Do Childless Women Get The Last Laugh? Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis speaks her unspeakable truth

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meghan, a childless dog lady, had a whole other episode cued up for this week when her friend Vanessa Grigoriadis called her with a surprising observation. According to Vanessa, moms today are so stressed out (even miserable) that childless women are getting the last laugh. This is especially true for women in midlife who started families in their late 30s to early 40s and are now saddled with elder care for aging parents while also having school-aged children. Does she have a point?

In this conversation, Meghan gloats over her utterly carefree lifestyle while Vanessa lays out what the public discourse around J.D. Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment is getting wrong. An award winning magazine journalist who has done deeply reported features on subjects like the NXIVM cult and whose countless celebrity profiles have included Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift, Vanessa also talks about charting a new professional path (podcasts, naturally) in an economy that’s quickly becoming oversaturated.

GUEST BIO

Vanessa Grigoriadis is a veteran longform journalist and a co-founder of Campside Media. She is the co-creator of the Chameleon and Fallen Angel podcasts, and hosted New York Magazine’s Tabloid series on Ivanka Trump. She is a National Magazine Award winner, and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Her book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, was published in 2017.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As you go through your life and you have kids now who are 9, 10, 11, 12, a lot of people get divorced, right?
0:12.5	And a lot of people find that phase of having kids to be quite emotionally taxing, right?
0:21.4	It's not physically taxing because you're not running after them, but it's like emotionally
0:24.8	taxing.
0:25.9	And in that phase, you get a lot more moms complaining about their kids.
0:33.8	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
0:35.8	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:41.6	So it is August already. I cannot believe it.
0:46.3	And I'm going to do something a little bit different here for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to have some more casual conversations, kind of impromptu. I actually had a whole other episode teed up and ready to go, but a few days
0:56.1	ago, my friend Vanessa Gregoriatis called me because she wanted to talk to me about the
1:02.5	childless cat lady discourse. Now, if for some reason you haven't been following this,
1:08.2	congratulations, I assume you are aware, however, that a couple weeks ago,
1:13.7	it surfaced that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance had said a couple of surprising and,
1:22.3	you know, pretty offensive for most people, things about women without children. These were remarks
1:29.4	that he made three years ago with Tucker Carlson having to do with his hypothesis that women
1:37.3	without children were ruining the world. People without children generally did not have enough
1:43.3	of a stake in the future to really deserve to vote and things like that.
1:47.8	In fairness, I do think these remarks were taken out of context and, you know, are coming from a place that most people were not quite understanding the big picture.
1:58.5	But in any case, Vanessa had some surprising things to say.
2:01.6	She actually is a mom. She's got two kids. But she had a theory that it was so difficult to be
2:08.8	a parent these days. And moms are so stressed out that childless cat ladies are actually having the
2:14.1	last laugh. And she wanted to come on and talk about that. And I thought
	...

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