#69 – Childless Cat Ladies vs Project 2025

[00:00] Paulette: Buen día mi gente, and welcome to La Vida Más Chévere de Childfree Latinas. The only Spanglish podcast for childfree Latinas y Latines, helping us liberate ourselves from the toxic cultural brainwashing we all grew up with, so that we can design our best lives instead. I’m your host and resident childfree Latina, Paulette Erato.

[00:23] Since JD vance, a Yalie, who was apparently once or is now only cosplaying as a hillbilly, opened his mouth about childless cat ladies, let’s talk about one of the most divisive and toxic cultural norms that has ever existed. Misogyny. What we’re about to see unfold between now and the election is an especially disgusting and harrowing type of misogyny called misogynoir.

[00:55] To give you a definition so we can all be on the same page, let me quote the Wikipedia page on this. Misogynoir shows how sexism and racism manifest in black women’s lives to create intersecting forms of oppression. It was coined by Black feminist writer Moya Bailey in 2008 to discuss anti-Black misogyny.

[01:16] End quote. Misogynoir. In case you didn’t know, noir is the French word for black. But wait, I haven’t actually defined misogyny yet either. So, what is that? Again, quoting from Wikipedia. Misogyny is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that can keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy.

[01:47] Misogyny has been widely practiced for thousands of years. It is reflected in art, literature, human societal structure, historical events, mythology, philosophy, and religion worldwide. End quote. So, now we’re on the same page. Misogyny is the form of sexism, and when it intersects with racism, it becomes misogynoir.

[02:13] Sexism is just believing that men are superior to women. Misogyny is the hatred, contempt, or prejudice against women and girls, and it allows for violence against women for no reason other than they are women. And misogynoir is all of that directed specifically at Black women. So we’re fighting misogyny, misogynoir, and thousands of years of programming that relegate women to lower class status.

[02:43] And that is what a certain party is advocating for, putting women back in their quote unquote traditional place. We’ve fought this fight before. I mean, just look back at 2016, except this time it’s with the added benefit that the person in question, Kamala Harris, is also Black and Asian. Let’s not forget that.

[03:10] Her mother is from India. And although South Asian people aren’t usually lumped together with East and Southeast Asian folks in our racist American environment, it’s still not a plus in her favor. I mean, look at how the racists are coming for her JD’s Indian wife, Usha. She’s a San Diego area native who went to Yale for both undergrad and law school and clerked for two conservative Supreme Court justices.

[03:35] And even with all the racists still hate her. And their kids. I will never understand a man or any person who exposes their own children to that kind of hatred. The heady rush of power, even just proximity to power, must be a very intoxicating drug. Because how selfish is that? To cause your children trauma in the pursuit of power.

[04:09] This is why they say power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. So JD made a comment in 2021 on Fox News saying, quote, a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. End quote.

[04:28] Oh, JD, they want the rest of the country miserable too. And yet studies show that childless single women are the most content and satisfied people in the country. So he’s wrong, but this is a little trick called projection. The conservatives are very good at it. They project the things that they’re actually doing, saying, and feeling onto the opposition and then claim that this is what the opposition is doing. When in reality, what they’re doing is telling you in very plain English. And it’s telling on themselves. Like, remember they’re always calling the opposition snowflakes, and yet can’t stand being called weird. Who’s the snowflake?

[05:16] The idea that childless cat ladies have no stake in the future because we don’t have children, again, is projection.

[05:25] They’re saying they wouldn’t care if they didn’t have a stake in it. And since that’s how they think, then it must be true. I mean it JD is saying he wouldn’t care unless he had to. He also called his now running mate, 34 time convicted felon and the grossest person I’ve ever met whose initials are funny enough, DJ.

[05:53] So it’s DJ and JD. Anyway, he called him an idiot, reprehensible, and compared him to Hitler, but now they’re buddies. The members of this brain trust are nothing if not projectionists and also hypocrites. JD has also said he wants those of us without children to pay higher taxes, as if we don’t already do that.

[06:19] His actual quote is, if you’re making $100,000, $400,000 a year, and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you’re making the same amount of money and don’t have any kids. End quote. Mmm. Friend. Listener. This man is either pretending or doesn’t understand how taxes work because this is exactly the way the system is already set up.

[06:43] People with kids get tax breaks of up to $2,000 per child that the rest of do not. So he’s advocating for keeping the system the same and pretends not to realize it. Because this man has kids and has presumably done his taxes at some point. And he’s in government, the one who gives the tax credits, so he should know this.

[07:09] Also, his choice of income brackets is telling. If you’re making $100,000 a year, you are so far ahead of the median American income, which is less than $75,000 a year. And at $400,000, the other one he mentioned, that’s only the top 11 percent of earners in this country. Nearly 90 percent of the country makes less than that.

[07:37] That 11 percent also includes all the billionaires we keep giving tax break after tax break after tax break to. But even more interesting is that this tax credit that JD wants so badly tops out at $400,000 for married people filing jointly. If you make more than that, it starts decreasing. So I wonder how he came up with these rather vague amounts.

[08:04] I think it fits into his hillbilly cosplay. He’s playing dumb. Do conservatives do that? Play dumb? Hmm. So back to the misogynoir we are already seeing. This is going to get exhausting. I am already exhausted. I’m sure you are too. That is the point. But let’s pause and I’ll explain the childfree versus childless thing.

[08:32] In any other context, I am not a childless cat lady. First of all, I’m not childless, I’m childfree, and I’ll explain why that’s important in a bit. Secondly, I don’t own a cat. Unlike many, many, many stereotypical childfree people, Ryan and I are also staunchly pet free. Neither one of us wants the responsibility of an animal, or more than one.

[08:58] We like them. But not enough to sacrifice our plants, furniture, or clothing to their claws and their dander. So, back to the difference between childless and childfree. The generally accepted defining difference was explained by my guest Talia Molé in episodes 23 and in the re release in 51. Here’s how she put it.

[09:21] Talia: I’m not childless. There’s nothing missing in my life. I’m childfree because it’s a choice and it liberates me.

[09:29] Paulette: Yes, childfree is usually a choice and childless is usually due to circumstances. Of course, people choose whatever vocabulary they want to describe their particular situation. So that’s why I’m saying usually. It’s broad strokes.

[09:45] Some of the guests on this show started off by wanting kids, but remained childless by their circumstances and eventually grew to accept and even embrace, by choice, the title childfree. See the links in the show notes for episodes with Theresa and Julie. And since International Childfree Day just passed on August 1st, we should get our terminology right in these broad strokes.

[10:10] Like I said in the newsletter last week, which if you aren’t subscribed to, you should be. Link is always in the show notes. It’s not the childfree, the childless, the immigrants, the illegals, the stepmothers, the cat mothers, the uppity minorities who refuse to know their place that are the problem. None of these people, nor any other boogeyman that’s going to be dangled out there by the people trying to strip us of our rights are the problem.

[10:35] The people trying to strip us of our rights and the 1% ers funding them are the problem. And they’re very good at distracting us from the real issues. So we’ll fight each other instead of them. Divide and conquer. It works in war. It works on the pickleball court, and it works in politics. The same party that doesn’t care about pronouns also doesn’t care about the differences between childfree and childless.

[11:07] Fight the real problem, the people trying to take our rights away. They’ve all grouped us together in this one big category in order to maintain the narrative that women without children are bitter and have nothing better to do with their spinster existences than the sad fate of owning a bunch of cats.

[11:27] The idea is so laughably stupid, I’m not really sure how they get away with it. And people are dumb enough to fall for it? Apparently, yes. So, because they’re not interested in the nuance, I’m not going to fight them on this vocabulary thing. I’m going to assume that the people listening to my show, like you, and following me on socials, understand the difference and also understand the damn assignment.

[12:00] Which is a trending hashtag, hashtag I understand the assignment, and I’ll get to that, but let’s talk about these supposedly miserable childless cat ladies. I can’t even say it without laughing. Because the childless cat lady trope isn’t new. It’s the product of a very successful 17th century campaign by both the church and powerful European artisan guilds to run women out of the business of brewing beer.

[12:29] Allow me to remind you of the witch archetype, pointy hat, broom, black dress, cauldron, and black cat. Sound familiar? My podcast bestie and previous guest, Amanda B. of the Six Degrees of Cat podcast, did a wonderful episode explaining this last year for Halloween. And frankly, I was going to save this story about misogyny till then, but the cultural zeitgeist forced this topic up a few months early.

[12:59] Don’t worry, October will still be full of scary shit. It’s an election year after all. Anyway, go listen to Amanda’s episode, which of course is in the show notes. You’ll probably fall in love with her show because aside from this podcast, it’s the best show in the entire world. So the modern day witch, something they can’t use to insult us with anymore, has been rebranded as a childless cat lady.

[13:25] So scary. They’ve even, curiously, positioned billionaire Taylor Swift as the ultimate bad example of this, as she’s in the middle of one of the most successful tours of all time. It’s ridiculous how far these people will reach to grasp at straws, but here we are. Because that billionaire is first, a woman, and secondly, not playing into their very narrow worldview that women are only good for, I don’t know, making sandwiches and birthing babies.

[14:01] And if you think I’m exaggerating, check out Project 2025 written by The Heritage Foundation. It has a very Christofascist bent. Christofascism means that Christians impose themselves on other religions and cultures and political parties that do not march under the banner of their version of Jesus Christ.

[14:23] Christofascist. Definition supplied by Wikipedia. So much for the separation of church and state. Remember, the state of Louisiana has already tried to put the Ten Commandments in all public schools. So if you’re not scared, maybe it’s because you’re not paying attention. Project 2025 is the free and publicly available 920-page document that’s a blueprint for the explicitly ultra conservative vision of America.

[14:53] Its aim is to centralize power under the president, which is why the Orange Clown is telling people at his rallies that they’ll never need to vote again because they, the ultra conservatives, mean to take power for themselves and never give it back to the people. Yes, they’re advocating for a dictatorship.

[15:15] Project 2025 will also roll back diversity and inclusion policies, focuses only on the traditional definition of the family as the one true unit, meaning anything that isn’t one mom and one dad is not going to be recognized as a family. So what do you think that’s going to do to divorce? We’ve already heard that they’re trying to do away with no fault divorces in many States.

[15:43] Who do you think is pushing for that? Project 2025 also does away with the Department of Education as a whole. They plan to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, because get this, they promote climate change by reporting the weather. And they’re coming after Sesame Street for being too woke for kids. Meaning the channels that air Sesame Street will lose their public funding.

[16:14] You know, PBS. Babe, they’re afraid of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus, probably also Bert and Ernie. They can’t be friends anymore because that’s gay. We all know how the Christofascists feel about gays and everybody else under the LGBTQIA plus umbrella. They, the bad guys, aren’t even hiding their playbook anymore, and that’s just what they’ve made public.

[16:42] Imagine what they aren’t telling us. They also know this can’t be done overnight, so this is the long term plan. Do you really think they’ll stop until they’ve made women and minorities fully second class citizens? What’s the end goal? To have legal chattel slavery again? They’re already passing policies at the federal level to pave the way to make this happen.

[17:07] Presidential immunity was only one step. Remember how they did away with abortion protections? The single word abortion is used 91 times in the text of Project 2025. They’re super obsessed with it. And they’re foaming at the mouth to do even more damage, because in their eyes, all of this, modern, single women enjoying their lives, is wrong.

[17:32] It’s the wrong way to live. You’re doing it wrong, so you’re gonna be punished and forced to live how they want you to. Probably like the Ballerina Farm Girl with eight kids and no nannies. They want you too exhausted to fight back. Exhaustion is the point. So back to misogyny and misogynoir. The way the misogynoir plays out could be rather blatant where they call her lazy or say that she slept her way to the top.

[18:02] It might be more covert in coded language, these dog whistles that they’re very well known for. Just recently, the former president was making fun of VP Harris’s laugh, calling her crazy, that she’s nuts. Because men like him and the people who created the Project 2025 blueprint are threatened by women showing joy.

[18:27] You know, the thing you do when you laugh, you exhibit happiness and joy. They’re threatened by women who are happy, women who have self esteem. Weaponizing a woman’s ability to laugh is an old tactic. In the 19th century, if a woman laughed too much, she was diagnosed with hysteria. This is where they want us to go back to, not just the chattel slavery days, but back before women had any rights whatsoever.

[18:58] They needed a father to provide a dowry for them to get married and had no decision making power, even once they were married, everything was controlled by their husbands. Y’all, women couldn’t even open their own bank accounts until the 1970s. That’s when Gen X was being born. There are some of us who were alive before women could have credit cards, could have their own loans.

[19:24] Do you realize this is what they’re trying to take away from us? This is where they want us to go back to when women were simply property of their fathers or their husbands. I mentioned chattel slavery earlier, but owning women, that’s what they want. Want to fully control us, to not allow us to display any emotions, except for the ones they allow us to.

[19:51] That’s weird, right? That’s weird. Is Kamala Harris my pick for president as a childless cat lady? Cause again, we’re all in that boat together. We’re all childless cat ladies here, okay? As any longtime listener of this show knows, I am not a fan of hers. You’ve heard my rant against her in an episode with my friend Theresa, number 38 that I mentioned before.

[20:12] But you may also have heard the saying that voting isn’t marriage, it’s a bus ride. VP Harris puts us closer to our destination and more importantly, further away from the Heritage Foundation’s bullshit than voting for the only other option on the ticket. The orange guy. The you’re fired guy. He was fired! And impeached! And convicted of 34 felonies so far!

[20:38] Now if you want to talk about third parties, okay, that’s the guaranteed option to throwing away your vote. At least when it comes to voting for president. The federal office is currently a binary vote. That’s it. You pick from either the red side or the blue side. Those are your options. And if you think both sides are the same and you’re mad that President Biden or Harris aren’t calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, I have some more bad news for you.

[21:06] You may not want to hear it, but it’s true. Genocide is good for business. I know it’s disgusting, it’s abhorrent, but neither side is ever going to change that. First of all, we don’t control Israel. They’re not a colony of the United States, unlike Puerto Rico, where the U.S. did actually institute a genocide against an entire generation of Puerto Ricans in the fifties and the sixties by performing illegal and unconsented to hysterectomies on women.

[21:38] Why aren’t we mad about that too? Or what about the genocide perpetrated on this very land we all live on, the one that is baked into our DNA as a nation? The very founding of this country was built on the blood of the indigenous population. Like I said, genocide is good for the business of the United States.

[22:03] If you want to get a deeper understanding of this and how it plays into global U. S. policy, we’ve covered that here before. Check out episode 57 with Professor Alsultany. Her book, Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, very clearly outlines how our nation has always, and will always, continue to perpetuate harm over a certain subset of people deemed less than, the people the U.S. feels superior to.

[22:29] It’s been Muslim people for a long time. A generation ago, it was Latin America where we had a ton of CIA backed coups all over Latin America. And of course, before that, African slaves. And so many, many, many more people in between. So what do we do? Well, make your pick between the red team and the blue team in November.

[22:57] But if you’re serious about third party candidates, the real place to force a non-binary choice starts at the local level. Where do you think these politicians come from? Unlike the Orange Conor Roy, most people do have to work their way up the system to get to be president or even a senator. They run for local office, they run for student office, they have grassroots campaigns in your own backyard, maybe even in your front yard.

[23:25] Make sure you vote for them too. That’s where your vote has the most impact and also the most direct effect on your everyday life. The people you vote for mayor, city council, state representative, those are the people that most directly affect your everyday life. Get voting and get involved. Canvass for these folks.

[23:49] And if you’re not finding anyone you like, then step up to the plate yourself. Because remember, voting isn’t marriage. It’s a bus ride to get us closer to our destination. But at the same time, we all have the power to get involved. We might be tired. We might feel overwhelmed. We might feel like this isn’t our job, but isn’t it all of our jobs?

[24:13] Remember, they want to keep us tired so we don’t fight back. You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of seeing people claim that both sides are the same. Yes, both sides will allow a genocide in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, and a bunch of other places to continue. I will give you that much because that’s the business this country is in.

[24:35] But only one of those sides wants to strip all of your rights away as an American citizen. Especially if you’re a woman. Or gay, or not white, or poor, or not Christian, or anything else that isn’t a specific rich white man without a fucking conscience. Because even if you’re white, if you’re poor, you are a moral failure and a bad look for their campaign.

[25:00] They don’t care about you either, no matter the color of your skin or your creed. So, childless cat ladies, we can make the correct choice so that we can force Project 2025 off the table for now. But we have to stay vigilant because they’ll try again every future election cycle. at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level.

[25:25] So stay woke. Keep your eyes open because what’s at stake is our rights as people. That’s the assignment to keep them from stealing our rights away. Keep them, the ones continuing to weaponize their hatred of women, especially Black women, the misogyny and the misogynoir, keep them from power. Because as we know, power corrupts.

[25:48] But the dictatorship that the Christofascists want so badly is absolute power. And there’s no coming back from that. So the takeaway here is that even if I’m not an actuality a childless cat lady or a witch, I will stand with them from this point on against the evil perpetrated by the Christofascists ultra conservatives.

[26:08] Your vote matters, so use it to your advantage, not against your best interests and that of all future Americans. Also, you might as well stop believing that both sides are the same, or that childless cat ladies are bitter. And if you say you understand the assignment now, in August, make sure you turn in the damn assignment in November. And the next November, and the one after that, and so on.

[26:37] And that’s a burrito. Hey, mira, if this episode made you feel some kind of way, dígame. DM me on Instagram, or send me a text. You can do that right from your phone. If you want to be a guest on the show and put your story out there too, check out the guest form on my website at pauletterato.[26:58] com slash guest. Yep, just my name, pauletterato. com slash guest. Y no se te olvide que hay más perks when you join the newsletter. Todos estos links están en los show notes. Muchísimas gracias for your support y hasta la próxima vez, cuídate bien.