If I Was in a Hollywood Movie, I’d Be Dead

Where are the happy endings for single women without kids?

Photo by Roger Starnes Sr on Unsplash

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For a time, when I realised I was unlikely to have children, I no longer wanted to exist.

I’d just broken up with someone, and my window for having a biological child was closing. I realised the option to have kids might soon be off the table.

The sense of despair was astonishing and unprecedented, particularly given that marriage and motherhood has never felt like a vocation for me but more as something I figured would happen at some point, just, well, because.

The intensity of my feelings felt weirdly disproportionate to my actual thoughts and beliefs about motherhood, which, from the outside, looked both wonderful but also like a serious and life-changing responsibility.

Then a few months ago I went to see a new film called The Substance, a stylish horror featuring an ageing Hollywood starlet who takes a strange potion that allows her to experience youth again, but with major consequences that ultimately end in her grisly demise.

In the film, she is childless and lives alone in a lavish but depressing flat with seemingly no friends.

And it got me thinking.

How many other films had I watched that showed women like me in similarly bleak circumstances?

And how might that have impacted how I felt all those months ago?

Villains, fuck ups and has-beens

A single woman without children is not allowed a happy ending in films.

In an industry with a depressing lack of representation of older women, I could find a surprising number of cautionary tales about older women without children.

From the woman who loses a child and tries to steal someone else’s (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 1992; Mothers’ Instinct, 2024); to the older career women on the verge of a breakdown (Fatal Attraction, 1987; The Substance, 2024); to the vain, washed up childless starlet (Death Becomes Her, 1992; Blue Jasmine, 2013); to the suspected lesbian preying on a younger woman (Notes on a Scandal, 2006; Rebecca, 1940).

In herarticle,No Life Without Family: Film Representations of Involuntary Childlessness, Cristina Archetti, Professor in Political Communication and Journalism at the University ofOslo, analyses 50 films featuring female characters who are infertile or otherwise don’t have children.

She finds that nearly every character either dies — usually by suicide — or ends up having a miracle baby or becoming a mother figure in some other way.

She cites just four examples of female characters with no children who are allowed to survive and lead normal lives: superheroes Black Panther and Wonder Woman; Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity (although her back story includes a daughter who died); and Noomi Rapace’s character in Prometheus (although she births an alien).

Across all 50 films, the only women permitted to live without having birthed a living being or adopting some kind of mothering role are superwomen whose missions are no less noble than saving all of humanity.

No pressure, then!

She also notes that women in the films are variously portrayed as:

“…weird, cold, neurotic and hysterical…[They] excessively drink alcohol, smoke, consume junk food and behave irrationally…live in empty, soulless flats…and are so affected by the inability to bear a child that their characters tend…to show extreme signs of stress and even develop mental illness.”

Similarly grim examples abound in the Disney films I lapped up as a girl: The Evil Queen in Sleeping Beauty, Ursula in The Little Mermaid, Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians.

What gives?

No right to life without giving life

These aren’t just whimsical stories that have no bearing on how women feel about their lives.

Evidence shows that the media is a key source of inspiration about the identities we adopt and how we choose to live our lives. It also has the power to shape our beliefs about what is socially acceptable, with adherence to those social norms being shown to be a key source of self-esteem for young people.

If we’re sending young women the message that not having children is shameful and wrong, that’s going to sink in.

Of course, for women who have yearned for motherhood or even just assumed it was a destination she would reach one day, not having children carries some level of grief.

But if we consider the subliminal messaging many women will have internalised from a young age — that to be single and not have children is effectively a death sentence, whether real or metaphorical in the sense that such women die socially — is it any wonder a woman’s reaction can be, not just grief, but a desire to no longer be present in the world at all?

Prof. Archetti explains that in the films she analyses:

“…a life without children, outside the family framework, especially for women, is unthinkable and impossible.”

And in interviews with real childless women she comes away with the sense that, for these women:

“Childlessness is about much more than not having a baby: it is an existential crisis.”

Is it any wonder women feel that way when we perceive what we are losing is not just parenthood, but the right to belong, the right to be loved, the right to feel pride and self-worth, and even the right to exist.

At a subconscious level, this is a loss so monumental it’s hard to imagine it not triggering some form of existential crisis.

Finding Archetti’s research felt like a lightbulb moment for me.

This wasn’t all coming from me.

By virtue of my age and relationship status I was slowly being co-opted into a club I had no idea existed, a club for women no longer deemed worthy of happiness, or even life itself.

Welcome to the outcasts

On top of all that, there are society’s reactions towards women like me.

Which, let’s face it, aren’t exactly great.

When women experience negative reactions from loved ones as well as people in power such as American politicianJames D. Vanceand British politician,Andrea Leadsom, both of whomhave implied that women without children have less of a stake in society, the threats in these films can suddenly start to feel ominously real.

But these reactions are, to an extent, understandable if not acceptable.

If we consistently send subliminal messages that women without children are irresponsible, selfish and immoral, it should come as no surprise when one of the impacts is real life hostility towards women who don’t have children.

It’s not just us seeing our characters and lives rubbished after all, it’s the whole world.

There is also, as columnist Nesrine Malik writes for The Guardian, the existence of the “colossally unfair” unspoken contract whereby many women are still expected to perform the lion’s share of unpaid and unsupported care work that is essential for societies to function.

Women without children — particularly those who identify as childfree — are sometimes seen as ‘opting out’ of that system and thus become fair game for abuse.

Under this reasoning, it is not patriarchal exploitation of women that is the problem, but women who stubbornly refuse to agree to the terms by which they are expected to exist, terms they never signed up to in a society they had no hand in building.

And there is another sting in these tales, which Prof. Archetti highlights.

Because a proportion of these films depict childless single women as saboteurs, hell bent on destroying the films’ heroines, who have already established their nuclear family or are in the process of doing so.

This sends a second subliminal message, that a woman without children is not only a threat to herself, she is a threat to other women, thus serving to underline the danger she poses and entrench her isolation from the sisterhood.

After a weekend away with a married friend during which I found myself ignored, insulted and treated to stories about single women who had died without anyone noticing, I started to get a sense of my new found status as the woman you are allowed to hate.

Neurotic, weird, drunk, immature, soulless, treacherous and insane: it is hard to understate how harmful the messages we tell about single women without children can be.

If they were being given to us by a loved one, we would call them a form of psychological abuse and tell women to get the hell out.

Women worthy of the big screen

Slowly, I have rebuilt my sense of self worth by learning from thought leaders in the childfree/childless space and spending time with people who celebrate my wins and make me feel like I am enough as I am.

And during that process, I’ve realised I’m not the only one to have had these feelings of despair.

Jody Day, author and founder of childless women’s organisation Gateway Women, and Lucy Meggeson, host of the Spinsterhood Reimagined podcast, have also confessed to similar feelings when, as single women, they realised their biological window for having a child was closing.

Thankfully, they’re both a world away from feeling that way now. But for women crossing that threshold for the first time, there is still so much pain.

And we deserve so much better from our creative industries.

Because there is much to celebrate about our lives.

History shows single, childfree women contribute to society in myriad ways — just as parents do. They do all manner of work, contribute economically to our society, care for others and love widely and deeply.

And often they do those things with little positive reinforcement. To the contrary, they may well be facing intense hostility and judgement.

In an interview with the We Need To Talk podcast, 44 year-old Jo, talks about her shame at being single in her 40s, a shame that stops her showing up proudly in the world.

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What might women do if they were shown inspiring messages about how they could make a meaningful mark on the world? How might they thrive and how might our world thrive with them?

It’s high time we stop the character assassinations of single, childfree women and show them representations of themselves that truly resonate and inspire.

Because every woman cowed by shame is squandered potential in a world that needs all of us showing up as our best selves every day.

And when women dive wholeheartedly into this life, it turns out we can weave magical stories that are ripe for retelling on the big screen.

So come on Hollywood, give us single ladies without kids a dose of your razzle dazzle.

Give us the blow outs and manicures, the best friend side kicks, the platonic love interests, the hard knock lessons, the inner transformations and the gorgeously uplifting happy endings that make us weep and cheer and roar and roll into bed with achingly full hearts.

Drench us in feel-good messaging and play back our lives to us in all our complex, brilliant, life-affirming glory so we have the courage to go out and build those lives for ourselves.

Or if you can’t do that, please, can you just let us bloody live for once?

By Nadia Huq

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