Pop Tart: Chelsea Handler, Paris Hilton and the power of childless women

 

Emily Brookes is Stuff’s food editor. She also writes about culture and pop culture.

Chelsea Handler has a child-free day

OPINION: This week, Chelsea Handler woke up and decided to throw a bomb at social media by making a video called A Day in the Life of a Childless Woman.

The video, which Handler posted to her Twitter account, begins with the comedian waking up at 6am.

“I remember that I have no kids to take to school, so I take an edible, masturbate, and go back to sleep,” she says in a voice-over.

The sketch next has her waking up at 12.30 “for a busy day of doing whatever the f… I feel like”, before escalating into going to Paris to visit her favourite croissant place and achieving enlightenment on the plane over “since I have no screaming kids”.

”The weightlessness of my existence has granted me superhuman powers,” Handler goes on. “I teleport myself back home.”

In the rest of the video she goes on a date, then climbs Mt Everest for a workout, invents a time machine and goes back to kill Hitler.

The video is a clear satire of a common TikTok trope in which women post videos that purport to show “a day in the life” but are, of course, 90 heavily edited seconds that make motherhood look like one long hashtag blessing.

Ostensibly, the point of Handler’s video was to illustrate that point, but she had another clear goal: rile up some conservatives.

And boy, did she succeed. Men and women – but mostly men, of course – fell all over themselves denigrating Handler for having the audacity to suggest that any woman could enjoy any single aspect of not raising young.

The delicious irony demonstrated here is that one woman – one! woman! – has the power to, with one video of just over a minute, send hundreds of men into days of frenzy over how little power she has.

Chelsea Handler, I hope my daughter grows up to be just like you.

Paris Hilton also has lots of child-free days

It turns out there is a way to have your parenthood cake and eat it too, and that is to be wildly, astronomically wealthy and pay people to do the more boring parts of parenting for you.

For proof of this, look no further than original nepo-baby Paris Hilton, and specifically her Twitter feed.

In the month since Hilton shocked us all by announcing she had welcomed her first baby with a photo of what looks like two immaculately manicured hands, Hilton has done, and tweeted about, all of the following:

– Walked the Grammys red carpet in one look;

– Attended a Grammys after party in another look;

– Performed at Uber One’s Superbowl party dressed up as Cheerleader Barbie;

– Driven a hot pink convertible;

– Ridden, or at least posed astride, a silver motorcycle;

– Appeared on the covers of two major fashion magazines;

– Launched a new metaverse dating show called Parisland;

– Attended her own star-studded 42nd birthday party, which she described as “low-key” despite it requiring a professional decorating crew, full hair and make-up and walking around all night in stilletto heels;

– Released a set of family snaps so photoshopped they look like AI, and

– Become an ambassador for Colossal, a genetics and bioscience firm working on “de-extinction” with a goal to bring back the dodo (I am absolutely serious about this).

I, by contrast, a not wildly, astronomically wealthy person, spent the first month of my first baby’s life binge-watching The Good Wife, making but not drinking cups of tea, vacillating between anxiety that he was too hot and anxiety that he was too cold, and googling “is my baby too hot”, “is my baby too cold”, “where to watch season 5 of The Good Wife” and “Jennifer Garner Ben Affleck” (it was 2015; they were divorcing).

Paris has now contributed to the world’s ballooning population, and the conservatives seem to be leaving her alone.

But let’s not forget that she, like Chelsea, is a woman of immense power, and that a bunch of men would vilify a woman who would use hers to kill Hitler while condoning another whose influence drove the immensely destructive ultra low-rise jeans trend, frankly, tells me all about them I need to know.