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Why We Needed Chelsea Handler’s Declaration of Childfree Joy
Millennials and older generations didn’t grow up with many images of women choosing different life paths. Now that childfree women are far more visible, there’s pushback.
It was just another day logging onto Twitter to find that the perpetually-aggrieved white male conservative podcast set was frothing at the mouth about a viral video. This time, it starred comedienne Chelsea Handler and Fox talking heads who jerk off to Norman Rockwell paintings.
How these people missed that this sketch is so obviously a parody of mommy blogs and TikToks is beyond me, but then again they also whine like the babies they want to force us all to have because of a Black actress playing a mermaid.
There’s two specific points I wanted to dive into here. The first one being what Handler is actually satirizing and the subsequent suppositions of childfree life (particularly women’s lives) by parents, and the second about the fascist clown show on Fox pontificating about how she can’t actually be happy.
Let’s examine the “Supermom” and “jet-setting female executive” tropes.
These are two diametric images seen in the media frequently, including social media. Print magazines targeted to mothers in their thirties and forties like Woman’s Day and Ladies Home Journal are still around, but mommy bloggers rose in the 2000s and 2010s, then the mom-fluencer came about when Instagram hit the scene and later TikTok.
Just like the highly-polished and curated images in those magazines, today’s moms get to foster their feelings of inadequacy over their unkempt homes and meals thrown together from the freezer section upon scrolling through those perfectly-shot Instagram reels portraying a woman who clearly moonlights as a personal trainer running a Shark-Ninja mop over an already-clean floor before she makes her…
