J.D. Vance Illustrates Five Lessons in Misogyny
When it comes to misogyny, J.D. Vance isn’t an anomaly or a throwback. He’s a textbook illustration.
By now we all know that the Republican VP candidate, J.D. Vance, has dismissed women like Kamala Harris as “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made… [who] want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” (Harris, in fact, has two step-children, no cats to speak of, and seems the opposite of miserable.) By now we all know that he has defended his wife, Usha Vance, against racist attacks on the grounds that she’s a great mother. (The full quote: “Obviously, [Usha]’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.” Well OK then!) By now we all know that he thinks people (read: women) should stay in violent marriages. Slightly less well-publicized but equally alarming audio has Vance, a radical anti-abortion extremist, dismissing the circumstances of being pregnant due to rape and incest as a mere “inconvenience.” Recently unearthed audio also showcases Vance agreeing with a conservative talk show host in 2020 that helping raise children “is the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” That’s right. Their whole purpose. He also agreed when the host said that having grandparents pitch in is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, but fortunately none of this is remotely new or surprising. The sexism and misogyny of J.D. Vance is a textbook illustration of how women are conceived in a white supremacist patriarchy: as the givers of love, nurture, and, perhaps above all, children. We are not, contrary to a common line, dismissed as less than human. We are human, all too human, in the mind of the prototypical misogynistic patriarch. But, to be sure, we are not allowed to be human in the way that privileged men are. We are human givers, not human beings, consigned to various forms of material, domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor. Every woman alive is conscripted into the service industry.
Here are five additional lessons about misogyny, courtesy of the sad, weird, mean men that constitute the face and base of the Republican Party currently.
1. Misogyny loves “good” women: On my construal, misogyny is not a matter of hating any and every woman. Rather, it is primarily a matter of policing and punishing “bad” women, who fail to perform our allotted role as “good” wives, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and so on. We refuse to have umpteen children. We refuse to have children altogether. We divorce our odious husbands. What’s more, we never marry them—an unforgiveable and racialized sin, particularly for single mothers, as the incomparable Lyz Lenz has argued. We show care towards other people and creatures—including non-human animals—and ourselves. We simply show up in the world as people with ideas and ambitions and pleasures and projects of our own, which are not in service of privileged men and their children. Worst of all, we may both live and speak out against patriarchal norms, expectations, ideals, and values. We may, in other words, be feminists. (I may have a child and a husband, but this makes me spiritually a childless cat lady by the lights of Vance and co. Can I have my own tee shirt?)
Frequently men claim that they can’t be misogynists because they love their wife, their mother, their daughters, and so on. Even if true, this is no defense at all. Misogyny loves a “good” woman. It is “bad,” deviant, outspoken women who tend to bear the brunt of misogynistic aggression. (Although even ostensibly “good” women may also encounter fallout. Misogynist policing leads to over-policing on the regular.)
2. Misogyny and sexism are frequently in lockstep: Whereas misogyny tries to enforce patriarchal norms and expectations, sexism is the ideological branch of patriarchy that theorizes women will just love our allotted role under it. It says that women are “naturally” loving, caring, giving, and attentive. We just have different brains. We are oriented toward children. We are made to care by nature. We will be so happy, in fact, living up to patriarchal ideals that we will do it with a smile on our face and a song in our heart. If sexism was true, there would be no need for misogyny. Unfortunately for patriarchy, of course, sexism is deeply false: women are socialized to care and are not naturally more empathetic than our male and gender non-conforming counterparts. (The empirical evidence on gender differences in empathy is actually scarce—though, tellingly, you can sometimes get women to exhibit more empathy on tests than men by priming for gender.) So, metaphorically, sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts. Sexism is the brains; misogyny is the brawn. Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.
Someone like Vance is invested in the magical sexist thinking that women will naturally care more, and care better, for everyone around them without becoming unhappy. (And who cares if we do become unhappy, honestly.) Men are excused from all caregiving tasks, naturally. But the nasty edge to Republican rhetoric and, most importantly, their plans for women make it clear that the cracks are starting to show. Many women now have the audacity to think that our “purpose” is, well, whatever we want it to be, both individually and collectively—as multifarious and variable and unpredictable as it should be for any human being. And that is where misogynistic insults and punishment start to become necessary to pull us back into line: we are labelled “abnormal,” “miserable,” immoral, feckless, and grossly irresponsible insofar as we do not conform to patriarchal norms and expectations of caregiving. Misogynistic laws that enforce childbearing in horrific ways are a go-to move under patriarchy, deeply invested as it is in removing our hard-won, precarious reproductive freedoms. Anti-abortion campaigning is not about life, as is hopefully all too obvious at this point: it is about controlling us, and punishing those who cannot or will not fulfill our assigned “purpose” under patriarchy.
Image source: Yahoo News
Interestingly, I’d argue that Donald Trump is less a sexist than a misogynist: he is happy to have women serving in positions of power in his businesses and administrations, as long as they are supremely deferential to his masculine authority. But his degradation of women—including rape and sexual harassment—is the epitome of misogyny. That may partly explain, I think, why he chose two incredibly sexist (as well as misogynistic) men, in the form of Mike Pence and J.D. Vance, to round out his tickets. While the contrast between these two VP picks has been much-discussed, less has been said about what unifies the two: a kind of untrammeled sexist vision of what it will take to make America great again that makes up for deficiencies in Trump’s own, more purely misogynistic worldview.
3. Misogyny is deeply racist within a white supremacy: Let’s not put too fine a point on it. Women who are racially marginalized have it so much worse than white women under white supremacist patriarchy. This is not only because they are made vulnerable by their lack of racial privilege, but also because they are often assigned caregiving roles that are especially menial, degrading, and which require their caregiving labor be deployed in service of white families. This applies, most obviously, to the figure of the “mammy,” a harmful trope theorized by the brilliant sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, among others, wherein Black women were often coerced or enslaved into caring for the white offspring of wealthy white families rather than their own children. But it also pertains to the eyebrow-raising sense that a woman of color can redeem herself by marrying a white man and providing him with the children she then rears dutifully and lovingly. That Usha Vance’s prototypical feminine virtue is being billed as somehow compensating for her race is not J.D. Vance misspeaking. Again: when people tell us who they are, we ought to believe them.
There are broader morals here to be reflected upon too. That Republicans hate actually helping families, by subsidizing childcare, providing free school breakfasts and lunches, and mandating parental leave is not an anomaly or hypocrisy. They care about the family only as a unit of white supremacist, heterosexist, and patriarchal power preservation.
4. Misogyny is a unifying, organizing, animating force in political conservatism today: Political theorists have not, by and large, paid enough attention to misogyny in its intersections with racism, white supremacy, ableism, transphobia, ageism, and so on. But it can explain a good deal about our current political landscape. It explains why Republicans flock toward male leaders who exhibit not traditional masculine strength but rather a peculiar mixture of pettiness and fear and shameless misogyny that is emboldening to a constituency that feels it is losing. (Watching Trump and Vance freak out and lose their collective shit at the Harris and Walz campaign has been a delightful experience.) It explains why Republicans care so much about anti-abortion laws, even though these have proved spectacularly unpopular with the majority of Americans. It explains why Republicans are so desperately afraid of and violent toward trans folks: trans women epitomize “deviant” women who cannot fulfill their allotted childbearing role under patriarchy, and trans men are similarly convicted of refusing it (even though some can, and do, get pregnant—a fact of life which has also become unspeakable in some circles). It explains, moreover, their deep commitment to the gender binary and to denying life-saving gender-affirming care for trans and non-binary adults and children: patriarchy needs to maintain the myth of an exclusive, exhaustive partition between two sexes wherein privileged men can select “good” women, based on appearance and dress and mannerisms, to bear and raise their children. Any hint of gender subversion—even the time-honored tradition of drag—is a grave threat and must be punished, outlawed, extinguished. Playing with gender is playing with fire for these people.
5. Misogyny need not be sincere, and it goes far beyond individual men’s attitudes: There are real questions to be asked about whether J.D. Vance is sincere in any of his sexist or misogynistic beliefs, given recent revelations about his friendship with a trans classmate at Yale, among other evidence. I can’t stress this enough: his underlying attitudes do not matter. Misogyny is a matter of what women face, not what men feel about us, deep in their hearts. When they insult us, we are demeaned. When they punish us, we suffer. When they get elected and make laws designed to control us, we live—or die—under them. Yes, misogyny often involves hostile and hateful attitudes towards “bad” women. And sometimes those attitudes can even miss the mark, seeming to be directed more at a stereotype about us rather than our true persona. But, again, this does not matter. As I said in my first book: When your effigy burns, you burn right along with it. Misogyny kills. It truly doesn’t matter if a misogynist like Vance is shrugging on the inside, making a cynical bid for power that doesn’t reflect his own attitudes. In this, and so much else, he’s still a textbook illustration.
Thank you for this utterly brilliant essay, Professor Manne. I have read, with delirious excitement, almost every word you have written, and I feel compelled to tell you, with huge gratitude, that your work has been life -altering for me. Even though I cared full-time for my beloved first husband, who died after a 3 year battle with brain cancer, I was demonized by his family and friend group for not doing “enough.” To cite just one of innumerable misogynistic punishments: Once, when I left him with his sister, a friend of his, AND his caregiver for a few hours, because as an introvert and writer, it was hard for me to never be alone, the friend sent an email to 20 people criticizing me as a selfish wife (not realizing I was on the thread.) The fact that I craved solitude—a male-coded good—was transgressive in and of itself; but it also confirmed wide-spread suspicion that I was not in fact (to my own shame) transcendently fulfilled in my role as nurse. And because we had no children, I had no excuse to ever leave my dying husband’s side—which a “good” woman can only legitimately do, of course, to care for sb else. (Our cherished rescue dogs didn’t count.) During this period, I could not help but be aware of how all the sexist expectations around my duties as a wife conveniently spared other people from having to share in the burden and sorrows of my husband’s care. Anyway, in addition to grief, I struggled with enormous amounts of guilt and anguish and bewilderment over this scapegoating—until I read, and reread, Down,Girl and Entitlement, rapturously underlining most of every page. Thank you, thank you for clearing away my mystification, and helping me to understand structural misogyny and the role it played in that painful chapter of my life.
There's a lot to be horrified by, but the quote about postmenopausal women stood out to me because describing women by their probable reproductive status is a key indicator of the red pill/incel style of writing. I'd still hate him if he just bragged about his biology professor mother-in-law taking a leave of absence to help out with childcare, or talked about grandmothers, but that postmenopausal bit added an extra pile of horribleness.