The Terrible Revenge of the Media’s Childless Cat Ladies

Lashing Out In Rage At Their Own Poor Life Choices

When J.D. Vance was chosen as Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, his previous comments decrying society’s capitulations to “childless cat ladies” evoked a firestorm of feminist ire. And for good reason — Vance’s comments struck at the heart of the feminist’s hubris. Vance was destroying the notion that a woman’s career or her live-in boyfriend or her cats were an honest substitute for raising children. 

The only time feminists have been more angry about a man’s commentary on the importance of women having children was when Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker extolled the virtues of homemaking to female graduates at Benedictine College’s commencement ceremony.

“How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross this stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world,” Butker said. “But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Pearl-clutching that extolling the virtues of motherhood is cruel towards women who either cannot have children or are unmarried through no fault of their own is a disingenuous distraction. None of the people claiming they care about the barren or the unhappily single actually care to help these women get loving husbands and children. In fact, if one does get these things, they are immediately considered worthless “breeders,” feminist’s new favorite term for women who become mothers of many.

The recent push to see raising a large family as “breeding,” a word that evokes images of a young heifer ignorantly awaiting impregnation by an angry and aroused bull, is part of a calculated effort to scare young women from the greatest calling she could ever pursue. Willfully childless feminists in the media are making a sinister attempt to demoralize those who want to have something entirely normal — a husband and children — as the “weird” ones in an astonishingly brazen case of deflection. 

Calling childbearing “breeding,” comparing biological men to women, or accusing happy mothers of participating in a handmaid’s tale style subjugation ritual is the ultimate revenge of the childless cat ladies who feel threatened by the women who rejected their lifestyle. Many think pieces are dedicated to tearing down the women who choose a lifestyle different from career feminists. Their logic is that if they can sufficiently denigrate the women they wish they were, maybe mothers and wives will become social outcasts and their vocation a pursuit of the past. 

An October article in Vanity Fair accused Vance — whom they described as “one of breeding’s biggest advocates” —  of trying to trigger “mommy mania” by encouraging men and women to get married, stay married, and have lots of children. To illustrate her point that women are regressing, the article’s author pointed to the farm-wife influencer feminists love to hate, Hannah Neeleman. Neeleman describes her wedding day as “greatest day of my life,” a comment that the author obviously finds both ridiculous and offensive.

New York Magazine’s profile on the National Conservatism this summer in Washington DC harped on what the author called the “nursemaids of national conservatism.” The author used the arcane moniker to describe women at the conference who extolled child-rearing and condemned the rise of online pornography consumption as “NatCon’s porn scolds.” The author calls conservative mothers a mere “resource” for the men of National Conservatism. Confronted with the reality that politically-astute, conservative women exist, feminists have no choice but to make self-serious allusions to The Handmaid’s Tale as a substitute for critical thinking.

There is no reason someone who cares about women’s rights would want to call the greatest miracle a woman performs with her body “breeding,” except if they are so angry with their own and others’ capacity for childbearing that they will self sabotage to destroy it. 

The real dystopian dehumanization of women occurs in the surrogacy industry, where women’s bodies are bought and sold as a commodity, and the fruit of her womb is wrested from her in order to elevate the social status of childless men. But of course, feminists defend surrogacy with only a few notable exceptions. 

One wonders why Dylan Mulvaney cosplaying as the most ignorant caricature of a woman does not make feminists angrier than Vance’s “offensive” turn of phrase. Instead, feminists laugh along at drag brunch and present awards to men in dresses. 

At least Dylan Mulvaney does not imply that they might want to have children, or that doing so is in any way a uniquely feminine pursuit. At least surrogacy, however dehumanizing, provides a little hope that they can pursue childbearing on their own time, after the more important things are accomplished. 


Image Credit: Unsplash

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Sarah H. Wilder

Sarah H. Wilder is a wife, mom-to-be, writer and a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in southwest Michigan. A graduate of Hillsdale College, she formerly worked as a reporter at the Daily Caller. Her writing has also been featured in The American Conservative, The American Mind, The Federalist, and others.

9 thoughts on “The Terrible Revenge of the Media’s Childless Cat Ladies

  1. In one of the recently previous articles posted on this website, we saw a demonization of liberals, what conservatives call ‘the left,’ and now we see the same for feminists. We should note some parallels between pre-Nazi Germany and today. We had a man who tried to use force to overthrow the fair election of his opponents as well as pressure to get the then Vice President to do the same. He encouraged violence against dissidents at his rallies. He told the proud boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ during a Presidential debate and advertised the rally on Jan 6, 2021 by saying it would be a ‘wild time.’

    He’s called liberals ‘Marxists’ and described as being ‘vermin’ and a threat to democracy. At the same time he wants to use the military to move against some politicians callingl them ‘Marxists’ and ‘fascists.’ In so doing, he demonstrated that the only definitions he knows for those words are pejorative ones. And now we have the above article that talks about feminists as being monolithic in negative ways.

    If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that when authoritarians demonize a group, they are setting the population up to approve of committing atrocities against that group. And those Trump conservatives whose support for Trump is not out of their hatred for the Democrats are authoritarians to varying degrees. Either they are passive, active, or a combination of those two kinds of authoritarians.

    Yes, there are valid criticisms to make of feminists and feminism in general. But legitimate criticisms of them are made with the understanding that there are things we can learn from those feminists. That is not what the above exhibits.

    BTW, though their views on abortion are tragically wrong, many feminists are mothers who love and cherish their children. And some feminists are men. And there are a variety of views that feminists have on several topics.

  2. Why is a woman speaking in public? You’re supposed to be pregnant and scrubbing floors, not writing. In fact, why did you even learn to read? You might want to read something your husband disapproves of, so you should never be tempted by reading in the first place. I’m sure your husband will make sure your daughters are never given the opportunity to sin that reading presents.

    Seriously, you cannot simultaneously argue that the only important thing a woman does is be a placental mammal who can also cook and also say you respect women and defend their rights, Either we’re adult citizens like all men or we’re nothing but breeder cows. You advocate for women only being the latter, while hypocritically insisting on actually being the former. Which is it, babe?

          1. So, are women adults with rights or broodmares? Do we contribute ANYTHING but a uterus and breast milk for infants?

          2. Gojra71,
            Instead of asking what universe in which one lives, you might be rational is you explained why you said that her second paragraph was hysteria? In fact, hysteria isn’t even the correct word.

          3. Karen,
            The two women I am closest to are the wife and the best friend. And from my experiences, I’ve learned and benefited a lot from both. But I would be robbing myself of what I have learned and the how I have benefited if I regarded women as the above article does. And that is what some cannot see.

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