Targeted Ads Are Ruining My Life

That might sound like hyperbole, but oh my fucking god, just let me rant.

I’m just going to lay it all out for you, Dear Reader, because I don’t even care anymore, I am so over it: I can’t get pregnant. I’ve both been trying and not (no medical intervention, it’s complicated, don’t preach to me about trying) for, like, half a decade at this point. I joke all the time I don’t want kids because that’s a lot easier than explaining the complex feelings and the failure on my part. And, like, I do stand by the fact that kids are terrible–other peoples’ children are quite frequently just the pits, not to mention the selflessness you must achieve to be a good parent is mind-blowing. But I also have known quite a few kids that I just love to pieces. My niece, my friends’ kids, that baby at the grocery store. I’m torn–I don’t think adding a baby into my life right now is a good idea. If it just happened, I would probably be over the moon (while simultaneously filled with dread because anxiety, like the devil, never sleeps), but I do feel like waiting until I’m not in limbo anymore would be better. But none of that hemming and hawing really matters when my body is just, like, completely removing the choice.

But here’s the thing: I can fill my life up with other stuff and be incredibly satisfied. I love writing, creating, video games, DnD, my husband, my cats. These things make missing out on this one thing that socially has been pounded into my head as the only thing I’m good for as a woman, feel okay. But the internet just insists on finding me, targeting me, and reminding me.

I can NOT get away from fertility ads. I have marked them as something I don’t want to see, I have changed my ad preferences, I have set myself to be non-targeted on social media sites, I have installed ad blockers. I went through Facebook and removed every single category I was included in, AND YET. I still get these stupid fucking commercials where an incredibly happy, healthy, beautiful woman in her late 20s pretends to be filming a vlog about how she was worried about her eggs because she’s so fucking old now, so she’s been pissing on a stick for a month straight so a company can tell her to go ahead and try to get pregnant, she’s perfectly fine, don’t worry, she’s still a woman and can do the one thing she was put on this earth to do. Also, thanks for the cash you didn’t need to spend, lady, looks like all that fear we’ve been pumping into you your whole life worked!

I mean, just look at all these I grabbed in less than 5 minutes of scrolling Facebook:

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Just LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE ALREADY, ya know? And I know that last one is a period-tracking app, and I am a big fan of women understanding how their bodies work, knowing what and when ovulation is, and how pregnancy occurs. Honestly, everyone should know, regardless of sex, even childfree people, because actually getting pregnant, even for totally healthy people, can be very difficult and only has a small window to happen, and if people were better aware, the stigma might be taken away, and random assholes wouldn’t constantly ask when you’re going to have kids as if asking when your husband is going to raw dog you is socially acceptable in any other context! Yeah, Karen, I’ve been producing thick, white cervical mucus all day, so he’ll be blowing his load right up against my cervix instead of on my tits tonight, thanks for asking! BUT I also think it’s incredibly disingenuous and unsafe to say that tracking is as effective as the pill. Like, fuck off with that. Tracking is great, but only if you’re doing it right, and it’s way easier to fuck up, way more difficult to understand, and takes way longer to get right than popping a pill every day. Fuck that app. Fuck ALL these apps and companies. Get the FUCK off my timelines.

And if it’s not dried-up-uterus-armageddon ads, it’s fucking pro-life, fascist, religious bullshit with photos of ultrasounds and happy infants and talking points against allowing women a right and a choice with their own bodies. MY BODY ALREADY TOOK THAT CHOICE FROM YOU, SO YOU CAN FUCK OFF TOO. You’d think if some “benevolent,” bearded fucko in the sky wanted babies to be born, he’d give them to the people who wanted them. But that’s not how life works, dumbass. Children get leukemia, women gets sexually assaulted every fucking day, and the paradox of a kind god that allows bad things to happen doesn’t exist. Get with reality, assholes, and dump that money for pro-life ads into something worthwhile like feeding actual children who are starving on this planet right under your imaginary deity’s Anglo-Saxon nose.

And don’t tell me the solution is to get rid of Facebook. You know how much I want to get off Facebook? To get off ALL social media all together? The desire is overwhelming. But there are plenty of people who make those platforms tolerable. Lovely posters who are my friends, who make me laugh, who support me and who I support back. And I also need to run my own ads someday if I ever want to sell a goddamned book, so I have to have these accounts and monitor the ebb and flow of the market. It’s a nightmare and hypocrisy: I hate ads, but I want to run ads. Yeah. It fucking sucks. Everything sucks. And being on the verge of 34 with a uterus and the need to use baby-naming websites for character creation only to be misinterpreted by the algorithm as the ticking of my biological clock FUCKING SUCKS.