I was just reading an entry on The Blog That Boredom Built about how the author calls herself childfree, meaning she has no children and doesn’t want any. I don’t care one way or the other about that, but I do take offense at the perceived necessity for 1) a label to apply and 2) a new word to mean “childless.”
We choose to call ourselves “childfree” rather than “childless,” because we feel the term “childless” implies that we’re missing something we want–and we aren’t.
So because of the inherent offensiveness in the word “childless,” at least to a select group of people, we gotta have a new term, a more politically correct term, that keeps people without children from feeling victimized or improperly labeled. There’s that labeling thing again! It seems like anymore people feel the need to apply all kinds of labels to themselves. I’m an Aries, I’m emo, I’m goth, I’m childfree, I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-death penalty, I’m vegan, I’m Republican. Are we trying to fit in with a group? Are we lonely? We grasp at every little characteristic about ourselves to try and see what fits with other people, what connects us to others. Read our Facebook profiles, our MySpace profiles, our Virb and bulletin board and Yahoo! profiles. They all store information about the bands we like, the movies we like, our political views, our religious beliefs, brief descriptions that sum up everything we are in one teeny little paragraph. Everyone says not to judge, be open and accepting, don’t label people… Well, it’s obvious we don’t need to label others, because we label our own selves enough!
And I’m no exception. Anytime I join some new forum or “social networking” site, I spend time customizing it so that my profile tells the most about me in that one little page. I look for groups that spell out my interests, I itemize my personality into different labels so that I’m neatly spelled out in a cluster of standalone words. It’s silly, but I still do it. A person can’t find out everything there is to know about a person, or do anything more than scratch the surface of likes and dislikes, by reading such information.
And as for replacing the word “childless” with “childfree” because you see not having children as good and not bad, I think that’s also silly. It’s as silly to me as the P.C. replacement of words with inherent male bias to gender-neutral words. I’m not a policeman, I’m a law enforcement officer. I’m not a postman, I’m a letter carrier. Blah, blah, blah. It’s a bunch of hooey that’s the result of an overcorrection in steering our society away from being completely male dominated. Yes, equal rights for the genders, that’s good and should be how things are, but I don’t see the need in changing our language so as not to offend someone’s delicate sensibilities. You’re always going to offend somebody, so there’s no use dancing around, trying not to step on anyone’s toes, by changing around how we talk. If that were the greater good and what we really wanted, we should lose all the character in our language and just switch to Newspeak (the “doubleplusungood” in the title is a reference to this, for those unfamiliar with George Orwell’s “1984″).
The thing with the word “childless” is that it implies a person is missing something from his/her life by not having a child. “Childfree” has a more positive connotation. I’m childfree, not childless. I do not feel I’m missing out by not having a child. I’ve heard many people say “Poor so and so is childless” and I don’t want to be known as “poor so and so” because I don’t feel bad about not having a child. Having children is great, but it’s just not for me.
Just thought you might want a perspective from someone who considers herself childfree. I’m not sure I explained it well, but it’s kind of late and I’m tired.
:)
Just because you think wanting to be referred to as childless instead of childfree is “silly” doesn’t mean everyone else does.
Childlessness may be the result of a deliberate choice, circumstance, or infertility and/or other health problem[s] that would prevent or preclude them from having children.
Childfree is a term indicating that they do not see the absence of having a child as lacking in any way, as the suffix -less seems to imply.
Political correctnes drives me nuts. It’s so overused that it almost loses its purpose. We know that by calling somebody mentally challenged that we mean they’re a retard. The rest of the world and the retard himself knows that, too, so why bother using the fancy dancy long-ass terms to replace the nouns we’ve used for ages? I’m so tired of overly sensitive people who don’t like to offend or be offended. GGROW SOME BALLS, damnit (oh lord, there I am promoting male dominance…)! There are so many other things we could be worrying about.
We had a big section on political correctness in one of my German classes over in Germany. I felt it was even more pointless there because German is a language where most nouns dealing with people (professions, etc) ALREADY HAVE male and female forms. How more politically correct can you get than that?
I guess I should start calling myself childfree now :D
I believe these words are referred to as eufemism = saying something bad in a nice roundabout way. Of course in this case I’m really generalizing quite a bit since they are not “bad” things.
No matter what you call it, literate people will still get the meaning and label you the exact same way, with a side not of “oh this one is also literate”… still it sounds fancier.
As for why we try so hard to fit in? The Humans as a need companionship, so we try to see which group requires less adapting or so,
I don’t find it necessarily bad these things, as long as we acknowledge that other areas of interest have merit. Those people know something that I don’t.
You can put someone’s eye out if you throw pablum at them hard enough. It will still be a tasteless, homogenized, formless, boring mass when it hits.
Some folks get pretty aggressive in their attempts to turn language into pablum under the guise of correctness. This may be the skid resulting from “overcorrection”. There are militant political-correctors out there who will condemn and browbeat anyone who does not pay proper homage to their edicts. You will be thankful to be blandified and stored in your allotted pigeon-hole or you are the enemy of civilization.
Let ‘em wallow in their pablum. They will either bore themselves to death, thus saving everyone else from their pedantry, or they will recover with the realization that grunts and symbols of communication among human beings are not laws of the universe. Rearranging the grunts and symbols does not necessarily create new meanings behind them.
The man who smiles, bows and calls me “mister” is probably going to be greeted with more suspicion than the one who runs at me yelling, “You old sorry sack of shit!” The first may cause me to guard my wallet while the second may have me frantically stirring the cobwebs of memory for a long-lost friend.
Oh, the categorization thing is marketing. While we are indeed social animals and seek tribes of our own kind, all of these web profile things are simply aids to marketing departments. You are tuning the pitches that various and sundry hawkers will use to separate you from your earnings. Who better to define the marketing categories into which you fit than you? Since your primary purpose in this life is to consume, it behooves you to provide as much assistance to the pitchmen as you can so that they may more easily fill your consumer needs. You must achieve your maximum income level in order to achieve maximum consumption, which, of course, is nirvana. He who has accumulated the most by the time he dies, wins.
On the other hand, customers are royalty. Let the peddlers grovel and guess at what might please our lordship enough to get us to part with a coin or two. We shall favor only those who show proper respect. Those who do not shall be scorned and sent begging. In exchange for our notice and our coveted coin, we will tolerate no strings from the purchased wares to the peddler. The trickster who tries to control what he pretends to sell deserves disdain from all royalty.
(Why do the “news media” call them “suicide bombers”? Their goal is not suicide; that’s a side effect. Their goal is murder and fear. Suicide must be more politically correct than murder).
Are you a hyphenated person? I hate hyphenated people. They can’t seem to decide who, where, or what they are. If you have a hyphen stuck in you, please, just rip it out, make a decision and make a stand. “Americans” (generally referring to citizens of the U.S., so you Canadians, Mexicans, Costa Ricans, Argentinians, etc., may safely ignore this rant) seem to be the worst about sticking hyphens in each other. (I’ll be kind to the HTML and stick spaces around the hyphens…) If you’re a Black – White – African – Irish – German – Catholic – Protestant – Muslim – Jewish – Redneck – Tater-tot-eatin’ – Arabic – Leaf-blower-toting – Obese – American, just toss those hyphens away and become a genuine politically incorrect asshole Nunya, as in Nunya damn bidness wtf I am. Let the P.C.ers and the “news media” go sort nits instead of human beings. The only one-dimensional people I’ve ever met are those who want to sort everyone else.
The only grunts and symbols that we need to rearrange are those which have been historically used to divide, control, demean and conquer. If it’s a fightin’ word and you don’t want to fight, don’t use it. “Childless” means simply “without child”. Any other meaning is carried to it by the one using it. “Childfree” implies release from some bad situation. I suppose that a woman who has had to go through some of the side effects of carrying a growing, kicking, scratching, demanding fetus around in a stretch-marked belly for about
9 months might be tempted to proclaim herself “childfree” when the critter finally decides to blast his way out into the world. She might even want to sing, “Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” (Women get weirder than usual toward the end of that cycle. Moon and hormones and all that stuff, y’know).
That’s enough rambling. Surely by now I’ve made someone mad, someone glad and someone bored. It would be a good balance.
Well that’s the culture we have now isn’t it? It makes commercialism and consumerism much easier. If you’re emo, you shop here. If you’re a rocker, here. etc. And it makes politics easier, if you’re liberal say this. If you’re conservative vote for this guy. Don’t you think?
I didn’t ever hear the term ‘childfree’ until 3 weeks ago when I was absolutley bored & started watching talk shows again. I come from a family that thought it was wrong to be without at least one child. It was a demeaning thing to be called childless. It is also a demeaning thing to be called blonde, which I am naturally blonde, but no one changed that word for me. Nor do they change it for anyone else. All I am blabbing about is I think people need to respect other peoples choices. If they say something wrong (ie childless instead of childfree) and the person is offended they should apologize and leave it at that. There is no need for fighting and labeling. It comes down to personal choice and being mature enough to respect others wishes.
As the two commentors above said, I also don’t believe “childfree” is the same or is a euphemism for “childless”. A word that is similar and more positively connotated doesn’t mean people are deliberately trying to be PC. For example, if a person calls herself “heavy”, that’s not a more PC term for “obese”. They are different things. I don’t have a problem with the “childfree” sentiment because I find it’s a handy descriptor of someone who made the decision to not have children, rather than not being able to have children.
All in all it does mean the same thing, but I do understand the distinction between the two. I guess it doesn’t make a whole lot of horse-sense if you’re not childfree, but honestly, being childfree is an alien concept to people. Every time I tell someone I never want to have children, they start preaching about “ohhhh, I used to think the same, but you’ll change your mind” or “but you’d be a great mother”, and the ever-present “what, are you infertile or something?” No joke. It’s a damned frustrating thing to come against, so distinctions are made for ease of understanding. I am not merely childless for the moment — I won’t change my mind, I’m not infertile, and I don’t care to see if I’d be a good mother or not. I am childless, by choice, for life. If it takes a new word to drive that point across to people, so be it.
And I don’t see that creating new words for more defined concepts is a bad thing. Language evolves. If it didn’t, we’d all still be speaking in grunts.
The importance of the “vegan” label is even greater. The only reason I ever mentioned it when I was vegan was it helped people understand that I’m not anorexic, and I don’t hate your food, but your food is packed with butter and bacon fat, so I won’t be eating it any time soon. I don’t see how that’s any different than mentioning a food allergy.
As for other, less important labels that we put on ourselves… yeah, we’re lonely people. A human is but one person with one mind that cannot be fully understood by anyone else. We can be in a crowd of people, and still be alone. So how do you not be alone? How do you get out and find people? Make your interests known. All we’re doing is setting up tribes, which has been the model of social interaction since the dawn of man. It’s no more wrong to say “I am emo” than to say “I am Sioux”. One is a bloodline while the other is not, but both words describe a people with their own set of customs.
Are sugarless and sugarfree gum different? Because as far as I’m concerned, they’re the same thing – both without sugar and I’m not buying either of them.