Disclaimer: Before I begin this post, I want to assert that while I have watched a couple of seasons of the Bachelor, I do not watch the show on a regular basis (this is for lynn, who thinks I'm addicted to all of the tv shows. While I don't watch the Bachelor regularly, I do very much like to watch the very end of the first episode because there is always one unstable woman who freaks out about being rejected by this man who she's only spoken to for 10 minutes. This week, there was a doozy. This season's spectacle was horrifyingly delicious in the way that only really bad reality tv can be. Apparently, in her brief conversation with the Bachelor (full of cliched desirability, this one--a doctor, and blond!) the crazy woman declared that she was in her reproductive stage. As you can imagine, this was a bit startling to the handsome doctor (the woman is a doctor, as well). When this woman was rejected, she started yelling at all the rejected bachelorettes: "What's wrong with men?! Why are all men such shitheads!" And then she yelled at the Bachelor: "What's wrong with me? Am I too short? Are my breasts too small? Why are you on this show if you don't want to reproduce?" Then she yelled at a member of the filming crew; "Do you know what's wrong with him? What's his problem? I guess I shouldn't have talked about reproducing." And then she started sobbing about how she tries to help people and how she gets nothing in return. And about how she's tried every kind of dating (online, dating service, and now this!) and nothing has worked. Oh, the poor woman.
Woman over a certain age have this reputation--that they only care about making babies, that they are only looking for men to be partners in reproduction. This woman was the stereotype taken to the extreme. Watching her, I thought how crazy she is, how she might want to relax--just a little.
Then, I read a blog posting by a food blogger who is also a gynecologist. She was taking a break from food blogging to write about her practice and women's reproductive health (a strange departure, and she actually took the post down later in the week); anyway, in the post, she had a chart that showed how women's reproductive ability plummets dramatically at a certain age. There is, in fact, a "reproductive stage" for women and if you miss it, you miss it. Men, on the other hand, don't face such limitations.
I've always been rather ambivalent about having kids, so it's hard for me to understand the urgency that some women feel. It's hard for me to understand how a woman can declare without any introduction that she is ready to reproduce and then curse her fate when a man doesn't immediately respond. But maybe I don't understand because I haven't yet reached the edge of that plummet into infertility.
This biological reality puts women in a tough position, I think. You're not supposed to care, you're not supposed to advertise your desire for children, you're not supposed to pursue relationships primarily to reproduce. And yet one's body can assert some pretty persuasive imperatives. And we are, after all, just animals.
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4 comments:
That's a hoot. Now I'm sorry I miss such thngs.
How would a woman respond to a man who started out a dating conversation "Let's have kids?" Well ok, she doesn't seem to have said that exactly--so how about "I'm ready to reproduce. Let's get it on!" (cue the Barry White tune.)
I might be responding to the wrong part of the story, but I just have to say that although I've never worked in reality TV, I have worked around it and I have friends who have worked in it....and it's just as scripted as all other TV. People are told to hit marks and say lines and essentially ramp up drama. Just as Girls Gone Wild might plant pornstars in New Orleans to encourage locals to pull their tops off, I don't think it's beneath reality TV people to plant actors in their show...and also skew the edit so that it serves the purposes of the "story."
In my own defense, I don't think you are addicted to all reality tv shows. I was asking, re my comment about Tony Soprano, if that was the one HBO show you weren't yet addicted to. It was a joke. I, of course, know you are not addicted to all shows. Just some, like myself. Perfectly restrained and respectable. BTW, the American Idol premier was delicious. My favorite loser was the fake tan Paris Hilton look-alike. They're all going to be famous, and then American Idol will be sorry!
I know quite a few people in their thirties and forties who have called off relationships--even marriages--because their partner was not (or no longer) interested in having children. And there's a lot of men on that list, not just the stereotype of frantic women whose biological clocks are perilously ticking and whose wombs are wailing.
Mr. Tart and I are certain that we want to have children, and sooner rather than later, but even though I am secure and happy with that knowledge, I hate going to baby showers. Being around a group consisting of almost all moms who have gathered to brag about how awful their pregnancies and labor were makes me extremely uncomfortable. I can't contribute to stories about mastitis, dirty diapers, and binky colors and textures. I sit and smile and count how many times the word "epidural" is mentioned, how many minutes before "placenta" occurs in conversation, how many total hours the women present have spent in labor (last baby shower it was near 75). It's like a cult whose initiation involves terrorizing all the other moms-to-be in the room. For a day or two afterwards, I never want to go near a penis again so I can be certain that I'll never turn into those women. Every woman who wants to be on The Bachelor should have to attend a baby shower right before filming. That would calm them down.
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