Misogyny in U.S. law and the 2024 election
By Leigh E. Rich
For most of our lives, women have suffered the catcall. Now, we must endure the cat whistle.
More audible than its canine counterpart (which typically spreads racist and xenophobic messages through coded language), the cat whistle calls for misogyny. Neither is new, of course, just amplified in the 2024 election — in an exhausting and disheartening way that makes it seem more like 1824 than the cusp of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
Sure, like immigrants and members of America’s BIPOC and LGTBQIA+ communities, women have long heard the insensible frequencies whenever politicians and leaders of institutions have pursed their lips to blow (even in the prior fifty years when progress seemingly was being made). But today, the cat whistle is sucking in new air. And a lot of it. All bloated. All blustery. Daily hyperventilations (mostly by men) that women are but mere ribs (and, of course, handmaids and wombs) in the body politic.
Who’s hysterical now?
It still must be women (or anyone “female-adjacent”). What else could we want? We’ve been instructed by Mr. (Don’t Let Her Ad)Vance himself that we’re otherwise miserable “childless cat ladies” who should be giddy about the paper bags that have been graciously propped open for our lives and amusement. Who else will make the lunches that go in them? (Silly biddy Betty Friedan must have led us astray when, in 1963, she noticed that a “problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women … a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered” when patriarchal ideals bullied them to care more about making their children’s “peanut butter sandwiches” than something of themselves — too “afraid to ask … ‘Is this all?’”) So how, pray tell, did we overcome the mesmerizing scratching at the bottom of the sack and stealthily pounce past our mandated path as but happy helpmate, chasing yarns of equality or even being, ahem, top dog? (Tellingly, Merriam-Webster’s online thesaurus provides no antonyms for “helpmate,” just synonyms for “assistant” and “wife.”)
Oh, wait, our foremothers fought for it.
No wonder we’re rolling over in our litter boxes, suffragette whites sullied and pussy hat ears pinned back in justifiable dismay.
There is much to scratch at.
Donald Trump (asininely toot-tooting his own whistle at a Pennsylvania rally last month) claims he will be women’s “protector” at “a level never seen before,” despite deeming Kamala Harris “dumb” and “mentally impaired” since birth (a two-for-one dog-plus-cat call out), reposting “content … making sexually oriented attacks” on Harris’s professional successes while telling Fox News it’s the Dems who are “demeaning women,” and applauding himself for the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Casey, and a constitutional right to abortion. And these are just the latest hits of the tinny troubadour found liable for defamation and sexual assault.
His backup band hasn’t sounded much better.
Since Harris selected Tim Walz as her veep running mate, Republicans have taken issue with a 2023 education bill the Minnesota governor signed that provides free meals to students and menstrual products in school bathrooms. Though his detractors childishly challenge his “manhood,” the former social studies educator and football coach who served more than two decades in the National Guard has worn these off-key slights proudly: smiling effusively as full-bellied kids, with access to essential supplies, can better grow and learn. (Science bears both out: Issues such as hunger and period poverty undermine children’s academic success.) “Tampon Tim” isn’t the slur his opponents cattily think; rather, it intimates how a grownup takes seriously the ongoing instrumental needs more than half the population does or will confront.
Though some claim the issue in the law is the language (and how this might support or even acknowledge transgender kids), Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy blew the whistle on how puerile the taunts really are. Following a podcast appearance by Harris in the wake of Hurricane Helene, Kennedy hollered that the storm’s survivors “don’t give a function about tampons” — yet on a good day, let alone without water, power, or possibly a home, tampons and other menstrual provisions are exactly what many people need. (Indeed, a few might be stuffed into Kennedy’s gassy mouth until he learns a sliver of knowledge and empathy for the human biology he and his cohort like to blather about. We might then have leaders whose policy positions outgrow harmful fantasies like uncompensated care work and “legitimate rape.”)
Even industry has a whistle, overlooking and undervaluing the femtech that could improve women’s lives and reap extraordinary profits. Yet, as Amelia Hill notes in The Guardian, “[i]nvestment in femtech stands at just 1-2% of total health technology funding. And between 2011 and 2021, only 4% of new medical technology drugs relating to female-specific health conditions were approved” in the United States. The gender bias begins before a funding pitch and continues when a product comes to market, with spurious ideas about innovations being too limited and words like “vagina” problematic for online retailers.
As Mo Carrier, cofounder of MyBliss, describes in Hill’s article: “At the last funding round I applied for, I was told — by a man — that lubricant was too niche to fund because it was only needed by menopausal women. He wouldn’t even look at our research. … That funding eventually went to yet another workplace productivity app.”
To be fair, perhaps that productivity app was geared toward grandmas? In 2020, then-venture capitalist (and future Ohio senator) J.D. Vance seemingly nodded along when Eric Weinstein, host of The Portal podcast, stated that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren. And not, of course, advocate for women’s rights or think about things like abortion. In the words of Bernie Moreno, Ohio Republican candidate for Senate: “Sadly … there’s a lot of suburban women … that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
No, it’s an issue for lawmakers who truly care about kids. How every life — save for the schoolchildren sick or hungry, immigrants in cages, or pregnant people possibly bleeding out in the hospital parking lot — is sacred. Good thing, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lauds in Dobbs, how much has changed: those “modern developments” that have altered attitudes about single motherhood, ensured “the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance,” and enforced laws that “ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” provide “safe haven” drop-offs after childbirth, and guarantee parental leave. No matter that women and the complexities of pregnancy and childbirth are all but absent in the new anti-abortion precedent or that women and physicians — based on actual experiences in accessing medical care, paying for it, addressing fertility- and life-threatening complications, and managing tenuous (and often unpaid) workplace support — might beg to differ.
In a Fox News town hall with Trump, Harris Faulkner asked the GOP’s nominee and former president about the consequences of Dobbs and the so-called scaremongering tactics Democrats have raised in its wake. Referring to Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old woman, wife, and mother from Georgia who died after being unable to access abortion care, Faulkner propped up a straw man for the Republican straw man, explaining how “Senators Warnock and Ossoff, [former] Atlanta Mayor [Keisha] Bottoms, and Amber Thurman’s family have come out on a press call” to discuss just how real those consequences are. Trump’s only response was that The Faulkner Focus program would “get better ratings, I promise.”
Apparently, when Trump jokes about the preventable death of a Black woman, the audience laughs.
But even he, great pro-life (and also pro-women?) “protector,” has softened his ideological, unshakeable (since 2016) stance that life begins at conception. And for the most important of reasons: political expediency. He won’t, as president, support a national abortion ban, or maybe he might, and he’ll vote in favor of Florida’s abortion-protecting Amendment 4, but then again, maybe he won’t. What matters is safeguarding the unborn — er, uh, his reelection. (And, in any case, Florida Gov. Ron “DeSaster,” as Trump has named him, has sicced the state’s Department of Health on local TV stations thinking about running pro-amendment ads.)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also seems to have caught this particular political bug — staying mum at a recent debate on questions about Texas’s abortion bans (that, per The New York Times, forced approximately 35,500 patients in 2023 to cross state lines for abortion-related care). Yet Cruz, as MSNBC blogger Clarissa-Jan Lim notes, is “a staunch anti-abortion zealot who has long pushed for restrictions on abortion access” and, in 2022, called Dobbs “nothing short of a massive victory for life.” More pressing for Cruz, it now seems, is ensuring the rather few transgender athletes are kept out of girls’ and women’s sports. Because he’s supporting women.
At least the Alabama Supreme Court stayed ideologically consistent in February when it ruled that frozen embryos from assisted reproductive treatments are “unborn children.” Yet lawmakers — including Republicans and Gov. Kay Ivey who, like Cruz, claim to be staunchly “pro-life” — quickly passed a legislative carveout for IVF. While this (initially) secures the procreative autonomy of those struggling with infertility and other reproductive obstacles, the cat whistle message for women rings clear: Lawmakers will scramble to protect electoral and industry concerns, but once an embryo is in a womb, the only “you” that matters is in the uterus. Would that they “would Remember the Ladies”!
Matthew Wollin, in The New Republic, frames the state of U.S. abortion bans in similarly stark terms: a revival of coverture, where a pregnant person’s identity is subsumed not by the “superior interests” of a husband but by that of the embryo or fetus. “From a legal standpoint, when a person becomes pregnant, she simply stops existing. The only thing that exists is her fetus.”
Motherhood, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders highlights, does indeed make one humble. Not Kamala, of course. She, per the Arkansas governor’s estimation, doesn’t have any children (step-kids don’t count) and, thus, “anything keeping her humble.” And humility is the main metric for a governorship or the presidency. Just ask Mr. Trump!
But Sanders is a woman, and her cat-whistling could be mistaken for catfighting. Better to leave the task to men. Like Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who wrote the book on Manhood, or commentator Tucker Carlson and televangelist Lawrence Wallnau, who frame the progress of others as emasculating and nothing but a zero-sum game. Turning Point USA’s Graham Allen maintains that “no real men would ever vote for Kamala Harris” or the Democrats. To do so, per Carlson, makes a man “weak” and unbosoms, in Jesse Watters’s words, certain “mommy issues.” There’s also Senate leader Mitch McConnell and “bounty hunter” Jonathan Mitchell, willing to break America’s checks and balances — and any women along the way — for partisan gain. Or the sham FBI inquiry into Brett Kavanaugh’s past and the belauding of “sexual matador” Stephen Miller as he dishes out dating advice: “Show that you are a real man” and “not a beta” (even if the alpha wolf idea is outdated myth).
So, yes, with the squealing of today’s cat whistle, tampons and lubricant and politicians who might have an inkling about women’s actual lives might be “too niche.”
The (literal) take-home messages from Trump, Vance, Alito, Cruz, and their ilk: remain pregnant at all costs, birth and raise the children, “complement” one’s husband, stay in “maybe even violent” marriages, and shoulder the unpaid domestic and care work despite greater financial, physical, and mental health costs. Anything less is but feminism’s “great trick.”
Well, Betty, guess you got it wrong: Women are the sandwich generation.
While not every man (or woman or those of other genders) gleefully huffs and puffs on the cat whistle, its earsplitting sounds amplify and echo in our current climate, creating harms that affect us all. The 2024 election is increasingly aligned along gendered lines. Per Catherine Lucey, Aaron Zitner, and Xavier Martinez of The Wall Street Journal: “The gender gap has come to define a deadlocked presidential race, with a galvanized group of women voting for Harris because of her support for abortion rights and Trump wooing men with uber-masculine rhetoric” — a divide that “cuts across racial and economic lines.”
Like the dog whistle — a gadget invented by father of eugenics Sir Francis Galton — the cat whistle persists in our society not merely despite “the better angels of our nature” but specifically to put those emasculating better angels back in their petticoated place.
Rich, L. E. (2024, October 17). The cat whistle: Misogyny in U.S. law and the 2024 election. Leigh Rich Freelance: insertcomma.com.
References
Abigail Adams, “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March – 5 April 1776,” original manuscript from the Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa. See also Erin Allen, “Remember the Ladies,” Timeless: Stories from the Library of Congress (blog), Library of Congress, March 31, 2016, https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/03/remember-the-ladies/ and how Allen underscores how “Abigail Adams was an advocate for greater political rights for women, especially in regards to divorce and property ownership.”
Steve Benen, “Trump takes ridiculous steps to make the gender gap even worse,” MCNBC, September 9, 2024, https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-takes-ridiculous-steps-make-gender-gap-even-worse-rcna170191. See also https://x.com/American_Bridge/status/1830402938172252426.
Virginia Chamlee, “Why Are Tim Walz’s Critics Calling Him ‘Tampon Tim’? Republicans’ new nickname for the Democratic vice presidential candidate stems from a Minnesota education bill that Walz signed into law in 2023,” People, August 8, 2024, https://people.com/tim-walz-tampon-tim-nickname-explained-8692690. See also HF 2497, https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?f=HF2497&b=house&y=2023&ssn=0 and https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF2497&session_year=2023&session_number=0&version=latest.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf.
Molly Cook Escobar, Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Allison McCann, Scott Reinhard, and Helmuth Rosales, “171,000 Traveled for Abortions Last Year: See Where They Went,” The New York Times, June 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/13/us/abortion-state-laws-ban-travel.html.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963). See also Jacob Muñoz, “The Powerful, Complicated Legacy of Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique,’” Smithsonian Magazine, February 4, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/powerful-complicated-legacy-betty-friedans-feminine-mystique-180976931/.
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LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, SC-2022-0515; SC-2022-0579 (Ala. 2024), https://law.justia.com/cases/alabama/supreme-court/2024/sc-2022-0579.html.
Clarissa-Jan Lim, “Cruz dodges abortion ban questions during debate: ‘Why do you keep asking me that?’” MSNBC, October 16, 2024, https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ted-cruz-colin-allred-debate-abortion-rcna175668.
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Alander Rocha, “Alabama passed a new IVF law: But questions remain,” Alabama Reflector, March 11, 2024, https://alabamareflector.com/2024/03/11/alabama-passed-a-new-ivf-law-but-questions-remain/.
Terri Rupar, “Josh Hawley thinks masculinity can fix America’s problems,” The 19th, June 23, 2023, https://19thnews.org/2023/06/josh-hawley-manhood/.
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Kevin Shalvey, “Sarah Huckabee Sanders swipes at Kamala Harris for not having biological children,” ABC News, September 18, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/huckabee-sanders-harris-lacks-humility-raising-biological-children/story?id=113800656.
Anna Skinner, “How Many Transgender Athletes Play Women’s Sports?” Newsweek, April 21, 2023, updated May 11, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/how-many-transgender-athletes-play-womens-sports-1796006. See also Jody L. Herman, Andrew R. Flores, and Kathryn K. O’Neill, How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States? (Los Angeles: The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, 2022), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf.
Joe Sommerlad, “‘Sexual matador’ Stephen Miller offers advice to young conservatives looking for love: Ex-Trump adviser was pitched as ‘some sort of sexual matador’ by Fox News host Jesse Watters,” The Independent, October 9, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/stephen-miller-trump-romantic-advice-fox-news-b2626585.html.
Rachel Treisman, “JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments: The centuries-old trope has a long tail,” NPR, July 29, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/07/29/nx-s1-5055616/jd-vance-childless-cat-lady-history.
J. D. Vance, “JD Vance Pacifica Christian Full Video,” Vice, July 21, 2022, YouTube video, 54:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QM4J0jMrXo.
Maegan Vazquez and Sabrina Rodriguez, “Trump falsely attacks Harris as ‘mentally impaired’ and ‘mentally disabled,’ prompting criticism: The remarks drew a rebuke from a group that advocates for people with disabilities,” The Washington Post, September 28, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/28/trump-harris-attacks-mentally-impaired-criticism/.
Kathryn Watson, “Ohio’s GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says abortion isn’t ‘an issue’ for women ‘past 50,’” CBS News, September 24, 2024, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ohio-gop-senate-candidate-bernie-moreno-abortion-issue-women-over-50/.
Eric Weinstein, host, “J. D. Vance – American Dreams and Nightmares,” The Portal (podcast), episode 32, April 29, 2020, https://theportal.wiki/index.php?title=32:_J._D._Vance_-_American_Dreams_and_Nightmares&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop. See also https://x.com/HeartlandSignal/status/1823811043375907296?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email and Joyce Vance and Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, “Here’s a message for JD Vance from two ‘postmenopausal’ women: Instead of being mocked or dismissed as a group of faceless caregivers, women like us deserve society’s respect. And that starts by making our health a policy priority,” MSNBC, August 15, 2024, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/jd-vance-trump-women-menopause-rcna166808.
Matthew Wollin, “The Insidious Legal Theory Behind the Abortion Rights Rollback,” The New Republic, October 14, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/maz/article/185911/abortion-coverture-arcane-legal-theory.
