THERE really ought to be a point when the world stops talking about and obsessing over whether Jennifer Aniston is pregnant or not, but unfortunately this sentence is not going to be exactly where it happens. Let me make it clear, I don't really care about whether she is or ever will be a mother. What bothers me is the fact that the workings of her womb are the subject of international media scrutiny in the first place. My first reaction on reading the quotes that made the headlines from Aniston’s latest in-depth interview, with InStyle magazine, was one of weariness – that, in 2018, yet again another woman was having to explain, justify or even discuss the fact that she had not had children.

Addressing speculation that she is "heartbroken" or "sad", Aniston said: “No-one knows what’s going on behind closed doors. No-one considers how sensitive that might be for my partner and me. They don’t know what I’ve been through medically or emotionally. There is a pressure on women to be mothers, and if they are not, then they’re deemed damaged goods. Maybe my purpose on this planet isn’t to procreate. Maybe I have other things I’m supposed to do?”

It saddens me that she has to justify herself in this way. Even now, after several waves of feminism, a number of female world leaders and decades of the pill, there is still a tendency to treat famous women as if they were brood mares whose purpose, above all, is to reproduce. I can appreciate that a bit of bump-watching comes with having a royal family, since that antiquated institution revolves around the creation of heirs. But the obsessing over bump potential in any and every female celebrity tells us that even now, the chief thing still asked of a woman is to procreate.

The headlines around Aniston over the past year say it all, revealing a media obsessed with the merest hint of a possibility of pregnancy. “Jennifer Aniston spotted cradling growing baby bump in Montreal.” “Pregnant and in hiding.” “Yes I’m pregnant with Brad Pitt’s baby.” “Jennifer Aniston not pregnant with Brad Pitt’s baby, despite report.”

Seriously? This is what the world is obsessed with? Over the years Aniston has been asked a great number of times, in many different ways, about whether she plans to have a baby. Each time she has answered quite differently. And, to be quite honest, why shouldn’t she? That’s probably what I’d do if the chief thing I ever got asked about was whether my womb was going to get put into full reproductive use.

“For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up,” Aniston wrote in a 2016 blog post in the Huffington Post. “I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of ‘journalism,’ the 'First Amendment’ and 'celebrity news’ ... The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty.”

I’m fed up too – and I’m not even the subject of this bumpwatch. What I am is a mother of two sons who also thinks it’s equally possible that I might have lived another life, without children, and found as much fulfilment. No wonder Aniston seems frustrated. The former Friends star has been put at the centre of a debate on gender politics, not because she wanted to be there, but just because she has been theorised over too often, and generally made the subject of some public piece of narrative about what motherhood means to women. There are, without a doubt, as she says, other things she was put on Earth to do.

EQUALITY THAT DOESN'T ADD UP

EVERY time I try to get my head around last week's story about how the Freemasons are about to open their membership to women, but only if they were men when they joined, or trans men, who were formerly gender assigned as women, I feel that they’ve presented us with an arcane, Sphinx-like riddle which we need to solve before we move any further forward on how we approach gender. For I can’t, for the life of me, work out why they don’t just decide to drop the rules, share their precious handshake with us all, regardless of gender, and chillax over a few beers?

The new rules were created, it turns out, by the United Grand Lodge of England, because one of their members, Edward Lord, is overseeing a City of London identity drive that is opening up women-only spaces like public lavatories. And, as many pointed out, if loos should be opened up to trans people, so should lodges.

By all logic this should be the beginning of the end. It should be the case that the Grand Lodge doors will open to the few women out there who might actually like to get in on the aprons and handshakes. For, if they can take trans women and trans men, then surely they can take us all. Whatever problem they had with women is clearly not based on anything either biological or cultural. I doubt, though, that this will happen quickly – for the problem with women relates to history. The problem is a fear, in men, of power systems unravelling. Above all, our welcoming, would deliver the terror that there’s not really that much that separates us at all.