Childless cat (and dog) ladies: Unite!

Are we over-reacting? No. We are never over-reacting.

In the days since Kamala Harris became a candidate for President, I’ve seen several headlines and social media posts calling out the right for criticizing her childless status (which is inaccurate since she is a step-mother). I’ve searched for this criticism, but it is thankfully limited (as far as I can tell) to some dated remarks from JD Vance and a tweet from Will Chamberlain, who I’d personally never heard of until the tweet.

I assume the reason we on the left are sensitive to even these few remarks is because we know full well, based on (gestures broadly) the world, that this is precisely what many people in our society will think. If Kamala Harris has not given birth, and ostensibly because she’s chosen not to, then she’s one of those women. Those women who do what they want, who take a less trodden path, who don’t conform to patriarchal rules for what women can and should do with their lives.

I want to always be careful to acknowledge that many women do want to have children, and some may want to stay home with them while others want to continue working outside the home. To be perfectly clear: I celebrate any path, so long as the woman freely chose it. I will be the first to say there is far too much criticism of mothers by child-free women, whether it is light-hearted or not, and I hope we soon see that we’re all on the same team.

However, I think the criticism coming from men in powerful positions, of women who do not conform, poses the most danger. Men like JD Vance and Donald Trump, who think that women should not get to decide whether or when to have children, or that women who do not have children don’t care about the future of the country or the world. These are men who wield enormous power, and may have more come November. And they are precisely the men who others like Tucker Carlson and Jesse Kelly and Ben Shapiro want to see in power. I shudder to think how many listeners and followers these men have. How many people listen to a rant like this, and just nod along in agreement?

In reply to their tirade about her comedic skit on being a happy childless woman, Chelsea Handler asked: “Are you really upset about how much freedom I have, or are you upset that you haven’t been able to take it away from me yet?”

Aside from Kelly’s absurd argument that women who don’t have children are unhappy, the broader right-wing narrative is that these women are selfish. They say that if women aren’t having children, they don’t care about supplying our future work force, and they won’t support policies that are good for the future of the country, because they have no stake in it.

I have a lot of child-free friends, as well as friends with children. I have never noticed a distinction in how we talk about the future. We all care about the shape of our world, how the country is managed, and what it will be like for young people in twenty or thirty or fifty years. I care about the life my friends’ children will have, the life my nieces and nephews will have, and yes — even the children they will have many years from now.

The suggestion that women who don’t have kids don’t care about the future is demeaning (to say nothing of the unjustness of never making the same claims about men). I guess it is not unexpected that certain powerful men in the world demean women in this way, when they do in so many other ways: they don’t pay us equally, they expect us to raise kids and keep houses for no money, they make it impossible for women to achieve the same as men in all aspects of life, and they limit our bodily autonomy while gaslighting us each time we try to call out the inequity of it all. When we fall victim to the world we live in, they tell us we should have behaved differently or dressed more conservatively or smiled more to achieve a better outcome.

In fact, it is possible to consider the well-being and happiness of others, even those we haven’t met or will never meet. It’s called empathy — and I’m actually not surprised it’s an alien concept to Vance and his ilk.

It’s called empathy — and I’m actually not surprised it’s alien to Vance and his ilk.

Ridiculing women for not having kids is just one move in a long game, and it probably seems like one of the least harmful. I mean, who takes these guys seriously? We can laugh about how ridiculous Jesse Kelly sounds; how unhappy he must be to take issue with a comedic skit. But the reason he takes issue with it is because it is a threat to his own lifestyle and his power. His talking points are insidious, and they support an undercurrent that carries people like Donald Trump to power. Here is a man whose entire platform is built on strength and control, who finds small ways to undermine women — whether it is making fun of Nikki Haley’s dress or looming behind Hilary Clinton or calling Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock” — so it serves him to have talking heads who keep up gender stereotypes. And what happens when Donald Trump is in power? Women are at best sidelined, and at worst killed by a misogynistic abuser or a Trump-invented abortion policy. No, he is not directly responsible for a domestic abuse victim, but he has a voice and platform that he uses to spread misogyny rather than try to end it.

While I have not yet seen too much of a continuation of Vance’s “childless cat lady” rhetoric, I don’t expect him to rebuke it. Instead, I’m sure he will cultivate the same kind of coded misogynistic language Trump and others use, and allow the Fox News types to continue their hate-filled rants more openly. Together, they are loud. But I’m heartened to see that the childless cat ladies themselves have committed to a counter-offensive that has effectively drowned them out. Let’s keep it up.