Hello brave reader and welcome to Lance’s Rants. My goal with these entries is to be a male voice in the childfree discussion; a view that seems underrepresented to me.
In spite of the title I won’t be ranting all the time. Sometimes I’ll attempt to be informative. Sometimes I’ll be funny – at least to me.
My ultimate goal is to draw more men into the discussion. Hopefully those of you out there in childfree relationships with men will encourage them to become involved and to be heard.
Where Are the Childfree Men?
Anywho, let’s get started …where are all the childfree men? If you peruse the online childfree universe it certainly seems dominated by women. Empirically, w{n}hab!’s Facebook following is 85% women.
Why is this? I believe that there are a number of contributing factors, but primarily it comes down to this: women have more skin in this game:
Women bear many more costs than men do from the discomforts, inconveniences, and pains of pregnancy and childbirth; Pregnancy can irreparably damage a woman’s body
Women (still) do a disproportionate amount of the child rearing compared to men
Women experience significantly more societal pressure to have children than men do; Women are directly or indirectly stigmatized when they don’t have or want children
Let’s assume I’m right for a couple of seconds. If so, it seems obvious that women would be more engaged in childfree discussion and advocacy.
Childfree Men Stand Up!
Even if women have more skin in the game, I still think that committed childfree men need to be more engaged if only selfishly. For example, one reason I’m here is because many of our long-term friends are now parents …and now we’re no longer priorities for them.
While I don’t like it, I don’t hold this against our friends. Frankly, if you choose to be a parent, your priorities should change to a degree. However, ‘losing’ your friends to their children gets old. At this point in my life I want to establish friendships with people that share my decision to be childfree.
So, childfree men, I encourage you to get involved. If you are in a committed relationship you should be supportive of your significant other. If you’re single I’m guessing this is great place to meet chicks. 🙂 For all of you men, the childfree community is a great place to meet like-minded people with the chance to create new and lasting relationships.
Hasta!
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