I know I said that today I’d debut the advice column, but this took priority. The advice column will be published either tomorrow or Thursday. Thanks for understanding!
This week on Twitter, we ushered in some particularly annoying discourse. Model Maggie Greene posted her weight gain that contributed to regaining her menstrual cycle, because when she was underweight she stopped menstruating (for those who aren’t familiar with the female reproductive cycle, not having a period also means you aren’t ovulating.) Of course, some of the trad-troll-type accounts started making comments that I assume were tongue-in-cheek about the underweight body being “more fertile” even though at the time, she was quite literally infertile.
The message, of course, is that whatever is hotter is more fertile (and I’m aware many men would find the photo on the right hotter—that was an entirely different debate and I don’t feel like wading into it.)
This hotness/fertility connection (which is hardly new) gave birth (heh) to this post, hereby crowned the first copypasta for women:
People had quite a lot to say: that she was lying about her height or weight, that the supplements were pointless, or that “processed food” without qualifiers could refer to food that’s been in a blender, or even just sliced. My critique was that if she wanted to brag about her body (and I’m not trashing her body, she looks great!) she could have done that without the weird fertility screed. Literally just say “my body was tea here” and nobody will care!
But what most people noticed immediately was that she had no way of knowing she was fertile or not—she didn’t have any kids.
Naturally, this led to women one-upping her, which at first seemed justified. She was being arrogant and obnoxious, after all. Women, especially those who were not as skinny or as appearance-obsessed, flexed on her by bragging about their actual fertility, usually including details about how they got pregnant on the “first try,” and sometimes including photos of their babies.
To someone who didn’t see the original tweet that sparked this drama, however, this type of flexing looked cruel and pointless. It was giving, “the skinny pretend-fertile girl won’t see your tweet but the 15% of women who are actually infertile will.” Even having unfortunately seen the original tweet, as a mom who has gone through IVF (albeit not for female-factor infertility) it was hard to see such blatant bragging about easy conception and not feel a sting. And look, that’s my own problem. I pride myself in not being too sensitive or easily offended, and the last thing I want to do is force everyone to capitulate to my triggers.
But all the bragging—even if justifiably directed at one very annoying woman—wasn’t an isolated event. As someone who has gone through the “infertility journey,” one of my biggest pet peeves about the whole thing was that people felt that fertility was something you earned by virtue of being a good or healthy person—and that fertility was directly tied to your attractiveness or your sexual energy in general.
The truth is much more disturbing, and nobody wants to think about it—not the people who haven’t tried to conceive yet, and especially not the people who successfully conceived on the first try, who see it as a measure of their superiority: fertility isn’t something you do. Fertility is something that happens to you, or not.
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