Rise of the childless cat ladies

JD Vance's misogyny has mobilized an army

A Pew Research poll published yesterday found that 47% of American adults under age 50 are unlikely to have children—a 10% increase from just five years ago.

Reasons for not wanting children varies from generation to generation.

• 57% of respondents between 18-49 gave “they just don’t want to” as the top reason, whereas 31% of people 50+ said the same.

• The older group’s number one reason for not having children? “They wanted to focus on other things.” Only 21% in the 18-49 age bracket stated this reason.

• Affordability is a big issue. While only 12% of 50+ respondents stated this as a major reason, 36% of the younger cohort claims this is why they’re not procreating.

• Not finding the right partner is more closely aligned: 24% in the 18-49 group, 33% in the 50+ group.

• A big reason often given in the media is climate change. Only 6% of the 50+ group stated this, whereas 26% in the younger cohort listed it.

The poll also asked about the benefits. Turns out the generations are more closely aligned here.

• Having time for hobbies and interests: 18-49, 80%; 50+, 57%

• Affording the things they want: 18-49, 79%; 50+, 61%

• Saving for the future: 18-49, 75%; 50+, 57%

• Being successful in their job or career: 18-49, 61%; 50+, 44%

• Having an active social life: 18-49, 58%; 50+, 36%

Interestingly, maintaining relationships with friends who have children were low on the priority list for both groups, with just 14% of the younger cohort and 11% of the older cohort giving this reason.

Regardless of reason, one thing is obvious: Americans have less interest in procreating. Which makes JD Vance’s weird and misogynistic statements even more tone-deaf.

More cats, not kids

While this topic is something I’ve discussed with my wife and friends for years—I’m on a regular text chain with another childless couple where this often comes up—not having children has been in the news thanks to right-wing VP pick JD Vance’s insensitive comments.

Shortly after Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Vance tried criticizing her as being a “childless cat lady.” It’s not a new sentiment. Vance apparently hates cats. And as far back as 2021, he called Paul Krugman a “weird cat lady.”

That same year, he explained his disdain of cats, of women, and of the left to Tucker Carlson:

We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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. And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it…. If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.

Vance was wrong then, and is wrong now. Harris has long been a parent to her two stepchildren. Buttigieg and his husband adopted twins shortly after this statement (though not because Vance criticized him). AOC is only 34 years old, and whether or not she decides to have children is irrelevant to her ability to govern.

Vance later claimed that the “childless left” hates Americans that choose to have a family—an absurd and baseless claim. Now that he’s reviving the idea with a much higher profile, Americans are being clued in on just how disconnected and weird a man he is.

Speaking for myself, as someone on the cusp of the generational divide in the Pew poll (I turned 49 last month), my top reason for not having children is simply not wanting them. I’ve been married twice, with my current relationship approaching 10 years, and neither of my partners wanted children. We all have our reasons, just like every human, but the general consensus has been “we like our lives without them.”

This doesn’t include hatred for children. (How some parents act around children in public is another story.) My closest friends adore their children. They couldn’t imagine life without them. Being a parent is often the single more rewarding experience for them. I love that for them, just as I love not having that for me. Multiple realities can co-exist simultaneously, which is simply called life.

But the binaries that pull political parties apart now penetrate every thread of the fabric of our existence. It’s often bewildering, because people as labeled by politicians and social media trolls and people in reality can be very different things. Most real-world conversations have more depth and nuance than what daily passes through my feed. Sadly, compressing and flattening reality plays well for pundits and clicks.

And so this technique often works. Yet it’s falling flat for Vance. Instead of coalescing around his message that “parents should have more voting power than the childless,” women everywhere have embraced the childless cat lady meme. While we laugh away his strange Mountain Dew comment, the left quickly weaponized cat ladies, because underneath his statements is a deeply resentful and misogynistic sentiment that must be fought.

Plus, the notion that humans have to exponentially produce is a hangover from extractive capitalism, not a biological demand. We only hit a population of one billion in 1804, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Our population is now 8.1 billion. That’s plenty of human to go around, now, and for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps if Vance’s party was focused on creating a more equitable society where everyone has better opportunities, the discussion could be about living a great life now, not being concerned about a certain number of future lives. But that’s not and has never been a concern for Vance, or the modern GOP.

Maybe the real problem isn’t that there are too few humans, but too few cats. At 600 million, that’s only one cat for every 13 humans.

Perhaps that’s the real tragedy.