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Married couple sticks it to nosy friends and relatives with viral 'announcement' prank

They got so tired of the baby question, they decided a formal announcement was in order.

Photo via Carrie Jensen/Imgur, used with permission.
One couple's perfect response to people asking when they're going to have kids.

Every couple has gotten the question at some point, especially from pesky parents and in-laws. It's a rite of passage when your relationship starts to become serious, and it only ramps up faster and faster after you get married: "When are you guys going to start having kids?"

Like many couples, Carrie Jansen and her husband Nic had heard this question a million different ways, a million different times.

The pressure really started to mount after the pair got married. While Carrie loves kids (she's an elementary school teacher, after all), she and Nic simply aren't interested in having kids of their own. Now or ever.

"It's not what I was meant for," explains Carrie in a Facebook message. "It's like, I love flowers, and everyone loves flowers. But that doesn't mean I want to grow my own. I'm perfectly happy admiring other people's gardens."

Carrie wanted to tell her family that they don't plan on having kids but knew if she did, they'd say something like, "Oh you'll change your mind one day!" and that pesky question would keep rearing its ugly head. So she decided to get creative.

Ah, yes, people who have chosen not to have kids absolutely love having their thoughtful decision immediately dismissed as silliness! Worse, there's the camp that insists they'll regret it one day, and begs the couple to reconsider.

Still, it's not an easy conversation to have with loved ones and relatives.

"We don't want kids, but if it’s Grandma asking, I won’t tell her straight up...because we don’t want to give her a heart attack," Carrie told Buzzfeed. "So usually, I’ll give her the general ‘We’ll see!’ or ‘Not this year!’”

pregnancy, moms, motherhood, family, couples, childfree, culture, love, relationships, marriage, petsDressed to the nines on their wedding day. Photo via Carrie Jansen, used with permission.

Rather than continue to deflect the question over and over, Carrie decided that a clear and formal announcement made sense. But how to make the announcement was another matter. How could she and Nic strike the right tone? Serious, but not morose. Firm, but playful. Final, but optimistic.

But that's not to say that the couple wasn't planning on making any big changes. In fact, they were adding another mouth to feed to the family, and they decided to announce it with a series of maternity-style photos, revealing the twist:

The new addition was a puppy named Leelu, not a baby.

"My husband and I have been married 3 years and everyone is bugging us about having a baby. Close enough right?" she captioned the photos shared to Facebook and Imgur.

pregnancy, moms, motherhood, family, couples, childfree, culture, love, relationships, marriage, petsLook at my newborn baby... puppy. Photo via Carrie Jensen/Imgur, used with permission.

Her pictures went massively viral, with many of the commenters giving her props for hilariously addressing the dreaded "kids " question.

"If you don't want kids, don't have kids. Seriously. Have fun with each other. I had three kids early and it's all about them now," wrote one commenter.

"I wish people would just mind their business raising a kid ain't easy and cheap," wrote another.

"I got my husband a vasectomy for his birthday this year. Best gift ever," chimed in a third.

Carrie was overwhelmed and inspired by the viral response. "Having children is definitely a hot topic, and one that is evolving in this generation like so many other social issues," she says. "It's exciting to find others that feel the same way I do.”


pregnancy, moms, motherhood, family, couples, childfree, culture, love, relationships, marriage, petsThe happy, child-free couple at the beach.Photo via Carrie Jensen/Imgur, used with permission.

Carrie is hardly alone in not wanting to have kids — in fact, a record number of women are choosing not to have kids today.

Pew Research recently concluded that 47% of adults 18-49 say they're "unlikely" to ever have children, a number that has grown steadily over the years. Statistica backs this claim up, finding that 46.9% of women aged 15-50 in the United States are childless. Despite the numbers, however, because we still live in a patriarchally-driven society, women regularly face the expectation that they should be mothers, and they often are judged if they decide not to be.

When you think about it, it's pretty baffling! Child-free people are not some fringe minority. They make up about half of all adults. It should be viewed as a completely normal choice that requires no explanation or, yes, even funny gimmick announcements.

Whether you want to have one kid, five kids, no kids, or a puppy, the choice should be yours and no one else's.

There are a lot of reasons couples might choose not to have children. It could come down to the cost, the stress, the loss of freedom — or simply because they don't want to.

What's especially great about Nic and Carrie's viral post is that it went on to inspire other couples to do the same: Make cheeky announcements about puppies, their decision to go child-free, or even their vasectomies!

No one else has the right to put pressure on you to change your body and life in a drastic way. Thankfully, because of women like Carrie — and partners like Nic — who aren't afraid to bring the subject out in the open, the expectations are slowly but surely changing.

This article originally appeared nine years ago.

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Health

Historians take to Reddit to gloriously dispel the 'boys don't cry myth'

"Masculinity and tears have not always been at odds."

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Time to stop believing this myth once and for all

Who decided "big boys don't cry"?

It's not rare to see powerful and high profile men overcome with emotion at times, but when they do, it's usually met with some form of criticism or seen as a display of weakness. Simply put, in today's world boys and men are simply not expected to display vulnerable emotions like sadness and grief. (But anger is usually A-OK!)

When we think of the founding pillars of "manliness," we think of strength, bravery, and stoicism, and we often assume that it's just always been that way. After all, ancient Greek warriors didn't cry! Medieval knights didn't cry! Men just don't cry! It's, like, biology or something! Right? Right?

Well, actually...

A couple of historians recently took to Reddit to debunk this myth once and for all.

A user named Sassenacho prompted the thread on the r/AskHistorians subreddit with a simple question: "Today, there are voices that call for (much needed) acceptance of men's emotionality, but it is still kind of taboo. I was wondering when and why this changed in western society."

Photo by Luca DG Photography on Unsplash

The explanations that ensued were fascinating.

Cassidy Percoco, a curator and historian at the St. Lawrence County Historical Association and author of "Regency Women's Dress" kicked things off, explaining that "masculinity and tears have not always been at odds."

Those rough and tumble medieval knights with their shiny armor and big swords? Percoco says they were actually expected to weep on occasion.

"In the Middle Ages there was a trope of masculine weeping being a mark of religious devotion and knightly chivalry; by the sixteenth century it was well-established that a masculine man was supposed to have deep emotions and to show them — in some cases, through tears."

It was a part of the whole chivalry thing and a sign of religious devotion.

As far back as Biblical times and in the age of Greek and Roman heroes, crying out of grief or sadness was just something men were expected to do.

From there, Percoco jumped forward to 17th and 18th century England. Hundreds and hundreds of years later, men crying and sharing their feelings — a gentlemanly trait known as "sensibility" — still hadn't gone out of style.

"A gentleman was to be courteous to women and other men, to talk problems out, to keep from bursting into loud displays of anger or drunkenness. You might think that that would also put the kibosh on weeping — giving way to feelings of all sorts — but this was not the case. Another gentlemanly trait of the eighteenth century was sensibility, which today sounds like it ought to mean "rationality" but is actually being aware of and susceptible to one's finer emotions."

Alex Wetmore, assistant professor in the English department at University of the Fraser Valley, chimed in as well to explain that in the mid-to-late 1700s, popular fiction often celebrated male leads who cried "a lot"!

"People are often interested to hear that there was a period of time of a few decades (1740s to 1770s) where fiction devoted to men who cry (a lot!) was not only acceptable, but, in fact, tremendously popular and widely celebrated."

Wetmore identified an archetype, which he calls "The Man of Feeling," who appears in a ton of novels from that era. (Wetmore even wrote a bookon the subject.)

"When I try to explain this recurring character type to students, I usually describe him as like a comic book superhero ... BUT with the notable exception that the 'superpower' of men of feeling is an ability to spontaneously shed copious amounts of tears."

It's quite the contrast to the unflinching action heroes we see today.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

It wasn't until the early 1800s that things began to change, and men started feeling the pressure to hold those tears in.

Percoco and Wetmore were both hesitant to prescribe a definite cause and effect relationship, but they do suspect the Industrial Revolution played a big part in turning the tide. (Reportedly, some factory managers actually trained workers, usually men, to suppress their emotions in order to keep productivity high.)

The age of the stoic and emotionless cowboy (a la John Wayne, who most people agree never cried in a movie) wasn't far behind, followed by the gun-wielding "Die Hard"-ian action heroes of modern cinema.

But ... while fictional macho men may have been suppressing their tears, the real men of the real world were doing the same thing they'd always done: wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

For instance: General Ulysses S. Grant cried when the Civil War finally ended. President Eisenhower cried on the eve of D-Day. And baseball legend Lou Gehrig cried when the Yankees retired his number.

And, yet, since it took hold about 200 years ago, the expectation that "boys don't cry" persists.

Today's world is certainly not one that celebrates open displays of emotion from men, often to their detriment.

Research shows that these repressed feelings can often come out in unhealthy and harmful ways, and it's all so we can meet a standard of masculinity that, likely, never truly existed.

Next time you catch someone bemoaning the "wussification of American boys" and yearning for a time "when men were men," it might be worth asking them when, exactly, they think that was.

This article originally appeared on 11.20.17

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Science

The surprising reason medicine tends to work better for men than women.

Yet another reason why we need more equality.

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Even the medical field has bias.

Men.

We have it pretty good. Especially when it comes to our health.

Not only do we get to write the health care legislation, but increasingly, we're getting all the good medical treatment.

We can thank lab animals for this — and the researchers who study them.

For a long time, researchers believed that male animals were better for trials of new medicine.

It was widely assumed that hormone cycles in females would screw up the results.

As a result, currently, over 75% of all lab animals are male.

animal research, studies, gender bias, disease

Lab mouse in a surgically gloved hand.

Image by Rama/Wikimedia Commons/CeCILL.

The problem is, when you test primarily on male animals, you're making medicine that's more likely to be effective for, well, men.

According to a report in New Scientist, researcher Natasha Karp and a team from the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute studied tens of thousands of mice of both sexes. They found that when you switch off genes in male mice, the mice express different traits then when you switch off the same genes in female mice.

If genes express themselves differently depending on the sex of the animal, the researchers found, so do some genetic diseases.

drugs, health, politics, community

Gene therapy: rad as hell.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

The team concluded that "drugs optimized for male animals may be less effective in females, or even cause harm." Of the 10 drugs that were pulled from the market between 1997 and 2001, they explained, eight were riskier for women.

Male animal-bias also means drugs that work better for women might not even make it into testing to begin with.

As with the debate over what constitutes an "essential" health care benefit (according to some hi-larious U.S. senators, mammograms shouldn't), when it comes to "who constitutes a full human," it appears men are the considered default setting, while women are an afterthought.

equal rights, equal representation, experiments, medical advancements

A bearded man looking off into the distance all manly.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

It's a pretty sweet gig for us men.

The thing is, women are half of us. We like them.

As fully formed human beings with lives, free will, hopes, dreams, and so on, it'd be nice if medicine worked better on them when they got diseases.

There's been some progress toward making medical experiments more equitable, at least where human subjects are concerned.

Clinical trials (on humans) used to involve pretty much no women. Now most are 30-40% female, though that still means women are underrepresented.

Thanks to efforts of researchers like Karp and her team, we now know we need to extend that progress to the animal kingdom as well.

"Unless there’s a really good reason not to, we should be using both sexes in biomedical research," Karp told New Scientist.

Male animals, she argued, have traits just as particular as female hormone cycles that make them similarly varied from an ideal "norm."

Ultimately, more comprehensive research benefits us all — men and women.

Better studies lead to more effective medicine, which leads to less sickness and sadness all around.

That's the hope anyway.

The animals of both genders who turn out to help us out with this project deserve a hearty "thank you."

If we start with equal treatment, we might finally get some equal treatment.

This article originally appeared on 06.29.17

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Pop Culture

Husband praised for explaining his definition of a woman's 'true beauty'

"Is this man an actual unicorn?"

@chrissyjpowers/TikTok

This guy gets it.

One woman was so floored by her husband's kind and poignant words regarding the unfair beauty standards women continue to endure that she decided to record them. And people can’t get enough of the clip.

“Tell me what you just said, it was so brilliant,” says Chrissy Powers in her TikTok video. “I just looked at a picture of ... Jennifer Lopez. And I said, ‘How does she look that good at 50 something?’ And you said ...”

“I said she spends millions of dollars on herself to look like that ... That's the problem with patriarchal culture,” he responds before diving into an incredibly insightful, totally uplifting speech.

“The patriarchal culture tells women that if they don't look like a celebrity, their value is, like, nothing,” he continues, referencing a joke made by comedian Bill Burr about how men go to the movies and see a shirtless, buff Brad Pitt but don’t internalize any shame around it.

“We know we can't, so we just accept it. We are just us,” he quips.

The conversation then hones in on how there’s a double standard specifically when it comes to aging.

Powers says, “If we see women getting old, then we say, ‘She let herself go.’” and her husband immediately links that mentality to a falsehood promoted by capitalism.

“The idea that a woman is only valuable when they're between the ages of 18 and 25. That's ridiculous,” he says. “Listen, women have to stop believing the lies that the patriarchal culture machine tells them, that their value is only because they look young. It's ridiculous.”

via GIPHY

“Aging is not the problem,” he attests. In fact, when his wife asks if he thinks she is hotter now than when they first met, this is his thoughtful response:

“Oh, 100%. Oh, God, you're so much more beautiful. I mean, you were hot then. But you have…there is a wholeness to your beauty now because it comes with wisdom,” he tells her. “It comes with inner knowing. It comes with doing the work that is required to get to this point. Because if you're not growing, you're stuck. So you're doing the beautiful work of the change, the lasting change of moving forward, which is wisdom.”

And now for his mic-drop moment:

“Women who can love themselves for how beautiful they are…that’s what so attractive to any man.”

Um, yeah. This guy is a keeper.

@chrissyjpowers Sunday Sermon: How the patriarchy makes women question their beauty and then makes money of their insecurities. #realbeauty #aginggracefully #embracingaging #consciousrelationships ♬ original sound - Chrissy Powers

And perhaps the best part? During the entire conversation, their young daughter sat absorbing what Powers captioned as “true beauty” being defined by a “conscious man.” Talk about leading by example.

So far, over 280,000 people have viewed Powers’ post, and women have flooded the comments section sharing how much her husband’s words meant to them.

“When you said ‘there is a wholeness to your beauty now...’ tears came. Women aren't told this enough if at all. So, we learn to tell ourselves. Thank you”

Another joked, “Is this man an actual unicorn?”

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