Which Women Is JD Vance Insulting Today? And Whom Will JD Vance Insult Tomorrow?
Postmenopausal women and Indian mothers-in-law, it's your time to shine!
In a 2020 appearance on the podcast “The Portal” recently unearthed by Heartland Signal, vice presidential hopeful JD Vance held a discussion with host Eric Weinstein about the fact that his mother-in-law (a biology professor and provost at University of California San Diego) lived with them for a year to help them care for their new baby.
Between nicer people, this could have been a lovely discussion. Between JD Vance and Eric Weinstein — best known, perhaps, for coining the term “Intellectual Dark Web” and for coming up with a “theory of everything” that actual scientists thought was rather ridiculous — it … was not.
Vance started off normally enough, talking about how exposure to their grandparents has been good for his kids, before Weinstein jumped in with “that’s the purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory” — which Vance, notably, did not refute.
“Did your in-laws, in particularly your mother-in-law, show up in some huge way?” Weinstein asked.
“She lived with us for a year,” Vance said.
Weinstein responded to this by claiming that free childcare from grandparents is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” which Vance also did not push back on.
“Yeah, it's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of, up against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family,” Vance said. “My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship, was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval, and her mom just took a sabbatical — she's a biology professor in California — just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year.”
So, first of all — that is not what a “sabbatical” is for an academic. A sabbatical is when they are allowed to take time off of work for academic or enrichment purposes. What his mother-in-law took is called “family leave.” The University of California college system allows up to a year of unpaid family leave for academic appointees like Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri, Vance’s mother-in-law. The state of California also provides paid family leave for workers for up to a year.
JD Vance, mind you, has called paid family leave a “very terrible thing” and “actively bad.” So he loved the fact that his mother-in-law was able to come stay with him for a year, but hates the things that allowed her to do that in the first place.
“Okay, so it's just one of these things where it's like this, this is what you do,” Weinstein interjected. “A biology professor PhD drops what they're doing to immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant.”
“Painfully economically inefficient,” Vance said. “Why didn't she just keep her job? Give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Right, because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you do. The, the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, is to me … it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It's the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market-oriented way of thinking about ‘What's good and what's desirable?’
“If people are paying for it, and it contributes to GDP, and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good, and if it doesn't, it's bad, I think that that entire sort of to me that's sort of … to me that’s sort of the root of our political problem.”
Oh boy.
This is an argument that a lot of people on the right have been trying to make for a while now. While maintaining that we are, of course, total commies, they also claim that the reason we support women having jobs is because we think the only labor that has any value is labor that is paid for. You know, because we are such market-oriented capitalists.
It is, of course, some very obvious bullshit. It also goes to show you exactly how much these people know about actual radical left politics. I guarantee you they’ve never heard of the Wages for Housework movement, which proposes that those who do choose stay home with children receive tax-subsidized wages — which would allow those with less money than Vance’s family to also choose for one parent to stay home and take care of the house and family while still maintaining economic independence.
It’s also worth noting, again, that we are the ones who support and work to build the systems that allowed Vance’s mother-in-law to come and stay with them and take care of their children.
Because the thing is … exactly none of us are mad at parents or even spouses who are not parents who choose to stay home. We do not value what they do less. What we do value, however, is the ability of those people to have economic independence and not have to rely entirely on their spouse to the point where they would be completely fucked in the event of a divorce.
It seems unlikely that JD Vance or Eric Weinstein would have dedicated their lives to venture capitalism and hedge funds, for free, out of the goodness of their own hearts, because they believe it is valuable work. No, they chose those jobs because they wanted economic independence.
In 2020, when this conversation took place, there was a lot of talk around the manosphere about the supposedly unfair “distribution of sex” and how “enforced monogamy” was the cure for this. Jordan Peterson, one of the proponents of this idea, was/is notably part of the group Weinstein had dubbed the Intellectual Dark Web.
The desire to end abortion, the obsession with getting women to have a bunch of kids, to get them to stay home with said kids, to end no-fault divorce, to then insist that the whole point of a postmenopausal woman is to take care of kids — these are all, ultimately, about putting women in a situation where they are economically dependent on men. This is about isolating them so they will not go away. They want women to look out at the vast expanse of their lives and see “taking care of children” as their future.
Vance is very much in cahoots with young conservative men — many of whom are consumed by a deep panic over “hypergamy,” their belief women always date up and that 10 percent of the men get 90 percent of the women, while the rest of them are left alone. They usually blame the sexual revolution and feminism for this, as it meant that women no longer had to depend on them for survival and were also able to choose when they wanted to have children.
You may be thinking “But Vance and Weinstein were talking about postmenopausal women on this show!” — but there is a reason for that. It is that they are aware that women fear ending up in a Betty Broderick situation.
Betty Broderick, should you be unfamiliar, was a woman who dedicated herself to her physically and psychologically abusive husband and their children, working to put him through law school and then quitting to become a housewife, only to find herself alone and destitute after he left her for his 22-year-old legal assistant and took their children with him (as he was a lawyer, he used his influence in the community to prevent her from getting a lawyer). The whole situation drove her mad and she ended up sneaking into their house in the middle of the night and killing both of them.
This was obviously an extreme case, but Broderick received a whole lot of support from other women like her at the time, because they had been through something similar or were afraid they might.
We’re seeing something similar now with newly divorced “tradwives” finding themselves completely fucked.
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There is an interest in keeping women from fearing ending up in situations like these. So what those like Vance and Weinstein are pushing for here is the idea that a woman’s life trajectory may just be, you know, “get married young, have lots of babies, take care of the babies and your husband, and then even if your husband leaves you for a younger model and you can’t find a new partner, you will find purpose in taking care of your grandchildren, so there’s no need to fear this lifestyle.”
But there definitely is.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Keep telling postmenopausal women what their role is, couch-fucker. You may find out really fast that the defining characteristic of postmenopausal women is being sick of everyone's shit and not keeping quiet about it.
Also the age cohort currently in or approaching menopause is Generation X. Our default mode is being sick of your shit. You've been warned.
What Vance actually said here, without realizing it because he’s stupid, is that those two self-centered, hyperambitious Yalies needed the MIL to live with them the first year because they lack the empathy required to care for a newborn and grandma was concerned the newborn might die.