“Am I allowed to pick my life? Do I have to justify it for you?” asks journalist Chanel Dubofsky in a scene from Therese Shechter’s upcoming documentary, My So-Called Selfish Life. Shechter, friend of BUST, explores the choice of non-motherhood in a society, as Shechter describes, “where motherhood feels mandatory.”
Taking the viewer through the history, politics, and popular culture of motherhood, the documentary visits a variety of people with all types of reasons for making the conscious decision to forgo having children. Among the subjects are a university student on a 5-year quest to get her tubes tied; the founders of a childfree LGBT seniors community; a Red State couple getting pressure to have kids from unexpected places; an single artist and rapper searching for her Golden Girls family (pictured below); and a woman whose unsuccessful fertility treatments led to a total life transformation.
This new doc will round out Shechter’s trilogy of documentaries about women and identity. Shechter’s first two documentaries are I Was a Teenage Feminist and How to Lose Your Virginity. Like My So-Called Selfish Life, both films tackle giant issues in the realm of womanhood — what it means to be a modern feminist and the deconstruction of myths surrounding virginity.
To get this movie finished and released, Shechter has set up a Kickstarter with two weeks left to contribute.
Photos via My So-Called Selfish Life.
published Ocober 4, 2017
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