People Really, Really Dislike J.D. Vance! Maybe He Should Lean Into the Couch Thing? (2024)

As far as we know, J.D. Vance has never had sex with a couch. That’s a rumor (misinformation!) that has been zinging around the internet for a week after a Twitter user made the hilarious and flagrantly untrue claim that, in the pages of Vance’s historically ominous bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, he wrote about an incident involving an “inside-out latex glove” and “two couch cushions.”

Again, this did not happen, and the original tweet has since been deleted, but the assertion was oddly believable because Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir, and memoirs often contain embarrassing confessions from a bygone youth—especially when they are authorially wielded to articulate a very masculine flavor of learning things the hard way. Also, Vance, with his craven opportunism and clammy demonstrations of weirdly angled hatefulness, is an easy guy to make fun of. An unnatural masturbation habit, revealed in a self-serious memoir, is the perfect ammunition to take him down a peg.

But this internet joke sparked such a frenzy that the Associated Press published an honest-to-God fact-check of the rumor with the honest-to-God headline “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news wire service searched the memoir for keywords and found no mention of “sofa” or “glove,” and the references to “couch” or “couches” were not at all related to the act of having sex with furniture. (The AP’s coverage of this became a whole other story when the AP pulled the article, telling Mediaite that it “did not go out on the wire to our customers” and “didn’t go through our standard editing process.”)

This is not the first time a wildly salacious fabrication about an unpopular Republican lawmaker has picked up steam on social media. Perhaps you recall 2016, when Ted Cruz was mounting a doomed presidential bid and leftists started bandying about a conspiracy theory claiming that the Texas senator was, in fact, the Zodiac Killer—despite being born years after the serial killer’s murders, among many other inconsistencies. (Cruz would eventually lean into the meme by posting several coded letters on Twitter, snuffing the joke out once and for all.)

I doubt that Vance will employ the same tack, because experimental sexual behavior has become a source of extreme anxiety in the worryingly puritanical right, and his adjacency to Donald Trump—with all of his tough-guy posturing and glaring insecurities—does not provide a ton of scaffolding to yuk it up, even facetiously, about memes about alleged adolescent horndoggedness.

But you know what? When the false reports about J.D. Vance masturbating with couch pillows started to circulate, it was the only time Vance appeared even mildly relatable to me since he secured the VP slot. Seriously.

In the past few years, and thus far on the campaign, Vance has spent his time and energy adopting a slimy and aggressive alt-right posture—designed specifically to energize 19-year-old message-board racists and tech overlord David Sacks. He has championed all the usual grotesque causes—calling for an end to the “the tyranny” of Dr. Anthony Fauci; championing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; trying to ban gender-affirming care for minors—but has failed to show off any real facility for charm. In his first rally as a vice presidential hopeful, Vance bombed his way through a nonsensical riff that had something to do with the Democrats potentially disliking Diet Mountain Dew because of racism (not real). Earlier this week a resurfaced interview with Tucker Carlson from 2021 showed Vance referring to Kamala Harris as a “childless cat lady,” showcasing a classically incel-like psychic makeup: an obsession with procreation paired with contempt of women.

These 8Chan-ish talking points are unpopular and odious in any context, but especially when they’re being projected by someone who is clearly in communication with a network of Peter Thiel–adjacent tech guys who are desperately attempting to triangulate an imitation of “basedness.” (See also: Masters, Blake.) The transformation has made J.D. Vance entirely unknowable and synthetic, which is quite a feat given how just a few years ago, his memoir was lauded for its authenticity and insight, to the point where it earned a Ron Howard adaptation.

And I think that’s why this couch-screwing rumor has struck a nerve. I mean, yes, it is objectively hysterical to imagine such an imperious self-proclaimed striver being reduced to a state of frantic sexual desperation, but my God, at least I can identify with that plight. Reminiscing on the bizarre ventures of pubescent horniness is a universal rite. It is empathetic. It’s human! It’s, dare I say it, charming. It is evidence that you have lived a life, and are beholden to all varieties of vulnerabilities and instincts. That you know how weird it is to be a preteen, how confusing sexuality is when it decides to rear its head. Which is to say, it’s the opposite of dispensing Groyper-tested misogyny and control-obsessed “family values” across from Tucker Carlson.

And it’s not just me. Polling CNN conducted after the Republican National Convention found Vance to be the least-liked new vice presidential candidate since 1980. Brutal! There are probably a bunch of different reasons for this kind of response, but I’m willing to bet that the fact that Vance comes across like a willing vessel of psychotic far-right donor money—a man who was grown in a lab deep within the Palantir Catacombs—is a big part of it. I’m not sure how he can reverse that tide, but frankly, at this point, a funny, horny anecdote or two sure wouldn’t hurt.