Suzanne Harrington: Men like Trump have long feared childless cat ladies 

People watch a presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive watch party in Berkeley, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Miaow! That’s the sound of all the cats of all the childless cat ladies, miaowing up a storm.

The cat chorus, now led by childless cat-lady-in-chief Taylor Swift and her 283m strong basket of Swiftie kitties, supporting the presidential childless cat lady herself, after Ms Harris got her clever claws into her opponent’s sclerotic psyche and scratched where it hurt. The size of his rallies.

His only comment about cats seemed to be about eating them; not another cat-related sexual euphemism to make you retch into your handbag, but the actual consumption of domestic felines by immigrants: “The people that came in — they’re eating the cats”

When fact-checked by a moderator as racist hallucination, Harris’s opponent responded, “I’ve seen people on television!’” 

Harris, who had obviously read the How To Trigger A Narcissist handbook cover to cover, could have been an actual cat, with four legs and a furry tail in a trouser suit, and still have eviscerated him. 

All it took was for her to target not his policies (he has none) but his sense of self, an entity not unlike Schrodinger’s cat in both its enormity and non-existence.

The world watched as she dropped him on America’s doormat, purring, while he melted down like a mad villain in a B-movie, shouting how he won the debate “by a lot.”

Thanks must go to tone-deaf sidekick JD Vance, who has handed the Harris campaign the greatest election slogan of all time. By a lot. Childless cat lady is electioneering catnip.

All around not just the US, but in every country watching the pre-November proceedings with anxious optimism, people are identifying as childless cat ladies. 

Mothers, fathers, dog owners, people who couldn’t name a single Taylor Swift song and are allergic to cats, we are all childless cat ladies now. 

A cat, yesterday

PIGS VOTING FOR SAUSAGES

From Oprah to Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Aniston to Gigi Hadid, Barbie to Ripley from Alien, our culture teems with cat ladies. Sleek, clever, independent, unruffled, poised, beautiful: and that’s just the cats.

Men like Harris’s opponent and his ethically rudderless running mate (who once referred to his paylord as ‘America’s Hitler’, but now stands beside him) have long feared childless cat ladies for being the opposite of pregnant in the kitchen. 

In the murky past, such women were murdered by men in their tens of thousands for being witches, because any woman living alone with her cat was one less woman available for unpaid drudgery and factory levels of baby-making.

An aberration. Vance’s thinking is still in witch-burning mode — women who have not had children have ‘no stake’ in society. (Other than to be burned at one?) They’re ‘childless sociopaths’.

The irony is of course that these two men seek to preserve laws which protect and prioritise guns over children’s lives; which support forced birth from unwanted pregnancies; which regard maternity leave as communist.

And still, there are many, many American women who will vote for these two, like pigs voting for sausages.

It’s enough to send you up the curtains, claws out, hissing and spitting in disbelief.