Why don’t you just burn me already

That women without children are still vilified in the year 2024 shows how little progress we have made.

T.H. Matteson, Examination of a Witch, 1853 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Last weekend, the cruel orange vulgarian addressed a rally of his cult members. Even before President Biden had announced he would not contest the next election and Kamala Harris had become the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, Trump was most generous with his nastiness, spreading it widely beyond attacks on President Biden and bestowing it upon Vice President Kamala Harris: “I call her laughing Kamala ... you ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy.” The audience roared in approval. If you look carefully at the clip, there are women behind him in the crowd, nodding and laughing in support. “You can tell a lot by her laugh, she’s crazy, she’s nuts,” Trump went on to say. (I will never, ever, ever understand how any woman can find a reason to support Trump, a man who despises women.)

A day or so later, old footage of Trump’s nominee for vice-president, the execrable JD Vance, started to do the rounds (“He’s like if a packet of instant gravy were also a person” one wag noted on X*). Addressing an audience of conservatives in 2021, Vance said: “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

Vance upped the venom during a 2021 interview with the foul right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson, saying: “We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Nasty, nasty. Among others, he name-checked Kamala Harris (who has step-children) and AOC, US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who does not have children). (A fascinating New York Times article about the history of cats and strong women here: “Before and long since, cats have served as the dubious companions of spooky, self-determined women.”)

Trump and his Machiavellian henchman’s mockery of women – about their boisterous physicality, their childlessness and their right (or lack of) to participate in a democracy as equal citizens – has a direct line to the home-grown heinousness of former Liberal** Senator Bill Heffernan (on former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2007: “Anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren … they’ve got no idea what life’s about”) and oh, fancy that, another former Liberal Senator, George Brandis (again on Gillard, this time in 2010: “She has chosen not to be a parent … she is very much a one-dimensional person …”) And never let us forget that Australia is a country that fixated on an empty fruit bowl on the prime ministerial kitchen bench and decided it signified an emptiness, a lack of capacity to nurture, the fruit bowl owner’s lack of capacity to be Prime Minister. Never let us forget that, during Gillard’s term as Prime Minister, people held up placards at an anti-carbon tax rally (little over a decade ago) saying “Ditch the Witch” and the-then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott stood in front of that placard as he addressed the crowd.

As a childless woman, I’m so very tired of all this, so very tired of it. Because I know that what is said by people in positions of power has a direct relationship to what people in the community come to think (are given permission to think, enabled to think and what they then say) and has a direct relationship to what is felt by the people who are the targets of such commentary and has a direct relationship to what is done to alienate them. And … by extension … how I and so many other women feel in the world.

Let me tell you what is felt, what I feel: exclusion, othering, diminishment, wrongness. Knowing that a section of the population – and I do not believe it is a small section either – believes me to be lesser and unworthy, to barely have value, to be one-dimensional and ignorant because I do not have children is distressing. And god forbid, I am unpartnered too. Burn me now. (An add here: not every childless and/or single woman feels this; many I know feel empowered and undiminished. I will never stop longing for the sound of their voices. Keep talking, my friends.)

Actor Jennifer Aniston has conceivably had similar feelings. On Instagram Stories this week she lambasted Vance and his comments about childless cat ladies. “I truly cannot believe this is coming from a potential VP. All I can say is … Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.” Aniston has spoken previously about her struggle to conceive and unsuccessful attempts to have children through IVF. Meanwhile, the (clearly incredible) ex-wife of Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, has defended the Vice President against these Victorian-era tropes about women. “These are baseless attacks,” Kerstin Emhoff told CNN. “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

(via Threads; more here)

(via Substack Threads)

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For sure, laugh at the cat lady memes and social media takes, but never forget – behind them lies, in many cases, deep grief. There are many, many reasons women do not have children and only one of them is because a woman has made a conscious decision not to have a child. (I wanted children very much. I didn’t meet the right man. By the time I considered attempting to have a child on my own it was too late, too impossible. Over the years I have heard from very many women who have never ever, ever got over the fact they were not able to have children; their grieving is perpetual.)

I have written on this subject more than once, I am tired of writing on this subject but for those hard of hearing, for those who do not understand the relationship between what is said, what is thought, what is felt and what is done, the message needs repeating. In a 2021 article for Australian Vogue, I wrote:

“We tend tiny, empty graves hidden in our hearts. We endure the daily tortures—the careless questions and judgement, the thoughtless commentary, the barrage of propaganda. In our fundamentally conservative country, even in the third decade of the 21st century, to be a woman without children who wanted children is to be in an invidious position.”

And in Good Weekend magazine in 2016:

“ … the dominant culture celebrates two roles for women, each a function of female physicality: the desirable young woman and the mother. The drumbeat of the tribe wills me to believe that, even in the 21st century, I’m something other: selfish, empty, meaningless. On melancholic days, it’s not hard to see myself as the incredible disappearing woman, an outlier. I feel the sting of the suffix: childless. Less. Less of a person, it seems to say sometimes, a life that’s less.”

This much-propagated idea that women who don’t have children are selfish is crazy-baloney. Increasingly, women are electing not to attempt to conceive because of their concerns about what sort of world their children will inherit; they rightly worry about the planet, the effect of adding to our troubled and damaged planet’s population, and the capacity of our troubled and damaged planet to safely house their children in the decades ahead. Nothing in there suggests selfishness to me. (ABC RN interviewed several young women earlier this week … can’t find the program to link to … maybe on Breakfast … about where their thinking was in relation to children. Most of them mentioned the environment as a reason they didn’t think they would have children.)

Even as a woman without children, I care enormously about the future of the planet. I am stricken that this great wonder of a thing we call home is so struggling, that it might not survive as we know it. My “investment in the future of this country” (as JD Vance describes it) does not have to be measured in children. I am a broader, more multi-dimensional, more generous being than that. You can care for the future and act upon that care as a person without children just as powerfully as someone who has bred. You can look beyond your own life and think of other people’s children, of nature, of wilderness, of the environment, and still feel a passionate investment, a sense of grief that this glorious world of nature might not prevail. (Witness the Australian legend Bob Brown.)

Conversely, do people who have children really do it for selfless reasons – for the good of society, even the national economy? (Witness then-Australian Treasurer Peter Costello in 2004, urging people to breed for the sake of the economy: “One for mum, one for dad and one for the country.” 🤮) I think not. I think, in the main, people have children because the biological urge to reproduce is built into our genetic material and the idea of parenthood, of happy families, of solidifying relationships with offspring, is compelling.

I will come back to this: the ugly things people in positions of power say about women without children have a direct relationship to what is felt by these women and has a direct relationship to what is done to alienate them. Things said further entrench discrimination and exclusion and, in those hearing the message, a sense of isolation and otherness and grief and pain. Just imagine if Trump/Vance/Heffernan had made similarly disparaging comments about people of colour, the uproar that would have ensued …

It is Friday afternoon, 5.36pm, as I write, and I want to hit “send” on this email as soon as possible. I do not have time nor the emotional energy now to detail the slights, the stigmatisation, the casually cruel comments, the social exclusion, that I have experienced as a childless woman. (More often than not, partnered mothers have been responsible, not men. Do they see single women as a threat? Please know – I am not interested in your husbands. Meanwhile, thank you to my married friends, my coupled friends who always include me … thank you!)

But quickly, before I sign off, can I return to Trump’s comments about “laughing Kamala”. God forbid, a woman who should laugh loudly, heartily, fully. In a brilliant article in The Atlantic this week, headlined “Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman’s Laugh”, Sophie Gilbert wrote:

“Women who laugh in public have historically been associated with a lack of social modesty, with hysteria, and even with madness. In insisting that Harris’s laugh is somehow a sign of psychological depravity or narcotic-induced lack of inhibitions, conservatives are doing their best to couple Harris in people’s subconscious with a specific reaction: disgust.”

Reading that Atlantic article I was instantly reminded of the time two decades or more ago that a former male colleague (actually, a direct report) told me something along the lines of, “it would be a brave man” who pursued a relationship with me. I think his message was that I was “too much” … possibly too heated, too emotional, too strong, too big. At his words, I shrank back into myself, questioned myself, my very being. God forbid that a woman should be a strong, emotional woman, a woman with passions and emotion and anger and opinions – and a big laugh. (We should not forget Germaine Greer’s words from The Female Eunuch which I believe remain true still – “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”)

It is infuriating to me that I still question myself, still doubt myself, still struggle to know how to express my passion and emotion and anger and opinions lest I be thought of as, as … as something like a witch. And yet … all the mediocre men who feel not a shadow of self-doubt. How can this be? How can this remain?

I make no apologies for this being the Kamala Harris edition of Vamp.

* I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to link to anything on X anymore, but … too good not to!

** For readers overseas: in Australia, the Liberal Party is a conservative party and not “liberal” as the word is used and understood in the United States.

Housekeeping

• Thanks so much to all of you who took out paid subscriptions to Vamp last week. The winners of the signed copies of my book are Jo Heywood and Shannon Frost. (Jo, Shannon … sorry, haven’t had a moment to get to the post office yet … will get there soonest!)

• If you missed last week’s edition of Vamp, I wrote about my near-drowning experience.

• I’ve started to bring my archive of newsletters from Mailchimp into Substack … it has been funny-weird seeing some of my earliest ones again and how much the newsletter has changed since I started it in 2022. Catch up on my writing about the difficulties of a weekend away alone, how to turn 30 again (hint: it’s better than Botox), and, my first post ever – on my squishy shitty sad soggy places.

• Email me if you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions about the newsletter. It’s going to take me a while to get into my Substack groove … there’ll likely be typos and probably other issues (my team is me, myself and I!) and I’m happy to hear if there are elements of the newsletter that aren’t working for you.

• Finally: please DON’T buy any papers published by Nine this week including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Financial Review (nor look at Brisbane Times and WAtoday websites). My colleagues are on strike, protesting against a pitiful management response in enterprise bargaining negotiations. Management and strike-breakers will be producing the paper for the next few days. Show them you care about quality independent journalism by not buying the newspapers and by signing this petition!

🎵Mood

I try to keep on top of hot stuff for you, I really do. Three weeks ago, my expert pop-culture source told me I needed to direct you towards Chappell Roan quick-smart. I dawdled and, in that time, Chappell Roan has exploded into the mainstream. “… [a] cool, confident and queer 26-year-old US singer-songwriter,” according to The Sydney Morning Herald “capturing attention for her commanding vocals, wild style (part drag, part Halloween costume) and bold statements”. Says the news website Mashable:

“She puts out smart, fun pop songs she called ‘slumber party pop’ in a recent NYLON feature. Her 2023 debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, is fantastic – Pitchfork called it ‘a bold and uproarious introduction’ – and has sparked a sharp rise in popularity for the campy singer-songwriter. Things like magazine features and an NPR Tiny Desk Concert have helped her gain traction online. And, most notably, she opened for Olivia Rodrigo on her Guts World Tour.”

(Roan’s mainstream arrival segues into what some have dubbed the “Brat Girl Summer”, a pop culture and aesthetic moment. The New Yorker calls it “the summer of girly pop”; the northern hemisphere summer’s hits “have been exuberant and canny, treating femininity as a kind of inside joke”, the magazine says. Headlining the “movement” is English singer-songwriter Charli XCX, whose sixth album, Brat, was released earlier this year to huge acclaim. Witness too, American singer Sabrina Carpenter’s ubiquitous Espresso. See also, below, “Decoded”, to learn how Charli XCX’s Brat and the “Brat Girl Summer” is driving Kamala Harris’ Presidential campaign on social media.)

I love Chappell Roan’s My Kink is Karma (great title for me right now, yeah?!) but Pink Pony Club is super-cute too.

Meanwhile, my expert pop-culture source is going to a Chappell Roan dance night next week. “The queers were into Chappell ages ago,” he says smugly. “It’s nice seeing everyone else catching up.”

If Chappell Roan isn’t your speed, check out the Spotify playlists I’ve made – a “Fake” playlist, pulling in some of the music from the soundtrack as well as other things that I love, plus another one – my favourite opera arias.

Wild thing

I can barely can tell AFL from netball but this week I was transfixed by this ABC documentary, one in the series of I Was Actually There. It tells the story of the famous moment in 1993 when the St Kilda Aboriginal player Nicky Winmar lifted his jersey and pointed out the colour of his skin after a game against Collingwood marked by a tirade of racism against him and his Indigenous teammate, Gilbert McAdam. “I’m proud to be black,” he shouted to jeering Collingwood supporters. The two rival sports photographers who caught the moment talk of the challenges they faced convincing their editors to run the photograph in any sort of prominent position. “It was important that the truth was told, but it was very close to falling through the cracks,” photographer for The Sunday Age Wayne Ludbey told the program. Watch too, for the fabulous characters, including the fab Marlene, a supporter who was there on the day. On ABC iView.

Beautiful thing

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A post shared by @simong9

For overseas readers … it’s a rendition of a kookaburra, one of Australia’s most wonderful birds.

Reading

In her remarkable The Marginalian, Maria Popova explores ageing and the writer Grace Paley’s work on the matter. “Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.”

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In The Guardian’s “Modern Mind” column, a Sydney addiction psychiatrist looks at the phenomenon of men’s loneliness. “Many men are socialised to prioritise strength, independence and stoicism, making it difficult for them to open up and form emotional connections. Many ageing men experience loneliness due to the loss of a partner and friendships.”

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The vexed issue of grandparents becoming their grandchildren’s child minders … “As parents, a good part of my life and that of my husband’s has been dedicated to raising our own three children and neither of us wish to take on that level of responsibility again,” writes Avril Moore in a column for The Sydney Morning Herald. Furthermore, I resent the fact that despite the equal involvement of said partner during those years and now as grandparents, the expectation is that I alone, by virtue of my sex, should somehow be participating in child care on a regular basis.” And wow – there are 610 comments under the column. A big issue!

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David Sedaris, the wonderful wonderful David Sedaris, in The New Yorker – he goes on a safari: ‘ “Have you seen a kill?” people in the other four-by-fours … would ask. It didn’t take long to realise that seven lionesses weren’t enough. They had to have blood dripping from their jaws. “On our first day, we saw a lion eating a wildebeest,” I’d tell them. That was like saying you’d seen one eating a sandwich. The prize was to watch one pounce on her prey, and rip its throat out.” ’

Decoded

We’ll be hearing a lot on the news over the next few weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention about Vice President Kamala Harris and whether she’ll secure the party’s nomination for president (it’s all but guaranteed) and who else might be on the ticket. One name is going to pop up a lot – Pete Buttigieg, who ran for the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primaries and has been the US secretary of transportation in the Biden administration. (Buttigieg was a “trending” subject on X … formerly Twitter … when I checked earlier this week.) In this video, watch Buttigieg’s BRILLIANT take down of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. (An expert American source tells me that Buttigieg isn’t a chance in this race: watch instead, he says, Roy Cooper, Mark Kelly and Andy Beshear.)

(via Threads)

Plus: what you need to know about how the Kamala Harris campaign is embracing, leaning into an enormous social media moment. “As nearly all Democrats rallied behind the Vice President offering support in tweets and TV interviews, a perhaps unlikely voice weighed in: the British pop singer Charli xcx, who tweeted, “kamala IS brat.” If you see a chartreuse, a strong lime-green colour associated with the Harris campaign, this will explain why.

Food

KAMALA HARRIS THE FOOD LOVER: “I don’t think there has been anybody who understands the power of cooking quite like Kamala,” says Alex Prud’homme (author of Dinner With the President: Food, Politics and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House) in an article this week in The New York Times. The article notes that Harris has “turned cooking videos into campaign assets and has taken a particular interest in food issues like hunger and farm labor”. She also unwinds by reading cooking sites and cookbooks. (Her favorites, says the Times, are by the Italian cook Marcella Hazan and the California chef Alice Waters.)

The possible-hopefully-next-President’s YouTube channel mixes in with the politics a few food videos – Kamala learning to make dosa, an Indian crepe, with the actor and comedian Mindy Kaling (above), Kamala baking monster cookies in Iowa, and Kamala cooking bacon-fried apples.

A 2019 video of a besuited Harris simultaneously getting a sound check ahead of a TV interview and leaning off to the side to advise a reporter on the best way to brine a Thanksgiving turkey has resurfaced and done the social media rounds … it shows her as relaxed, warm, generous – and real. Fan-girling here.

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A post shared by @kirstenljenkins

FARM DAYS: Victorian country farmer (and chef/restaurateur) Annie Smithers in all her bucolic glory. (Great video behind the still image here.) When I fell in love with (or thought I did) a man who said he was a wealthy farmer, this was the life I dreamed I might have with him: In a shed. Muddy boots, cows, sheep, goats, chicken, compost, veg garden, cooking. Not a designer handbag in sight. See also, Fake 🤷‍♂️ See also, still number 1 on Paramount+ (… oh, correct that, number 2 behind South Park 😢).

CHEAT’S RAVIOLI: This Gourmet Traveller recipe is the bomb – spinach and ricotta ravioli using wonton wrappers and frozen spinach (with lemon and sage brown butter). I tried it this week and can’t recommend it highly enough. I still have some filling mixture left in the fridge and will give it another trot around the block tonight … although my sage plant is somewhat denuded …

margaretdoublebay

A post shared by @margaretdoublebay

DREAMING OF: Splashing out on a meal at Neil Perry’s stellar Sydney restaurant, Margaret, in Double Bay. It’s heaven. This dish (above) looks heavenly: new season mussels on grilled @bakerbleu sourdough with macadamia cream and native togarashi.

PLUS: WHEN RESTAURANTS BECAME LOUNGE ROOMS …

Had dinner last week at the brilliant Sydney restaurant Poly with my lovely friend “A” (sorry if I ranted a bit about stuff!) and found it hard not to be transfixed by, well, these gorgeous young things having (I think) a gorgeous time. … him watching her watching her phone … when I dragged my attention back to our table … this was stunning … tuna crudo with Abrohlos scallop and beef fat dressing.

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Home and garden

AT HOME WITH BELLA FREUD: Catching up on this … it’s what every “home/design” story (what every “home”) should be like IMHO … character, memory, story, authenticity and friendship. (Although, of course, we can’t all drop names like Bella Freud can.) Love the armchair with its protuberance of stuffing, the little red cups, the reading room, the blue suit, Lucian Freud’s handstand photograph. … Fabulous!

PLUS:

PORTUGAL: A divine secluded retreat on Portugal’s west coast. “[Textile designer Carolina Irving] has lived in such disparate spaces as a Stanford White ball-room in New York, a shingled beach cottage in Amagansett and a Haussmannian flat in Paris, carrying her cherished possessions from place to place and imbuing each home with her unmistakable style. This is especially true of the Portuguese hideaway she has crafted over the past decade.”

PLUS:

A SCOTTISH FARMHOUSE: Lola and I would be so very happy in this farmhouse on the west coast of Scotland. “From its huge windows, the sky can alternate between rain storms and sunshine in a matter of minutes, the sea grows rougher and calmer by turns, and distant hills blur and reappear again over the course of the day.”

Socials

From this …

To this …

(via Instagram Threads)

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Stolen words

“Before I was elected vice-president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then … And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”–Vice President, Kamala Harris (more here: video well worth watching!).