22岁女性博客：我从不想要孩子！【图】

作舟摄影


传统观念、生活方式、性别歧视、个人自由选择、评判与指责等不是传统东方”儒家“社会的专利。西方女性给人的印象似乎很自由自在，但她们同样受到来自周遭的各种评判和指手画脚。关于“生孩子是否对每一个人都是必须的”之类的话题，在传统社会里，价值观和人生哲学早已将女性角色固定在了古老的定义之中。但是，人类的进化不是只从生存本能、政治科技等方面体现的。人类的进化是和人对生活方式、生命意义等的抉择和维护这样的抉择的权力与自由中体现的。

今天，女性对繁衍后代的思考不再仅是对原始价值观（繁衍后代来维持人种的继续），而是从更个人、跟客观的角度分析个人的生活方式与自由选择是现代人基本的价值观之一，更不应该被所谓“大多数世俗的观念”所歧视。年仅22岁的杰西卡博恩妮尔在最新的博客里大胆而理性地抒发了自己的“誓言”，引发了很多女性读者的共鸣。

我很喜欢她的英文行文与自己的声音，融合“正反”不同的观点，不卑不亢，不夸张，更不煽情，完全是我书我心，直接而又十分的知性。



I don't Want Children -- Ever!

I am about to tell you something that may shock you. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Okay.

I do not want children.

Now let me be clear, it's not that I don't want children right now. It's not that I don't want children until after I'm married, or after I've paid off my student loan debt, or after I've bought a house. There is no caveat to this statement.

I do not want children ever.

If I'm being totally honest, that's largely because I don't like children. I'm not good with them. I have spent my whole life as an only child and have utterly loved every minute of being sibling-less. I could be the poster girl for only child syndrome: spoiled, achievement-oriented, impatient, etc. And as such, I don't really have a ton of experience with children. I've never even held a baby (and no, I don't want to hold yours, thanks for asking). And so, I'm extremely awkward around them. I have no idea how to interact with a child younger than 12. Children are a mystery to me.

My only child-ness has also made me equal parts introverted and selfish. This is, admittedly, not a great combination if you have to sacrifice your own needs and want to constantly care for another, smaller human being who can't fend for itself yet. And I have no desire to change these things about myself. It's who I am, and I like who I am. I like the life I have and the childless life I envision for myself in the future.

Now, none of this is meant to be a knock against folks who do want children. If that's what you want to do, then you should do it. Parenthood is a phenomenal thing that makes so many feel fulfilled and happy. And that's great, but it's not for everyone.

We live in a society -- in a world, really -- where it is assumed that the default desire of women is to have children. Producing offspring is supposedly so hardwired into not only who a woman is, but also who she is supposed to be, so that if she doesn't want to have kids, there must be something wrong with her. She has deviated from the societal norm regarding what is expected of her, and therefore she's defective. She's less than other women who do wish to take advantage of their reproductive systems. Or she is, simply, wrong about what she wants. She clearly does not know her own mind, and if given enough time (and, perhaps, enough patronizing lectures about how a "real" woman is naturally supposed to want children) she will change it. And if you think I am being hyperbolic about any of this, you have clearly never been a woman who has expressed a desire to remain child-free out loud. Believe me, I have encountered all of this rhetoric at one time or another.

There are, rather obviously, a number of things wrong with these stereotypical notions of who women should be and what they should want (thanks, patriarchy). I am convinced that there are few things more frustrating in this world than expressing how you feel, and then being told you are, actually, incorrect. The response I've been given the most often when I tell someone I don't want kids is immediately "Oh, you're young. You'll change your mind." Full disclosure: I'm 22. And yes, I'm still young, but that doesn't automatically mean I'm incapable of coming to a mature, well-reasoned conclusion about who I am and what I want for my life, you know what I'm saying? The casual dismissal of something you know to be absolutely true about yourself is infuriating at best, and dehumanizing at worst. Let us also acknowledge not only the vast amount of sexism contained within these ideas, but also the cissexism embedded in them as well. Not all women can have children, and not all people who can have children are women. Gender stereotypes like these end up being all the more harmful because they refuse to operate outside of a binary that winds up being exclusionary to the many folks who don't neatly fit into it.

Throughout my teenage years and now into my early twenties, as I became more and more certain about wanting to remain childless, I unwittingly internalized a lot of these ideas about who I was supposed to be as a woman, and what I was supposed to be wanting and feeling. There's all this talk about maternal instincts women of childbearing age feel and how they begin yearning to start a family. I wasn't feeling anything of the sort. I recoiled inside at the thought of having a child instead of being filled with this warm, wistful glow. I didn't understand. What was wrong with me?

Then, about a year ago, I slowly began to come around to a surprising revelation:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with me.

I do not want to have children, and that's okay. As it turns out, not wanting kids will absolutely not make me "less" of a woman. I am not defective. I am not wrong. I know my own mind. I have intrinsic value as a singular, autonomous person, and that value is not contingent upon me using my body to produce another person. Wanting to be child-free does not make me any better or worse of a human being than any other person who does choose to have children. It's just a choice I've made about my own life. It's no less valid a choice than the choice to become a mother. And that, to me, gets at the real heart of feminism: being granted the freedom to make choices for myself without judgment.

Now, if you happen to know any good cats that need homes, call me. I'm positively nuts about cats.

This post originally appeared on Femsplain.com.

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Jessica Burnell works for a think tank in Washington, D.C. She enjoys yoga, ranting about the patriarchy, obsessing over her cat, Alex, and constantly re-watching The West Wing.



注：


Cissexism: “顺性别主义”，由 Cisgender（顺性别）衍生而来。“顺性人”是指“自然性别”的人以自然，或天生的性别而生活的人，如出生时是女孩儿，而且一生都是以“女性”的（生理、心理）特征生活与标签的人。

由于“性”的区分不再是“男女”那么简单，比如变性人与双性人等。女权主义人士在维护“弱势人群”的过程里，将现代人的性别区分进一步科学地划分开来。

所有跟帖： 

• 美国现在时兴给３０－３５岁的没孩子的妇女的生日贺卡上写 -abookl- ♀ (152 bytes) () 03/03/2015 postreply 13:46:59

• Scary! -冲浪潜水员- ♂ (15 bytes) () 03/04/2015 postreply 01:33:29

• 问候久违的作舟，祝羊年快乐。你的摄影真棒，梦幻般的光影和色彩，富有动感的画面。 -斯葭- ♀ (0 bytes) () 03/04/2015 postreply 21:50:52