Baby Bones, Bird Brothers: What JD Vance Could Learn from Fairy Tales

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Amid the continuous stream of absurd “brand-new sentences” that describe current events, some text strings are still wild enough to exert stopping power. Earlier this year, one appeared in my feed as a post on X:

thank god my vice president of america saying “ancient brothel” + “pagan world” + “baby skeletons” polymarket parlay finally hit

You’d want long odds on that parlay, yet here we are: A sitting vice president has deployed exactly such terms. On January 23, 2026, Vance strung those words together during a speech at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally held in D.C. The event that began as a protest against Roe v. Wade in 1974 has continued even after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Marchers have since set their sights on other goals—criminalizing mifepristone, eliminating states’ Medicaid funding for abortions, and expanding the number of states that ban it outright. 

About fifteen minutes into his speech, Vance briefly broke from boilerplate:

I read an article some time ago about classic archaeology, of all things. And one particular piece of information has haunted me: that one of the telltale signs of an ancient brothel in the pagan world was that you’d always find a large number of baby skeletons nearby—a lot of baby skeletons; and those bones predominantly belonged to boys because, unlike little girls, those boys would be of no use to the future adults who were running those brothels.

Now, this is shocking to us because we grew up in a Christian culture and were formed by religious values. Even those of us who aren’t particularly faithful, it’s a shocking thing to hear. But we remember that in the ancient pagan world, discarding children was routine.

From the skeletons in brothels to the child sacrifice of the Mayans, the mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded rather than the blessings to cherish that they are.

Vance has long styled himself a guardian of tradition who sees antiquity as a source of moral weight; a year before the march, he justified immigration crackdowns by advising people to “just google ‘ordo amoris’”—a Catholic doctrine ranking obligations of love toward others. He wielded the concept, which traces back to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, to argue for a hierarchy of care that places those who aren’t “fellow citizens” last. 

Indeed, just three days before Vance stepped to the podium to mourn the discarded boys of antiquity, ICE agents took five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from his home outside Minneapolis. ICE then flew him to a detention center in Texas despite his family’s pending asylum claim. It seems whatever compels Vance about far-flung, long-ago baby skeletons does not apply to boys his own administration targets. His concern is notably selective, and so is his language. 

Take “classic archaeology, of all things.” The Yale Law grad acknowledges this is a weird digression while performing modesty about an erudition he wants the audience to notice. Antiquity here also does the work of building atmosphere, which is thickened by the suggestion that Vance has been “haunted” by what he’s read. “Haunted” is the vocabulary of the ghost story. From “skeletons in brothels to the child sacrifice of the Mayans,” through his double invocation of the “pagan world,” his speech thrills with all the pleasures of the horror tale.

A subset of the audience for that tale is the youngish conservative man—sometimes barely past boyhood—to whom a story about slaughtered boys vaguely registers as a story about himself. The narrative then functions both to validate grievances and to recruit: A culture where women are empowered would see you as “of no use,” so stand with the tradition that recognizes your worth.

Vance has discerned correctly that the baby bones reflect a civilization’s willingness to expend men. However, he has evinced no understanding of where that willingness originates or how it profoundly informs the tradition he’s defending. That understanding is buried in the same genre Vance has been cribbing from: older fairy tales. Before they were softened for children, macabre stories encoded adult anxieties about gender, labor, and the sustenance of households or bloodlines. To receive their lessons, we must now spend some time in the woods, in the bewitched houses and flowering fields where for centuries men have been turned into birds.

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Once upon a time…

A king and a queen had twelve sons. The king declared that if his next child were a daughter, the sons must die so the girl could inherit everything. His boys fled to the woods. Years later, the daughter, born with a star on her forehead, found her brothers—only to watch them fly away as ravens. To bring them back, she’d have to endure seven years of total silence. She stayed quiet, even through marriage to a king whose mother sought to burn her as a witch. Just as the girl was tied to the stake, seven years expired. Her raven-brothers swooped in, regained human form, and freed her. 

Once upon a time…

A man with seven sons sent them to fetch water for the baptism of his newborn daughter, but the sons dropped the jug. In his rage, the man cursed them all to become ravens. When the girl grew up and learned what had happened, she quested around the world to find them. The Morning Star guided her to a house where her brothers returned as men.

Once upon a time…

A king hid six sons and a daughter in a castle in the woods to protect them from their wicked stepmother. But the stepmother found the boys in front of the castle and flung enchanted shirts over them, transforming them into swans. Their sister spent six years in silence, sewing shirts from star flowers. She was nearly burned at the stake when her swan-brothers descended, allowing her to throw the shirts over them and turn them back into men. The youngest brother, whose sleeve was unfinished, always retained a swan’s wing. 

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These German fairy tales, collected by the Brothers Grimm, fall into Aarne–Thompson type 451: “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” They are considered tales of “redemption,” in which women lift unjustified curses through love and sacrifice. They are also a type of horror story, not so different from the one Vance was telling. In Vance’s account, “the mark of barbarism” was that babies would be treated “like inconveniences” if they were “of no use.” These stories address the same frightful question: what do you do with surplus boys? 

Across much of medieval and early modern Europe, primogeniture—the law or custom by which the eldest son would inherit the whole estate—meant that every son after the first had to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Non-inheriting sons would often join the church, the military, or government service. In addition, according to fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, in the German states where these brother-tales were collected, kings would commonly draft sons as soldiers and disappear them into wars. As a result, some fathers made their daughters their heirs—a fraught option that undergirds the anxiety in these tales. 

We see that logic of wealth consolidation at work in “The Twelve Brothers,” where the king tells his queen: “If our thirteenth child, which you are soon going to bring into the world, is a girl, then the twelve others shall die, so that her wealth may be great, and so that she alone may inherit the kingdom.” And it is there again in “The Six Swans,” where the boys of a widowed king’s first marriage represent an obstacle to his new wife’s position and her future children’s claims. The enchanted shirts the stepmother sews to turn them into swans are her way of disposing of existing male heirs. Indeed, stepfamily inheritance was a persistent enough source of conflict that German regional laws sometimes specified farms had to pass to children from a previous marriage.

While disinheritance is one mechanism by which boys become “of no use,” inability to perform labor is another. In “The Seven Ravens,” where the boys are cursed for dropping a jug, they are deemed worthless to the patriarchal household beyond their usefulness for a specific physical task. When they fail at that task, they are treated as “inconveniences to be discarded”—not by pagan whores, but by their own father. Contrary to Vance’s indictment of feminized cultures via “ancient brothels,” these tales testify to the instrumentalization of male lives under patriarchal systems of labor, inheritance, and war. 

Of course, there is also that cruel evolutionary logic that will ring familiar to manosphere acolytes, groypers, incels, neoreactionaries, looksmaxxers, and other highly online segments of Vance’s base: since women are the limiting factor in reproduction—one woman can bear a couple dozen children in her lifetime while one man can father thousands—male lives are more expendable from a biological perspective. So men should hunt. Men should fight. Men should be sent into mines and onto oil rigs. Tacitly, though, this means men must be socialized to accept their own disposability.

We can quantify the costs of this setup in contemporary American life. In 2024, men constituted 92% of workplace fatalities and 80% of suicide-related deaths. They are also more frequently killed by other men, making up about 80% of homicide victims. 

Addressing disproportionate male death, scholar James Gilligan has argued that patriarchy assigns all men the role of “violence-objects,” dehumanizing them even as it grants them structural power. This is the flip side of woman as sex-object, but it’s not a pill redpillers can swallow. Even in the Grimms’ tales, men struggle to accept the known costs of the patriarchal system. For instance, when the boys in “The Twelve Brothers” are warned of their father’s plan to kill them, they vow: “Wherever we find a girl, her red blood shall flow.” The instinct to retaliate has always been aimed first at women. 

But the stories recommend an alternative path, one limned in starlight.

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Each variant depicts the daughter as stellar—oriented beyond the earthly, human realm. In “The Twelve Brothers,” the girl’s beauty is enhanced by “a golden star on her forehead.” In “The Seven Ravens,” the girl is guided to her brothers by the “morning star” or Venus. The daughter of “The Six Swans” has to sew shirts from asters (“starwort” or “star flowers” in some translations). These symbols identify each daughter as what Carl Jung called the anima: the feminine image in the male psyche through which a man relates to his own depths. The anima’s purpose here is to restore the men she loves, though as a sister instead of the more common love-interest incarnation. 

Jung’s protégée Marie-Louise Von Franz, in The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, observes of this dynamic: “The shirts can be either the means of bewitchment or of redemption … Projection acts on people like a spell. If you expect the best you are likely to get it, and if you anticipate the worst people are unable to bring out their best.” Indeed, projection is how each sister saves her brothers—by projecting their humanity onto them, insisting on their worth in a world that had already discarded them. Patriarchy treats men as animals: expendable and violent, fit for labor and war. Only the sister’s refusal to instrumentalize her brothers brings them back.

Von Franz is careful to note that the anima is not a real woman and should not be confused with one. Problems arise when projection lands on living women, who may be unjustly expected to remain endlessly silent and sacrificial in order to help men. The swan-wing brother reminds us that redemption is always threatened by incompletion and imperfection. None of us are perfect. None of us should be expected to give up our lives because of the accident of being born a sister or a brother.

Contrast this occulted traditional remedy with Vance’s politics. From criminalizing abortion to ending no-fault divorce, his positions advocate for a world in which the sexes are primarily instrumentalized for natalism, nationalism, or simply cosmetic traditionalism. His would be a world that reduces everyone to being either of use or “of no use”: women in terms of their reproductive capacity, men in terms of their ability to consolidate resources through toil or force. Ironically, it would be a world that treats those who fail their assigned roles as “inconveniences to be discarded,” the very ethic he calls the “mark of barbarism” in his March for Life speech. That calculus of use also shapes the administration’s policies beyond family life, with, for instance, 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act instituting work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Consequently, millions of Americans are expected to lose medical coverage and food stamps over the next decade.

The text string that precipitated this essay (“ancient brothel” + “pagan world” + “baby skeletons”) was Vance deploying horror tropes to frighten a modern audience. But the baby bones of antiquity and bird brothers of fairy tales represent the same men, expended through the same calculus that characterizes his current vision of patriarchal traditionalism. In fact, the tradition he claims for moral weight has spent centuries telling us our humanity can only be restored when we refuse to instrumentalize one another. Our redemption lies in the kind of mutual recognition Vance’s politics foreclose.