“Selfish” is what abortion opponents call those who defend it. “Selfish” also is what filmmaker Therese Shechter was called her whole life for never having children. Her documentary film My So-Called Selfish Life was released on 6 May, when globally, discussions reopened about abortion after Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade.
In 2013, Shechter tackled the taboo of virginity with How To Lose Your Virginity and encountered a great response as she initiated a public discussion about something we only talked about behind closed doors. This new film too feels like freeing speech about a forbidden matter. Shechter brings together the voices of these people who resist the social construct that a woman’s greatest value lies in her ability to procreate. What happens to those who try to choose – and sometimes refuse – motherhood by themselves, for themselves, regardless of what is expected from them? The film addresses with a sense of humor, frankness, mainstream references, feedback, and interviews, the paternalistic view that society has of women.
“We do not like to admit to ourselves that we see women above all as reproducers,” wrote French feminist author Mona Chollet in Sorcières. Also known as the maternal instinct, a generalized belief that a woman realises her deepest identity when she becomes a mother is a cause of pain for those women who do not have children. By choice or not, some for this time only, others forever, they are all prey to this injunction to be a mother that honours, medals, successes, will not disarm.
This film is a necessity because it thwarts the social pressure that women are under to give birth by freeing their speech, a pressure further applied by the reopening of discussions about abortion in the United States. It is an ode to choice, to free-will in matters of reproduction. It draws the link between eugenics and pronatalism, deconstructs the myth of the biological clock, and opens up alternatives to the traditional nuclear family. And above all, it states loud and clear: those who have not had children are doing fine. Shechter’s film comes in the nick of time.
Film Cred: My So-Called Selfish Life explores the culture of pronatalism, which describes the world as being a place where having babies is the norm but that uses many ways to make it feel like it’s a choice. Is that how you would define pronatalism?
Therese Shechter: I think it’s a system. Like patriarchy is a system, or nationalism is a system, capitalism too. And a thing with a system is that it’s so embedded in our culture that we don’t notice they even exist. So this level of ‘business as usual’ makes it very challenging sometimes to talk about. These things all exist and they’re tied into things like panic over fertility rights and gender roles. The suggestion, the pressure, the forcing of having children and generally it is serving larger forces in our society although because it’s such a part of our society, we all believe that this is the right thing and the best thing and the most important thing. Until we maybe suddenly think about it which is just what I hope the film helps people do.
FC: I suppose you approached this movie with ideas about that topic. I found an interview where you said that somehow, when you made How To Lose Your Virginity in 2013, you already thought about this one. Did you have any surprises along the process of making this movie?
TS: I approached this movie with two questions, that’s it. It started in 2015 officially, but the entire process is discovery. Whatever I said this movie is going to be in 2015 is partially what the movie became but so much of it was this discovery process of talking to people in the film, people who were advisors to the film, reading books, watching films, thinking about it, trying to make connections…
Part of the surprises for me were the things I took for granted as real, that were not. For example, the biological clock, this thing we all grew up with. Discovering that it was written by some journalists in the seventies, based on no science whatsoever. It wasn’t even based on a real person, because he wrote, at the beginning of the article, that there’s a composite woman, that he has put together, based on all these different women he knows who all have baby fever. And he describes her as young, and attractive, and maybe there’s a man in her life and maybe there isn’t, all this crazy condescending language! And that is where we got this idea that there is a time bomb in our body that is going to go off. There’s no science behind it! There’s fertility, you at some point are no longer fertile. As some people say in the film, the idea of biological clock is social, it’s what’s happening around you, the messages around you and what your friends are doing and your family is saying, and a lot of social psychology that might make you feel like I must have a baby right now. There’s nothing in your body that’s actually doing that.
Another thing was fully understanding pronatalism as this very large system, because I thought about it in the way of, you know, your family asking: « when are you going to have kids? » or « when are you going to give us grandchildren ». Or just getting money from the government every time you have a child. Which is standard in Canada, where I grew up, I know it is in France as well. And that’s pronatalism: you get money when you have a child. It got bigger and bigger. No, it’s not what the family is saying to you, this is what we see in commercials and on TV shows and movies, and this is how we talk about the right people having children and the wrong people having children… So just seeing that extending before my eyes was quite surprising but makes a much more interesting film.
FC: What kind of filmmaker are you? Has it evolved since your last movie How To Lose Your Virginity?
TS: I think I’m the kind of filmmaker who’s asking questions and following those questions and seeing where they take me. My main goal is to confront topics that we don’t confront enough. Things that make you really thorny. I’m interested in issues about women’s lives of course and figure them out and try to empack them and create films that are not necessarily typical narratives. I’m not following children in a chess competition, and who’s going to win. It’s not that kind of classic narrative. It’s the narrative of an idea. And as we go through the film, the idea gets more and more complicated, or more and more revealing. I think that’s what I’m always trying to do, it’s to take an idea and then present it in more and more complex ways to create an overall – hopefully – new way to look at it. And see it through different eyes. And I want to do that in an entertaining way. I really want my films to be entertaining. I want them to be full of engaging people, full of pop culture because I think pop culture is a way that we learn who we are supposed to be in our society. It’s so important to me.
Because they are such thorny issues, and because they make people uncomfortable, and because it challenges things that people very deeply believe, it has to be entertaining. The aim is bringing people around, and not shutting down the conversation. Not that this works with everybody certainly but that’s the way I like to tell stories. Some people make films that have gorgeous fields, that you can look at for 5 minutes and go ‘Oh my god what a beautiful field’ and look at how the sun is shining. That’s beautiful, I love films like that, it’s not my main goal, that’s not the main thing I’m trying to do. I’m trying to bring you into a world of ideas and do it in a way that you wanna stay with it and see where it takes you.
My very first documentary was in the early 2000s, it was me wondering what happened to the feminist movement which had been really influential when I was a teenager. Did it disappear? Did it go underground? Did it become irrelevant? The film was called I Was A Teenage Feminist. Through the course of the movie, you’re sort of following me going to different places, talking to different people. And trying to understand did I lose my feminism or did it kind of lose me? That was the goal of that film.
So My So-Called Selfish Life looks a lot better than the first one. When I started my first film, it was the first time I used a video camera. I didn’t have any money so lot of it, I shot it myself! I love all the films I have made, I think they’re wonderful but I think I’m a better filmmaker with each film which shouldn’t be surprising. The ideas get more complex, the execution I hope gets better. For me it’s a very straight evolution of the more times you do something, the better you get at it. I have a very specific style and a very specific voice so I don’t see that my next film is going to be about hunger in America and we’re gonna follow three families and their challenges. Those aren’t the films I make.
FC: You mentioned it was a hard topic to talk about. Did you encounter any resistance from people to talk about it?
TS: Off the record no, people were happy to talk about their own lives. For example, I got resistance in a sense that people said: “But having children is the most important thing a woman can do.” I understand that you feel that way. There were people that I spoke to who absolutely refused to talk about it on camera. The level of taboo around this subject was revealed to me. When I would have this really fantastic conversation with someone and I would say “I’d really love to have you part of the film to tell your story.” And then they’d say “Oh no no my family doesn’t know this about me, they don’t know I don’t want kids. My husband and I keep telling them we’re trying. My family thinks we’re infertile. And that’s what they’re going to keep thinking. I can’t tell them we don’t actually want to have children.” I was told this is a common thing that people do in certain cultures.
So people were not out, to use the language of LGBTQ people, and they didn’t want to be out. They were happy to talk to me but there was absolutely no way to be on camera. That was very surprising but I understand. I hope, if they watched the films, I hope they found a way to have those conversations. I heard from many people recently who ended up watching the films with their families. And it opened up a line of conversation that they didn’t have before, which is all I could ever wish for, honestly that’s all I want. It’s not all I want, I mean, I need to pay my bills [Laughter]. But apart from that, it’s so important.
FC: You had a really good feedback to see the impact of the film, that’s amazing!
TS: Yes! We just had this period where we were globally streaming for a certain period of time, which I refer to as a virtual theatrical release, it’s like being in a global theater for two to three weeks. People were sending me emails, people were sending Instagram messages. They were creating Instagram stories about the film and about how they felt about it. There was so much feedback. Documentaries take a long time to make, generally speaking, because it takes time to raise the money that you need, or you’re following a story that has to evolve and you’re working alone, most of the time. My editor and I, who is brilliant, Siobhan Dunne, her and I are just working in my little office for a long long long time, just the two of us. To have it out in the world and have something coming back to us, is really rewarding. We wanted this to be a conversation.
FC: A simple way to talk about your movie would be to say: it’s about those who don’t want children or can’t have children. But you also interview your mom, who obviously chose to have a baby. It’s interesting, as the movie is giving us the knowledge to answer that question: do I want a baby or was I taught to want babies? While making the movie, were you thinking of people who don’t have children by choice, or did you also think of how people who might want children one day would receive it?
TS: Our core audience are people who don’t want children and who are very happy to have this sort of support and validation and all of that but for me, it’s a much much bigger conversation. It’s a conversation for anybody who’s ever thought about whether they want a child or not, felt pressured in a certain way and hasn’t had a chance to sit and think about it. Because it’s such an assumption of something we’re gonna do. There’s specifically one woman in the film who really wanted children and couldn’t have them and how she sorted out the rest of her life when she knew that that wasn’t going to happen. My mother of course is in it and there are other people who became parents. I think that this is a film about reproductive freedom, it’s about bodily autonomy, it’s about having the space and support to think about what you want your life to look like and what that might mean for you. So for me it’s a much broader topic. We live in a world that reinforces this idea over and over and over again, and if you don’t fully buy into it, there’s something wrong with you. And if you do buy into it, and you’re unhappy about it, there’s something even worse wrong with you.
So I support people having children. My sister is a fantastic mother, and my sister has always wanted children. She and her husband are wonderful parents. She knew what she wanted, she knew what she was getting into. I don’t think she had this fantasy about it, being perfect and wonderful. People just need the facts, they just need to be told the truth. And they need the tools to do things on their own times and on their own terms. And be able to shout out a lot of the noise that is so confusing for all of us.
And especially people are saying : ‘Oh wow, perfect timing, this all Roe v Wade decision is coming up, you couldn’t have timed it better.’ And I’m thinking that we finished this film a year ago, this was happening a year ago too. It’s not like we somehow made a discovery about how very difficult it is for women to actually get the reproductive healthcare they need. And what the implications of that are, especially for poor women, Black women and Indigenous women. (…) I’m glad the movie came out now because people could attach their thinking to how they’re feeling about Roe v Wade, but we’ve been working on this film for 6 years.
FC: It also says that it’s not because we have a legal right that our social or society right exists as well.
TS: It’s true. Here is an interesting feedback: someone who liked the movie but didn’t think it was really important. “Why are we talking about this? If you don’t want children, don’t have children.” That’s something I hear from people, a lot. But that’s the problem, that’s not what the world is. Just because we have birth control pills doesn’t mean that we’re free to make all of these choices. Just because abortion happens to be legal where I leave, in NY City, doesn’t mean that every single person who gets pregnant wants to be and wants to have a child. Just because it’s legal, it doesn’t mean it’s accessible, it doesn’t mean that it is affordable or that the options are safe. Part of the panic now is that middle class white women have suddenly felt it, because everyone else has been dealing with this for a long time.
For all of recorded history, women have been trying to control their reproduction. So it’s not like a thousand years ago, women didn’t care that they were pregnant and didn’t want to be. There is a very long history of how people try to prevent pregnancy, how people try to terminate a pregnancy, how people try to keep themselves out of every situation where they could possibly get pregnant, like becoming a nun for example, because your chances of dying in childbirth were incredibly high. Maybe they didn’t want to die as they were delivering their first child. Sorry I’m getting into these rabbit holes (laughters)
FC: No that’s great, that’s what we’re here for! I guess in the movie you were able to convey a lot, but you must have so much in mind regarding the whole discussion around it.
TS: There’s a lot in my brain at this point (laughter). Also I’m really fascinated by it, I’d say I’m obsessed by it. I don’t think you could undertake a documentary like this without being completely obsessed with what you’re working on. It’s too difficult, you’ll never finish it, if you didn’t have this obsession. I say obsession in a healthy way, not an unhealthy way. You’d never finish it, it’s too much work, it takes too long, it’s too expensive. So yes, there’s a lot that didn’t get to the film that is in my brain.
FC: What have you planned to get the discussion going?
TS: During our little theatrical virtual event, we had three panel discussions. The first one was on reproductive justice, the second on creating different kinds of families, and the third is a conversation between me and my mother, who is a lot of people’s favourite in the film. The editor of the film is moderating. Those are available to anyone who wants to watch them. We also have some resource guides. We have a discussion guide that people can download if they want to host their own conversations on the topic. (…) And we’re selling the film to schools, universities, non-profits, conferences, and companies.
FC: Your movies are full of mainstream references. What is it about mainstream and pop culture that is relevant in this your artwork?
TS: Growing up, I remember watching TV shows and absolutely not understanding the female characters and the way they were written, for talking about women without children. I remember an American TV show in the 80s, 90s, during my formative years. There were two women on the show who didn’t have children. One woman wants children and is completely neurotic. Another one who doesn’t want children, she’s a career woman, and a real bitch, they’re both unhappy all the time. And I thought: “That’s the life I want! I want that! I am aspiring to this person’s life and you’re telling me she’s miserable all the time.” I was so confused by this. And in Backlash, a book written by Susan Faludi, she breaks down the whole show and explains that it was written by people who were quite conservative. They wanted to push this idea that happiness comes from a heterosexual partner and children, and a nice house, and a good job.
FC: Do you have in mind series or mainstream references that showed you a realistic role model of how a woman can be happy and represented as such?
TS: It’s still not that easy to find, especially in terms of roles who don’t have children in our role models. It’s interesting because sometimes there are role models but you can look at their characters as being not good characters. People are always talking about Grey’s Anatomy and Dr Cristina Yang who is played by Sandra Oh. She’s one of the doctors, she doesn’t want children, she talks about it all the time. She gets pregnant, she has an abortion. She’s very much in control of her own narrative, she knows what she wants and she’s very secure in that. I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy but I know a lot of people who love the show. So in the end, she’s quite a role model because she knows what she wants and she lives her life accordingly and makes her own decision and when she gets pregnant, she has an abortion. Frankly, if I got pregnant, I would have an abortion because I totally don’t want children, it’s not negotiable. But she’s also a ‘difficult’ person, depending on how you interpret it.
When I started making I Was a Teenage Feminist, it was part of it. It was like: ‘I’m 40, I’m not married, I don’t have children, I do not look like a supermodel. Have I completely failed at everything I was supposed to achieve by this age?’ I was asking myself those questions. I was like: “you know what, back when I was 13, I felt good, strong, empowered by this show Free to Be You And Me.” It was a TV special, full of these very empowering stories for kids that reinforced the idea of “you could be who you want to be”. (…) For me, it was the story of this princess who didn’t want to get married and her father was forcing her to get married. And there was a running race and whoever won the race, got to marry her. And she says: ‘Fine, but only if I can run in the race and if I win the race, I don’t have to marry anyone.’ Just right there, you’re exploding every convention in fairytales. And she ties with a guy. And the King says he can marry her daughter since he tied. And the guy says ‘I wont marry your daughter if she doesn’t want to get married, I’d like to be her friend.’
FC: That’s awesome, I need to watch that!
TS: Right, that’s the perfect feminist fairytale. And then they become friends. They both go off, exploring there and there, separately. And the last line is: “We don’t know if they ever saw each other again but we know they both lived happily ever after.” That really rewired my brain at the age of 13. So I looked back at that time, and I thought: “That was feminism.” Feminism made me think really differently when I was young. But I lost my connection to it, because we grow up, and there’s the world, and there’s people around you doing certain things. So I Was a Teenage Feminist was an attempt to find those things that I could reconnect to.
FC: When do you consider you found your feminism back?
TS: I think during the making of that film. That was sort of my mission, in this first ever documentary I made: figuring out what feminism meant in the 21st century. What does it mean? And is it still around? And it was by all means still around. But it had been so suppressed in the 80s and 90s. The people I met making the film also, of course, because I was putting myself into environments that I had not been in before. So I’m the last person to have discovered Riot Grrrrl. I think there was more in the seventies, to be honest. I think we have regressed. I had more pop culture role models in the 70s than I think I would find now. People may not agree.
Watch more of Juliette’s conversation with Therese Shechter here.
My So-Called Selfish Life will be streaming again July 29 – Aug 1 to celebrate International Childfree Day. Get on the film’s First To Know list for details.
