Usha Vance, Rama Duwaji, & the Tragedy of Heterosexuality

This is the first time that we have recorded an episode where I'm sitting down and I have actually no idea what we are talking about. So for listeners, Caro invited me to an appointment called Two Girls, One Cup. And I texted her and I go, what the fuck are we talking about tomorrow? Today's episode of Diabolical Lies is brought to you by Buckeye1748, who recently left a review on our Apple podcast that, Katie, I'm going to have you read. Oh, no! I cannot tell you I saw this last night, Katie. I have been kicking my feet for 24 hours. Read the title first. Okay. Okay. Felt attacked as a male. Two stars. Two stars. Not one. As a liberal white man, I was looking for a new podcast and stumbled upon the Scott Galloway episode and left feeling attacked to be who I was. While I don't agree with many things Scott says, it felt like an entire episode of unjustifiable bullying. Editor's note, we read statistics. Like something out of a liberal Fox News. While I do support many things they said, the delivery was hard for me to digest. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I felt strongly enough about this that it's the first review I've left for literally anything in years, including when Dr. Sellers push repetitively for a review. Okay, the first sentence of this of like, as a liberal white man, I felt attacked. I'm like, this is literally like the birth of gender studies. Like, we are clearly doing something correctly. Number one, anyone who just like skims through podcasts and clicks on a new one with no context is a serial killer. Total serial killer. Number two, I love that this guy was like, I don't agree with Scott Galloway. I do agree with these women. However. They made me feel weird about some of the behaviors that are inherent to who I am. And I also just have to highlight that he gave us two stars. Like, there was some redeeming quality to our podcast that he had. We got an extra star because he's like, materially, what they were saying was correct. However, I don't like their attitude. I also just love the idea of a liberal white man looking for a new podcast. I'm like, oh, are the five million that are catered to your exact demographic not enough that you like had to find something new? Anyways, it just felt like a perfect intro for the conversation that we're about to have today. Before we get started, we actually have a few pieces of housekeeping to discuss. I think first and foremost, we have a bunch of new listeners to the podcast over the last month, and so I thought it might be useful to reintroduce ourselves since this is a very lo-fi podcast, and we don't always do that. So I'm Katie Yadity Tosin. I am a financial and economics writer, so I have a book called Rich Girl Nation, which is a personal finance book, and then I founded and own a company called Money with Katie, which is where it kind of started as straightforward tactical personal finance, and then like accidentally became a pathway to radicalization. And yeah, now I'm here co-hosting a culture and politics podcast that only periodically makes my Fox News mom cry. And I am Carol Claire Burke. I am a thinker about town. I think about stuff professionally. I think about stuff and it has slowly gotten me into a position of quasi-authority. I have a novel coming out in April. That's going to be another piece of housekeeping later on. It's called Yestrier if you want to pre-order it. And you and I, Katie, met about two years ago now. And long story short, we just started talking about a lot of things in text and we would send each other voice memos. and we just wanted to basically take our voice memos and turn it into a podcast. And so we soft launched it about a year ago, and now it is a more formalized podcast that airs every other Sunday. So you get two episodes a month. Sometimes we do bonus episodes, but the cadence that you can always count on is that it's every other Sunday, we release a long form episode and it really runs the gamut of what we're interested in. I think you and I are obviously both interested in feminism and womanhood, but we talk about private equity, we talk about terrorism, We have a big episode on Epstein coming up. One thing you'll notice is that our episodes are very long. That's intentional because I think we both find short form things a little bit stultifying. And the level of rigor that we are trying to bring to these conversations in order to get at something genuinely new and interesting takes a long time. So you will probably find that you're listening for around two hours. But one of my favorite early reviews of the show was like, this show is two and a half hours long, and yet somehow it feels concise. And I think we really pride ourselves on that. So I think the primary purpose of this show for Caro and I is, you know what, I'm not going to speak for you. I'll say what it is for me. to stretch myself intellectually to really challenge my own beliefs about things and kind of grow my understanding of the world and kind of the schema by which I'm like interpreting these current events. But the secondary benefit of this show is that Cara and I decided from day one that we wanted it to be a force for good beyond just yapping. So we redistribute 33% of all subscriber net revenue, merch net revenue. One in every $3 we make is given away to some sort of worthy and relevant organization or cause. And sometimes we give them to one of the Diabolical Lies logo groups, which you'll have access to if you're a paid subscriber. Other times we executive order it and we decide what we're going to give to, but that's another really cool element of the project. Yeah. And as this podcast has grown, so has the community. And there are a lot of paid subscribers who now meet up now. There are different regional groups. That's really fun. So on that note, if you're listening, I don't know what platform you're listening to this on, but we are curious how you are finding this show. So we're going to put a little poll super quick in the show notes for this episode. And if you can just take a second and tell us like, I heard about you on a TikTok or like I found you all scrolling on Substack or, you know, like the person that this episode is dedicated to, You were just like a serial killer, scrolling Apple podcasts, saw our amazing show art and clicked on it. We want to know how you came to Dirty Little Liar Town. The last thing I'll say is that sometimes we get questions about the name. And Diabolical Lies was inspired by the Harrison Butker commencement speech in 2024, where he said that feminism was the most diabolical lie that women have been told. So that's where the name comes from, if you're confused. Yeah, we're always thinking about you, Harrison. We see you when you're sleeping and we know when you're awake. And the third piece of housekeeping is about my novel, Yesteryear. We're getting ready to launch Yesteryear this spring, and I'm announcing our launch night, which is April 7th. It's going to be a Tuesday, and I would love for as many Diabolicalized listeners to come. It's terrifying for me to invite people to something like this. Well, tell them where it is, Caroline. It's going to be in New York City. It'll be at a place called Symphony Space, which is a very cool, like, performing arts center. And we have a really fun evening planned, and I'm going to be joined on stage with Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton of Good Noticings. So this is, like, our first and currently only planned sort of pseudo-diabolicalized crossover with Good Noticings, which I'm really excited about. Yeah, I think it's going to be really fun. I am going to have a larger book tour, and I will share the dates of that when we finalize it. But this is going to be like a particularly special night where we kind of talk about all things America and womanhood and trad wives. And I wanted to share it with the Diabolicalized community first. So we're going to have details in the show notes for anyone who wants to get a ticket. You can get like a regular ticket or you can do like a ticket book bundle, but please come because I would like to have a career as a novelist and pretty much everything is riding on this. So just take that into consideration when you decide whether or not to attend this on a Tuesday night. I'm going to start posting Craigslist ads. Like what they did for the Melania showing where they're like paying people $50 to be seat fillers. And they're like, you have to stay the whole time. Honestly, Katie, I accept. Please continue to do that. I don't need this to be legitimate. I just need it to look good in photos. That is my real goal for this. So anyways, all joking aside, I'm very excited about that. This has been a long time coming, and yeah, it's going to be crazy to actually be able to talk to people about this book that has just been in my head. You read it, and we haven't talked about it yet. We still need to talk about it. It's so fucking good. I can't wait to interview you about it for the Caro episode. Okay, is that when we're going to talk about it for the first time? I think that that would be cool, yeah. That would be cool. Okay, whatever. Just raw dog that conversation. Wow, my palms are sweating. Okay, so Katie, today we are talking about three topics that I have wanted to talk about for a very long time now. Little behind the curtain peek, I have like a running list of ideas for Diabolical Lies in like one of those stickies on my computer. And sometimes it's a topic that I think is worthy of a full episode. And sometimes it's like a book or a theory or this little nugget of info that I want to kind of wedge in somewhere. I think you and I both often have that where like you read a book that changes your life, but you want to figure out how to fit it into an episode. So each of these ideas that I wanted to talk about had a separate bullet point, and it was only when we did the Scott Galloway episode that I was like, oh, I can just neutrabullet this. We can just get this done in one day. So today we are talking about Usha Vance, Rama Duwaji, and a book called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by lesbian scholar and academic theorist Jane Ward. Katie, you have not read this book, right? No, I've never even heard of this book. Okay, I mentioned this book once. I think it was on an AMA a while ago. And it's one of a small collection of books that has rewired my brain. And I've been wanting to do an episode on all the theories that are inherent to this book. And again, I kind of figured it out when I was thinking about Usha Vance and Rama Duwaji. So I just want to talk really briefly before we get into like, and if books could kill style profiling of these two women. I kind of want to explain why I feel like it's worthwhile to talk about this right now when you have, you know, gestures wildly, so much taking place in America, and we are rapidly approaching the cliff, and the emergency brake is broken. Well, and now we know we have a lot of white male liberal fans who are just dying for us to talk about women and not men. Exactly, exactly. So, Backeye1704, this one's for you, babe. This episode is literally dedicated to him. So, the bulk of today's conversation is about these two women, Usha Vance and Rama Jawaji, who are both political wives and also just kind of like cultural ciphers for the American public. But they're also just at the most basic level, examples of two different versions of heterosexual love. And so in that sense, I wanted to kind of compare and contrast. And then when we were doing your ICE episode, Katie, I realized that there was even more of a need for us to have this conversation now, a conversation that we have been dancing around and kind of implying on this podcast for a long time, but we have never just dedicated a full episode to you, which is what is straightness? What is heterosexuality? Apparently, we seem very straight. Alternately, we seem in love with each other, depending on who you are. Exactly. What did that one commenter say, a podcast relationship truther? He's like, my ears perked up. Yeah, you know, I mean, And to be quite honest, I think that seeing how listeners perceive you and I has made me more interested in this conversation, where it's like, what are the implications of someone saying that I am straight? What do they think they know about me if they say that I'm straight? In the Scott Galloway episode, we kind of talked about how there is this broad perception, even in like progressive spaces, that men and women are different. Men have to be protectors. They need war. And if they don't have like a world war to contribute to, then they will act out. And women are the guardrails, right? Like, this is just generally accepted. We've talked about this so many times. And then your ICE episode really kind of clarified things for me as I was writing this episode about the idea of surplus men. Can you just summarize that really quickly for people who didn't listen to that episode? Sure. So the surplus males theory that we talked about in the ICE episode was something that was brought to my attention by a woman named Therese Lee. It's a 2002 paper that basically studied the social or societal effects in Asian countries that had gender-specific abortion. So they essentially killed off a lot of female infants. And so what they ended up with were societies that were demographically skewed toward men. men. And when you have a bunch of men outnumbering all the women in a patriarchal paradigm where, like, women are the means by which you validate your masculinity and achieve status and esteem, it essentially led to this situation where you had a lot of, quote-unquote, surplus males or males who were unable to achieve that status or esteem in society clustering together and fucking shit up for people. And so the way that it was involved into the ICE episode is the surplus males theory applied to basically like ICE agents and these men who want to become ICE agents because it gives them both income and meaning, which is something that the surplus males theory suggests these men lack. And so it's like, okay, well, they have these violent tendencies or these inclinations toward, oh, I should be a protector, but they have nothing to protect because no one will fuck them. And so they start tear gassing children, basically. And again, the implication at the end of this argument that people are sincerely making is that women should be marrying these men. That if more women were serving as like the guardrails and also as the source of purpose for these men, then we would not have this polarized environment that we have now. And I mean, to be clear, this is pretty much the entirety of like the gendered underpinnings of the Heritage Foundation's policy recommendations for everything. Everything that they want to change about the policy as it pertains to marriage, to children, to family formation, it all kind of hinges on this idea that if you can get men into stable marriages with women, and then obviously have them procreate, that that is like the silver bullet that will make society operate well and which will actually prevent future government intervention down the line. This is why they all hate welfare. This is why we have, like, the carceral state. Like, it's all connected, but it's funny the way in which this just very explicitly shows up in documents like Project 2025 because it essentially lays out this thesis for you. Yes, I am so glad that you brought up the Heritage Foundation because in addition to like the roving band of unfuckable and deeply violent men we call ICE agents, the Heritage Foundation has also been very active recently. This is kind of, as Katie hinted, the American right-wing think tank that is behind Project 2025. They are also largely the group that orchestrated the fall of Roe v. Wade. And they recently released a new report, their latest report, which is called Saving America by Saving the Family, a Foundation for the Next 250 Years. There you go. Featuring W. Bradwell-Cox. Yep. So, Katie, I want you to read a little segment from this report. The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage, the committed union of one man and one woman, is its cornerstone. It is the seedbed of self-government. The home is where fathers, mothers, and their children cultivate virtue and practice cooperation, responsibility, stewardship, and self-reliance. Without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity. It lacks a storehouse. What are these words? A storehouse? A whole lot of something to cover up nothing. It lacks a storehouse of strong and brave men to protect itself from hostile aggressors at home and abroad. There you go. Babe, the call is coming from inside the house. There's your specter of danger. It lacks even the ingredients for responsible citizenship itself, without which no republic is possible. Despite their own radical philosophy, even the mad communist dictators of the 20th century, such as Stalin and Mao, could not eradicate the need for the family. Okay, so wait. So the family is like a bulwark against madness and chaos and civilizational breakdown, but it wasn't enough to prevent the spread of communism? Is that what we're doing here? Correct. So, I mean, look, Katie, you and I could spend an entire episode on this report, but I'm just going to give you the highlights so that we can get into it. This is a report written by the people who have the Trump administration's ear. To be very clear, this is a report from people who have gotten things done, who are incredibly powerful. And the whole highlight of this report is we've got a problem, yada, yada, yada. People aren't having kids as much as they used to. You know, they're not getting married. We could focus on IVF, but actually we should not. Because for example, if we offer mass subsidies for IVF or egg freezing, then we're contributing to, quote, the devaluing and commodification of children. What we need to do is, quote, eliminate marriage penalties and welfare and establish work requirements. In other words, they want to gut welfare. We need to continue getting rid of DEI policies and other acts of regulation that somehow hurt families. They want to give people tax credits for having kids, which whatever, and this is the kicker. Instead of, like, dealing with the childcare crisis, they want to stop, quote, discriminating against at-home parental child raising and incentivize people to raise their kids at home by giving them a credit of $2,000. And this is to level the playing field. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew this one would get you. How little do they think women earn that $2,000 a year is going to be a competitive incentive to get women to give up their paid work to stay home and raise children? I mean, all of the credits around kids, I have to say just to include the Democrats, are like paltry and pathetic for what people need to raise children. The Heritage Foundation also wants to do marriage boot camp for couples, like regulated marriage boot camps for couples who cohabit with children but aren't married. And this is at the same time as we have Republican lawmakers also in lockstep with the Heritage Foundation who are working to chip away at no-fault divorce laws. They're looking to find ways to reverse the teen mom trend so that more teenagers are giving birth again. And all of this comes down to an idea we talk about ad nauseum, which is the importance of, quote, what is natural and right, which is the nuclear family, which we've talked about a lot, but also which is straightness. The idea that the most natural thing in the world is heterosexuality. They have this, like, kind of circle jerk about ancient Greece, which I find so funny because I did, like, three minutes of research and, like, yes, marriage existed in Greece, but, like, women were slaves and everyone fucked everyone. So, I'm like, I don't know what you guys are getting at from there. Like, divorce did not exist, but I mean, they don't want to. So anyways, what is going on in America is deeply connected to what we are talking about today, even though this conversation is hopefully going to be a little bit lighter than the one we had two weeks ago. But one question I want everyone to keep in their heads is the one that we had in our Lily Phillips episode, which is what do you not need evidence to believe? So we're going to sandwich this. We're going to talk about Usha, and then we're going to dip into some academic theory with tragedy of heterosexuality, and then we'll do Rama, and then we'll conclude with some additional words from Jane Ward. So Katie, what do you know about Usha Vance? Usha Vance. Usha's an interesting character. Usha was kind of the centerpiece, in a way, of my MAGA womanhood episode from last year. Because she was the notable exception to the Mar-a-Lago face trend. And I said, this is really interesting. We should watch what she does and what they do to her very closely because she is a woman of color in the inner circle of the Trump administration. She's the vice president's wife and the mother of his three, almost four children. She's also like was a highly powered lawyer prior to, you know, J.D. Vance becoming vice president. And she kind of continued to look like a real person and like didn't take on the cyborgian feminine aesthetic that all the other high-powered women in the Trump administration have. And so I just found her very fascinating. And I thought that she would be kind of like an interesting canary in the coal mine or like leading indicator and somebody to pay attention to. She just announced that she is pregnant with their fourth kid. And JD said some, made some creepy comments about like, you know, I want the birth rate higher and I'm doing my part or some crazy shit. Walking the walk, yeah. We're going to talk about that. She's also, I will note, she and their children have been the subjects of a lot of racist attacks from the white nationalists, right? From the right. From their base. From their base. I think it was Nick Fuentes who was like, I don't know. They bring up the fact that one of JD's children is named Vivek. and they like have a lot of fun shitting on him for like being a race traitor, which is a very leopard's eating your face moment, I think, for the second in command of the Republican Party. So Usha Vance was born and raised in San Diego to Hindu parents who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s. Her father is a mechanical engineer and professor at San Diego State University and her mother is a molecular biologist and provost at the University of California, San Diego. Also a free babysitter, per JD. Yep, also a free babysitter. Usha is and has always been, by all accounts, a brilliant person. She was a stellar student all throughout her educational experience. She went to Yale University as an undergrad. She graduated summa cum laude. She spent a year teaching American history to students in China. Then she went to Cambridge University in England to get a Master of Philosophy. And then she went to Yale Law School. For those who aren't familiar, Yale Law School is like a bastion for conservative thought, which is useful background info. I know we think of the Ivies as like little lib out stations, but that is not the case for Yale Law School. So while she is at Yale Law School, she is already known there as someone to watch, as someone who is at the top of her class. She serves as an executive editor on the Yale Law Journal. Barack Obama famously, I think, was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Journal. It's just a very, very prestigious spot to have. She has friends. She is featured on, like, lists of Yale's hottest students. And it is during her time at Yale Law School that she meets one James David Vance. Was that his name back then? Or was he— Oh, no, actually, thank you. No. What was his name? His name—I actually was looking this up. No, J.D. Vance lies about everything related to who he is. What was his name? James David Hamill to Vance. Yep. Yeah, yes, that was post-Yale Law. Yeah, good point. Yeah, James David Hamill. She was reportedly introduced to him via Amy Chua, who is a very controversial professor at Yale Law and author of that- Tiger Mom. Yeah, that controversial, it was like a parenting book, Tiger Mom. She's been accused of getting fucked up with her students and like telling girls to look nice when they go out into the world, but that's neither here nor there. So J.D. Vance is, as we all know, a fucking loser. Citations not needed. But in addition to being a loser, he is also a rabid opportunist and a pathological liar. We don't have time to unpack all of this. You can listen to the If Books Could Kill coverage of Hillbilly Elegy, but like TLDR, he grew up in Ohio in like a lower class family. His parents got divorced. His mom was an addict. And then he became famous for representing Appalachia because he visited his grandparents in the summer. But like, I looked into this and as far as I understand, his grandparents weren't even living in Appalachia at that point. It was just that they had spent most of their lives in Appalachia. But like, they weren't even there when he was visiting. But like, because they were from there, he made the statement that like, he got, you know, hillbilly vibes. And it's very like six degrees of separation for the area that you claim to represent. Okay, listen, JD Vance has as much claim to Appalachia as I do. Yeah. His house in Ohio is like 20 minutes from where I grew up. Oh, yeah. That's actually so true. Hillbilly Elegy, Katie. He'll talk about that area and I'm like, dude, this is not... It's Rust Belt, right? Wouldn't you qualify that as Rust Belt? Yeah, but even then, I mean... Yeah. I don't... Do you remember the town he grew up in what it was called middletown ohio okay let me we're gonna google map middletown ohio from my house that i grew up in wait this is so funny please hold 56 miles wow katie you gotta write a best-selling memoir i should be the one doing the diner circuit with the Trump voters being like, this is what America has been forgotten. I mean, I maintain that if and when you and I ever want to make the switch, we will be billionaires in 30 days flat. My Fox News segment is going to hit so hard. If I ever decide. You're like white blonde. You'll look so hot. Listen, listen, if I ever decide that I value my parents' approval more than my intellectual career, y'all are going to be like, why is Katie co-hosting Jesse Waters now? This is so weird. But yeah, okay. I shiver to think how quickly you would ascend. There you go, folks. JD Vance's hometown, 56 miles away from where I grew up. And I can tell you, it's not Appalachia. Yeah. So after high school, he joins the Marines. He serves for four years, never in a combat role because he is and has always been a baby back bitch. He basically served like as PR for the military, which feels so right. He received a few medals, but none of the really good ones because I cannot overstate this enough. He is a thoroughly average mind situated in a thoroughly below average body. And fine but not great is really all he could hope for at the time. So he goes to Ohio State. He graduates summa cum laude, must have worn a short skirt to class. And then he ends up at Yale Law School where he meets one Usha Vance. At first, they are friends. And again, Usha, keep in mind, is an executive editor at the Yale Law Journal. JD is on staff. He basically works for the editors, okay? Because again, Usha was superior in every single way. Ironically, his job at the time was to work with editors to check citations. And I'm like, LOL, where did that instinct go? Well, this is your point about the rabbit opportunism of it all. See, this is what's going to power my Fox News career, is that when it pays to conveniently forget truth, there are a lot of people that are willing to give you a lot of money for that. Absolutely. So we don't know a lot about their time dating. Usha has said that JD cooked for her, which I guess like a few short ribs are worth a lifetime of public humiliation. I think we can just safely assume that at some point JD gave her the worst sex of her life and she was like, I'd like to do this forever. So they get married. I want to be careful with any speculation over Usha's political ideology. We're going to talk about it briefly today. So much is made of it, of like what she thinks about politics. And we really only have rough assumptions to go off of. But I will say at this point, at the beginning of their marriage, we actually know quite a bit about like where they stood politically. And I think their politics were roughly similar and very moderate. Usha was a registered independent who had on more than one occasion voted Democrat, but worked for conservatives, spent time obviously in conservative bastions of thought. JD was a conservative who was like very open to liberal debates and liberal friends. Like, that has been reported by more than one publication that he was known for being, like, very friendly with liberals, very interested in having conversations and debates. So, it seems like they had a lot of similarity in that way. And for the first half of their lives together, they have a very progressive marriage. Remember, JD is average at best, and Usha is, like, exceptional. She's an exceptional person. But I will give him a little bit of credit. He genuinely, during this time period of their early marriage, seems to, like, admire and respect and support his wife. Yeah that was his first fucking problem This bitch thinking that she can do stuff with her brain So they have an interfaith marriage At this point JD has not yet converted to being a tradcath but he is Christian and he wears traditional Hindu garb on their wedding day They have blessings in both faiths the Christian and the Hindu faith They start having children Their children's names are Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabelle. Vivek is a very Indian name. That is not a name that J.D. Vance would come up with. I'm sure his next kid will be named like Tom or whatever the fuck. And as they have children, Usha's career is on the rise and they follow her career because her career has exponentially more potential. This is even after she starts having kids. So they go to Kentucky, to D.C., to San Francisco. And every step of the way, she's doing the kind of work that you would dream of as a Yale Law School student. She clerks for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who is now the Chief Justice. She clerks for and will later defend the honor of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She gets a law but an incredibly prestigious law firm specializing in civil litigation. And during the same time period, J.D. is just, like, doing what he can do to be near her, right? Like he's a law clerk for less respected judges. He gets a gig as a corporate lawyer. He goes into venture capital. This is around the time that he meets Peter Thiel. Yes. So during this time period, he meets his daddy, Peter Thiel. But again, like for a Yale law school grad, even meeting Peter Thiel is not that unusual. Like this is the most prestigious law school in the world. Like everyone who goes is probably going to have a good career, a very good career. But Usha's career is the kind that you would expect for someone who aspires to be a Supreme Court justice one day. This is not the career of a woman who plans to be a stay-at-home mom. Yeah, it's about as elite as you can get. It's not just elite, but it's playing the long game. People who might want to become stay-at-home moms later probably would go into corporate law immediately to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Usha's playing the long game. Being a clerk for Supreme Court justice is long game shit. I feel like you're kind of making me like Usha. I'm like, damn, bitch. Go off. Yeah, it should be. There's a lot. I think that there is a lot. And again, we will talk more about this, but like there is a lot to respect about Usha. She is like no bullshit, a supreme intellect. There's no frills around what she accomplished. as like me reading yesteryear and being like, am I supposed to like Natalie? Because I really like Natalie. I'm like the naked ambition. 100%. Relatable. So then one day, unfortunately, Usha's time in the sun runs out. Okay, jump scare time. Wake up, babe. Your husband has found his footing as a blind and lobotomized shit can foot soldier for fascism. And the tides are about to turn. So, in reality, these are slightly overlapping timelines, but J.D.'s rise looks like this. He releases Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 to universal bipartisan fanfare because the only thing liberals and conservatives can always truly get behind is a shared endeavor to low-key thinking poor people are idiots. Again, no time to discuss that book. Listen to the If Books Could Kill summary. J.D. starts mapping out his political aspirations with one Peter Thiel, who will eventually give $10 million to his first Senate campaign. He starts out as a never-Trumper when he's doing these media appearances. Again, Hillbilly Elegy was very critical of Trump. But then he does what all ambitious opportunists do, and he just totally folds and starts fawning over Trump. Yeah, this is the period they gave us all those interview clips where he's, like, calling Trump Hitler and shit. Sure, sure. And what's also funny is that, like, this part of the timeline is going to take 10 seconds to review because he became the VP candidate, like, a year after he became a senator. It was almost immediate. He has no experience. Right. He has no political background and he is a puppet of Peter Thiel. That much is clear. That's really all you need to know. 2019, he converts to Catholicism. And in his defense, he never could have predicted how much numerous Catholic popes would hate him. He runs for Senate in Ohio in 2021. And even with his new makeover, by which I mean the beard and the eyeliner, he is a middle-of-the-pack candidate until he grovels hard enough at Trump's feet to get his endorsement. And then he wins, and then he becomes VP. So you have two diametrically opposed people within this marriage. You have someone who has a lifetime of success, a lifetime of proven accolades, and you have an idiot who was willing to sell himself for the devil. That's basically like what we have here. To be like extraordinarily fair to J.D. Vance, if I was going to— Which— I'm going to do this for the sake of— For Buckeye? I'm doing it for you, Buckeye. Nuance, bitch. You asked for this. This is... The liberal white man, he's like in a closet being like, what am I? Who am I? Why am I hard? A hundred percent he masturbated to our episode and doesn't know why. This is what you get for your second star is me giving this generosity to James David right now. I wouldn't say that J.D. Vance is an idiot. I would say that he is in some ways profoundly mediocre for all the reasons that you've listed, but in other ways clearly has demonstrated an understanding of navigating powerful people and ascending in powerful spaces. Getting into Yale Law School and like shacking up with the smartest woman you can find there is actually a pretty strategic move. It's a type of intelligence. Yeah. And then to basically identify the fact when you are presented with a connection to a man like Peter Thiel, that doing whatever he wants you to do is actually your quickest path to relevance and power, also a type of intelligence to recognize that's your ticket. And what's so ironic about it, though, is that within the MAGA world, J.D. Vance is like their intellectual. He's the one that sane washes everything and makes it sound even a little bit cogent because he is surrounded by genuine morons. Yes, I agree with that. The only caveat I would add to that, I think you're right that he has a certain kind of intelligence. I stand by just reiterating again and again that he is a plant compared to his wife in terms of neurology. But the only thing I will add to that is that people like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, they don't put money behind anyone that they think is their equal. So I will push back and just say, J.D. Vance is smart in that he knows how to climb certain ladders, But even then, I think that these people are letting him climb ladders because he is so pliable. He's controllable. Right. And so that is like a, he is not the mastermind in the situation, I guess is what I want to say. I think at any given point, he might be masterminding his own life, but other people are masterminding him. And that is like the game that he is kind of within. I guess what I wanted to call attention to, though, in this particular instance is essentially like what we saw during the vice presidential debate. He's smooth. And in those types of rooms, I think that, you know, beyond being pliable, the fact that he's articulate and he lies with such ease, I think is what makes somebody like him so attractive to a person like Peter Thiel, who can smell the ambition and the mediocrity on him. But he's a smooth talker in a way that, you know, even though he lacks charisma, he lies very easily. The fact that that was like your defense of him. I love, I love, he may be, he may be charmless and disgusting, but he lies well. Yeah. Yeah. So, J.D. Vance becomes vice president. And what happens to Usha, Katie? What happens to Usha? So, we haven't seen much of her. I actually would say that like she kind of disappears into the background. She is far less visible and far less the focus of media attention. I made a joke about the Melania documentary, but I think that that's actually like a pretty useful foil for the type of treatment that Usha gets, which is they kind of just pretend she's not there. And really the only news that I have seen about her recently is the fact that she is now pregnant. Yes. So Usha basically disappears. She actually is relatively present for JD's campaign. Like she goes with him to a lot of rallies. She speaks at like a small handful. I think that they realize very quickly that she is not an asset because of the obvious racism of the base. And so she doesn't do that as much. She does very few interviews. There was a profile of her in the free press. And maybe it was over the summer. And you and I were like, oh, we should do a bonus up on this. But there was so little in the article that we were like, oh, there's not even anything. There's nothing to say. It was such a stupid article. So anyways, she has since done a few interviews and we're about to watch a few clips. So as I have stated, Usha is objectively remarkable. I think that much has been made of the Vance family, and there's a lot of ire directed at them, again, fairly. I think we have a hard time looking at Usha without being blinded by rage, but we're going to look at her right now. So she's clearly brilliant. She's extremely well-spoken, as you're about to see. She has a feminine affect that isn't overbearing in the way that some conservative influencers can behave. She's charismatic. She's beautiful. She's by far the most likable and intelligent woman in the Trump administration. Again, a tool that they cannot use. I watched every interview of her that I could find, and she did an interview with Meghan McCain over the summer that we're going to watch a few clips from. And we're going to watch, Katie, a clip where she talks to Meghan McCain about how they raise their children culturally. And I want us to think again about how I described the early years of their marriage compared to how Usha talks about it now. You know, obviously, when you're deciding to marry someone and you're falling in love with them, you think of so many different things going forward about your future. And you are Hindu and your husband is Catholic. I'm just curious, because I have quite a few Hindu friends in my life, how you incorporate your faith together in your lives and with your children. Well, at the time when I met JD, he wasn't a Catholic. He converted later. And when he converted, we had a lot of conversations about that because it was actually after we had had our first child. Maybe it was after Vivek was born, too. I'm having trouble placing the date now. But, of course, when you convert to Catholicism, it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that. And we had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that when I'm not Catholic and I'm not intending to convert or anything like that. She is very pretty. Yeah, she's beautiful. I don't think I've ever seen her speak before. I actually think it was a really helpful thing to happen because we were obligated to have those conversations as a part of his conversion. And it felt like I could be a part of it and have some say over the way that the direction our lives were going. So what we've ended up doing is we send our kids to Catholic school. We got on the rise and made them Catholic. And we have given them each the choice, right? They can choose whether they want to be baptized Catholic and then go through the whole step-by-step process with their classes in school. And so far, our oldest child has done that, and we'll see what our second child does. But we make going to church a family experience. The kids know that I'm not Catholic, and they have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition, from books that we give them to things that we show them to the visit recently to India and some of the religious elements of that visit. So it is a part of their lives, and they know many practicing Hindus as a part of their lives in their own family. Do you celebrate like Diwali or Holi with them? Any of like the traditions? We haven't. We're actually hoping to have a Holi party. So we're looking forward to that next year. Beautiful. I think they love it. No, I mean, you can explain it. It's a beautiful tradition. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it would be a lot of fun. Their main point of access is through spending time with my parents and my grandmother. My grandmother is a particularly devout Hindu. She, you know, she prays every day. She goes to the temple regularly. She'll do her own pujas. And so they access it that way. We spend a lot of time with them. We don't necessarily mark a lot of the holidays at home. What we do is with my family, they'll either call and we'll talk about it. There are certain things that they'll do every year or we'll see, you know, the gods in their home and be there when pujas are happening and all that. Okay. Thoughts, Katie? Well, Usha, do you want your children to know where Spain is? Got one question for you. Not sure if Catholic school is the path that you want. So that to me, I actually watched this twice. I really just think you cannot deny that she is like a master communicator. She is very effortlessly elegant. Agreed. In her presentation and in her communication. She's so skilled at this that it would be very easy to miss the implication of what she's actually saying. So to reiterate, her children are being raised in the Catholic faith. They go to Catholic school. Their father talks nonstop about how— They go to Catholic church. They go to mass every week, it sounds like. They go to Catholic church. She goes to Catholic church every week. She doesn't plan on converting, but she is, by all intents and purposes, a practicing Catholic. They say that their children can decide when they're older. Which, okay, listen. You're sending your children to Catholic school and taking them to mass every Sunday. That's not a choice. For anyone who's not Catholic, Katie and I were both raised Catholic, Catholicism is terrifying. Like, you don't learn that shit and be like, oh, I won't. You're like, wait, I'm going to hell? I have to apologize weekly? Like, Catholicism is not like a roll in the sand. No, it's not. Like, when you learn that as a kid, it's serious. Catholic guilt will shape everything about your personality. And I am proof of that. Yeah, it still shapes my sex life. Talk about the tragedy of straightness, am I right? Seriously, Riley is like, preach! It's like, sex is disgusting and dirty, so you should save it for the person you love most. There is something really interesting, too, about the framing here, because she described all of that as compromise. Or like, well, we're doing both, in that everything about them is Catholic, but they still get to hang out with their Hindu grandmother. Right. So, Katie, at this point, Usha had three children. Her oldest, I believe, was eight or nine. They have visited India once. Their grandparents are in San Diego while they live in D.C. Again, her children go to Catholic school. They go to Catholic mass. Her children eat meat. That's pretty important. Usha is a vegetarian, so they do not abide by that Hindu cultural tradition. They do not currently celebrate any Hindu holidays, maybe next year. So elegant. Yeah, we're really excited to do that next year. Again, they have had children for almost a decade. This interview was recorded and shared in June. In November, four months later, her husband would tell a packed stadium of religious conservatives that he wants his wife to convert to Catholicism. again usha did not just give up her professional career because i understand that that is a frankly a very normal thing that happens to women and also particularly for political wives usha gave up her cultural and religious heritage and she began the time-worn heritage of straight women everywhere which is sitting pretty in a house somewhere and occasionally stepping outside to smooth over the mess her husband has made so just one instance of this let us recall the childless cat lady comment that J.D. Vance made in July 2021. Katie, I'm going to have you read it for the class. This is an all-timer. Yeah. We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of- I'm like, stop there. Let's talk about the corporate oligarchs. Literally Peter Thiel. Yeah. Famously, all the corporate oligarchs are single women with cats. Yeah, seriously. I wish. There's precisely one, and her name is Taylor Swift, by a bunch of 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 it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. This is giving all the managers in corporate America are women and gay men, and we need more men. Yeah, it's giving Scott Galloway. Childless cat lady, Pete Buttigieg. Gay men do not count as men. No, obviously. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? Okay, now let's see what Usha said to defend J.D. Vance and these comments, okay? Again, this is a master class in heterosexuality. All right. He made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and it had actual meaning. And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder and we should be asking ourselves why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents. And that's the conversation that I really think that we should have. And I understand why he was saying that. What do you say to the women who were offended or were hurt by that? Well, I think I would say, first of all, that J.D. absolutely at the time and today would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family who really, you know, was struggling with that. So thoughts, Katie? Dude, get this woman a political career. I know. Elegant. She is miles ahead of him. Thank you. Unbelievable. Well, I think what she was saying, what he meant is just that it's so hard to be a parent in this country. But that's not what he said. But damn, that's better than any defense I've ever heard him give of that phrase. Katie, it's a Democrat talking point, too, which I find to be so elegant. Like, that was so not even remotely what he was saying. But it is so classic. Like, again, when you think about this coming down to the idea of a marriage, it feels very 2016 of like, how many times have you seen a wife being like, oh, he didn't mean that. He meant something entirely different. And like, well, now you're just putting words into his mouth. And I'm like, no, I'm actually just listening to the words that fell out of his mouth. So, as you noted, there have been an insane number of racist posts about her and plot twist. It's like always coming from the right, which poses a very tricky problem for J.D. Vance. Like you mentioned, Nick Fuentes called J.D. Vance a race traitor. Jen Psaki made a comment on air where she was like, Usha blink twice if you're okay. And then JD gave a response where he's like, anyone who's mean to my wife, whether it's Nick Fuentes or Jen Psaki, can eat shit. And it's like, are we comparing the two? Like, Nick Fuentes said you were a race traitor. And Jen Psaki was like, is Usha okay? But JD has to do stuff like that, right? And also, your posture has not been to defend her or your children. Right. Do you remember when the Doge, that one Doge 19-year-old, they had discovered a bunch of crazy white nationalist tweets from him where he was making extremely racist comments about Indian people and JD defended the Doge kid. He was like, he's just a kid. Yeah. Totally. It's like, dude, if you won't even, that's how you know though. If he won't even defend his own sons from, like, forget the wife. He doesn't, like, whether he respected her at one point or not is kind of irrelevant. Now, he clearly does not respect her now. There's no way. But if he will not defend his own son, his own child from racist comments, that man has no allegiance to anyone or anything. That's a great, I forgot that that even happened. So there has been, as we have discussed, a lot of speculation about Usha. There were rumors about divorce over the summer. There are rumors that JD was slipping it to Erica Kirk. Yeah, because of Erica Kirk's traditional, the traditional mourning leather pants of the grieving widow. So then, of course, we get the pivot of the century with Usha announcing her fourth child, okay? Sorry, let me, Usha did not announce that. JD announced that. Usha is in the chokie in like the basement of their house doing whatever she does during the day when the kids don't need her. Just reading Supreme Court cases crying. Exactly. Exactly. So I want us to see this clip again from her interview with Meghan McCain about how she felt about the idea of growing her family. Now, this was in June. Oh, God. Wait, and when did she announce? They announced it this month, but just to, like, get the math out of the way, she would have been either already trying or they would have started trying immediately after. Anyways. Oh, my God. I'm so scared. So we're going to see what Usha has to say about having a fourth baby. You have three gorgeous kids. I just met your little daughter. She was walking to go get some craft. She's beautiful. Eight, what are their ages? You tell me. They are eight, five, and three. Okay. Three kids. Very exciting. Did you guys always want to have a, I mean, I wouldn't say big family, but as three children. When did you decide to have kids? And how important was having children to your marriage? Well, we decided, I don't think we would have gotten married if we didn't both know that we were going to have kids. because we were both independently very interested in it. So that was never in question. By the time we were married, we knew we were going to have kids. The number, though, that was in question. I grew up with just two kids in my family. And JD has a differently structured family, but he primarily grew up with just his sister. I think what we had decided at the outset is we'll have two and then we'll see how we feel after that. And I thought maybe I would have two kids and I would think, I'm done, this is good. But I just liked having the two kids so much that I think I ended up being the driver for three, which really surprised both of us. And now we're at three, and I think, I'm feeling pretty good about this, and sometimes he thinks he might like to have a fourth, but we'll see where that leads. Do you think it's still open? I mean, never say never. Sure. We do really love having our three kids, but I'm also really enjoying that they're at an age now where they're a little bit more self-sufficient. They play together as this little pack, and we're kind of past the baby phase. oh thoughts katie oh my god thoughts wow dude i i know i'm breaking like every leftist rule right now by feeling sympathy for usha vance but i fucking feel for usha vance guys i feel sympathy for her yeah but i feel like every time we talk at any time anyone expresses any morsel of empathy for this woman. I don't care. This is our podcast. It's immediately swatted down with like, she knows what she's doing. She knows what she got into. She could get out at any moment. I'm like, I don't know. I just, I'm watching this woman and I'm like, dude, I can't help but feel bad for you. Okay. I also just have to say, this is where we get into like the free will of it all, like the Hannah Nealman thing. Usha, you know, again, we will talk briefly about like her political inclinations shortly, but like Usha cannot easily get out. And I'm not saying I know that she wants to get out, Usha Vance and J.D. Vance would not get divorced. Her life would be destroyed. Like, even the safety of her bodily autonomy would immediately change. So that is like a laughable suggestion. I think people are very fairly furious at what she is complicit in. But complicity is not easy. And I think a lot of women have suffered in these roles for time immemorial of like not being either brave enough or capable or feeling safe enough for whatever reason to want to leave. But again, it goes back to the Hannah Nealman thing in our first ever episode, which is like, if you have to burn your life down in order to escape, do we call that like a casual choice? So anyways, to reiterate, they both wanted kids. She was happy and she wanted a third kid. She did not want a fourth. Here's the critical phrase. She's happy to be past the baby phase, which is to say she was happy to be done with the work, okay? Usha is due at the end of July next summer, which means she conceived around late October, which means that she and JD started trying for a baby either before. I doubt that they were trying at the time. I don't think that she would have answered in the way that she did, but it would have meant that they started trying pretty immediately. Usha is 40 years old. Now, I know that the idea of age and pregnancy can be very triggering, but just like very practically speaking, 40 years old is medically considered to be an advanced maternal age. You have an increased likelihood of a C-section. You have increased likelihood of chromosomal abnormalities, increased risk of gestational diabetes, increased risk of preeclampsia. It is not nothing to have your fourth child at 40 years old. Her children are eight, five, and four, and now she is about to be a 40-year-old mother of four with a newborn. Earlier in that interview, she stated explicitly to Megan that she wants to return to work someday. Really? Oh, fuck. Yeah, she said, but you know, whenever we can, right? Like if J.D.'s political aspirations put that off, no problem. Well, this newborn also just put that off. Like it is so apparent that this was not her choice. And then, you know, again, have a jump scare to J.D. Vance saying, I walk the walk. I talk the talk about pronatalism. It's also you kind of have to think about the point in the second Trump term that we are in, which is like we're approaching the middle. They're already thinking about, they've been thinking about the successor, right? J.D. Vance is making a, we know that this man is not going to go quietly into that good night when it comes to who is going to replace Trump as the head guy. So it's, man, I'm feeling a lot of things right now. I have to be honest. I know, it's tough. Do you want to share with us? Share with the class. Well, Caroline, thanks for asking. You and I just two little nerds sitting in our Diabolical Eyes merch being like, what do you think? What do you think? Two bitches telling each other exactly. Two bitches. Just America and Israel fist pumping over the... Can I please not be Israel? All right. I didn't hear specifically what she said about when I can or when it's time. But to indicate an interest in going back to work in one of the only long form interviews that she has done to this point, is a very calculated admission. Yes. That is not something that she would be saying, I think, unless she was trying to either prime the ground for that to happen and kind of, like, float the concept to see what reception is like to it, and or something that she just earnestly feels very strongly about. Yeah. And I just want to note, yes, being second lady, I'm sure, is a pretty serious obligation in some respects. at the same time, the amount of- I'm not even sure that being vice president is a serious obligation. I'm like, I mean, I've watched Veep. Did Veep teach me nothing? That's a good point. Seriously. But I think you have to think about the fact that, yes, they have three children. Yes, she is second lady. They also have a tremendous amount, I'm sure, of money, wealth, power, resources. People with complicated and competitive and, you know, seriously demanding jobs have both parents work all the time. There is a much bigger reason that she has not gone back to work right now than like, oh, I have kids and my husband's vice president. Like she could if she really wanted to and if he supported it. So I think that that's really tough to kind of like read between the lines there. Well, and remember, we've talked about this previously on the podcast that JD did a few interviews where podcasters like in the right-wing variety were kind of giving him crap for her not being like a full-time caregiver, right? And he was saying that like her parents help and they were like, well, that's the role of the menopausal woman. The molecular biologist grandmother. Exactly. They were framing her mother as being a full-time caregiver. Her mother is a full-time professional, like a deeply decorated academic. So yeah, again, I also have a lot of empathy for Usha Vans. I think you can hold two birds in one hand or whatever the fuck. So again, we're watching these interviews. At another point in this interview, I'll link the whole thing. It's genuinely worth watching the whole interview in the clip. At another point, she says that from the moment that JD found out he would be the vice president pick and the moment they had to announce, they had five minutes. So like, I am a little bit skeptical about how much conversation they actually had about what it would mean for him to run for office. So Usha has given JD everything. She has given up not just her career, she's given up her culture. She's given up the decisions that she would want about their future family side, her privacy. She has to basically just take racism on the chin Her husband will not defend her And in return what has JD done He calls her his best friend He says he talks to her about his problems at night Usha said at one point that JD learned how to cook some Hindu dishes. So that's pretty awesome. And I want to acknowledge a thing that people are probably thinking, which is like, well, she's a politician's wife. This is what happens to all politicians' wives. You have to leave your job. You have to prioritize. But I think what I am trying to point out here is that it is not an uncommon pattern in political couples that the man runs for office, forcing his wife to give up everything when the woman was the more qualified candidate to begin with. Like in a world where things made sense, Usha would be the political candidate here. Yeah, she would be vice president. She would be vice president. She would be the one who wrote a memoir. She would be the one becoming a Supreme Court judge. Again, like that was the path that she was on. I'm not saying she was going to get there, but she was on an extraordinary career path. She could be vice president. And there are, of course, plenty of qualified men too, but there are a lot of fucking unqualified men who run for office and win simply because they are men. And I think that this is why Usha Vance is so triggering. There is so much about her politics, about J.D. Vance, but I think there is this story of their marriage that many women look at and immediately understand and identify with, and it is kind of infuriating. So now we're going to get into a little bit of academic, academic background about why ladies are so angry. Katie, what is heterosexuality? Now to the lesbian to explain. Like a quick like spotlight just beams over. Yeah, to tell us when we can't, to show us when we can't see ourselves. Yeah. Because we're too blinded by dick. What was the question? What is heterosexuality? Oh, um, don't make me do this. This is like when you ask me what capitalism is. Heterosexuality is the sexual orientation wherein you prefer the opposite sex. Katie just twirling her hair while she checks with it. Yeah. Sure. I think that's a good answer. So the general mainstream belief about sexuality is that you are basically born how you are. You're born with your sexuality. You're born either being sexually desirous of the opposite sex, so that's heterosexual, or you're born with queer desire, the range of which obviously runs the gamut depending on how much you are a Republican. So the mainstream Republican belief is that everyone is born straight, but that some people are turned queer, hence their fear of drag shows. It's the water, yeah. Yes, it's the water. It's too much fluoride. Oh, and the microplastics, I forgot. Yeah, of course. The mainstream liberal belief is that everyone is born the way that you're born. You can be born straight, you can be born gay, you can be born bi, but you don't have any control over that. And so we should give everyone the same access to rights and legislation and dignity, etc. It is also just kind of culturally accepted that to be queer is to live a very hard life, that it is much easier to be straight. And that, you know, if you're conservative, your goal is to try to fix queer people. And if you're liberal, you feel bad for them and you try to defend them. But you still kind of fall under the idea that like, well, who would choose to be gay? Of course you wouldn't choose such a hard... I mean, there's the famous Family Stone scene where Sarah Jessica Parker is like, why would you wish for your child to be gay? That's just, it's such a hard life. And Diane Keaton is like incredible. So Jane Ward challenges all of this very directly. Katie, I'm going to have you read a few excerpts from the introduction. And I'm just going to note too, I have a feeling that this book would make a lot of people uncomfortable. I have a feeling that it does make a lot of people uncomfortable. It has certainly challenged so many notions that I have. And so I will just say like. Okay. exciting. We're doing something unusual in that we are just focusing exclusively on this book, and so people can decide how much of it that they agree with, but I think it is really, really radical and not enough people have access to it. So, I'm going to have you start with this section right here. This book argues that the basic premise that heterosexuality is easier than queerness requires renewed investigation. For instance, if we were to take this premise to the contemporary lesbian feminist Sarah Ahmed, we would be encouraged to consider that one of the ways heteronormativity sustains itself is by telling and retelling a story about how heterosexuality makes people happy, while queerness produces difficulty and suffering. This story about queer suffering under the force of heteronormativity is true, but it is also only a sliver of the story about queerness, and it is one that masks not only queer joy and pleasure, but queer relief not to be straight. The story about the benefits of heterosexuality is also one with wildly differing levels of truthfulness or explanatory power once subjected to an intersectional analysis. This is fascinating. So there are a few fundamental arguments made in this book, each of which, again, I think are going to strike a number of our listeners as radical and maybe uncomfortable to consider. So number one, Jane Ward does not accept the idea that we are simply born with fully established sexual desires. We might have genetic predilections, but we are cultured into desire. We are cultured into heterosexuality. We are cultured into the relative stigmatization of certain forms of pleasure. And queerness, Ward argues, can absolutely be understood as a partially conscious desire and decision to extricate yourself from a system of oppression. So I'm going to have you read another little section here. One of the foundational principles of lesbian feminism is that each person's sexual desire is their own responsibility, if not something they can choose, then at least something they can choose to examine and take ownership of. A far cry from today's born-this-way approach to sexual orientation, which has been most widely embraced by gay men, lesbian feminists claimed their love of women as a cultivated political stance and active opposition to heteropatriarchy. Okay, you know what this is making me think of is the other day, Trested McMillan Cottom was posting these stories where she was like, she basically was like, I tried being a lesbian once. I really tried. It wasn't for me. Only she could get away with that. I know. I mean, she's a genius. She's a genius, folks. Well, I saw it and I was like, oh, whoa. Like, yeah, it did feel a little bit radical. And I think that this is a, this is not like an area of feminist history or queer history that I've really spent much time with. But I know that it is something that people have very strong feelings about because there are obviously a lot of implications about the degree to which sexual attraction is a legitimate or like the way that we legitimize it and whether or not there's a sort of i guess hierarchy of totally orientations like the like the idea that i think we have culturally which is like straightness is the default right like and and anything be anything we're gonna get like the history. Yes, other than that is an aberration. You got me nervous, Caroline. You got me nervous. Good thing only 100,000 people are going to listen to this. I'm sure I'm not going to say anything objectionable. There are a few elephants in the room that we're going to like walk past as we go through this conversation. The first one is, yeah, this is an impossible conversation to have in mainstream culture. Ezra Klein could not have this conversation because like as soon as you factor in any level of awareness or agency or choice into the conversation about sexual desire, you are going to have a whole raft of Republicans going, see, they are choosing to be gay. They are being influenced by drag shows. But the real argument here that Ward is making is not as fixated on people choosing or not choosing. And again, she already makes caveats about choice. It's not about that. It's about how many people unknowingly consent to being straight. And again, this theory wouldn't make sense under the logic we have, which is that being queer is miserable. You have to begin to accept the idea that being queer is a joyous lifestyle, is maybe even a preferable lifestyle, in order to begin to understand her theory that, for example, these, you know, lesbians who are making it a cultivated political stance would want to do that. And so you're already starting to shift your worldview to make room for this idea that someone would ever want that. So again, number one, our sexuality is not totally pre-established at birth. Number two, the idea that heterosexuality is more punishing than queerness is. I want to be very clear that Ward acknowledges the violence that queer people suffer. She talks about this a lot. She makes a lot of caveats. But she is very adamant that heterosexuality is more violent, that the injustices that women in straight relationships suffer are not even marked, are not even acknowledged, and that queerness can often be considered a departure from that violence and a desire to seek out safer communities than the ones that are run and cultivated by straight, cishet, white men. Okay? And again, we're going to get into that. So this is the part where I was personally thinking about— Buck, I'm going to hate this shit. He's going to hate it. Another thing I will say that I love about this book is that she makes such an effort to cite like a million lesbian feminist scholars. Like, I have a whole list of women where I'm like, oh, want to double-click on that? Want to double-click on that? And we will quote some of them throughout this. But I want to pause here because this is the part where I had an elephant in the room, which is like the whole procreation of the human race thing. Like, how can you claim that being straight is not natural when it is arguably the most natural thing on the planet, right? Oh, like necessary for, yeah. Yeah, like the male and female having sex to create more of their species. So this is fucking fascinating. Katie, when would you guess that the phrase heterosexuality like entered the lexicon? When was George Bush elected? 2001? He's like, okay, I want ice and I want straight dudes and I want it in the Merriam-Webster. The phrase heterosexual, I don't know, like 1800s? Yeah, even later, like 1900s. Oh, damn. Okay. That's because all them Greeks were fucking. They weren't going to put a label on that shit. Yeah, exactly. So marriage has been around forever, right? And like certain versions of the family, as we understand it, have been around forever. But the idea that men and women were attracted to each other or that it would be necessary for marriage is an incredibly new idea. Marriage was about ownership. Again, women did not have rights for thousands of years. Women were not autonomous individuals. Like, up until the late 1800s, we still thought women weren't capable of, like, reading or writing. Men owned women and children. And so marriage, again, in the time of the Greeks, all the way up to like the 1700s, would often happen between like a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. Like our understanding of marriage was absolutely just about property consolidation, wealth hoarding, maintaining a bloodline. And I imagine, like, with the agricultural, like, if most people are living in kind of like an agricultural society, even the decision to have children, I imagine, was more about, like, populating your home with workers. Right. And, like, people who can help. Totally. Rather than creating life as some sort of sentimental value. Totally. We've talked about this, too, with child labor. Right. The idea that, like, women and men did not view children with the sentimentality that we view them now. They were laborers. Exactly. So there's a phrase that the queer theorist David Halperin talks about, which is sex has no history, but sexuality does. So like the history of procreation is just a fact and it's been happening forever. But sexuality, which is when we basically instilled meaning in the act of sex, has been contested for a very long time. I found an amazing article by the BBC about this. I'm going to have you read some of this. You know what this is making me think of, too, is the kind of mainstreamification of figures like Louise Perry and these other reactionary feminists that we've talked about who argue that sexual liberation or the tendency for women to have sex casually was like, oh, this was A, the fault of feminism, and B, the reason why women's rights are now degraded because women are giving it up too easily. And it's really interesting to think about that argument in the context of the conversation that we are having now, where you think about meaning within sex or meaning within sexuality as something that is a cultural construct and not natural. Because they kind of just slip that in. Like, it's just a logical jump that you're kind of, like, assumed to make. It's just natural. And again, the idea that, like, there is before and after, and the before and after is, like, 1960. And it's like, no, this was contested and very fluid for hundreds of years as we were figuring out, like, what humans are, what are brains, what are people, how different are men and women, all these questions. So, okay, I'm going to have you read this. Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals, writes Han Blank, a scholar and author on the topic. Neither were there homosexuals. it hadn't yet occurred to humans that they might be, quote, differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced, end quote. Sexual behaviors, of course, were identified and cataloged and oftentimes forbidden, but the emphasis was always on the act, not the agent. So what changed? Language. In the late 1860s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kurtbeni coined four terms to describe sexual experiences. Heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality, namely monosexual and heterogenic. Kurt Benne used the term heterosexual a decade later when he was asked to write a book chapter arguing for the decriminalization of homosexuality. The editor, Gustav Jager, decided not to publish it, but he ended up using Kurt Benne's novel term in a book he later published in 1880. The next time the word, so I was right, it was the 1800s. Sort of. The next time the word was published was in 1889 when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Kraft Ebbing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, amazing band name, also would be a good podcast name, Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalog of sexual disorders. But in almost 500 pages, the word heterosexual is used only 24 times and isn't even indexed. That's because Kraft-Ebbing is more interested in contrary sexual instinct or perversions than sexual instinct, the latter being for him the, quote, normal sexual desire. For Kraft-Ebbing, normal sexual desire was situated within a larger context of procreative utility, an idea that was in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of the West. In the Western world, long before sex acts were separated into the categories hetero and homo, there was a different ruling binary, procreative or non-procreative. That's interesting. The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation, because life-bearing seed—oh, seed, there's that word again—is spilled in the act. While this ethic was largely taught, maintained, and enforced by the Catholic church and later Christian offshoots, it's important to note that the ethic comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian scriptures, but from Stoicism. Fascinating. Okay. Damn. So a few notes here. First of all, I think this is like a total aside, but most of the famous male podcasters are dabbling in or fully interested in Stoicism. So it's worth It's just like having your little flag up there. So it is true that the term arrived in the 1800s, but it was only in around 1930 that the term began to mean what we understand now. Heterosexuality was initially viewed as a form of perversion. Again, because procreative sex was the only acceptable sex act. So if you were desirous of having sex with women just to have sex, that was not okay. And that was heterosexuality. Oh, interesting. Yes. so for a long time reproductive sex was the only accepted sex okay and obviously this changes in various cultures and it depends on like religious affect what fucking little freaks dude little pregnancy fetish they're on that rfk shit total pregnancy fetish but it's also interesting because again during this time period a lot of people were having sex with one another with the same sex whatever and it was just stigmatized culturally it was like you can't share it because you have to be having sex for having a baby, but people still did it. I think the distinction that I find most fascinating about that is that the distinction between the act versus the agent, the idea that like an act could be homosexual or heterosexual, but that you're not assigning that label to the person engaging in the act because that creates a lot more fluidity around like the human is not labeled in that way. It's just that like these things are hetero or homosexual. Exactly. So So it was pretty easy up until, I mean, it's probably pretty easy even now. We've talked about this in our Lily Phillips episode about the homoerotic behaviors in Iran. Wait, wait, wait, what? How men in Iran have like very homosexual relationships with one another and will go to baths and like it's a whole thing because male-female relationships are under such tight lock and key. Oh, yeah. Okay, wow. For a second, I was like, what the, was I there for that recording? What the fuck are you talking about? We've covered a lot since Lily Phillips, who has also undergone a religious conversion, RIP. So anyways. Oh, Jesus. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm still rooting for her. So anyways, it's usually easy for people to get away with same-sex pleasure because women can congregate with other women and men with other men, often in these restrictive communities without being watched. So here is what I mean about the definition of heterosexuality changing. In 1901, a medical dictionary defined heterosexuality as, quote, an abnormal or perverted appetite towards the opposite sex, okay? Sounds about right. 1923, Merriam-Webster defines it as, quote, morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex. In 1934, we finally get a definition that feels relevant to today, which is, quote, manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex, normal sexuality. So that is 1934, okay? This is a massive shift that takes place where heterosexuality goes from being something kind of disgusting and unacceptable to something that is inextricably connected to reproductive sex. Jane Ward calls this the notion of mutual likability, like the idea that women and men can and should be attracted to one another and that should matter in a marriage. Like the idea that it should matter at all whether or not women are attracted to the men that they marry. This is recent. And I don't think it's accidental that this shift of social understanding comes during a time period of, like, rapid intellectual and industrial growth. Like, you have a new reason for why people should stay in the marital formation. You have people coming to cities. You're living in the wake of the Enlightenment. You're at the dawn of scientific innovation where we're learning, like, just how similar humans are. You're in the thick of, like, suffragette and civil rights movements. You need something else to undergird the desire for reproductive sex, and you need to have a reason for why people should stay married. And so it's no longer that you have to, but you want to. You want to. You're attracted to your husband. Don't you want to have sex with him? It's normal. No. As any married woman could tell you, no. That's why we start podcasts with each other. Exactly, exactly. That's where we get all of our energy out. No, I will never stop making homoerotic jokes with Katie. So in some ways, you're giving people more agency. You're like, I guess, opening a door to desire. But you're also like creating very explicit ends with very dubiously established claims. Like, I don't know if you read much about Freud, but his whole theory was that kids would become successfully heterosexual only through having an incestuous desire for parents. And this is like still commonly accepted. Yeah, isn't this, this is where like the Oedipal complex comes from. Yeah, that's just like a theory that a guy made up. That's why I refer to myself exclusively as my cat Sam's mommy girlfriend. I am both mommy and girlfriend. So back to Jane Ward. The result of this kind of like social construction of heterosexuality is that a lot of people, men and women alike, end up in what amounts to like an extremely violent and unpleasant trap. So I'm going to have you read a quick little aside that kind of gets into this, I think, tension between the idea of, you know, violence against queer people and violence against straight people. So this is what she has to say about that. Let me be clear. Homophobic violence happens to young people and adults, to women, men, and trans people. It happens to straight people when they are gender variant and or presumed to be queer. And it happens most harshly to queer people of color and poor and working class queers. In all cases, it is tragic. But misogynistic and racist violence happens to straight people too, and in many ways, gendered and sexualized and racist forms of violence and suffering are much more unrelenting for straight women than for anyone else. Whoa. Uh, damn. So this is where she starts to talk about what she means and how we can understand the social construction of what heteronormative culture is, okay? We could start with childhood, where in adult men who work as writers for Disney Pixar are still using the big screen to communicate to little girls that finding a prince makes magic happen, changes the world, wins wars, beautifies everything, and brings girls closer to the divine. We could look to high schools where sex education teachers are still training girls in how to relate to themselves as inevitably straight sexual victims and gatekeepers and to boys as sexual agents and predators. We could take notice of the fact that blatant expressions of misogyny have become the commonplace language of heterosexual sex itself. Fuck that bitch, murder that pussy, grab her by the pussy, choke her out, dig her out, and so forth. Paging ICE agents. We would also want to examine the ways that so many boys and men value other men's approval more than women's humanity. Ooh, that's a bar. Continuing a now centuries-old tradition of positioning bros before hoes and using control over women's bodies to earn male respect, and to reroute their disavowed desire to one another through a more socially acceptable object. We might choose to focus, as the Chinese feminist journalist Leta Hong Fincher has done, on the role of the state in encouraging women to embrace men's mediocrity— Oh, Usha! Paging Usha!— to pretend to desire men they do not want and to roll back their own accomplishments for the good of the nation. Wow. Thoughts? Very Usha-coded. Yeah. I can see why we're talking about these two things together. Yeah, I was thinking about the Disney Pixar thing and how in the last 10 years, there has been a little bit of a shift in that. We have seen changes in how women are depicted. And like, the resulting fallout is massive. Like when you think about how much work goes into this project, the ultimate proof of how much work goes into maintaining heterosexuality is that as soon as we started to have a little shift in that, people freaked out. Like women don't view themselves just as wives anymore. And you see how quickly Republicans and members of the Heritage Foundation have scrambled to try to pull that back. They were like, well, unfortunately, ladies, now we need to have a fascist takeover because you're all getting a little too mousy. Exactly. Exactly. So the tragedy of heterosexuality is twofold, according to Jane Ward. Number one, it's that heterosexual relationships are inherently defined by the influence of sexism and toxic masculinity. and number two, women will spend their whole lives trying to fix men, which leads to just like an exhausting game of up and down for their entire lives. I think it's important to note that Jane Ward is not saying that like men and women aren't meant to have relationships or that you can't be attracted to the opposite sex. I think it's so much more about the conventions and the social mores that come with it than it is about your pleasure and desire. And one thing she points out is how so many men and women in heterosexual relationships are completely lacking in the tools to give each other pleasure or even to understand one another. I was actually thinking, Katie, about the episode we did about, the episode we did where the woman cut her bangs when Hillary Clinton lost and then her husband, Jeff, was like, I don't know what's going on. Wait, I completely, that was, dude, that was like a, that was a complete political realignment for that woman. She got one bad haircut and like renounced feminism forever. She did. And her husband, again, like, didn't know how to help her. He didn't really understand why she cared about abortion. Like, they did not understand each other. That was such an obscure substack. It was a substack that had, like, four likes. I was like, there's really no reason for me to include this, except for the fact that I think it carries immense honesty and explanatory power for why women ultimately just fucking give up and go along with it. Because to the joke that you always make about, like, well, ladies, if you empty the dishwasher before your husband gets home, you don't have to have a fight about it. It's like if you just do your best to give in to that structure, in some ways, it does remove a lot of friction from your life because you're no longer going against the dominant grain and everything that's trying to push you in that direction. Yes, and I think if you want to get heady about that, I would also say giving men the greatest benefit of the doubt, like a lot of men who just want to be happy and want to be able to communicate in their wives, what you're doing is giving into the language that you have both been given. So it's like, oh, we've been taught how to communicate this way. We've been taught how to play these roles. And so it's like, it might be a relief for your husband to be like, okay, I guess she likes the thing that I thought women are meant to like. Okay, cool. Because I don't have the language for anything else. I don't know how to walk through this world of a different progressive universe. So it's, again, I encourage anyone to read the book because there are so many funny parts, but Jane Ward talks a lot about how lesbians are just like perplexed by straightness. So I'm going to have you read a few sections here. In my now 45 years as an observer of the straight world, I have noted that it appears to be completely acceptable for straight couples to share few interests, to belittle or infantilize each other, or to willingly segregate themselves during important moments in their relationships. In no way do I intend to imply that couples should spend every minute together, but if we held straight couples to basic standards of good friendship, mutual respect and affection and a sense of comfort and bondedness based on shared experience, many straight relationships would fail the test. Damn. Yeah, she also just talks about how it's like straight people claim to be attracted to one another, but it doesn't really seem like they are. Like women will report being terrified of male genitalia and men often prefer a vision of women that is wholly artificial. So I'll have you read this too. While straight men's desires for female bodies is often portrayed as an incredibly powerful force, many men's notorious confusion about what produces female orgasms, their disinterest in providing oral sex to women, and their dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body worth desiring—waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.— suggested that heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more conditional desire for women's bodies than is often claimed. That is so fucking real. That's crazy. To lesbians, men's countless missed opportunities to actually like women are baffling. Your thoughts? Jesus. Yeah, I mean, this is reminding me of that one time I was like, I think I wrote an essay several years ago now about Botox and filler, and I slipped in a line just about the fact that like, and by the way, it's kind of pedophilic that like every vagina is supposed to be or like that's like the trend is to be just completely hairless like a nine-year-old. I'm like, just gonna note that that's fucking weird. A hundred percent. And I think there is something very true here that is reinforced all the time. Like you think about men are from Mars, women are from Venus. You have this oppositional blocking and tackling, this idea that like we are meant to be an exact opposition to one another we're not meant I mean even Esther Perel or like modern dating experts will be like well all of the chemistry again is in the differences like you have different ways of communication I think what I find interesting is that all these claims are made that that is necessary for pleasure but it's actually very hard to square the notion of pleasure within all of those differences like you have two people who are primed to not understand one another and so I mean we could get into this but like just putting this out there, straight women across every study have far fewer orgasms than lesbians Like just left right and center It also funny because I think if I projecting this into like popular media it does feel like the hate fuck is kind of a trope Like the person that you have sexual chemistry with because you dislike them so much, like that is popularized, normalized in media. Absolutely. And so I think that beyond the ways in which men and women are basically cultured to not understand one another and to not have things in common, I think it's also worth noting that you have like basically just one societally accepted concept of straightness. So again, going back to the fact that like people call you and I Katie straight, like the idea that you and I inherently have the same sexuality, that we have the same type of straight. Again, there's no spectrum as there is with queerness. There's no range. Men and women are monogamous. It's because everything about me just screams missionary. I know. I mean, same. But there really is this like one way to be straight. And if you and your partner ever step out of those norms, which, you know, are not just about how you behave with your husband, but about what you wear, what type of house you buy, how you communicate in the world, if you step out of those norms, you will run the risk very quickly of being accused of some sort of derogatory term. If your husband spends too much time with you, he's gay or metro. I mean, the entire movie, I Love You Man, is about that. If you don't buy a house, but instead you live in a camper van, you're a hippie. And then that gets into weird more is about sexuality. It's like there are all of these terms that are used to reinforce that there is one way to be normal. There is one way to be straight. And within that one way to be straight, it is just normal and often accepted for there to be a total breakdown of trust, total breakdown of respect, total breakdown of general interest between these two partners. It's totally normal for a husband and wife to have nothing in common, to have totally different social lives, to have different political beliefs. I think everyone listening to this could think of a number of couples in their life that they know about this. Again, this was a huge topic with the Trump election in 2016. How many wives were like, well, my husband doesn't get it. And it's like, this is just accepted. It's like, well, of course he wouldn't understand abortion. Or like, of course he doesn't understand women's issues. It is normal and expected for women to perform what amounts to a series of services for their husband. So housekeeper, therapist, confidant, sex object, parent. And there is this idea that these can and should be things that happen in healthy relationships, but they actually have to be mutual if that's the case. They can't happen in a healthy relationship that the woman gives everything and the man simply takes. But that is the expectation in a heterosexual relationship is that the woman gives everything and that the man will take. So again, bringing this back to Jane Ward's thesis, Ward essentially says like, yeah, the reason queer people like to hang out with each other and not always straight people isn't just because they want to be with other people like them. It's because straight culture is depressing to them. So like the lack of identity expression, the lack of joy. Hey, you know what? It's depressing to us too. All right. Help! Help! It's the lack of love within partnerships. I'm blinking twice! I'm just kidding. I am Usha. I'm going to make sure it's to say I am Usha Vance. But seriously, like again, in the book, there are a lot of quotes from like lesbians that she pulled and they'll be like, yeah, I hate watching the husband and the wife bicker. I don't find it funny. Or like, yeah, I don't like watching how low the bar is for men in straight relationships. So again, Usha Vance saying, well, he cooked me dinner. It's like, okay, is that it? Is that all he did? But again, that is the bar in straight relationships. It's, oh, he comes home every night and he doesn't leave me wondering where he is. It is a very low standard. Also, it's like, think about how much of, how many male comedians' material could be effectively reduced to just like my wife's a bitch fuck my wife totally yeah completely and so i think when we are returning to usha vance with this in mind okay i think a lot of the fixation is on whether or not she is evil what her politics are i find like the evil conversation genuinely tired i'm just not interested i think it's like a very remedial way to think about like how humans operate i don't think anyone is evil but i want to say more explicitly we don't know what usha is thinking. But what happened to Usha, regardless of her political beliefs, is like a classic, almost allegorical tale of the tragedy of heterosexuality. And it's the practical reality of what happens when men and women uphold that dynamic. She can smile through interviews, she can tell you to her face she's happy, but like, she gave up everything. She gave up her identity, she gave up her time, she gave up her career, she gave up her ability to move through the world autonomously. If her husband wants the kids to be Catholic, they're Catholic. If he wants her to go every week, she's going to go every week. If he wants to run for president, he'll run for president. She'd like to return someday, but only when his career allows it. And now she's pregnant at 40 with her fourth child after saying she was happy being done with the baby phase. We don't know her, but I think the symbolism here is very clear. And everything about their marriage, I think, also represents the chasm of perspectives. You have one segment, Republicans going, oh my God, that's amazing. Like, look at the woman and her husband in their proper roles, like how happy they are. And then you have young women going like, hell fucking no, I would rather kill myself than become someone's legal chambermaid. Yeah. And also like Republican women report the same, which is kind of funny. Like when you actually look at what like Gen Z women who say they are conservative want, there are polls where they ask young women who identify as Republicans or identify as conservatives what they value most and what they want most. And they too do not want to just be somebody's chambermaid. Like, that's not... Which is the crisis. That's why people are freaking out. And that's why Project 2025 exists. That's right. Right. That's why the Heritage Foundation is guns blazing to insist and convince all of us that society has gone astray. And if we just return with a V to... Yeah. It turns out everyone likes basic human rights. Yeah. Shocker, I know. If we just return with a V to the quote-unquote natural state of being of heterosexual stay-at-home womanhood that will be happy. All right. So now we're going to move on to Rama Duwaji, the first lady of Gracie Mansion and Mayor Zoran Mamdani's wife. So there are a number of, there are a striking number of parallels between Rama and Usha beyond the obvious, which is that they're both two brown women who have like skyrocketed to fame as the wives of polarizing politicians. Like Usha, Rama is first gen. She was born in Houston to Syrian Muslim parents who came to America from Damascus. Like Usha, both of Rama's parents work. Her father is an engineer and her mother is a pediatrician who has gone on humanitarian missions in refugee war zones in Syria. When Rama was still a child, her family moved to Dubai for her mother's job at an American hospital. And Rama spent most of her childhood and adolescence there. So, like, Rama grew up in a family that was kind of similar to Jadie and Usha in their early years. like they're moving around for the mother's job. Again, like Usha, Rama is talented from the jump. She starts taking art classes at an American satellite school in Qatar and then transfers to Richmond, Virginia where she gets her bachelor's. After graduation, like Usha, she travels. She goes to artist residencies in Beirut, Lebanon, Paris, and then eventually settles in New York City. She gets her master's degree in visual arts and she continues to secure places in highly coveted residencies. By 2023, she's in her mid-20s and already freelancing with a number of high-profile clients like Vice, Cartier, Spotify, the BBC. Her drawings have been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post. She meets Zoran Mondani on Hinge. He's the son of an academic and a filmmaker. And at this point, he is a member of the New York State Assembly, and she has more followers on Instagram than he does. They get married in 2025. Like Usha, Rama is involved in Mondani's campaign, where Usha kind of allegedly served as a consult for J.D. Vance's speeches and his policies. Rama kind of helped curate visuals for his campaign. She did the early work of door knocking and raising awareness before his campaign went viral. But this is where Rama and Usha's stories diverge. The moment where their husband's career skyrockets. So to reiterate, as soon as J.D. Vance achieves a modicum of career success, Usha disappears. What happens with Rama is very different. And the ironic thing about visibility is that Usha is actually more visible during J.D. Vance's campaign than Rama is in Momdani's, okay? But she's visible like an ornament. She is literally representing her own disappearance when she is on stage. Most people didn't even know that Momdani was married until they found out that Rama was hot and that it became like a social media virality thing. They were like, God, the king can't miss. And so throughout his campaign, she's sort of around, but not really. She does not undergo the kind of transformation that is common to wives of politicians. Her fashion style does not change. Her behavior online doesn't change. She rarely, if ever, posts about her husband, and she consistently just shares content related to the art that she loves. She famously skips one of his events in New York to teach a pottery class. She shares pro-Palestinian content and keeps her lens on non-Western artists and creators. She gives virtually nothing to the press until an interview with The Cut after Mamdani wins the mayoral race. I'm going to have you read what she says about all of this sudden attention and fame. I realized that it was not just his thing, but our thing. I wasn't necessarily offended, but it was more the perception of being seen as someone's wife. I was spiraling about how that night the first article to come out was like, who is Zaron Mamdani's wife? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was so upset because that one article showed up when you searched my name and not an interview I did on my art or my work or the things that I've done and the achievements that I've had as an artist. And now there's like a bajillion of them. Thoughts? When she says now there's a bajillion of them, does she mean like now there is emphasis on her career as an artist or now there's more emphasis on who is Zoran Mamdani's wife? I think she's now saying like, now there are a million articles about me being his wife. Got it, yeah. I think I want to know, like I'll link her interview with the cut. It's incredible. The visuals are incredible. something very notable about this interview is that she doesn't express gratitude. She does not seem entitled to the American people in the way that it— Oh, conservatives fucking hate that. Yes. Like, I think that when you see Usha Vance in an interview, she'll be like, well, we're so honored. It's our job to present. That is not Rama's job. And she's very explicit about being very supportive of her husband and saying, we talked about it, like, I fully supported him, but being like, this is not my thing. That is his thing. I didn't sign up for this. I am not a representative of the American people. And in return, Zoran Mamdani makes clear that he feels the same. In one Instagram post, he says explicitly, Rama isn't just my wife. She is an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms. As an aside, he recently revealed that he's been getting allergy shots to prepare for getting a cat because she wants one, which is just like fucking incredible. Thomas is allergic to Sam. And that's really, that's the only way that I know for sure that my straight husband loves you. He'll be like, please no Sam in the bed. And I'm like under the covers within five minutes. Just French kissing your cat. Yeah. I think like, obviously these are not one-to-one comparisons. Usha is a mother and Rama is not. And even the most progressive relationship can fall into more regressive roles when a child enters the mix. JD, again, will call Usha his best friend. He'll say he respects her. She's the smartest person he's ever met. But his actions don't reflect that. I think the biggest distinction between these two wives is in what they have and have not been willing to give up. Like, Rama did not surrender her identity. And he didn't ask that of her. The biggest distinction between the men, though, the distinction between the husbands here, is that one of them likes women and one of them does not. JD Vance does not like women. He likes wives and he likes mothers, but he doesn't like women. And in fact, if you're identifying as a woman before identifying as a wife or a mother, he has an active problem with you. Zoran Mamdani likes women. He's the kind of guy who like has women who are friends. One of his greatest mentors is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His executive transition team is composed entirely of women from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. and I think that's really striking when we think about the construct of heterosexuality and the idea that like fundamental to that construct is that like your husband should not be friends with women. Your husband should only have eyes for you. Oh, it's a good point. Like when people talk about like, oh, the ideal husband, it's like, oh, he loves his mom. And it's like, fuck that. He should love women. Like he should like all women. It shouldn't be that he fetishizes his mom. And so when you get back to the tragedy of heterosexuality, Jane Ward is very explicit that like loving women is not an outcome of straightness. Objectifying women is. Loving women is queer. Loving women is fundamentally like a lesbian feminist theory. Finding them interesting and worthy of admiration, that comes from queerness. That does not come from straight culture. Oh, interesting. So this gets into something that I talked about in our Scott Galloway episode, the idea of using queerness as like a way to reimagine heterosexuality. And I, again, think that that can be something that can make people very uncomfortable. This is something that I first got from this book. This is something that Jane Ward talks about explicitly, that like a lot of theories that heterosexual couples benefit from already come from queerness. So one example would be conscious uncoupling. Obviously, Gwyneth Paltrow became very famous when she and Chris Martin did that. But that comes from queerness. Any sort of conversation about your sexuality, about what you like, about like giving into sexual pleasure, role play, that comes from queerness. And something that Ward talks about is that like a lot of straight people would be benefited from moving through the journey that queer people do, which is asking yourself questions about your sexuality. Like, why are you straight? What does being straight give you? What does it mean to you? When did you first know you were straight? What do you like about being straight? What do you like about men or women? What is it about them that attracts you? Like framing it more as like a, I don't even like the word choice here, but framing it with a little bit more intentionality or curiosity as opposed to just kind of being like a default background fact that's implied by your own sex or gender. Yeah. I've honestly never thought about the question or how I would answer the question, like, when did you know that you were straight? Well, I was just about to ask you, can you think of that? Well, I mean, I remember I got in trouble a lot even in preschool and kindergarten because I was very boy crazy, even as like a preschooler. Like I remember there was this preschooler in my class named Cody who I would chase around the playground and like try to kiss him. You're like chasing after him with like a crayon scribbled prenup. And I would get put in time out for it. So, yeah, I guess whatever listener was like, Katie, we can tell you're straight. I guess you did clock me because I feel like I've always been very boy crazy. When I think about my relationship to straightness at the earliest age, I think it was very informed by the content I consumed. Well, because obviously a preschooler doesn't have sexuality. Actually, Jane Ward would probably disagree with that and say that we have access to pleasure from a very early age. We might not have words for it. It's not like you necessarily know how to act on it, but children do access pleasure at a very young age. We've talked about this before, too. Yeah. Like, it's something that we don't really know what to work. I think it was the internet is porn. The idea that, like, children, the onset of sexual pleasure is very early, and we just, like, don't really know what to do about that. Something she says that I find really interesting is that babies are born with, like, an almost infinite access to pleasure, and that our access to pleasure basically gets whittled down as we get older. And that's not just sexual. It's just like the touch of a hand on your back or like the ability to be really connected to your pleasure and to not feel any negative emotions about that is something that is deeply interrupted by the time you're an adult. Every piece of pleasure either has a reinforcing mechanism or a disrupting mechanism, I would say. But yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting that like when you are queer, I won't speak for every single person, but at least this is how Jane Ward talks about it. Like, you have to answer those questions. And you often have to answer them a lot, sometimes to people that you have to like prove something to, often in a way that's probably very traumatic. but the plus side of that again in the name of moving past just queer suffering is that you find a name for the things that you like because you have to create a language you have to figure out what type of queer you are you have to figure out who you're attracted to and there isn't just one answer there is a spectrum and so with that you start to say like hey i actually like this type of female body or like i like when i'm a top or i like when i'm a bottom or like i like doing this type of dangerous role play. I like playing this type of game. I like doing all these things. And it's something that you can be much more upfront about because you have to. But we are completely stripped of that language as straight people. I can think of so many examples of like situations where women and men can't even say like the smallest thing of like, would you put your finger in my butt or something in that? You know what I mean? Like any request feels so dangerous because you're like, is this normal? Is this normal? Are my desires normal? Oh, interesting. And you don't know because we also don't talk with any specificity about it. Well, and I think that this is where there is still such a difference between even straight men and straight women because I think that there's a level of permissiveness around women's sexuality that just absolutely does not exist with men. A straight man cannot have gay sex once and then be like, yeah, not for me. You know, like that's- Right. It's not an act. It's who you are. Whereas a woman, someone who identifies as a straight woman could have sex with a woman once and be like, ah, not really my thing. And it doesn't like devalue her in the sexual marketplace. In some cases, you could argue that it actually makes her more interesting or more valuable. And And so I think that like if we're talking about who has the least access to sexual expression or curiosity or questioning or like the language with which to express those desires, it is straight men or men who identify as straight. Part of why I wanted to have this conversation is because I feel like I do want to say on the record, it is a weird experience to have people who have never met you in person make assumptions about your sexuality and like make assumptions about your marriage. I know that Katie and I give snippets, but like, we don't share our whole lives, nor do we. We're actually very careful about not sharing a lot of our personal lives, our personal conflicts on this show. And so I think it was when I started to see people like pretty frequently make assumptions or jokes. And again, all lightheartedly. It's not bad. But I started to be like, wow, people have a lot of perceptions about who we are. And a lot of the implications come down to us being straight. And it's like, well, what does that mean? Does that mean that you know what type of sex I have with my husband? Does it mean that you know how I see myself? And I think the theory is yes. The idea is like, yeah, we know how straight couples interact. We know what the standard of conduct is. And if you are a progressive person, you do not say the same for queer culture. I think we've been educated at this point to understand that there is a vast spectrum. And so the goal for like a lesbian feminist like Jane Ward would be like, how can you create that for heterosexuality? How can you be kind of pulling down the tightness of those walls of the social construct? So it's like, yeah, I'm a woman and I like having sex with a man, but I actually like this type of sex. and I actually like this type of relationship. And we don't like to be married or we like living in different houses or any of these things. You don't have any terms for that. And I think that if we started to do that, and again, that is harnessing queer theory, specifically lesbian feminist theory, that is how you start to get to a place where you have, frankly, a relationship like Zoran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji, where you have people who are theoretically heterosexual couple. We don't know shit about their sex life. We don't know shit about their relationship, but we know that he views her as a person. We know that she is not his property. We know that she has not submitted to him or given all of the things that we expect women to give in marriages. And I think the great irony of all of this is that J.D., Vance, and Usha are over there with their like, quote unquote, interfaith marriage. He's Catholic, she's Hindu. And the most progressive marriage is the one that has the Muslim couple, which has all of these, you know, Islamophobic associations around it about how men treat women. And Zoran Mamdani is viewing his wife as a far more complicated and autonomous human being than J.D. Vance has ever done with his. Yeah, I think within white Christian nationalism, Islam is really the boogeyman. It's that versus the West, right? And so white Christian nationalism is often talking about like the values of Western civilization and it's almost always like the foil is Islam. And I think it's really funny that the claims that are made about what Islam does to women are all the things that you often see white Christianity doing to women. Yeah. Obviously, so much of this episode leads to a similar conclusion as the one we did with Scott Galloway, like the idea that the way forward for men and women requires a reinvestigation of what queer scholars have been doing. You have to be looking, especially at lesbian scholars, to have a clear understanding of straightness because straightness is so all-encompassing that it is hard to see the boundaries of the territory that you live in without someone with a different perspective to kind of guide your path. It's really hard to understand that this is a social construct, that it is so recent, that it is socially enforced, and that it is not natural. Like, I think a thing you say on this podcast all the time is, if it's so natural, why are you working so hard to uphold it? The effort that is made to reinforce straight culture and the immediate disintegration we have seen of straight culture with just a little opening of the door with the idea of women's rights, with the idea of Pixar movies that aren't just about little girls getting married. Like, it has been immediate. Well, and I think there's, it's imbued with such stakes, too. Think about how the Heritage Foundation describes the importance of heterosexual marriage. All of civilization will crumble without it. Right. Right. Yeah. And so I think Jane Ward gives a lot of different examples of how straight couples can like learn from queerness and like basically inject elements of queerness into their marriages. You talk about different types of sex acts that kind of allow you to mess around with dominance and submission. You talk about having those conversations, asking those questions, reorienting what your relationship should look like. But I also just think more broadly, when I think about how fucked up everything is right now and how politicians on the right are just like scrambling to consolidate power, scrambling to restore the state of marriage, the falling birth rate, trying to keep all these cities under order with like literal martial law. I think that doing this research made me feel so hopeful because these politicians are not wrong. Something has changed fundamentally, and if they don't get it back, everything is changing. The dissolution of marriage and the ability for women to refuse to marry men is, I think, the most radical act of the last several centuries. It is on the level of the ending of slavery. And I think the implication of this mass behavior is already right now leading us to a radically different world. So it's like the world feels destabilized right now because it is. We are destabilized. But I think that we are going to be restabilizing to a better place. Like, it's not going to work. The cat is out of the bag, like the woman's out of the house, and I don't think that they're going to be able to get women to go back. And what the Heritage Foundation wants to do is create a form of marital slavery. They want to get rid of the right for women to divorce. That is complete ownership. But I think, again, it's not going to work. Like, the social construct of heterosexuality is already falling apart. There are all these studies that show that Gen Zers don't associate with the term, which isn't to say that they— With what term? Heterosexuality? Heterosexual. Oh, interesting. Kids who are technically, quote-unquote, straight— Doesn't resonate? Doesn't resonate with that. I mean, we see this with gender. Again, this is why people are so fucking terrified. People are having a radically different relationship to gender. That has begun to change. And this effort to, again, put it back in the box is so intense because of what is at stake. But it is very clear to me, I think, that we are only going to go in the direction of more gender fluidity and more queerness, only that won't be the word. I think that we won't have those terms. I think a lot is going to change in the next several hundred years. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think this effort is bound to fail. I saw somebody use the word extinction burst online the other day, and I thought that that was a really good way to put it. is just like the frantic grasping and the chaotic feeling of the old way trying to reassert itself right as it's becoming irrelevant. And I think that it's a little bit funny because to loop it back to the ICE episode, I feel like at the end of that episode, we came back to the importance of humanity and what this history has kind of shown me, I think, and the big aha moment for me in today's episode has been the idea that associating sexuality with someone's identity as opposed to their behavior is a relatively new phenomenon. And I think that anytime you can point to stuff like that in the historical record, which frankly is like most things, because our understanding of ourselves and like our bodies and all of it is so relatively new and always evolving, I wouldn't be surprised if 50 to 100 years from now, queerness was considered the default in the way that heterosexuality is kind of like culturally the background default now and that anything is a deviation from that. And to your point about it not being called that, I don't think there will be a label on it anymore. That is like the evolutionary direction that I think we're headed in. And I mean, think about if it sounds unbelievable that like 100 years from now, sexuality won't be a thing that is associated with an identity or that straightness won't be considered a default or how we conceptualize of it today won't be a default rather. Think about how absolutely unbelievable our lives would look to a woman born in 1894 when I was born. A woman born in like someone living in 1925 would literally, her head would explode if she saw the lives that we were living right now. Katie, the idea of women having sex for pleasure is so recent that it's hard to even comprehend. Women were burned at the stake for having sex for pleasure. Women were isolated and ostracized within this last century for having sex for pleasure. And now I would say that that is largely destigmatized. You're not even necessarily called a slut if you're someone who like has sex. Despite Louise Perry's best efforts. Yeah, no, seriously. We spend so much time thinking about the reactionary period as we should, but dude, the gains that we have made in the last several hundred years and in the last 50 years are incredible. Like, look how much we've gained. Look how scared they are. Like, they're really fucking scared. I do think it always bears repeating, too, that J.D. Vance represents a minoritarian movement. Yes. This is the vast minority of the country who wants the things that he wants and identifies with the things that he is saying. Their ideas are not popular, and that's why we have a police state right now. Because people are not actively choosing this way of life. It has to be forced upon you. Yeah. So, I mean, the purpose of today's conversation was not to, like, figure out whether Usha or Rama are better people or whatever. We don't know anything about these women, but we know how they make us feel, and we know why women are gravitating towards one and not the other. And I would encourage anyone who wants to learn more about that funny feeling, they should read this book. Because we just scratched the surface of what Jane Ward talks about, and it is like a really, really eye-opening theory about what it means to be a straight in this world. What it means to be a straight. Nothing gayer than loving your wife. Hey, fellas, is it gay to go down on your wife? That is really modern straightness. That's the motto of what it means to be a straight man in Trump's America. Seriously. Okay, that's it.