There is a furor of JD Vance denouncing the country as being run by childless cat ladies. There is a lot to unpack here and is my Tuesday top of mind.
It goes beyond the regret that he says that the U.S. is being run “by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Point number 1- I feel this is a call back to the spinster horror from the Victorian era and before where a woman needed a man. Otherwise, they would be “on the shelf” and unmarriageable by 23. She was forced to care for her parents until their deaths and after they died forced to live in misery, unwanted. (frowny face here) This is definitely the underpinning of this idea. It is a well-known trope that it was best to be widowed because the widowed woman was thought to be independent and beholden to no man.
Point number 2- I feel this is a projection of the miserableness of those who have children. They see those of us who do not have children as selfish and having all the fun they can’t have themselves. You know, because of the kids. I think this is especially poignant because some people with children want to make the world as miserable as them, mainly when it comes to book bans and drag queen bans. I get it, when you have children they are vulnerable and everything looks like a threat. But is it, though? Or is the threat coming, as it often does, from inside the house?
Point number 3- Who says those of us who don’t have children are miserable? Kind of goes back to point number 2. Projection much?
Point number 4- This lumps all women and men who don’t have kids into the bucket of not having kids because we don’t want them. This might or might not be far from the truth. What about those of us who couldn’t have kids? We are apparently the same as those who don’t want them. One of these things is not like the other.
Point number 5- I think this is about transphobia as well. Trans women do not have the plumbing to create or carry a child. This is through no fault of their own. But why not twist the knife? It says nothing about their willingness to carry a child, if it was physically possible.
Point number 6- Men like this and others who embrace what he is saying are afraid. Afraid of the woman who is not under a man’s thumb. Afraid of a woman who doesn’t need a man. Afraid of a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it.
Much like the abortion bans and the book bans, it is all about control.
They can’t control us.
And they fear what they can’t control.
Therefore, we childless cat ladies, married or not, women who are unable to bear children or not, are to be squeezed into a teeny tiny box of their making. Because they fear what they can’t control.
Fuck that.
My cats and my uterus and my husband would like a word.
I have also seen the childless dog women coming to our defense and that of Kamala Harris, who the slur was originally against. And it is glorious.
You bet I bought that tee shirt.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 