August 05, 2024

[PREVIEW] Tradwives And Childless Cat Ladies

9 minutes

It feels like we’ve been preparing for this one for years. We’ve talked about nap dresses and mom bodies. We’ve talked about the fear of losing your selfhood in motherhood. We’ve talked about egg-freezing and IVF. We’ve talked about the way that parenthood and non-parenthood are treated on both the left and the right. And now it’s time for all of these threads to merge together into a mega-discourse, thanks to Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance.

A preternaturally beautiful, homesteading momfluencer and an alt-right weirdo with the face of a socially-awkward 14-year-old (and an unsettling obsession with punishing childfree women) may seem like odd cultural bedfellows. But, as Claire put it, if Ballerina Farm is the trad honey trap who makes the pro-natalist lifestyle look romantic and joyful, JD Vance is the trad boot heel of the state who aspires to grind down upon all the childfree women in America until they’re barefoot and pregnant in their egg aprons.

For anyone who hasn’t been rapturously following the debate about Ballerina Farm and/or the pile-up of evidence that JD Vance is disturbingly preoccupied with policing the emptiness of America’s wombs, let’s back up and give some context. On July 20, The Times of London published a sharp profile of Hannah Neeleman, the woman behind the Ballerina Farm mega-brand, and her husband, JetBlue scion Daniel Neeleman. The piece included some observations about the couple’s relationship — like when Daniel drops the fact, seemingly unprompted, that his wife sometimes collapses into bed for a week from exhaustion — that led some readers to wonder if Hannah was more a victim of the culture she’s steeped in than a villainous propagandist with complete agency. (The reality is probably a bit of both.)

Around the same time, reporters were digging into Vance’s past interviews — something that tends to happen when you’re selected as the Vice Presidential candidate to a man you once thought might be “America’s Hitler.” And these reporters began to notice a theme: JD Vance fucking hates people who don’t have children, especially women. In 2021, he told Tucker Carlson that the country was being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they have made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Other clips of him making similar comments have since re-emerged, including one interview where he says not having children makes people “more sociopathic and our whole country a little less mentally stable,” and another where he calls childfree people (specifically millennial journalists without kids!) “sad, lonely [and] pathetic,” and urges people to “go to war” against their “ideology.” He has even put these views into several deranged policy ideas: (1) Instituting a tax penalty for people without kids, and (2) giving extra votes to parents. In the wake of mass criticism, Vance has essentially doubled down, grasping at straws to claim that the Democrats are an “anti-family” political party.

And this is where the Ballerina Farm brand and Vance’s ideology converge: a future where mothers are hollowly “exalted” by men, without being offered concrete support for the very real labor that mothering entails; a future where birth control and abortion care and no-fault divorce are societal ills; a future where everything is beautiful and white on Instagram and ugly underneath the surface.

In this episode, we discuss our reactions to Ballerina Farm and the “childless cat ladies” trope, and wonder how we can harness the anger we feel and channel it productively in this political moment. Hope you enjoy! Xo