First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the unending barrage of questions about when you’re going to put your uterus to its intended use and finally produce a damn baby.
Sigh. Like a lot of us endowed with the equipment to produce offspring, Zoe Kravitz is over being asked when — or even
if — she’s going to have kids.Kravitz married husband Karl Glusman less than a year ago — and has barely had time to figure out what it means to be in a marriage, nevermind what it means to be a parent or to want to become one. And yet, when the 31-year-old was a recent quarantined guest on Dax Shepard’s
Armchair Expert podcast, the topic of gender and reproduction still came up. “Do you think you’ll have a baby?” asked Shepard, admitting that he was aware that it was an intrusive, “triggering” question.[video_embed id='-1']RELATED: Meryl Streep and
Big Little Lies cast share girls night out[/video_embed]“When you get married or engaged the first thing people ask you is when you’re going to have a baby,” Kravitz replied, “I think it’s what they ask women, not men. It’s a little annoying… I really get offended by people assuming that's something that I have to do because society says so,"
explained Kravitz. "Right now, I'm certainly not in a place where I think I'm able to do that just because of work and also just, man, I don't know, I like my free time," she said. "Karl has his own career and needs to focus on that, but we’ve been together for a few years now, and we know where we are."The issues with asking women, famous or otherwise, about their personal, baby-making business goes beyond the obvious sexism that Kravitz called out on
Armchair Expert. Fertility continues to be a difficult topic for both women who want to have children but struggle to conceive
and for women who don’t want children but feel that they have to negotiate with a society that still expects them to. It also presumes that women don’t have other, more important things going on in their lives — like personal projects they might be working on or family members they might be caring for or their careers. Or a second season of
High Fidelity, perhaps?
[video_embed id='1952479']BEFORE YOU GO: Baby can't stop laughing at his excited dog[/video_embed]
