Childfree People in the Media: Disdain, Danger, and Demonization
The media's role in perpetuating The Patriarchy's lies
If you haven’t caught up with Parts 1 (The Rigged Game) and 2 (The Power of Regret and Cultural Conditioning) of this essay, please check out the posts below:
To recap, these are three ways in which The Patriarchy (or TP, if you have a sense of humor🧻) rigs the game against its subjects (aka, us👯):
Our cultural norms, especially the ones centering “traditional values”
Regret: the r-word that parents aren’t allowed to express
Media portrayal
In Part 1, I positioned The Patriarchy as “the house,” or casino, which always wins. And asked, what, precisely, does the house win?
In Part 2, I gave you the answer: it keeps everyone grinding away in service to The Patriarchy, believing that they’re competing with everyone else for the most happiness points in a zero sum game—meaning, at the expense of one another.
The most successful tool The Patriarchy has in perpetuating the lies they feeds us to keep us trapped in its servitude—and fighting against each other—is the media. Especially how the media portrays childfree people.
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Media Portrayal
The way childfree people are depicted in popular media is, at best, with disdain or as an afterthought. At worst, that we’re dangerous.
This is a topic I cover a lot, in almost every interview I’ve given and explicitly in some of my own episodes. Check out a selected list below:
Table for Four: A Family Conversation Podcast S3E13 - Child Free People
Do Childfree People Hate Kids? (video)
MProper Mimi: Live, Laugh, Love through a Childfree Lens
The campaign of demonizing childfree people begins very early in our exposure to media. Disney movies, the ones marketed to and consumed by children, are full of villains who also just so happen to be childfree, like Scar, Ursula, and Cruella de Vil.
Then we’re fed childfree people on tv or movies who are either too dumb or flighty for kids. To quote Brian Cox’s character Logan Roy from Succession: they’re not serious people.
Take for example that terrible show Friends, which had zero people of color on it, but was a wildly popular 90s tv show.
Who didn’t have kids: Phoebe was a ditzy artist who sang Smelly Cat and Joey, a thick headed numbskull actor. Both of them were frozen in perpetual Peter Pan syndrome, never willing to grow up.
But the serious people on the show, the ones with “real” jobs, they were the ones that had kids. Ross was a scientist, Monica was a chef, and it doesn’t matter what Chandler or Rachel did but they had white-collar office-type jobs.
Another example is the early 2000s show Bones. That show had a strong female lead and diverse female supporting cast, and I actually did like that show until—if you watched it too, you know what’s coming—they decided the childfree woman was going to have a baby.🤦♀️
The main character/brilliant scientist on expressed her vehement dislike for the idea that she had to have kids simply because she’s a woman, and even said she didn’t plan to have kids on one episode.
But after finally having a one-night stand with the hot FBI vampire guy her FBI partner Seely Booth they suddenly ended up together and had a baby (and then another).
Looper has a good article on how this move split the fan base, and utterly disappointed childfree viewers. I completely forgot that afterwards the next season completely glossed over the fact that they went from one-night stand to full-blown relationship.
The sexual tension was always there. That was the whole point of matching the uptight scientist with the the ideal good looking man (read: tall, dark, and handsome—another cultural cliché). But a pregnancy and then the birth reenacting the birth of Jesus?
So much cringe 🙄
These tropes aren’t limited solely to shows about white people. But it’s so rare that childfree Latines are seen anywhere. Think about it, can you name more than one or two?
Like Linda and I discussed in the episode about Wealth Warrior, we need our stories—nuestras historias—being told, too. If the general public doesn’t see other happy fulfilled childfree people in the media, what models or examples will they have to point to? How will they be able to see themselves in that capacity?
And not just childfree people but everyone else needs to see examples of them, too. If all they see of us in the media is that we eventually change our minds because secretly we did want kids all along, or worse, that we’re just evil and depraved villains, how are we going to change that perspective?
How are we ever going to shut down and end the childfree bingo game for good?
Representation is important. Let me illustrate that for you with a funny little story from when I was a kid. When I was little girl in the 80s, there weren't a lot of brown kids on tv. But all the kids on tv did have imaginary friends.
At least one kid on one episode of every tv show had an imaginary friend. But I didn’t. The way I made sense of that in my little child brain was to conclude that it was only something white kids got to have. And since I wasn’t white, I didn’t get one. It didn’t apply to me.
Little did I know I could conjure one up myself with my own imagination. But because I didn’t see any models of that behavior that looked like me, I didn’t know to think that. I was a little kid.
But now I’m an adult and I’ve made this podcast, and write these essays, so no other childfree Latines out there have to wonder what it can be like for them. You now have an example that proves that we childfree people, childfree Latines, can also live happy and fulfilling lives despite what the big bad media companies want you to believe about us.
The Patriarchy has set us up to believe that if you don’t follow the life script, you are the problem. It’ll make you believe you’re Taylor Swift singing “I’m the problem, it's me.”
But it’s not you. It’s The Patriarchy and all the ways it seeps into and dictates our social rules like cultural norms, “traditional” values, staying calladita about regret. And all of that is only further perpetuated by the media.
Of which I’m now a part of, because La Vida Más Chévere is content you can consume. And I’ll be here fighting the good fight, making sure childfree Latinas y Latines get the representation we need if only in this little corner of the world.
I invite you to also keep fighting the damn toilet paper and their bullshit traditional values. And the next time you hear someone say that childfree people must hate kids, feel free to correct them.
Or send them this series. Or this podcast episode. Or this video discussion.
Don’t believe everything you see on tv, and that’s a burrito!
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