Daniel Radcliffe Gets The ‘Babies On The Brain’ Tabloid Treatment After Saying He Wants To Be A Young Dad
Daniel Radcliffe is officially playing the baby calendar game and talking to the press about it. The 23-year-old “definitely” wants kids and is figuring when exactly to have them. And People magazine is covering this news as if he were a lady.
People mag actually leads into their piece with “Daniel Radcliffe has babies on the brain,” a phrasing normally reserved for celebrity ladies that comes across as belittling compared to how the media generally frames fatherhood: Men want to be fathers (regal, honorable, respectable), and women have “babies on the brain” (crazy, dumb, childlike, unable to think of anything else). But if we’re going to be employing this rhetoric for men and women who do want children, thereby stripping the phrase of its gendered connotations, I say the language is fine — better than fine — kind of strangely equalizing.
The tabloid reports that even though Radcliffe doesn’t have a lady friend at present, he is mentally planning out when to start his family:
“I’d like to get started on it before my thirties,” he tells Time Out: London magazine in its issue coming out on June 4. “I like the idea of being a youngish parent so I’ve got energy to play football even though they’ll be better than me by the time they’re four.” Speaking of football, Radcliffe says he’s “definitely going to be one of those parents who pushes their kids into things” namely, sports, “not the film industry.” Jokes the actor, “I will have to find a very tall wife if they’re going to be good at sports. You could be my size as a boxer, you’d just have to be a super featherweight or something.”
Daniel says that he has been incentivized to have his babies young because he grew up “around lots of people who were having kids when I knew them.” He describes the change in them as “wonderful,” ultimately giving them “a sense of purpose” that he really admires. At present, Dan maintains that he only gets that kind of “purpose” from his day job.
Sounds like a quote or two we have definitely seen before.
(photo: WENN.com)
