Childless Cat Ladies and the Power of Meme

A certain candidate made a big mistake last week. He wanted to shame his female opponent for not having children. He linked insulting women in the opposition party as being “miserable childless cat ladies.” I think he expected that the image of a cat lady to conjure a person who has dozens of cats in a hoarder-type home. He’s clearly not on the internet enough. Cats trend there. The idea that people might want to be a crazy cat lady is a joke on social media. Crazy Cat Lady starter kitThere are clearly people in his base that think that women who haven’t borne children are failures as women. He might have done better stopping there.

Not only are roughly half the voters in America female, but cats will always be more popular on the internet than this man.

Women without children (Really, people without children)

  • Women in America: 169,870,000 (rounded to the nearest ten thousand)
  • Women who do not have children in America: 46,000,000 (rounded, I don’t know how) [source: statistica]
  • So, roughly 27% of American women do not have children. [source: Pew Research Center]

Are they longing for children?

Pew Research found, in 2023, that 47% of adults under 50 say they are unlikely to have children.

57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids – a total of roughly 27% of the population — say a major reason is they just don’t want to. 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them.

After “don’t want to” and “focus on other things” came reasons that could be modified by government. The next most popular reasons were “concerns about the state of the world.” “can’t/couldn’t afford a child,” and “concerns about the environment.” All of these categories had a higher level of respondents in the adults of child-bearing age than by adults over 50. [source: Pew Research Center]

Because the choice to not have children is more prevent among younger adults. insulting women who aren’t raising children is insulting roughly 27% of adults under 50. Since some of the reasons that people are choosing not to have children are social and environmental issues, some of them would never have voted for this candidate, but some of them might have, but have been turned off.

Childless Cat Ladies United t shirt

The swag is for sale everywhere.

Cats: 

  • Households with cats: 25.4% of households in America own cats. [source: the Zebra]
  • Views of cat videos on the internet: In 2021, the figure was 26 billion views. Apparently, people search for dogs and cats, but they watch cats. [source: Treehugger]

To what extent households without children are also households with cats doesn’t matter. If there was a 100% overlap, there is more than 25% of the voting public that were painted with a disrespectful brush. Households without children are not necessarily miserable. Households with cats are not necessarily miserable. No one likes to be mock-pitied.

That’s not a stellar first week on the campaign trail, Mr V.

 

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