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Childlessness, whether intentional or not, is always an issue
Photo: IMAGO
"I'm 39 years old and have no children," says Jackie Dives.
Actually nothing special.
If you think so.
There are people who absolutely want children, but cannot for reasons.
And there are people who consciously choose not to.
And for that we have to take criticism.
There are repeated cases like this.
The influencer Jackie Dives makes them the topic.
She regularly uploads videos to TikTok in which she also addresses her childlessness.
In a video, Dives tells how she spends a gray Sunday as a childless artist.
She meditates, for example, goes to the market, and later goes for a run.
She ends the evening with sewing and Netflix.
There is a lot of approval in the comments on the video.
"This is the life I want when I'm in my late 30s," writes one user.
According to Dives, however, there is also headwind, as she explains in another video.
People asked why they share their childless everyday life.
Their long-term relationship failed because of the issue, Dives says in the video.
“I had to decide and be very, very, very sure if I wanted to let my partner go for a childless life.
I really loved my partner very much.” She knew that she didn't want children.
After the separation, however, it was difficult for her to imagine life without children.
For dives, this also has to do with the fact that there are no role models in the media or pop culture.
»I felt lonely and alien.
And I had to look for women who also made this decision.« That's why she started to address childlessness in her videos.
"I want women who don't want to have children to have an example of what their life could be like."
Childlessness as an issue
2.8 million people saw the video as of Friday morning.
It has been liked hundreds of thousands of times.
Dives told BuzzFeed that people should stop asking women if and when they're going to have kids.
“Women need to be encouraged to do what they want with their lives.
As with any stigma, the more we normalize it, the better it gets.”
The fact that childlessness is an issue for many people has been shown again and again.
The US comedian Chelsea Handler, for example, hosted a sketch for the "Daily Show" in February in which she satirized her childless everyday life.
"I wake up at 6 a.m., remind myself I don't have to take any kids to school, so I eat an edible, masturbate, and go back to sleep," Handler says.
"I wake up at 12:30 and get ready for a full day of doing whatever the hell I feel like doing."
Handler also went viral with it – and she also drew criticism for it.
For example in the program of the right-wing Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.
Right-wing radio host Jesse Kelly unleashed a misogynist tirade, saying, for example, that "feminists like Chelsea Handler" had been lied to by society, saying that a woman can do what a man can do.
Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro also fumed, saying Handler had it written all over her face how unhappy she was.
Handler responded to the rants with a new video.
"Wow," she says in it.
"Why do I even need kids of my own when I hear those crybabies all the time?"
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