Blog 9

This past Friday, when I was on lunch break at work, my female co-workers and I were chatting about all sorts of topics as we always do, but then one woman brought up something she had read about in the paper. She had read about a local woman who had given birth at 50 years old. I kind of just smiled said, “Well, yeah?” Her feeling was that it was “just gross.” Then my other co-workers started talking about it. The general consensus amongst them is that no woman that old should be having kids.

After they talked for a bit, I decided I would share my own thoughts on the matter. First, I told them that it is pretty common and it’s not a big deal. To which, they replied that it may happen, but “that doesn’t change the fact that she would probably die before her child even completed high school or college. When I pointed out that women live longer than men generally, they had no reply. Which then led into me asking them it is okay when a man has kids with a younger woman when he is older. One woman said, “Well, men do that because they want to feel like they’re young.” Then I started talking about how that’s ridiculous to say it’s natural for men to have kids when they’re older but not women. Why should men get to “feel young” while women just “get older?”

Because my co-workers are mostly female and we’re all pretty close, we tend to share our ideas, and often, I’m the only one who brings up the feminist side of anything. It’s kind of disheartening when week after week I hear that reaffirming sexist thinking and trying to justify it even when given a different perspective. Maybe after a while, they’ll begin to see things differently.