I had lunch with three guys from my St. Paul's summer in 1970 today. A fourth was missing. He had said "I'm sorry I have to cancel, but it's my wife's 100th birthday, and these things are important to her." Two of the men started to say "Well, maybe she likes to celebrate her birthday often - I mean, my wife does..." but Gary laughed "No. This is absolutely a dig, and I hope he doesn't say these things in front of her. How does he get away with this? Would you say something like that?"
"Do I look suicidal?"
"I had a friend at my old church who used to say '...and this is my first wife, Betsy,' which seemed ill-advised to me.*"
"Phil has survived seven cancer diagnoses, so maybe he doesn't sweat the small stuff now."
"That could be."
The point being that even if things are flat true, or meant to be funny, or to capture a general truth arguendo or whatever, they still might be spectacularly stupid to say out loud. Vance, if you expect us to follow you into battle, could you give us more evidence that you thought this one through? DC journalists are not going to ask you for evidence or numbers or research - they have little idea what those things are. But folks around here are, and I say "So how are you going to measure this? How many cats is the cutoff? What about one child long grown and five cats now? What if she wanted children? What about dog moms? What about men with cats? JD, how the hell are you going to back this up with any evidence that will hold up for five minutes? Thanks a bunch."
There are ways and places one can bring out the information as well. A comedian could say "Remember when you used to stay with your grandmother and she would bring you over to see her friends? The ones who didn't have any children of their own but had cats all over and they would make cooing noises over you and then ignore you, so they could sit down and she could complain about everything that was wrong in her life?" (A real comedian would be much funnier, yes.) Presenting it that way allows people to take an "if the shoe fits" approach, and even some childless cat ladies might smirk and think "Actually, I do have a couple of friends like that." The generalisation doesn't include everyone, nor was it intended to. You could technically say that Vance's comment wasn't intended to include everyone either, but it's too far over the line to give more than grudging acknowledgement of that.
Oddly, I believe there is something in there, and I was talking about a related subject with my brother yesterday. What with one thing and another, information has filtered back to me over the last year about older lesbians from two groups: women I used to work with (and I often knew both of them) and couples who are friends or siblings of the um, childless cat ladies that I know. I offered the opinion that they might be sadder than straight women I know of similar age, especially when widowed.
He disagreed, which I knew he would regardless of the data, because he is honor bound to make sure that any DEI group is just as happy, honest, or smart as the boring whitebread mainstream conservative culture. But I am so used to this that I can still get useful info by listening to what arguments he appeals to. And he did actually give some qualified agreement, relating it to the support of their general communities. He lives in western mass and worked in theater, so he knows way more lesbian couples than I do. And he is in a place more supportive of such than nearly anywhere in the country. So he wasn't seeing them as any worse off than other older people. That could very well be so. Community might matter.
It is very hard to tell what is up from FB. Older women are traveling together, or eating at restaurants and everyone looks cheery, but then in their other posts you see that they are Great Deplorers of others. What's the reality? Well, we likely won't ever know. I walk miles in my 55+ community and have chitchat with people on their porches, or in their yards, or also walking. Attitudes leak out. Or you hear about childless cat ladies from other friends who don't see them much anymore because they have become difficult, or reclusive. Or you meet with two CCL's in a group of retired social workers for lunch and they do tell you how hard their lives are, and how upsetting so many things in the world are, and how they really do prefer cats to people.
Men and women complain differently. While some men are boisterous and want everyone present to know what they think about Trump or Biden, most drop their voices a bit to complain.
And of course I always knew the grim underside from mental health, of people deeply unhappy and largely unnoticed, with her sister coming in to try and talk sense into her for the thousandth time; and from my wife's extensive prayer list, which always includes someone having great difficulty with their elderly mother. There's a lot of loneliness out there. And it may be my prejudices overruling the real data, but I think it really is worse for childless cat ladies.
One more thing. Vance also criticised them for not caring about the future of the country. But some of the ones I'm talking about were teachers, or social workers, or other professions oriented to the future of others. Maybe it is true that they no longer care much about the future of the country except in abstract and symbolic senses, like making sure that Trump doesn't "take over," or something**. But I think they get some credit for what came before, even if they are deplorers of things now.
*Steve McAuliffe used to say that about his wife Christa. Then she blew up in the sky in the Challenger disaster. Which is why husbands shouldn't say things like that.
**It can go the other way. I know at least two childless cat ladies who are big Trump fans. But usually...
13 comments:
I haven't paid Vance much attention, but what I've heard of his comments was much more focused and directed: not against cat ladies per se, but marveling that so much of our political leadership was transferred to people whose lack of children gives them a very different sort of stake in the future of the country.
Almost every left-wing activist I know is of the sort: middle-aged women with no children but many cats. They care intensely about the future of the country, though. It's definitely about stopping Trump at the moment, but also about gay and trans rights, about opposing public displays of Christianity and especially the Right to Life movement, supporting Palestine, and so forth. It's what they do instead of family life, I guess.
And really I think that's the answer to Vance's marveling: people without children have more time on their hands, and more money to devote to causes. It's really no wonder they end up in influential political positions as often as they do.
When I think about the issue of the national debt, I wonder about Vance's point. Every year we borrow more money to do things we want to do, but find increasingly hard to afford because we have to devote so much money to servicing existing debt. Every year this problem gets worse, because we keep borrowing vast amounts of additional money to heap on it.
Is it true that people who don't have children or a hope of grandchildren are thus less likely to worry much about that problem? They do seem to support the big-welfare-state, universal-healthcare causes that would finish the bankruptcy, and oppose shrinking the bureaucracy or cutting spending. Yet so too do many others in government who do have children, because their source of power is the spending of money and the maintenance of well-funded and empowered institutions like the Federal agencies.
By contrast, I also know several feminist philosophers who do have children. They occasionally go to a protest with a sign that says something appropriate, like "Forced Pregnancy is Unconstitutional!" They aren't activists, though, and almost every photo I see of them on social media is them smiling with their kids.
To your general point about health, now that I think about it, the ones with kids are in much better physical health as well. I'm not qualified to judge mental health, but the two are often linked.
I had not thought of this in relation to the national debt. People without children, and I suspect especially women, are more concerned with others who are having a hard right now, today, with no reliable shelter or medical problems. I don't think that is a fully bad thing, because helping real people is better than helping theoretical ones in the future. But it is a limited perspective, because it means giving no thought to them AT ALL, only the cultural, abstract wishes to make the world look nice.
And come to think of it, debt is a dividing line, because my children and even grandchildren are not theoretical and neither is that debt. that is the world they are already in and are moving into. Debt doesn't matter so much if you are just leaving and turning out the lights.
Observing young doctors becoming not so young in training programs, there is a thing I call Senior Registaritis ( Residentitis to ‘Muricans), where quite a few are a bit sad, a bit nutty, and v v tired. The ones who coped best all had spouses and children despite the obv extra pressure for obv reasons. It’s just prolonged and delayed in CCLs. The worst of the SRitis sufferers, with least insight and/or people skills, had the advantage ( over CCLs) of time to learn, and incentive that Lamborghinis don’t come quickly without private referrals which require what they ain’t got. Prayer for and Grace bestowed for CCLs their hope they can’t see.
For the love of Heaven, don’t argue like them, please.
Vance is correct.
John Bayley, in his tender and moving memoir of Iris Murdoch, who died of Alzheimers before him, with him, deserves to be considered with the Saints. He briefly speculates on what added strength he might have had, if they had had children. Despite this, he is a model of how a man should love a woman..
CCLs are just unlucky. Intelligence and education are no vaccines - Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married the same year as the improbable Bayley and Murdoch.
Well, Plath had Borderline Personality Disorder. One of the key symptoms is unstable relationships. I have to think there are a fair percentage who are on the spectrum as well, and find human beings a bit much.
King Lear thought there was love, as he understood it, from viewpoint of a not good King, where there wasn’t. And didn’t see it where there was love. ‘CCLs’ is a term that makes his mistake. ‘Mental Health’ does not explain all, or perhaps v much.
I would almost agree, except I have been thinking about how varied the category is. I think the arrow of causality is important in this case. There are women who are unhappy - not always so much sad as non-resilient, fragile, brittle, easily thrown off and made unhappy, even when they have friendly and charming dispositions when everything is going well. (There are lots of complications I am not touching on here.) I know some, and am friends with some. Some wanted to marry. Whether they also wanted children I don't know, but they never held a serious relationship and no one ever asked them. They are lonely, so they get a cat, and maybe another one. Being childless and owning cats has not made them unhappy - lots of women do that - but it flowed the other way.
The Democrats are trying to cement their base, who are much more likely to be childless, or to have children who are childless, than Republican voters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/opinion/natalism-liberalism-parenthood.html
Interesting note. I subscribe to the NYT. Searching for the title (!) of this essay in the NYT's own search box does not pull up this opinion piece, published last month.
The comments reinforce the article.
I have no idea how a party that prefers childlessness to childbearing could remain competitive over time. For example, the Shakers were an interesting sect, but they aren't a force in today's politics.
What seems to be happening is that children brought up with the ideas that self-improvement, in money or education or accomplishment (or comfort or entertainment) are the top values, not merely good ones, buy into more secular values and become liberal. The birth rate started going down in France 200 years ago and coincides with the drop in religiosity.
Post a Comment