Taylor Swift Does Not Have to Answer Questions About Having Kids Just Because She's Almost 30

For women (or at least for me), 30 is the age when the world becomes allowed to ask questions about whether or not we’re going to dust off the old uterus and put it to work. As my twenties wound down, questions about kids sped way up; family members, grad school professors, even relative strangers, like my hairdresser, began to think it entirely appropriate to ask me if I’d made any plans to get some sperm in these eggs. For some reason, 30 looms large in our cultural imagination as the age when women need to grow up and get a baby in us.

Taylor Swift will be 30 in December, which an interviewer for a German men’s magazine seems to think means she’d also like to talk about her plans for reproduction. According to a translation in People, the interviewer asked Swift: “In a few months you will be 30 years old …Is this a kind of turning point in your life? Would you like to be a mother someday, have children?”

Swift quickly excluded herself from that narrative: “I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30. So I’m not going to answer that now.”

Perhaps 30 is a turning point for some people, but it does not set off some internal female doomsday clock ticking down to our last fuckable day, or if it does, mine is broken. And most 30-year-olds still have plenty of time to do whatever they want or do not want with their reproductive organs, along with the rest of their bodies. I chose to spend the final minutes of my 29th year singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” into a whiskey bottle on a pier in Key Largo rather than delivering a child, but everyone should feel free to celebrate their 30th in the manner of their choosing.