A few months ago, I read a novel for a women’s book club called Romantic Comedy. It was about — you guessed it — romance and comedy, specifically in the life of its single, 36-year-old female protagonist; her career as a writer for “SNL” analog “The Night Owls;” and the phenomenon of funny, ugly men wooing women way hotter than they are but funny, ugly women struggling to pull off the reverse.
While the entire tone of Romantic Comedy is leftist, even down to its tired Covid plotline, the ultimate message is accidentally conservative (Spoiler!): It doesn’t matter how much of an independent, successful #BossB-tch you are, inside each woman is a biological urge to find the stability of a husband and, though the story doesn’t get this far, leave a legacy of children. Against all odds, protagonist Sally Millz gives up part of herself by giving up her job at “TNO” and marries the male main character. Her job will never fulfill her the way marriage can, and she knows it.
This book has been circling my mind ever since Democrats turned J.D. Vance’s years-old comments about “childless cat ladies” into both a victim card and a rallying cry. Vance’s point was that America, through the Democrat Party and their corporate friends, is run largely by people “who don’t really have a direct stake in it” and who are “miserable [in] their own lives.”
The unmarried and childless Oprah Winfrey capitalized on Vance’s comments in a cringey speech at
