Choose Your Fighter: Childless Cat Lady or Ballerina Farm?
and July wrap up!
What a decade July was!
To paraphrase Smashmouth: the unprecedented times start coming and they don’t stop coming.
At the end of every day I feel like Winona Ryder at the end of Heathers, stumbling out of the school, squinting at the daylight. (RIP Shannon Doherty 💔)
But who cares how I feel? I’m just a childfree cat lady! My thoughts and feelings don’t matter because I haven’t given birth to another, smaller human.
According to JD Vance, I have “no stake” in the future of the country; I am “anti-child” and “anti-family.”
Dude. I’m a kidlit author. I literally spend my days at my laptop, with my cats at my side, trying to write stories that will help children and teens cope with the world. I’m working on my sixth book. But I guess none of that matters because I’m not a mother.
I’ll just go tell my childfree cat lady friends that they don’t matter either. They may as well stop making their art, writing their books, teaching their college classes. Those contributions aren’t enough. They have to breed.
Whether we want to or not, whether we are able to or not, that’s beside the point.
While we’re at it, let’s throw out the work of Virgina Woolf, Octavia Butler, Louisa May Alcott. Someone go tell Dolly Parton we don’t need Jolene, the 244 million free books her Imagination Library has donated, or the $1 million donation that helped fund the Moderna COVID vaccine. She should have had little blonde babies instead!
We’ve heard this all before, of course.
Childfree cat ladies have been the target of ire since at least the 1400s. Back then we were called witches.
I’m actually writing a book about generations of accused witches, so allow me to flex my research muscles.
Women were targeted for being old, poor, childless, for living alone, being mentally ill or disabled, for deviating from social norms in any way. And if they had a cat? Well, that was a true sign of a witch. During the bloodshed of the witch trials across Europe, countless cats were killed along with the women accused of witchcraft. Pope Innocent VIII even demanded that when a witch was burned, her cat be burned with her.
All these centuries later, deviation from the norm still leads to ridicule and punishment.
But with every resurfaced clip of Vance yammering on about the Scurge of the Childless Feminists, he’s revealing more about himself. When he says childless people don’t care about anyone else, what he’s actually saying is that before he had children, he didn’t care about anyone but himself.
He’s describing the lack of empathy that is so common in his world of red hats and red pills.
This is how abortion gets banned for everyone except their daughters, and immigrants are “criminals” except for the ones they marry. But that empathy is non-transferrable. It stretches only as far as their front door.
“The notion that if we have not pro-created we are incapable of human concern is one of their favorite approaches.” – Stacey Abrams
But the other side of the coin is damaged too. For those who choose to and are able to have children, they must be mothers and nothing else. They have to give up their dreams, their careers, and take on what Harrison Butker called “the most important title of all: homemaker.”
For women, it seems, we have two choices: anti-family sociopath, or ballerina farm.
Either way, we are denied our full humanity and autonomy.
Instead of going to therapy, narrow-minded men like JD Vance take their insecurities out on the world, espousing tired tropes in an attempt to gain control of what they fear…
Women who do not need or want them.
JULY WRAP UP
Stacks…
Books I read this month:
Parable Of The Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Like many people, I started reading this on July 20th 2024 – the day the story begins. I finished reading it within 24 hours, a rarity for a slow reader like me, but that’s how gripped I was by the world and characters Butler created. Written in 1993 as a warning to society of what could come, it’s even more relevant today.
Democracy Or Else by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor,
and Josh Holloway (Libby audiobook)
I’m a longtime PSA listener, so I wanted to read this via audio, making it like one long podcast episode. There was a lot of good info on how to get involved in local and national politics, from grassroots organizing to running yourself.
The Nude by C. Michelle Lindley (Gifted copy from Atria Books)
Set on a small island in Greece in 1999, an American art dealer is trying to buy a sculpture that could change her career. The lemon trees, cobble stone streets, and ocean waves crash into the backdrop of the country’s political upheaval. I appreciated the questions raised about the ethics of buying and selling pieces of another culture. There’s so much meat in this book, I’ll be chewing on it for quite some time.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Gifted copy from Catapult)
A Palestinian woman with impeccable style and a large inheritance slowly unravels among the filth and isolation of New York City. Zaher’s writing is sharp as a knife, and cuts just as deep. At first I was frustrated by the narrators constant bad decisions, but by the end I wanted to unravel with her.
Screen time…
What I’ve been watching:
Am I Okay?
A movie about a late-blooming lesbian with people-pleasing tendencies entering the sapphic dating world for the first time? It’s like they saw my life and turned it into a charming, funny, much more aesthetically pleasing indie film. (Note to self: write memoir and add to the growing genre of millenialls-realizing-they’re-gay-after-30).
A Family Affair
Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron. Age-gap romance. Movie-star / “normal” person romance. (In this scenario, “normal” means Nicole Kidman, a wealthy, award-winning writer in her 40s/50s with great skin, an adult daughter played by Joey King, and a mother-in-law played by Kathy Bates.) It’s cheesy, it’s escapism, it’s funny, I loved it.
Sound on…
What I’ve been listening to:
I’ve been a devoted listener of Jessica Lanyadoo’s weekly astrology pod for years. Beyond the spot-on astro forecasts, it’s the powerful sermons that keep me hooked. Jessica brings collective liberation and real-world issues to the table in ways that many in her field are too afraid to tackle. Some people go to church on Sundays, I listen to Ghost of a Podcast while doing the dishes.
Chronic and iconic…
Reads from around the internet:
Ask VP Kamala Harris to Pledge to Enact an Arms Embargo
Join in calling on presidential candidate Kamala Harris to distance herself from Biden’s disastrous policy of arming Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation in Palestine.
'Bridgerton' season 3 captures disability, neurodiversity in regency era.
"That's what I want every audience member to feel. It's so important to see ourselves on screen. TV is a portal to believing in a bigger life and to imagining possibilities. So it's been really, really heartening to see."
“Seeking constant reassurance, whether it’s through our screens or by trying to get it from other people, is a perfect example of how our brains are designed to keep us safe rather than happy. Seeking reassurance might give our brains temporary relief, but it only makes us less likely to handle stressful situations because it confirms the myth that we need things to go a certain way in order to be okay.”
“Kamala Harris is not going to save America. No lone individual can with this level of corruption.
But Harris can be pressured to gut out institutional rot and pass humane policies — and yes, I realize these sound like fantasies, but don’t you know what year it is?! Don’t you know what country you’re living in? Everything about America 2024 is fantasy, usually of the nightmare variety. Why not add some good to the mix?”
Previously, on Stacks & Spoons…
And now, for the Harry of the Week!
It’s lesbians. Vance is afraid of lesbians because we have no interest in him. Witches=lesbians Childless=lesbians Cat ladies=lesbians 😉 (Note to self: all the “late in life lesbians” are going to write memoirs so get cracking on yours, Linda)
Love this Jen! Adore you!