[ SECRET POST #4424 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4424 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 11 secrets from Secret Submission Post #633.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

People, in general, aren't saying it's unrealistic or bad for ONE female character to decide she wants children after being childfree. Lots of real women do. Just like people, in general, aren't saying it's unrealistic or bad for ONE male action hero to be straight. Statistically, most real men ARE straight.

They're saying it's unrealistic for practically EVERY childfree woman on EVERY show to eventually change her mind, just like it's unrealistic for EVERY male action hero in EVERY movie to always be straight. Each individual childfree female character changing her mind adds to an unrealistic, overwhelming trend of characters that do this, just like every action hero being straight, every adds to an unrealistic, overwhelming trend of characters like that.

If your argument is 'realism,' then statistically speaking*, fully childfree women and gay action heroes should happen a LOT more of the time overall.

But it doesn't.

I will continue to call the trend unrealistic, not to spite you or anything, but because that's... what it is.

*https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-childless-women-in-the-us-by-age/
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-4-5-percent-u-s-adults-identify-lgbt-gallup-n877486

[(Anonymous)]

IAWTP

[philstar22]

This. And the thing is, childfree people do get told they will change their minds. Childfree women get told there is something wrong with them and that someday of course they'll want kids. So it isn't like this is completely harmless.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh so true. The number of times I had people smirk at me over the head of a child in their lap as they condescended to me about how I’d change my mind...

[philstar22]

Since having a hysterectomy, I've had someone in my family, who very well knows I don't want kids, tell me that "you can always adopt." It never lets up. I thought being no longer able to have kids would stop it. BUt nothing stops it.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

WOW. That’s spectacularly dickish. I mean, you’d think telling poeple for years that you don’t want kids and actually removing your ability to have kids would get the message across. Sadly, I’m not overly surprised. I’m lucky enough that most of my family have backed off over the years, but I’m sorry to hear you haven’t been as fortunate.

[greghousesgf]

some random nurse I didn't even know started handing me the same shit when I was in the hospital to have one ovary out because it had a big tumor on it (non-cancerous, thank fuck). I told her I'd already had my tubes tied and she went nuts on me, asking me if my parents weren't ashamed of me, etc. bitch.

[philstar22]

Good grief. People are so ridiculous about women and their reproductive capablities. Well, people are just ridiculous about women's bodies in general.

[tabaqui]

For fuck's sake!

[rosehiptea]

Wow that's horrible. Someone asked me if I had grandkids and I said that as far as I know my son doesn't want kids, and they started trying to reassure me that he might change his mind. Like he owes me grandkids or something. Fuck no.

[dinogrrl]

IAWTC, and the one it was replying too.

There's some truth in most tropes, that's why we like them, they're easy to engage with. Some tropes can be very good things for some stories. Some are groaners because they get way overused and are super predictable. And some tropes are actively harmful to the people and situations they describe, whether they were meant that way or not. 'Childfree person [usually of the female persuasion] decides they were wrong and they have a child and love it' is of that type.

Does it happen in real life? Yes, sometimes. Is that fact used as a weapon against childfree people? Yes, frequently.

[erinptah]

+100

+1

[(Anonymous)]

like, shit, people changing their minds and wanting babies is a literary trope as old as time, can we just have it not turn out that way a portion of the time? I won't even ask for half the time, I'd settle for a quarter.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not saying I disagree with your desire to see a larger variety of women with a larger variety of lifegoals presented in media, including women happy to not have kids.

But how often is the character in question ~actually~ childfree and not just projected upon by childfree folks? It seems like for most female fictional characters, babies don't come up unless they are having them, and most of them aren't having them in the story unless they are specifically designated a mom.

Like how many examples are we looking at where a female character explicitly says she never wants kids (NOT implied due to desire to focus on work, etc. or because of some apocalyptic scenario where having kids is dangerous, etc.) and then has kids?

[(Anonymous)]

"But how often is the character in question ~actually~ childfree"

You could argue that's unrealistic there already though, isn't it?

[(Anonymous)]

But the point is most female characters aren't established to be childfree or not, because they don't have kids. Especially female characters in the sort of series that there are fandoms for, they rarely have kids. You wouldn't know if they are childfree or not unless the issue came up, and it rarely does.

[(Anonymous)]

OP's secret is only about childfree characters that change their mind (not characters that don't say either way then turn out to have children), so I don't know what non-childfree characters have to do with it.

Lots of starts-out-childfree characters do exist, most of them falling into the 'independent woman don't need no man or family and/or is focused on career' trope. It's often used TO reinforce that the woman is 'independent' (problematic in itself, in a way)

[(Anonymous)]

Bones. Brennan was adamantly childfree.

Until suddenly she wasn't.

[(Anonymous)]

This is literally the only real example I ever see mentioned in these discussions. I've never seen any others in the media I've consumed either. I don't think it happening in one show warrants a million people bitching every time about it AAAAALLLWAAAAYSSSSS happening to female characters.

[(Anonymous)]

Bernadette from Big Bang Theory expressed not wanting children.

Gina from Brooklyn-99 even though she hated children.

The movie Four Christmases.

Arizona from Grey's Anatomy.

That's just a few from five minutes of Google searches of female characters who express childfree stances but turn around and have kids.

[nightscale]

Yup, it's the constant pattern and repetition that annoys me, not individual female characters who change their minds because I could see it as a believable thing with some characters, or even as a gradual development over time.

But not 'oh wait we have to write around the actress getting pregnant, uh, so now she's totally into babies!'.

[(Anonymous)]

or better yet, write the pregnancy in and have the character give the child up for adoption. that would be different. a baby plot that ends and the show could explore the subject. maybe they adopt the child away and the storyline ends. maybe they give the child to a friend/relative who had been having infertility issues. tv babies only sporadically appear anyway when the plot needs them - why not have it be because the mother is a vodka aunt?

[(Anonymous)]

Man, but if they don't want the character to have a kid, they should either hide it well or give a good explanation, because what they did on Frasier was awful. Friends did it well with Phoebe, with the surrogacy.

[tabaqui]

All of this.
Plus, the 'don't want kids' to 'omg, baaabeeee!!!' story 'arc' is boring as fuck.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you! It's relentless in media that we can't have one female character who doesn't have a child and the way supposedly childfree characters immediately get knocked up when the writers run out of anything else for them to do.

If OPs experience was that 100% of her friends id'ing as gay or bi turned out to later id as straight would she be okay with saying "everyone's straight really except me, shut up about having queer characters onscreen"?