Cat Ladies and Birthrates

How Many Times Can You Say "Weird" In One Essay?

image from TikTok video created by @talentless.ai

“J.D. Vance is ‘weird’? Have You Seen the Other Guys?” This is a headline from an essay by conservative columnist Lance Morrow in the WSJ that popped up on my phone. In said essay, Morrow feigns rhetorical amazement that people on the left could call J.D. Vance “weird” when they themselves are so weird, believing (supposedly) that “criminals are victims,” “civilization is barbaric” and gender is fluid. To put it simply, I don’t think like he does. But he did say something that I thought was, in a general way, great. It certainly describes something that I feel, something that I imagine many many people on all sides feel:

“There comes a moment in one’s life when the most familiar things begin to look strange, alienated. The mind, I suppose, prepares to travel elsewhere. It begins to sever ties with familiar things…We might call it the Phenomenon of Senile Alienation, or PSA. The idea enlarges itself as life goes on and begins to apply to such things as politics, which, especially in recent years, has accommodated itself to PSA by getting stranger and stranger. One wonders if Joe Biden, 81, during the debate with Donald Trump, looked so blank—so stunned and enameled in the eyes—not because his mind was slowed by age but because of an onset of PSA, the metaphysical illumination that may visit the elderly when they suddenly see the preposterous dimension of the world. In Mr. Biden’s case, it may have struck him, as the light burst on Paul on the road to Damascus, that the year 2024 had strayed across the border of normality and become purely fantastic.”

Who could fail to relate to this? We have all been driven weird! It was a short drive for me, but at a certain point I don’t know how many days ago I found myself Googling “Does Kamala Harris own a cat?” I discovered: she does not! And while I’m not 100% sure, it does not look like AOC or Pete Buttigieg own cats either! Most people reacted to Vance’s now infamous comment that lead Democrats are “childless cat ladies” by pointing out that it is unkind and inaccurate to say that step-parents/adoptive parents are not legitimately parents. But I was more bothered by the absurdly inaccurate application of the term “cat lady” to people who do not appear to own a single cat. Because cat ladies are real. They are people, usually single, sometimes male, but usually not, who have a lot of cats. A person in a studio apartment with three cats could be called a cat lady; one-bedroom house with six cats, an any-bedroom house with twelve+ cats = cat lady. One person with one cat living anywhere is not a cat lady. No cats at all, well, anyone deriding you as a cat lady is not only mean, they are weird, meaning that they are showing a disregard for reality.

I just want to note here that I have nothing against cat ladies. On the contrary I appreciate them. I like cats a lot and although, between me and my husband, I would not want to have more than four of them I am glad that hardcore felinophiles are willing to spend that much of their time dealing with litter boxes, etc.

I also want to acknowledge that I believe Usha Vance when she says that her husband’s comment was really about the lack of societal support for parenting. However her statement is an understatement. The more expanded version can be found in an Aug. 2nd NY Times editorial by Ross Douthat which begins: “JD Vance is one of the first important politicians in the United States to directly take up one of the preoccupations of this newsletter — the ongoing collapse of birthrates across the developed world and the grim consequences of an aging, childless future…” Douthat is talking about natalism, a movement defined in Wikipedia as a perceived “threat of global demographic collapse” which has become “a cause célèbre among wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles as well as the political right.”