Why Are Conservative Men So Scared of Cat Ladies?

Consultant Matt Gaetz and Senate applicant J.D. Vance discuss to the press soon after an April 30 marketing campaign rally in Newark, Ohio.
Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

To the banshee, the succubus, and La Llorona, increase the cat woman. Probably you have found her, although couple of do: She is a solitary creature with a fondness for night time walks and negative tv. Frequently underestimated by her foes, the cat woman is ruthless in the pursuit of her prey. No traditional spouse and children is safe and sound. The church offends her. She despises men most of all for they rejected her and need to shell out the rate.

Or at minimum which is what conservatives show up to consider.

“We are efficiently run in the country through the Democrats, by means of our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat women who are miserable at their own lives and the decisions that they’ve designed, and so they want to make the rest of the nation depressing as well,” Vance instructed Tucker Carlson in 2021. The cat woman did not reduce Vance from profitable a Republican Senate most important on Tuesday most likely she is basically biding her time.

I ought to acknowledge some defensiveness right here. I have two cats, no kids, and a therapist. I am also married to a person and went to Bible college, so I could not healthy Gaetz’s definition of the horrid specter. But I am also curious (a essential feline trait): What are gentlemen like Gaetz and Vance actually scared of?

The cat girl is an outdated stereotype dependent on stupid beliefs about spinsters and feminists. Associated with girls and “the domestic sphere,” cats appeared in anti-women’s suffrage imagery “to portray suffragettes as silly, childish, incompetent, and sick-suited to political engagement,” in accordance to the Culture Web pages. The notion is that if a cat is authorized to vote, a thing has absent terribly wrong. The very same is accurate if a girl shuns relatives everyday living to surround herself with cats.

The cat-woman jibe is a cheap way to personal the libs. A playground taunt, it also says anything about the bully who utilizes it. Hatred and anxiety are generally so intertwined they can be difficult to tell apart. The cat woman canonically has no person. Her requirements and patterns aren’t dictated by a partner and little ones. She can make up her very own mind, and she is no cost to do what she likes, which means she has the time to be political. Without the ballast of a loved ones, a lady can be tough to handle. I can see why that would irk conservative men like Gaetz and Vance.

Or perhaps they just despise cats. There’s no accounting for style.