I think there has to be a way to talk about how social & professional & public life is designed *for* childless people -- because it's designed for cishet dudes with or without kids, who are presumed to have wives that do all the childrearing work.

The nuclear family is incompatible with full-time work and/or leisure time. The only way to meet 100% of your professional duties and 100% of your parenting duties, and still have a life, is to split it so one person is driven out of public life & the other person never parents.

The assumption that you, the subject, either (a) don't have kids or (b) have someone taking care of your kids for you is just built into every part of public life, social life, work life. It's such a basic part of the world that it's hard to see until you have a kid yourself.

That means that women without children -- or, granted, women with a bottomless childcare budget -- may have an easier time navigating certain structures, but they also pay a social price and are stigmatized, because being able to maneuver that way is a man's prerogative.

I don't see women with children as being in any way LESS stigmatized. In fact, I think we really hate moms, as a culture. We blame them for everything and caricature them as useless idiots and if something is described as "mom" it's usually an insult: "____ jeans, wine ____."

It's hard to have the conversation because childless people, in my experience, tend to shut down or be angry around the idea that they have it "easy," and I think parents are very frustrated trying to convey how hard it is to people who haven't had to navigate these difficulties.

But I do think it's just misogyny all the way down, and women get falsely pitted against each other, because the default subject, the person every structure is built to privilege is, again, a cishet guy who has someone or several someones to do his domestic and parenting work.