I’m a 27-year-old woman, and many things come with that age. First off, the sheer panic that creeps up on me whenever I have to say that out loud. Some things are good, like finally starting to grasp some essential life skills, like scheduling, and washing your dishes now and not in two days’ time. Other things are less, let’s say, positive. My pet peeve: the content and messaging of targeted advertising.
The joys of being a grown-up woman include a cascade of ovulation test, pregnancy test and diaper ads. All of them urging me to fulfill the function that previously would have been my only option in life and which, even today, seems to be something people take for granted. I even had a Libero diaper ad thrown in my face when I was reading an article about ten women who had defied societal expectations by not having children (and who, by the way, were completely fine with that choice). Could there be any more irony involved?
Before I go into this in greater detail, let’s make one thing clear. I don’t hate children. Not one bit. What annoys me about these ads is not so much the cute baby faces that come with them, but rather the expectation that because I’m 27 I should be interested in ‘maximizing my chances of getting pregnant’ or at the very least in dreaming of one day doing that. What bugs me, what really bugs me, is the norm that they are implicitly force-feeding me and other twenty-somethings: that this is your thing, being a mum is what you should be aiming for. No matter your other interests in life, surely this is what all women should be thinking about.
What’s more, the ads I keep getting are singularly terrible. Clearblue’s ovulation/pregnancy test commercial, for example, features two women whose original voices have been dubbed over. And this has not been done a Disney-animated-film style, but in the cheap-ad style that couldn’t possibly seem natural to anyone. Is it yet another example of misogyny in our societies that ads aimed at women treat us like we’re brainless? If you’re going to harness the forces of capitalism in trying to sell me something I don’t need or want, couldn’t you at least put some effort and money into doing it?
Like I said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having kids. It makes perfect sense that a lot of people want to do so. Truth be told, I personally haven’t really made up my mind about this issue either way. And you know what makes it hard to decide? Constantly being bombarded with the idea that I should be wanting kids makes it difficult to figure out what I really want. How much of my potential desire to procreate has to do with conforming to what is expected of me, following in my friends’ footsteps or not questioning the implicit assumptions that I’m being fed constantly? How much of wanting to have kids would be attributable to having internalized a norm so strongly put forward by our society, from leading politicians exhorting you to ‘make sure we’ll have enough tax payers in the future’ to lifestyle magazines telling you that ‘women can only feel complete if they have had kids’? The problem isn’t just the ads. It’s the attitudes they’re conveying, too. Only a couple of weeks ago, an opinion piece published in Helsingin Sanomat in which a woman wrote about how she’s not planning on having kids caused a massive uproar. What’s wrong with her, people were asking. Many suggested that not only was she insane, her value as a woman was somehow diminished by her choice.
What frustrates me, more than the idea of maybe one day having kids, is that despite all the positive development of recent decades concerning women’s rights and options in this life, my value as a human being still seems to be strongly linked to my wanting kids. Like I said, I don’t know if I’ll have kids one day. Unlike some people seem to think, it might not even be a choice, for a variety of reasons. Either way, I don’t think my happiness is compromised if I don’t have children, and I definitely don’t think other people should be able to judge my life in any way. And whilst it’s unlikely that Google would stop selling my personal data to advertisers, I do have one request to the merchants of motherhood: if you must continue your quest to force-feed me your products, could you at least do so in the form of better ads?