missing the point.

I recently came across this article in the Globe and Mail.

From the title "Will Aussies elect a childless woman as PM?" I was expecting something sort of ridiculous. Instead I found an article that was really ridiculous. The article seemed to miss a really important argument about gender politics in, well, politics. The author of the article, Brenda Bouw, who I admit, I know nothing about, could have used her article to ask why we should even care that the Australian prime minister is, as she put it, childless and living in sin. While Bouw seems to be trying to fight the good fight in this article, I think she's missing a bigger and more poignant argument: in 2010, why should we care that a woman choses not to have children and to live with a man she's not married to? I think that she should have concluded her article by acknowledging that while there are many people in Australia (and around the world) that are uncomfortable with looking to an unmarried, childless woman for the leadership of their country, Julia Gillard shouldn't have to explain her choices at all. No man in her position would have to explain his choices. I think that Bouw was trying to almost excuse Gillard's choices which I don't think is very productive for women anywhere. When Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of France, I remember some discussion of his marital status, especially when he married Carla Bruni, a model/actress/singer. But there wasn't much coverage of the fact that he had just been divorced and there certainly wasn't any discussion about whether his divorce/remarriage (for the third time)/beautiful wife/three children were going to detract from his ability to govern France because no one really cared all that much. He's a man!

Women in the western world have the luxury now of being able to choose any life they want: children, no children, married, single, divorced and in a growing number of places in the world (hurrah!) they can chose to do that with a man, another woman or someone in between those two. I'm really tired, however, of people being asked to explain their choice. Can't we just let it be? Is it too much NOT to ask a couple in their twenties when they're going to get married? (Though, I secretly some times love when people ask me that question, but in my defense, so does my boyfriend.) Or when a couple in their thirties or forties are going to have children? I think despite women's mostly-equal status and the striking down of Prop. 8 (for now) we still just want everyone to fit into neatly married (to someone of the opposite sex), child-filled white picketed boxes. If that is ever going to change, we really need to start thinking the think, even if we are walking the walk.