Jill Filipovic analyzes the latest JD Vance atrocity:
The latest unearthed audio has him agreeing with a conservative podcast host on what women are for once we hit menopause: Helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” The whole purpose.
Vance has opinions about many different kinds of women. Those who don’t have kids are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too” and lack “a direct stake in the future of the country.”
Women who care about their work and plan their families are suckers: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Step mothers (and step parents generally), he has suggested, are not real parents.
We have not yet heard his views on the purpose of pre-pubescent girls, but he has said that he believes even raped and impregnated children should be forced to give birth, even though their circumstances are “inconvenient” — and Ohio, the state he represents as a US senator, has done just that, notoriously refusing to allow a ten-year-old rape victim to end her pregnancy (she had to travel out of state, at which point Republicans targeted the doctor who helped her).
He goes on to tell the podcast host that his own wife, who clerked for a Supreme Coourt Justice, had the help of her own mother who took a year off from her job as a biology professor to come help them in the home. He laments that some people would have just given them money. He, at the time, was trying his failed start-up and didn’t have time to help and wouldn’t anyway because it’s clearly a “female” job.
This guy is a real throwback and I think it’s comments like this that argue for the newspapers to release those documents they obtained that show the Vance vetting process. They either show that Trump and his people knew about his creepy sexism and either agree with it or didn’t care — or they did a very poor job of it. Either way, it’s newsworthy that someone with these antediluvian views made it on to a presidential ticket in 2024 despite a process that ostensibly vetted him.
I’m ticking off an awful lot of boxes that JD Vance seems to consider make me a useless, perhaps evil, member of society. It’s more than a little concerning.