Hallelujah! It’s the end of ‘poor Jen’

Jennifer Aniston last week hit back over the media’s endless pregnancy speculation. Hannah Betts, who’s had her fair share of ‘Still no babies?’ comments, knows exactly how she feels

RECENTLY, AT A WEDDING, a man informed me that it is ‘weird’ that I am unmarried and without offspring because I am a ‘good-looking woman’ – said as part of his attempt to sleep with me, despite the presence of both of our partners. At 45, it’s not the first time I’ve heard this line, but it’s the first time it’s been used as an inept seduction technique.

Last week Jennifer Aniston – so long the scapegoat for the world’s anxiety about single women and/or women who aren’t mothers – finally had enough of such talk, and took to the pages of

The Huffifington Post to say so. ‘For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up,’ Jen declared, stating that she had had enough of the ‘sport-like scrutiny and body shaming’ directed at her, and asserting that she has ‘grown tired of being part of this narrative’.

‘Here’s where I come out on this topic,’ she concluded. ‘We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child… We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own “happily ever after” for ourselves.’

In making such a passionate and articulate statement, let us hope that Jennifer forever lays the ghost of ‘poor Jen’ to rest. In its place, ‘Jen the champion of women everywhere’ – regardless of their relationship or parenting status.

For Jennifer is right when she refers to herself as ‘some kind of symbol’. She has indeed become a ‘lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends and colleagues’; the svelte embodiment of our cultural expectations, some Beverly Hills Everywoman.

In attempting to police Jen’s body and life choices, scrutinisers police all women – not least the millions across the globe who have rejected the role that society prescribed for them by being

single, or childless, or both.

I know because I am one of them. Contentedly child-free in my midforties, I am currently in a relationship, but was a lone wolf for years – taking lovers, but deeming myself single – and extremely happy I was, too.

I am not alone. The proportion of women without offspring has almost doubled since the ’90s, according to the Office for National Statistics, with one in five women of my generation remaining childless.

Among those with degrees born between 1965 and 1978, the figure rises to 43%. Indeed, Satoshi Kanazawa, a researcher at the London School of Economics, has posited that, the more intelligent women are, the less likely they are to want children: an increase of 15 IQ points decreasing the odds of their becoming mothers by a quarter.

Obviously, such arguments remain controversial with women who do decide to reproduce. However, we barren types are clearly not the social rejects that popular platitude condemns us as being. Witness Andrea Leadsom’s appalling attempt to characterise Theresa May as having less investment in the future on account of being childless.

Alas, Leadsom isn’t the half of it.

WE D O N ’ T NEED TO BE MARRIED, OR MOTHERS, TO BE COMPLETE

The degree of consternation that my own rejection of motherhood has provoked suggestions that I am the heroine of some ’50s B movie entitled Attack Of The Unused Ovaries.

At my first job interview after leaving academia at the age of 28, a man asked whether I was ‘about to have babies’. Not only was this inquiry illegal, it struck me as deeply irrelevant. What I was, was pretty excited about joining his workforce.

In my thirties, I tended only to be on the receiving end of this prejudice when I left London, the capital being a haven for blissfully single, childless women. However, of late, the questions have started again, as if – at 45 – my body might be demanding an 11th hour push as my biological clock finally, belatedly, kicks in.

The other day, a doctor fretfully demanded to know whether I was going to have babies, as if the thought might only just have occurred to me. It reminded me of that feminist popart spoof in which a woman clutches her face next to the speech bubble, ‘Oh my God, I forgot to have children!’ – a caricature easier for everyone to believe, it seems, than a woman who just isn’t that bothered.

Our still lamentably sexist society fears single and/or childless women because it fears all women – especially those who can’t be categorised into neat little boxes. Whether it was the early modern alarm over spinsters-cum-witches, or the post-great War preoccupation with ‘surplus women’, the freedom of the unencumbered female throws moralists into panic; making single women a problem that needs to be fixed.

At long last, matters appear to be changing – if the furore over Andrea Leadsom and the positive reaction that Jennifer Aniston inspired are anything to go by. To be sure, it’s depressing that, in 2016, it still needs stating that we are ‘complete with or without a mate, with or without a child’ – but how brilliant that our longsuffering poster girl is herself now owning and shutting down this conversation.

My 11-year-old niece veers between announcing that she’ll have children at the age of 22 with some incredible chap while juggling a brilliant career, and declaring that she may not want a man or offspring at all. This is all that we should want for the next generation: a choice – and the right not to be judged for it.

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