What People Still Don’t Understand About JD Vance’s Misogyny
What People Still Don’t Understand About JD Vance’s Misogyny
The Ohio Republican’s comments about “childless cat ladies” reflect a deeply rooted cynicism about why people vote.
REPUBLICAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL candidate JD Vance’s 2021 remarks about non-childbearing women and his recent defense of those remarks have rightly received widespread criticism for their blatant bigotry and what they reveal about the Ohio senator’s narrow perspective on humanity.
Beyond the offensiveness of Vance’s “childless cat ladies” crack, the misogyny of his focus on women and not men who choose not to make babies, and his lack of consideration for stepparents and adoptive parents is the naked truth of the moral and political lens through which he and so many others see the world.
Self-interest, they seem convinced, is the only interest—for everyone.
That view is baked into Vance’s assessment of those he calls “childless”—people who, as his fellow Peter Thiel protégé Blake Masters put it, have “no skin in the game.” An interesting choice of cliché, as it could be understood to mean not just that the only people who could possibly care about the future of our country or the future of the planet are those who are raising children, but also that they must have a genetic connection to that future.
Since the recycling of those remarks and Vance’s subsequent spinout, attempts have been made at damage control. Fox News Channel’s Trey Gowdy strongly critiqued the “cat ladies” snark—speaking admiringly of Catholic nuns, pointing out that the father of our country was biological father to no one, and reminding us that that those of us who teach and take care of other people’s children also have a stake in the future. He teed up that sentiment for Vance, who endorsed it but without retracting or apologizing for his previous remarks.
And why should Vance backtrack? It isn’t as if his cynical calculation—the assumption that people only act (and vote) in their own self-interest—is anything new. Or that that view isn’t shared by a lot of people. I recently had lunch with a cousin of mine I hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years. Somehow the subject of green energy came up and he went on a rant about California’s plan to allow no new cars that aren’t zero-emission to be sold by 2035. My cousin seemed to believe the law was little more than virtue signaling. I asked him if he had any concern about climate change and its impact on people in the future and he said, “Larry, I don’t care.” He said that his one daughter is in her forties with no kids and no plans to ever have any so why should he care. I asked him if he cared about the future of my grandchildren. He shrugged sheepishly and said it again: “Larry, I’m sorry, but I just don’t care.”
I kind of appreciated his honesty—and was glad for the vivid illustration that whether or not someone has children often has nothing to do with whether that person cares about the future. Would he feel differently about climate change if he had grandchildren? No more, I suspect, than I would find climate change to be unworrying if I had no children.
THERE IS A LONG HISTORY OF attempting to limit the right to vote to some definition of people who supposedly care more about the future than others.
During the Founding era, the franchise—already limited to almost only men, almost only whites—was further limited to those who owned property or paid taxes. That era’s definition of “skin in the game,” I suppose. For decades, most states forbade paupers to vote. Eventually, the right to vote was widened and these restrictions were lifted. Pretending that people without money at a given moment deserved no say in the country’s future was recognized as wrong.
And so it is today with the MAGA mockery of “childless cat ladies” with no “skin in the game.” Do we really need to explain to JD Vance—as I had to explain to my cousin—that there are decent people whose empathy goes far beyond their loved ones?
Would you want someone teaching your children who didn’t feel that way?
Would you want police officers or firefighters or social workers unwilling to sacrifice for the sake of people they don’t know?
When we thank soldiers for their service, do we think they put their lives on the line only for their own families? Did JD Vance when he put on the uniform of his country?
What kind of world would we be creating if we truly believed that people without children are less deserving of a vote, less deserving of a voice?
Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of numerous books, including Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher. His next book, tentatively titled A Lasting Impact, will be out next year.
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