The Whole Purpose

I'm traveling and wasn't planning on writing this weekend but, as you may have heard, Donald Trump's new adoptive failson stepped in yet another rhetorical cow pie a few years ago, and it turns out he never cleaned his shoes. This one is interesting to me in a way that another couch-humping joke perhaps wouldn't be, so I have a thought or two to rub together about it.

It breaks down like this: In recent days we were reminded that back in 2020 the bestselling author, pretend hillbilly, future prospective vice-presidential candidate, and full-time awkwardness enthusiast Jorts Decider "JD" Vance went on Eric Weinstein's podcast, and nodded along with an out-of-pocket statement that the host made.

The statement was that raising grandchildren was "the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female."

This statement makes a lot of post-menopausal women feel a certain way. It also makes women who might one day be post-menopausal feel a certain way, and also people who might not be women but who maybe see women as full human beings in their own right. This is for good reason, and that reason isn't that many women, post-menopausal or otherwise, don't want to help raise a younger generation.

Anyway, Vance's guardians and promoters are complaining that it's unfair to ascribe the words of the podcast host to his guest. Perhaps so. Vance after all only replied "yes," which is a word that can mean many things, and only all of those meanings involve positive affirmation. But even if he agreed, he didn't say it. So OK, maybe it's not fair. Poor oppressed JD Vance!

It might be a bit hard for Vance to dodge the rap, though, since he's spent so much of his time in recent years agreeing with creeps who say creepy shit about women, and being a creep who says creepy shit about women in order to impress creeps who say creepy shit about women, and generally just acting like the kind of creepy little suck-up who calls women "females"—which is to say one of a whole passel of moist pallid online dudes who freebased Jordan Peterson throughout the 2010s and antisocialized themselves into treating relationships with women as a sort of transactional warfare between sexes; a war in which men are bold adventurers looking for sex and family, natural human connections they seem to view as video game achievements to be bestowed upon them if they enter the proper cheat code; a war in which women are hidden clay jars containing sex and family, to be discovered and then once found added to the inventories of adventuring men as acquisitions. A number of these creepy perverts got rich on tech or crypto or whatever, and they think their wealth makes them geniuses instead of just wealthy, and the ones who didn't get rich through tech or crypto or whatever seem to think the wealth of the others conveys genius upon themselves, so now they go around talking about themselves as Alpha Chad masters of the universe, and speak of other human beings like they're fodder for their whims, and generally do their very best to sound like eugenicist mad scientists in Victorian novels.

Eric Weinstein is a financial executive and managing director for Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, who has also published a non-peer-reviewed unified theory of everything, and works on a research project investigating extraterrestrial life. And Peter Thiel if you haven't heard of him is sort of a patron god-king of this sort of thing, who has been a big booster of now-VP-hopeful and sometime writer Joust Department Vance, and he talks about injecting the blood of youths to preserve his own youth, and ending democracy, and other hobbies. It's all a big happy family nodding along to all sorts of sinister-sounding pronouncements about society and the people who make it up. But you can't say they don't have interests. Apparently the whole purpose of themselves is not some heavily constrained role defined by the damp, bearded, politician lackey of a pale billionaire fascist, but rather whatever it is they want to pursue, based on what interests them. Anything.

But all this is known.

What really jumps out to me is how much it reveals about how people who talk this way see themselves, and other human beings, and society itself.

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You may have caught that Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel are venture capital guys. It's probably worthwhile to explain venture capital firms. These are entities that have a big old boodle of money—oh, billions and tens of billions—who find winners among businesses to invest in and guide to even greater growth and heights, so that they can make their boodle bigger until it's bigger, so it can get bigger still. That's the idea, anyway, and I suppose it does work that way sometimes. More and more, though, a VC firm is in the business-crushing business, a practice whereby it gains controlling ownership in something already sustainable, and then enacts a sort of mob bust out on it, extracting all the value from it, cutting the jobs, selling or cutting the things that make it sustainable, driving up the short-term market gains, and then shutting it down for tax breaks. It adds only what it needs to to get the control, then takes everything, then leaves nothing behind. Getting the value is the whole point of the business.

Business-crushing makes the boodle of VC money grow just like picking and nurturing potential winners does, but I imagine without as much risk or effort. I get it. Who likes risk? Who likes effort?

Either way, it strikes me that this is a decent microcosm of how these creepy dudes talk about women and children and other humans: as property to acquire if it has value, as a thing from which to grow that value for itself, extract value and then discard once the value is extracted, to sell off the losers, and to always always always take all the value for themselves. Women and children and other human beings and human structures have a whole point, to be defined and measured by them, while they and only they get to be the whole point of themselves.

So this also strikes me as a decent way of looking at the way they think of society, as something that exists for them to acquire and own and use, instead of as a natural occurrence that is made by all of us, that creates a generative, sustainable, inheritable value that ties us all together, to which we all owe a responsibility, not to fulfill by fitting a role defined by some master class, but simply by fully being ourselves.

This is what's so noxious about Vance and his long line of creepy podcast hosts and thinkfluencers and the money that backs them both. We are all human. We don't have a point within society. We are society.

This means that the whole point of society is us. It exists to sustain us, and while we bear the responsibility to be ourselves within it, it is a thing made by humanity and for humanity. It isn't a big box store to buy for billions and then sell off for parts.

Yet these perverted creeps, who add nothing, want to own it so they can have all the value we create, and they think their unnaturally privileged positions will allow the acquisition, which is why they talk so openly and boldly about owning the bodies and lives and potentials and options of so many of us.

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The whole point of the post-menopausal female. It was an offhanded comment, I suppose. It was said in an offhanded way. The topic was something benign; the value of multi-generational families and how it can be a great thing to have grandparents help raise children—which is a very true thing. It's easy for those who want to defend the comment to frame anyone who finds the wording creepy and sinister as overreacting, or even opposed to the idea of multi-generational families, to the idea of raising children. And indeed these creeps who would be our masters do talk about the rest of us as if we hate things like family and children and society, even though they are the ones treating those things like possessions, and point to their own creepy obsession over possessing and controlling these natural things as proof that they care in ways we don't. This is the value of offhanded comments to people who want to achieve sinister things like owning all the rest of us. The offhandedness makes a nice little ditch to hunker down in, if people start to do something very divisive and polarizing like remembering your actual words, and managing to understand your clear meaning.

It's that "the whole point of" that gives the game away. It creates this entire creaking haunted house of assumptions. The assumption that comprises the frontage of the edifice is that women must have a point, and that certain men (them) are the ones who will define that point and make all adjudications about whether that point has been achieved. The idea tucked on the backside of this already creepy facade is that a lot of people don't have a point, especially a lot of women. In the basement you find other assumptions about what is to be done with pointless people—people who either never had a point to begin with, like immigrants or refugees or unhoused people—and what is to be done with people who could have had a point but instead chose to defy the masters of the rest of us and refused to achieve that point; choosing instead to forging their own paths by pursuing their own interests, and decided instead to just be themselves and live their own lives.

The whole point of the post-menopausal female. I guess it's also the "the post-menopausal female" that gives the game away, because these creepy would-be masters of the rest of us have this habit of framing women in a way that suggests that women to them are entirely a product of the status of their eggs: their relative fecundity, their usefulness in increasing the stock of citizens (with a mostly unspoken but easily detectable preference for white citizens), and their willingness to get down to the business of having as many of those children as possible, and raising them in a way that is acceptable to them, these would-be masters of the rest of us. And would-be masters of the rest of us are thick on the ground these days, and bold. A couple of months ago one of these creeps, a man named Harrison Butker whose whole purpose is to serve punt for the Kansas City Chiefs, got up at a graduation ceremony and told a bunch of women receiving degrees that they would only find their true purpose once they became the husband of a man like Harrison Butker and produced his children.

Again, those who want to can frame the outrage as if Butker was simply saying it is good and meaningful to be a parent—and who could disagree with that? And if you don't look close enough you won't notice how Butker is crouching in a ditch of offhandedness and weasel words, hoping people will fail to mark that what he was really saying was that each woman's path will not be blazed by women themselves, but rather it will be constrained by men like him.

It's not even "the whole point of post-menopausal woman." It's "the whole point of the post-menopausal female." The. Female. These aren't individuals with thoughts and dreams and skills and abilities and potential and things to contribute to our shared society. They aren't our aunts and mothers and grandmothers and neighbors and bosses and employees. They are a single sex, post-fecundity, and that's all. They are all the post-menopausal female, which has a single point to its existence, provided it fulfills that point, and if it doesn't, then it is pointless, it is nothing at all.

Am I making too much of a single offhanded comment on a podcast? Probably so. But hunker down in the ditch with me, where Eric Weinstein is pontificating offhandedly, and a future VP candidate is agreeing. Let's look at where old JD wandered after nodding along.

One of Junior Defective Vance's first moves as veep candidate was to attack Kamala Harris for not being a mother, or not a real mother anyway, not according to people like Vance. She's only a step mother, which means, per Vance, that she can't possibly care about children, or society, or securing the existence of her people and the future of white children. What is the point of a woman who hasn't used her precious precious eggs to the satisfaction of men like JD Vance? None at all, apparently, even if that woman is the current occupier of the high office that Vance himself hopes to hold, and is running for the highest office in the land. That's another of the creeps' knock against Harris, by the way: She's had sex. With men. But without producing children. And producing children? That's the whole point of the woman. Those that haven't fulfilled the whole point of the woman are just useless cat ladies.

What these would-be owners of us all won't grasp is that women, like all the rest of us, are the whole point of themselves. Women don't belong to them, nor do any of us. We aren't to be acquired. Most of us realize this and aren't interested in their shit, which is why they have to get rid of all that dangerous voting as soon as possible.

More and more of us are looking at these would-be masters of the rest of us–who suck up all the value of society for themselves and propose to leave nothing behind for those of us who made the value, then use the fact of their theft to claim ownership of the rest of us—and we're asking them the question they most fear; they, who insist that the right of human beings to live their life is something that must be earned.

"OK, but what is the whole purpose of you?"

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's probably pining for the fjords.