Journalism: the new Narcissism: 2

Today dear readers we revisit a place we've had a lot of fun with before. Namely the self-obsessed nature of journalists who can't comprehend they are not the story. Anyway today it's whitebreadhead Polly Vernon who is telling us why she doesn't want children with all the style and elan of a two year old throwing a tantrum.

Polly is doing what many (especially female) journalists do these days. She's defending a position that is personal on the basis that we are all feeling very strongly about it. Are we?

Guess what I don't want? Babies. I never have and I never will. Please don't tell me I'll change my mind. It's patronising, and how the hell do you know anyway?

Whew, two questions to open. Oh I get it. You sat down with those other mushy brained chicks at Observer Woman and said, "What about a really provocative angry piece about not wanting children." And they said, "Wow Polly, that's SO top of everyone's discussion agenda right now and nobody's every thought of the concept before."


Why don't I want babies? I'll ignore for a moment the insolence of the question. I'll ignore the fact that nobody ever asks a woman who wants kids why she wants kids; no one ever tells a woman who expresses a deep-rooted compulsion to procreate that she'll change her mind. Instead, I'll say: for lots of reasons. It's not that I am a power-crazed career bitch. I mean - I am; but that's unrelated.

The vehemence of your writing - for there is little else here- suggests that strangers are stopping you in the street on the hour and asking you if you have children. You're lucky: I only get charity campaigners.


I really don't like what parenthood does to grown-ups. But modern parents en masse? That pampering cult of Bugaboo-wielding, Mumsnet-bothering dullness?

Yawn.So you'll be talking about fellow journalists who wrote pieces like this and then had children?


Spare me. Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement (you, with the toddler-on-wheels: astonishing news just in! You don't have pavement priority over the rest of the world!). Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness. (It's my experience that parenthood doesn't make anyone less selfish. Humans simply extend the sphere of their selfishness when they have kids, so that it embraces the kids and dishes out a fierce battering to the rest of the world. Also - no one has a baby out of selflessness. You really want to be selfless? Adopt, lover.) And please spare me the pitying glances (I promise I don't want what you have. Honestly, I find it mind-boggling that you don't want what I have. Are you quite sure you're not poleaxed with jealousy?).

I'm older than you Polly. I don't have kids. And won't. And my four good friends are all mothers. Yet I've never experienced this. We talk about politics, about books, about food,about how their husbands should be put down. We also talk about the idiot mums at school, you know the journalists who've had children and go all ga ga and protective over them. Then we drink. After that they ask about my sex life. Maybe you're just too busy shouting all the time for people to engage you in conversation?


There are other reasons. I like my lifestyle, my career, my body, my capacity to run off to New York at short notice if the opportunity arises. I like that my money is my own to squander. I like that my weekends can be slept away, or drunk away, or read away; that I am not sleep deprived, or if I am, I can remedy that easily. I like how last-minute my time is, how disorganised, how guilt-free.

Great career by the way; writing for Observer Woman. You've told us you're obsessed with your skinny body before. Still if you really want to lord it over other women, the thing to do is have two kids and get back in your jeans in two weeks. That'll give you the oneupmanship you crave.


Mine is not an easy position to maintain. Partly because our society won't have it. Partly because our popular culture denies it... How perverse of me. How contrary. How (someone actually said this to me recently) not normal.

Oh come now Polly. This is completely fatuous. Nobody gives a flying fuck. Is your child-free status really of concern to people who are worried about mortgages, jobs and marriages? Admit it, the pressure you're feeling comes from yourself and you can't handle it. At 37 you're wondering if you can sustain yourself on a diet of City breaks. Will it be enough at 47? At 57? How many cities can you go to?


It doesn't help that fertility is the great cultural preoccupation of the day. While TV and film scriptwriters and commercial novelists have given up flogging the idea that marriage and monogamy will save us, they now seem extremely attached to the idea that motherhood will save us.

Polly, you gotta stop reading chicklit. Try reading philosophy: might improve your argument.


There is nothing new here. It's just cut and paste manufactured angst about something that really isn't an issue. It's not new: there were women who didn't have children 30, 40, 50 years ago. Granted they didn't have a work experience magazine to shout about it but they were true individuals in a society that was in transition. Polly is dancing about on a bandwagon that isn't rolling, except in the imagination of media females. We don't care and we wish you'd find something to write about that did matter instead of your own self-obsession.