You're Supposed To Support This

Want to know how "pro-natalist" men really view pregnancy? Elon Musk's tweets about Taylor Swift spell it out.

Here’s an all-timer creep tweet.

Late on Tuesday, after Vice President Kamala Harris’s fairly indisputable trouncing of Donald Trump in their first presidential debate, pop star Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Harris. In an Instagram post, Swift also supported “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body,” and signed off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” The signature was a nod to GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s weird refrain of denouncing opponents (women, usually) as “childless cat ladies” whose lack of children should (in his arguments) make them less eligible for political participation. 

Good, normal post from Swift. Now let’s see how the most influential freaks on the pro-natalist right responded. 

Shortly after Swift’s Instagram post, Trump supporter Elon Musk tweeted “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

It’s probably telling that a leading figure of the pro-natalist movement regards pregnancy—and let’s be clinical: the act of being inseminated—as degrading. Because that's what's going on with this tweet. Musk is discussing very obviously unwelcome sex acts against a woman, in retaliation for her endorsing a political candidate he doesn’t like. 

I put this kind of tweet in the same category as unactionable online rape threats. Both are regularly deployed to police women’s speech online, and both are reflexively downplayed by misogynists since, ugh, calm down, it’s just words, he’s not actually gonna do it, you hysterical broad. But like a catcall on the street, the primary function is to disturb and demean and to remind women—lest they become too comfortable or too successful—of the ordering system of gendered violence that underwrites a good part of our everyday lives. 

It’s the pointed end of the ideology Musk endorses, which preaches against birth control and for huge increases in reproductive labor, from which men—Musk is a father of at least 12 children by multiple women who have since criticized him as a partner—are overwhelmingly excused. And it’s something of a mask-off moment when pregnancy, which pro-natalists uphold as women’s almost mystical purpose, is invoked as punishment.

Maybe Swift wants to have children someday. That is sincerely none of anyone’s business. But, as I’ve written before, right-wing men are a little psychotic about Swift’s family choices.

I suspect this is because Swift’s celebrity status is such that, in the commentariat's mind, she’s almost a stand-in for young, white heterosexual women. She’s ultra-normative, pretty and palatable. She is what the right claims (at least publicly) to want women to be. She is almost a barometer for social norms. But as she’s aged, she’s stayed true to the demographic she exemplifies and, like many of them, has pursued a demanding career while remaining childless at The Big Age Of 34. 

This frank statement of preferences by a very famous woman—the archetypal millennial woman!—has caused conservative men’s brains to leak out of their ears, especially when Swift makes it explicit in the form of a presidential endorsement. It’s little coincidence that when the right praises Swift, it’s often for what they describe as her modesty (and here we run into some really gross comparisons, whereby Black pop stars are contrasted as promiscuous), and that when the right seeks to discipline her, they immediately attempt to degrade her sexually.

I don’t know if Swift’s endorsement of Harris will swing many voters. But I know that men like Musk view Swift’s choices as a referendum by young women, writ-large.

“Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy,” Musk tweeted Wednesday morning.

He’s talking about a parasitic infection transmissible by cats. Childless cat ladies, in other words, are a danger to democracy. But Musk has also this month shared a 4chan post that argued “people who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men)” are unable to truly think and that therefore they should not be allowed to vote. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

That’s not democracy and Musk doesn’t value democracy, only domination. The same goes for his view of motherhood.