at the centre of a womb is a woman.

bad parenting and celibacy politics.

A species close to the divine

Closer than man,

Because man does not bring about new life.

Man does not convulse,

Contort,

And compress

To create something made in the image of the creator.

The womb is an entity all by itself.

It lives and pulses and dictates the very existence of the body it inhabits.

Nothing that powerful can be considered an organ,

Or a part.

It controls the woman, restricts and grants and takes and takes and takes,

Until at the centre,

When the woman has been both stripped by

Man and her body,

We can no longer tell which one is more indispensable.

The woman, or her womb.

…

I’m four or so years into adulthood and it has put my perspectives on things in a very nihilistic frame of mind. In a 500 word essay I wrote for a job application and then extended as a newsletter, I wrote that Nihilism breeds apathy. We’re all fucking pissed and it’s gotta be someone’s fault. As much as I inhale my phone screen every time I see something about corecore or hope core or another weird way to describe the goodness of humanity, there’s a part of me that resigns to cynicism. The cycle continues.

Some thoughts:

Children terrify me. They’re so malleable to their surroundings that I’m terrified of causing life long trauma due to a glare or a higher decibel than what’s allowed. We’ve been thrust into an era of gentle parenting, affection supplied in regular intervals, healing. What I know is that we’re all trying to break the curse of generational trauma. That might mean that we’re better parents than our own, or we just don’t become parents at all.

I don’t entirely swing to the side of childlessness, but recently it’s not something I feel I have a choice on. Kids are cool (sometimes), I think their inability to understand social cues—and at times outright refusal—is endearing. Children are what we’re meant to be, free of the endless confinement of our own beliefs and other people’s beliefs and ‘oh my god, you’re doing/eating/watching/indulging in that? Couldn’t be me.’

Children are perhaps the closest thing we have to moral goodness. They absorb more than they release, so any “imperfections” are due to environments, parental figures, and socialisation. It’s not a child’s fault that they find the world to be hateful place, they’re given this predisposition by parents who hate the world or themselves, and a child’s world is their parents.

What I hate most about the idea that a woman must have a child is that some women absolutely should not be mothers. There are countless children who’ve been cut from the world or abandoned because of horrible parents and there is no child who deserves that, in the same way that a woman who isn’t ready for children doesn’t need to have them.

And then there’s the challenge to childlessness that women are selfish if their only reason for not wanting children is, well, not wanting children.

I’m in no shape to house another human being, the economy is punishing women for pushing out the babies they’ve forced us into having, and, frankly, there’s just no desire.

I don’t particularly like the term childlessness, because it feels as though I’m losing a child I’ve never had. I’m missing out the quintessential experience of a woman, which is to fill her womb with a baby. ‘I’m not having children’ is alright, too.

I don’t know how my parents are going to take this news, that I’m considering seriously the prospects of not having children, because they’re devout African christians. More liberal than most, but the blood runs deep and it often never runs out.

It also makes me ponder on celibacy. I didn’t choose to be a virgin, in fact I used to be quite upset that I haven’t gotten it over with. Virginity, social construct or not, feels heavy, like I’m constantly having to leave space for people’s - most usually a man’s - opinions instead of my own. 

I think the emphasis we put on celibacy has done nothing substantial for how women are pushed into the world of sexual literacy on a whim when it’s suddenly time to get pregnant for a man. I think about repression, and bottling up your desire for the sake of propriety, and the fact that you might not even like sex after you’ve waited for it.

Some recent examples were on twitter, about Lane Kim from Gilmore Girls and her depressingly unfortunate pregnancy arc. and a newsletter on how Lane should have gotten an abortion.

A short descriptor from the US Weekly is as follows:

Lane — who hid much about herself from her religious mom — found out she was pregnant with twins in the show’s final seventh season. She’d stay back while bandmate Zack (Todd Lowe) went on tour with Hep Alien.

Even without watching a single episode, this storyline—especially the one about keeping shit from her mom—is what I assumed it would be. How do you have sex without the burden of a potential child? Why should you give up your life for the sake of another?

Even with the many reasons we’ve been given to not have sex, I’d like to veer towards the other case we have for celibacy. The traditional incel, usually pertaining to men, is someone who believes that his lack of sexual activity is the fault of women and their newfound sexual liberation. on women gatekeeping sex. A femcel is a woman in the same position, where she doesn’t have sex with men, but the reason is the fault of conventional beauty standards, however these women blame themselves for their lack of sexual activity, for not being the right kind of beautiful, despite the fact that mostly everything in our society is created to subdue a woman’s desire. To summarise, Incels have killed women for rejecting them sexually, and femcels are eating themselves.

This topic is entirely to serious and too depressing for me to cover right now, so i’d you’d like to dig deeper, Emily Nagoski’s substack “On Femcels” is a good place to start.

Both of these things are obviously not good, because they suggest that being involuntarily celibate is a reason to hate yourself and those around you. Meanwhile, voluntary celibacy—usually pertaining to women—is a deliberate choice to not have sex. I’m not sure what the responses to this have been from both incels and femcels—although I can’t see it being good in either case—but the insane amounts of surveillance on our lives is part of the problem.

“Progress, commodification, abstinence have all been given virtuous titles, we are encouraged towards them to live ‘successful’ lives, directing us away from frivolity and hedonism.” - Ava Scott-Nadal, The Glasgow Guardian.

In an article called Resolutions on Celibacy, Ava Scott-Nadal makes a point that “Gen Z is in a period of extreme socialisation, we have access to everyone’s thoughts and actions through social media and it’s creating a perpetual surveillance state mentality.”

We’ve been put under microscopic watch by ourselves, constantly contradicting the liberation we’ve been proclaiming for the last couple of years. Your levels of productivity are being watched, your love life assessed through serialised breakup videos, and your choice to bring a child into the world is commodified as a trend or an aspirational lifestyle. You can either be Nara Smith with eleven children named after trees, or you can be a DINK.

So it isn’t all that crazy that you’re either having lots of sex or none at all because there are good and bad sides to both. With the massive amounts of scrutiny has come the idea that yielding completely to either side is a problem when in truth, I think it more unfortunate to not have the choice and then in turn get judged for not liking the cards you’ve been dealt. it’s not enough to tell people to abstain if they don’t understand what they’re abstaining from. Taking the choice away already ruins any healthy relationship with sex a person could have.

Like I said earlier, not having kids at least for me, doesn’t feel like my choice. If I want to be financially stable, I shouldn’t have kids. If I want to have kids I’ll be responsible for another person for the rest of my life. We’ve been individualised so drastically that the concept of giving ourselves up for another person is an uncomfortable idea, but at the end of the day we still do it. As much as we’d like to shield ourselves from the prospect of heartbreak or worse, embarrassment, we’re still going to be human about it. Let’s just hope the next generation of young adults are better at figuring this shit out than we are.