —but the idea of creating one, keeping them, nurturing and encouraging their growth?

You thought I was going to say “hell no. That sounds awful.”

And you’d be right. It does.

But.

All my life I have watched women I know settle for and accept maltreatment from men. All my life I have been mocked and questioned and cast aside as a pessimistic, repulsive pariah for my perception and interpretation of motherhood and marriage and childbearing. All my life I have stood in quiet—yes, hard to believe for those who know me, but trust me, this one was quiet—agony while people I loved suffered for the lives they wanted. I kept my mouth shut as tight as I possibly could as the closest mothers and women in my life—both physically and emotionally—beared the impossible weight of the kind of weaponized incompetence that truly makes the idea of eternal matriarchal duty and partnership my own personal hell.

And originally my answer to the kids question was different. Sarcastic. Caustic. A little playful.

“Money, sleep, and time are important to me—I’ll pass on kids.”

It sounded fine and reflected my values at the time, and that period of my life is one I owe a lot of foundational shifts and breakthroughs to. I won’t deny that nineteen year old Stella does not disagree. Fourteen year old Stella—and maybe onward until the last week or so, when these videos started popping up on my feed—had the right ideas. Jarring and sardonic, certainly, but true, and ultimately correct. I still think that kids would drain my bank account, suck my life force dry, and cut my “me time” down to a meager five minutes, head in my greasy, sweaty hands. I still think kids would prevent me from partaking in the hobbies and activities I love. And I still think that kids would upend, re-route, and ruin my life.

Some people are willing to put up with that shit. Some women didn’t have a choice. Cave-people didn’t know any better and housewives in the 1950s didn’t know any different. Religion and the patriarchy have done a number on a lot of us, made so many people blind to their own options and potential. And I can’t dismantle every single system, standard, or structure with one essay, but what I can say is this: I won’t be having kids because I will try my damndest to stay as far the fuck away from men as I possibly can.

I don’t want to explain this, and I almost feel like I shouldn’t have to, but I will. I have never, in all my life, met a man I could firmly say I would want to keep around (romantically) forever. It’s the little things, truly. Long-established habits that my friends dads have that their wives allow and/or ignore; comments made to me by male classmates; lascivious sidelong glances made at my tits on the cafeteria main floor. The gender pay gap. Alpine divorce. Widespread maltreatment of female athletes. Spousal abandonment. The rise of Only Fans. Tiny kids swimsuits. Andrew Tate and Dennis Rodman and Manny Pacquiao. Incentivizing, loser-ass bitches that exacerbate the bullshit by playing into all of it for the “benefit” of male attention.

It goes on. It goes on. I can’t say all of it. I can’t think of all of it. We’d be here all night. We’d be here all year. There are so many, so many things that irk me, that genuinely disgust the fuck out of me, that sink my stomach into my feet and push until the nausea appears as a physical entity in my mouth, about men. I do not want to procreate with or stick for very long around any member of that group in particular. Not right now. Not at times like these, and when I feel like this.

And yes, despite the current theme of vitriol, I do think there are good men. I do think there are amazing, worthy, intelligent, genuine men that exist and try their best and would be great to partner with. I’m a misandrist, not an idiot. I am reacting to the insurmountable amounts of systemic and social misogyny that pervade most of my life and the interactions I have daily. I do not hate everyone, I do not hate all men, and I do truly hope that the ones who know I would never, ever speak ill of them know that they are who I mean when I mention the exception.

That being said, “fuck them kids.”

And thank you, TikTok.