A Feature, not a Bug
Is Republican misogyny compulsory?
Politics 101: It is not a good thing when you are running for president and rumors persist that your running mate had sex with his couch.
But for the Republican Party in 2024, that’s pretty much the least disturbing thing we’ve learned about J.D. Vance.
We’ve been on this road for a long time. From the day failures in the 70s to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed to Donald’s getting elected despite bragging about assaulting women to his corrupt illegitimate super-majority on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the GOP’s war on women and embrace of misogyny is hardly new. But the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket has revealed a very simple and unsettling truth — Republican men are really bizarre when it comes to women.
We’re already seeing the vile innuendo and blatantly sexist attacks on Harris coming from the usual suspects at Fox. But American women are seeing with a new clarity what the Republican Party really thinks of them. And that’s because, like Donald, the Republican Party no longer thinks it has to pretend. Plus, of course, we’ve learned a lot since 2016.
Assume for a minute that we can take Donald’s running mate, JD Vance at his word that he did not engage in horizontal refreshment with any couches (this is a sentence nobody should ever have had to have written). Let’s focus, instead, on all of the cruel and tone-deaf attacks he’s made on childless women, whom he obviously believes are second-class citizens who should not be allowed to participate in our democracy.
“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids,” Vance once said. “Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
What?
On Thursday, actor Jennifer Aniston called out Vance for his disturbing 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he attacked “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. 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, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], 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?”
Aniston wrote on Instagram. “All I can say is . . . Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
I would add that I hope we leave Vance’s daughter—all of our daughters—a future in which they can make any decision they want about how, when, or if to have a family; whether or not to have children; how and when to have children; and how and when to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
Unfortunately, Vance isn’t the only Republican who expresses contempt for women who choose not to not have kids. In fact, it seems to be the attitude of the whole Party.
Blake Masters, the 2022 Republican Arizona U.S. Senate nominee, wrote on Twitter Wednesday night that “political leaders should have children. Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.”
First of all, Blake Masters was one of the worst Senate candidates in 2022—a gun fetishist and anti-abortion extremist who, thankfully, Arizona voters chose not to elect despite the massive amounts of money Peter Thiel poured into his campaign and his having, no matter how ill-advisedly, procreated.
Also, Blake, please stop using the word “skin.”
It’s instructive that even at this critical moment of the presidential campaign, Republicans are incapable of even temporarily hiding their bone-deep contempt for women. If they can’t hide it during the campaign, and we elect them, they certainly will not try to hide it once they’re in office.
Women are used to having to be on-guard around dangerous men who want to hurt and control us; those men who won’t take no for an answer. And we are painfully aware of how detrimental it would be to our safety and freedom if a party this dedicated to taking a sledgehammer to our rights was allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
We have to stop Donald and J.D. Vance and the rest of the broken men who believe that they deserve to have power us. Nobody who believes in democracy or equality should want Vance to be a heartbeat away from the presidency any more than they should want Donald Trump to be president.
There are a lot of ways in which would could improve this country. Perhaps we should start by make it a little bit less broken.
Yes, Mary it is compulsory. Why any woman would vote for a Republican is beyond me.
Contempt for women is a huge mistake. In time he will be totally cut off. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Thank you all for speaking out. Senior women support Kamala. We worked too hard for our rights and won’t give them up without a fight.