JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has been under fire for the past few weeks for mocking Vice-President Kamala Harris as one of the “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable” with their lives and “wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

And rightly so. That’s a stupid thing for anyone to say, let alone someone who is campaigning for political office. The comments were originally made in a 2021 interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, but Vance only doubled down when they resurfaced, saying: “I’ve got nothing against cats.”

He continued: “This is not about criticising people who for various reasons don’t have kids. This is about criticising the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”

I am a single, childless woman who doesn’t even own a cat, so God knows how far down JD Vance’s value system I am. All I have is house plants, and even they keep dying. When I first read Vance’s comments, they really didn’t shock me. I’ve heard similar things for most of my life.

“You won’t ever know what true love is.” “You’ll regret it.” “Do you not like children?” And, of course, all manner of “crazy cat lady” jokes. Any woman without kids will have heard the same. It’s awful but it comes with the territory.

I wasn’t going to write any kind of response to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments because it was very well covered by people far angrier than I am, and, what’s more, I find it all so predictably tedious. A hard-right republican, running on Donald Trump’s ticket, saying wildly misogynistic things about women having babies is hardly surprising, is it? The man voted against the Right to IVF Act back in June, for goodness’ sake. Of course he thinks all women should be (naturally) knocked up as soon as possible.

In my opinion the man is a moron who is so entrenched in his own patriarchal worldview that he really thinks “childless cat lady” is an insult to women and not a slur on the men they are turning away from. Pointing out that women who have........

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