Ohio Sen. JD Vance is a man with an obsession. The video of Donald Trump’s running mate raving on Fox News in 2021 about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” went viral in part because host Tucker Carlson’s practiced “dumbfounded” face adds an extra layer of weirdness to any clip of right-wing absurdity. But fantasizing about the secret unhappiness of all those pretty single ladies hugging kitties on Instagram was pretty much Vance’s full-time job for years. Media Matters dug up a whopping 13 other instances of Vance railing about childless women, calling them “sociopaths” who “must be stopped.” Repeatedly, he singled out cat ownership as a sure sign that one belonged to the “cabal” of non-mothers he believes are single-handedly destroying the nation.
It’s not just the big-ticket “distractions” like having a job that infuriates them, either. Garden variety pleasures, such as having a pet, cause them to come unglued.
But while Vance views our feline friends as a medieval witch-hunter would — as a sign that a woman is dangerously independent and therefore evil — dog owners should not feel safe from the ire of Vance and his friends in the uterus-obsessed MAGA movement. Vance wrote the forward to “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America” by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts is one of the leaders of Project 2025, which was developed to build Trump’s policy agenda without the larger public finding out about it. (That failed, and now the campaign is pretending to reject Project 2025.) “Dawn’s Early Light” was meant to be an airport book version of Project 2025, a snappy and readable volume that nonetheless displays the granular level of control MAGA Republicans want to assert over the choices of Americans in how to worship, whether to have kids and who they’ll marry.
Like Vance, Roberts is outraged that women have goals and interests outside of making babies early and often. The book has been delayed until after the election, but Media Matters has a galley copy, which features Roberts raving about the evils of birth control, in-vitro fertilization, and yes, even pets. Roberts laments that they allow women to feel that “having a child seem(s) like an optional and not natural result of having sex.” In the book, Roberts spits venom at dog parks, which he sees as a decadent concession to those he believes won’t “give up childish things, and live in the real world” by having kids. Dog parks are a result of “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government,” he snarls.
Someone should tell Vance and his buddies many people have both kids and pets. Did these two never read the funnies growing up? Charlie Brown and Snoopy lived in harmony, guys!
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Jokes aside, the fury over pets underscores what’s really going on with Vance and the neo-patriarchal movement he represents. They hide behind sentimental language about children, but the pattern shows something else: resentment towards anything that might distract a woman from serving a man and raising babies. It’s not just the big-ticket “distractions” like having a job that infuriates them, either. Garden variety pleasures, such as having a pet, cause them to come unglued. Not weird at all!
We can see this in another clip of Vance that’s gone viral. In it, Vance apparently agrees with a podcast host’s pontification on the “purpose” of “postmenopausal women,” language choices that only make sense if you think women have no value outside of baby-making. But while older women may be infertile, Vance assures us that he doesn’t think they need to die quite yet, because they have some value: Raising his kids so that he doesn’t have to.
This got attention because it’s of the gobsmacking misogyny of saying “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise children. But it’s much worse if you listen to the entire clip. Vance and the host, Eric Weinstein, discuss how Vance’s mother-in-law took a year off from her job as a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego to help raise Vance’s newborn child. Weinstein is ecstatic to hear they pulled a woman out of the professional world, if only for a year: “A biology professor, PhD, drops what they’re doing to immediately tend to the need of a new mother with her infant?”
Throughout the interview, both men use “this” and “her” to describe the baby, taking for granted that a man’s role is done on the night of the conception. As Jill Filipovic wrote in her newsletter, “The concept of a male caregiver doesn’t come into the picture at all.” During this time in his life, she notes, Vance was “[r]unning a useless nonprofit and then joining an investment banking firm.” Even though he complains, at length, about “prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society,” such as raising children, it never occurs to him to take a year off to raise his own kid. That’s women’s work — and with the restrictions on contraception and abortion he supports, it will be mandatory.
If you’re a woman and outraged over this, Vance has a ready dismissal at hand: Women who care about freedom of choice are not “normal.”
On Fox News Wednesday night, host Laura Ingraham complained that “suburban women, all they care about is abortion.” Smirking, as he usually does when discussing the tiny brain pans of the weaker sex, Vance corrected her. “Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura. I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.”
At this point, I must point out polls show abortion is a top issue for voters, especially pro-choice voters. But it’s also true that Vance, like Trump, is dialed into a fascistic ideology that argues their narrow views on gender roles are “natural” and everything that falls outside of that is “unnatural.” So yes, most women may be pro-choice, but that gets written off as an aberration imposed on women by the “feminist agenda.” In this view, a woman’s “natural” desire is towards young and frequent childbearing. Any rejection of that is rebellion against her fate ordained by biology and/or God.
Republicans are now running to reporters and claiming Vance “had never been vetted” before Trump picked him. In this telling, the cat lady and dog park stuff was unknown to the Trump campaign. We’re led to believe the Trump team was not aware Vance is a weirdo who spends most of his time in the subterranean world of far-right politics, pandering to an audience of men who believe it’s the end of civilization because they can’t get a second date. But alas, this is a self-soothing lie Republicans are telling themselves. As the Associated Press reported, the Trump campaign is “focused on a group of persuadable voters that they believe is key to victory,” which are younger men who get their “news” from pseudo-edgy, misogynist podcasts and influencers. Vance reflects this desire to appeal to men who have more opinions about women than conversations with them.