Every day, the trump/vance GOP presidential campaign says something so offensive and backward, it’s hard to put it to paper without losing brain cells in the process. For example, VP candidate Vance posits that women who don’t have children are “miserable childless cat ladies.” Meow. Vance went even further saying that women who do have children should stay in abusive marriages for their children’s benefit. Per the Los Angeles Times:
At a 2021 event hosted by a private Newport Beach high school, future Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said that after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, children suffered when their parents divorced, even when the marriages were unhappy or “maybe even violent.”
This one twitter reaction sums it up perfectly.
Contrast this with the Gov. Tim Walz phenomenon. The Democrats’ candidate for VP is an accomplished, decent, kind, down to earth caring dad who feels comfortable being second to a powerful woman and is smart enough to know he is not diminished in that service.
In contrast, GOP VP candidate JD Vance’s world centers toxic masculinity, where women’s only function is as a subservient wife, catering to the man, and as a mother to his offspring. Her needs, dreams, her very humanity, count for nothing.
My mother lived a life of duty and little else and she was miserable for most of it. Watching my mother be abused by my father is something I will never forget. It telegraphed the message that I must always be smaller than the man. That would seem to suit Vance and his GOP selfish insecure cabal to a T. Here’s a brief excerpt of my own experience growing up in a violent home:*
Devaluing my mother was the antidote to my father’s great need for her. By making her out to be incompetent, he made himself necessary. Her contributions could never be acknowledged, or he would be shamed by comparison. It didn’t matter that these notions were all in his head; there was nothing any of us could do to disabuse him of them.
Physical violence was by no means a constant, but the threat was ever present. The painful memory of watching my mom on her knees before my father, holding her arms above her head to protect herself from his raised hand, lives on in my four-year-old brain to this day. Dad’s stocky, muscular frame was stiff with rage as he loomed over my mother. “I will beat on you!” he screamed. My big sister had failed some test and he’d lost it. The sound that came out of Mom at that moment was not even words. She didn’t cry or beg before him, ever. If she was on her knees, it was to protect one of us.
In his booming voice, Dad would roar, “I will throw a bucket of ice-water on you!” I guess he figured that was the most profound way to shame her. We feared he would someday do it.
I once asked Mom why she chose to stay….
From her perspective, she was doing what was expected. From mine, she got no appreciation for working herself into the ground on a cruel man’s behalf.
I wanted Mom to credit herself for the thing I admired most about her—her everyday bravery.
No, it didn’t do my sister and I any good for my mother to remain in this horrid marriage, no matter how much we loved our parents. Owing to the abuse she suffered, Mom treated herself as a second-class citizen her entire life, inadvertently teaching my sister and I to do the same. It has taken a herculean amount of effort (and writing a book on the subject) to finally break free of such brainwashing. That JD Vance thinks this is fitting treatment, and outcome, for women is appalling.
Since he’s the privileged white guy to whom everyone else owes their fealty, it’s easy for him to glibly make such a comment. Clearly, he has no understanding of the cost to the wife and children that he condemns to an abusive situation. Kids are sponges, and watching physical or emotional violence unfold before them, they internalize a message not only about their own worthlessness, but that they are not necessarily entitled to happiness since their own mother experienced none.
A single parent environment of self-esteem, peace and safety, even with financial struggle, surely compensates for a home in which physical violence and emotional abuse present a daily danger to both mother and child.
Another problem with Vance’s stinking thinking is that he seems to believe we will somehow be magically be transported back to the 1950s where men worked, women prepared a roast at home and took care of the kids, presenting hubby a cocktail when he walked through the door. And if this is one of the abusive marriage JD thinks women should stay in, let’s hope the guy is in a good mood — otherwise he’ll knock his wife across the room. All part of the bargain, eh, JD?
This patriarchal world view conveniently ignores that GOP policies – centering tax cuts for billionaires while cutting overtime hours, union-busting, ending the ACA, cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veterans benefits (basically anything that would benefit the middle or working class) – make it all but impossible for a one income family to survive. This clueless, callous method of governing telegraphs a Party that longs for a past in which the white male was undeservedly centered in power with little concern for average Americans.
This is also the Party that wants to enact a nationwide abortion ban. As many have noted, Republicans are not pro-life, they are pro-birth. Any policies that might make it more affordable for people to have and take care of children are non-existent. Vance’s other idea is that grandparents are supposed to help take care of the kids, presupposing that they have nothing else to do, or that they are not still working themselves. In a GOP world, they would certainly need to, since trump plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. He tried to do so every year he was in office but Democrats stopped him.
Here is the icing on the cake: Vance just said the “purpose of post-menopausal women” is to raise grandchildren.
So glad this privileged ignoramus wants to tell me what my purpose is.
Please, vote Harris/Walz2024 in numbers too big to deny.
*This passage is excerpted from Anita Finlay’s memoir You Ruined My Life and You Stole My Bra, a Mother Daughter Love Story, on Amazon
