In Retrospect Transcripts

EPISODE 25 – WHAT ‘THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA’ TAUGHT US ABOUT AMBITION

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Susie Banikarim (00:01):

There’s a scene at the end of The Devil Wears Prada, where the character, Miranda Priestly, a famed and famously demanding fashion editor, gives her young assistant, Andy, a rare compliment.

Clips (00:12):

I see a great deal of myself in you.

Susie Banikarim (00:14):

This comment comes after a turning point in the movie, where Miranda has just saved her own career by brutally betraying someone who has been enormously loyal to her. So Andy is horrified by this comparison, and she rejects it. She says she’s not sure that she wants to be like Miranda.

Clips (00:33):

I mean, what if I don’t want to live the way you live?

(00:36):

Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.

Susie Banikarim (00:45):

But does everybody want the glamorous, punishing life at the center of this story? That’s the central question of the movie and this episode. I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:58):

And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:59):

And this is In Retrospect where each week, we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett (01:05):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Susie Banikarim (01:07):

Today, we’re talking about The Devil Wears Prada and the way it depicts women’s ambition. But we’re also talking about how a cautionary tale about sacrificing everything for your job ended up glamorizing exactly that. Jess, as we’ve said, we’re talking about the Devil Wears Prada today, a movie starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway and this fraught relationship they have. Anne Hathaway is a recent college grad. It’s her first job, and Meryl Streep plays her famous and powerful boss. And this is a circumstance you and I are somewhat familiar with in lots of different variations.

Jessica Bennett (01:47):

No, no comment. No comment. Not at all.

Susie Banikarim (01:49):

Exactly. Yeah. We’ve both worked for some famous and powerful women, some not so famous, but certainly complicated women, is how I would describe a lot of them. I think that’s partially why I feel so connected to the movie, and it is a movie I have seen countless times. It came out in 2006, and I honestly can’t tell you when I first saw it. I don’t remember if I saw it in the theater, but have you seen the movie? Do you remember what you thought about it or what you’ve thought about it over the years?

Jessica Bennett (02:19):

I mean, I of course saw it, and I think it came out at a time when I had just moved to New York and had dreams of becoming a journalist. So I was very interested from that perspective. Obviously, it’s not that true to life, but it’s really fun. Though, I forgot a lot of the details, so can you give me the Cliff Notes version?

Susie Banikarim (02:39):

Yeah, I think the more recent version is Spark Notes, but same thing, I will give you a little summary of the movie. So Andy, who I said is played by Anne Hathaway, has moved to New York right after college to pursue a career in journalism. She was the editor-in-chief of her college paper. She has this dream of working at The New Yorker or someplace serious like that.

Jessica Bennett (03:02):

Of course, this is what all my students want to do also.

Susie Banikarim (03:04):

So Andy goes to interview at a big publishing company thinking she’s going to get a job at some serious place, but randomly, the HR person tells her there’s availability to be the second assistant to Miranda Priestly, who is the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, which is a fashion magazine. That character is played by Meryl Streep and is widely understood to be a very thinly veiled depiction of Anna Wintour, who is the famed longtime editor of Vogue magazine. So despite this amazing opportunity, Andy knows nothing about fashion or fashion magazines. She gets the job because she has this moment while she’s standing in Miranda Priestly’s office where she pitches herself as hardworking and smart, and Miranda decides to give her the job.

Jessica Bennett (03:56):

So we all know Miranda is just brutal as a boss, but paint us a little bit of a picture.

Susie Banikarim (04:00):

She’s pretty terrible. She’s cold and demanding, and she makes really unreasonable requests that are essentially impossible. At one point, she demands that Andy find a flight for her during a literal hurricane, and it’s like, why can’t you get me out of here? And then there’s another example where she demands that Andy get her the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter book for her daughters, and Andy actually achieves that one. But Andy is determined to survive this job for at least a year because everyone keeps telling her that a million girls would kill for this job and that if she can just stick it out and succeed, that Miranda will be able to help her get those serious jobs she really wants.

Jessica Bennett (04:43):

Which is not dissimilar from what these types of bosses actually do promise in real life.

Susie Banikarim (04:48):

No, I mean it’s exactly what these bosses do promise. So initially she fumbles and she doesn’t really hide her disdain for fashion. There’s all these moments where they’re doing fittings and she’s kind of making a face or snickering, and that is very much noted by Miranda who finds it super annoying. And then there’s this first assistant played by Emily Blunt. So Andy is the second assistant. Miranda has two assistants, and that’s a seniority thing. The first assistant is more senior than the second assistant, and Emily Blunt is just hilarious in this. She steals a lot of the scenes and she just cannot understand Andy. She doesn’t think she’s deserving of the job, she doesn’t understand her fashion. She’s just kind of like, Miranda’s decided to hire you, but I’m just putting up with you essentially.

Clips (05:35):

Oh, I’m sorry. Do you have some prior commitment, some hideous skirt convention you have to go to?

Susie Banikarim (05:40):

But one of the other fashion editors played by Stanley Tucci takes Andy under his wing and she goes from being this unfashionable rube to hot and stylish.

Jessica Bennett (05:49):

Of course. Could have predicted that.

Susie Banikarim (05:51):

And in the process, she becomes seduced by the environment and this desire to please Miranda. So that is the context of the movie, and that is where we are when we get to this scene that we played at the top of the episode.

Jessica Bennett (06:04):

Yeah. Okay. So the scene. What drew you to this scene in particular?

Susie Banikarim (06:07):

Well, I love the scene. I think I always have, but over time I’ve become kind of more drawn to it because it really encapsulates for me the central tension in many women’s careers, in my career, in the careers I see of my friends. I think when you’re young, you do want this life. You want to be hugely successful, you want these big jobs, but you don’t really fully understand the sacrifices you’re going to make. You’re told that there will be sacrifices, but as you go through, you see what that really means for your life, and that is really complicated. So this dynamic, this tension between them is a reflection of, I think, something that we all struggle with internally, really.

Jessica Bennett (06:48):

And the scene begins where this tension is playing out.

Susie Banikarim (06:51):

So the scene comes at the end of the movie after Andy has gone through her transformation.

Jessica Bennett (06:56):

Her fashion transformation?

Susie Banikarim (06:58):

Yeah, her fashion transformation. Now she’s wearing amazing clothes and has a great haircut, and she does look, I will say, impeccable. And she has seemingly bought into this world and kind of in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. You see that all of her relationships are in tatters. She keeps ditching her friends and family, and she and her boyfriend have just broken up because she’s so obsessed with her work.

Jessica Bennett (07:23):

Oh, that’s right. Because she’s obsessed with her work. I feel like that’s also another frequent plot line in these types of things. It’s like the boyfriend can’t handle how devoted to your career you are.

Susie Banikarim (07:30):

Yeah. Can’t handle it. And they’re in Paris for Fashion Week. And even coming on this trip to Paris is supposed to be an indication that Andy has lost her way because it is Emily the first assistant who is supposed to go on this trip. It is a huge deal to go to Paris Fashion Week. And Emily has been talking about it for months, and now Andy has gone instead because Miranda has taken a liking to her and has said to Andy, you can come to Paris instead, but you have to tell Emily.

Jessica Bennett (08:02):

Oh, right. She’s pitting them against each other.

Susie Banikarim (08:04):

And now in Paris, Andy has discovered that Miranda is about to be fired and replaced by a much younger European editor, and she’s desperately trying to get to Miranda to warn her. And then unbeknownst to Andy, Miranda has already been aware of the plan and has outmaneuvered the publisher by getting the younger editor another job. And it’s a particularly brutal move and moment in the movie because Miranda has saved herself by giving the job that had been promised to the character played by Stanley Tucci to this other editor to get her out of the way. And so Stanley Tucci, who is this really loyal deputy who’s worked for her for years, who, you see in an earlier scene, is so excited about this new role now is stuck still at Runway magazine with her. And now Andy and Miranda are in a car together. And Andy is reeling from this because she has seen all of this go down and Miranda acknowledges that she saw how hard Andy tried to warn her and was impressed by that. And then she says to her…

Clips (09:15):

I see a great deal of myself in you.

Susie Banikarim (09:18):

And obviously Miranda means this as a compliment, but you can see just by the reaction on Andy’s face that she does not hear it as a compliment. And she objects. She says, “but I would never do what you did, Miranda.” And Miranda reminds her that she already did…

Jessica Bennett (09:35):

She already has.

Susie Banikarim (09:35):

… to the other assistant she replaced to go on this trip.

Clips (09:38):

No, no. That was different. I didn’t have a choice.

(09:41):

Oh no, you chose. You chose to get ahead. You want this life, those choices are necessary.

(09:50):

But what if this isn’t what I want? I mean, what if I don’t want to live the way you live?

(09:57):

Don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.

Jessica Bennett (10:06):

It’s so funny because she truly can’t conceive a world in which people don’t want what she has and what she has to do to hold onto it.

Susie Banikarim (10:16):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (10:16):

So yeah, it is a very poignant moment in that way, because Andy has realized that she’s doing the same thing.

Susie Banikarim (10:25):

Right. And just to finish this moment, when they arrive at the event they’re going to, Andy turns and leaves Miranda alone. And while she’s walking away, Miranda calls her and you see Andy look at her phone and it shows Miranda’s name, and Andy throws her phone into a nearby fountain.

Jessica Bennett (10:42):

That’s right.

Susie Banikarim (10:43):

So she’s like relinquished this life, and we don’t know how she gets back to New York. We don’t know anything else, but she has walked away in the middle of the most important week of Miranda Priestly’s year. And back in New York, we see Andy go to a job interview at a newspaper, the kind of serious publication she has said all along she wants to work at.

Jessica Bennett (11:01):

Right, she’s back in her dowdy clothes.

Susie Banikarim (11:05):

Although still with a much more fashionable touch, I will say. She still has a fabulous haircut. And so this editor who is interviewing tells her that he’s reached out to Miranda for a reference, and you see the look across Andy’s face. And he says he received a note back saying that Andy was the biggest disappointment, but he’d be an idiot not to hire her. And ultimately, that’s how we know this is a cautionary tale. Andy has made a deal with the devil, the devil in Prada. She’s lost her way. She’s disappointed her friends and family, but by the end, she’s seen the error of her ways she’s saved herself. And luckily for her, because it’s a fantasy, she’s reaped the benefits anyway. She’s now gotten this other job because Miranda has still given her her seal of approval, which it is a fantasy. So it is the fantasy we all have that boss who was terrible to us secretly thought we were amazing. That is the redemption we all want.

(12:07):

So obviously this movie is not high art. I don’t want to make it seem like we’re going into the ins and outs of this movie because I think it’s the best movie ever made, but it is the rare chick flick that isn’t centered on a man. It’s about a girl and her ambitions and figure out what she wants. The boyfriend storyline is a secondary plot point, and they don’t end up together. And the role of Miranda Priestly is not something we saw a lot in this way. A woman who is highly successful, unapologetic, fully in charge, and is really seen as a leader in this industry.

Jessica Bennett (12:44):

I mean, it reminds me of, like, there’s those movies about female ambition, in a way, from the eighties, I am thinking about Baby Boom and wasn’t there Working Girl?

Susie Banikarim (12:53):

Yes. Those are both movies I love, and they are both about women trying to make their way in their working lives. But in both those movies, the romance is still very central, and they do end up with a hot guy at the end, and that is seen as part of the happy ending. And here the happy ending is that she gets the job she wants, right? That’s a really big difference.

Jessica Bennett (13:16):

Did you relate to Andy in watching it at the time? I remember, yes, I too wanted to be a serious journalist, but I don’t know that I ever thought I would be capable of walking away in the same way she did.

Susie Banikarim (13:27):

I definitely didn’t relate to that. I mean, I felt like I had to do whatever it took to succeed, and I was willing to do that. I was not the girl who was going to throw her phone in the fountain. I had bills to pay and student loans and did what I had to.

Jessica Bennett (13:43):

Immigrant mentality probably, too.

Susie Banikarim (13:45):

Yeah, definitely immigrant mentality. I did not feel like I was in a position where I had a safety net, so there was no place to go.

Jessica Bennett (13:52):

I mean, I guess that’s the fantasy aspect of this movie is that most people are not in the position to throw their work phone into the fountain and just hope that you’re going to get another job.

Susie Banikarim (14:03):

And I actually, I went back to my LinkedIn, because I couldn’t remember where I was in my own career when this happened.

Jessica Bennett (14:08):

In 2006? Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (14:08):

So in 2006, I was working at ABC News. At that time, George Stephanopoulos was the host of This Week, which I think he still hosts sometimes. And I did have a very intense female boss who definitely had some Miranda Priestly-like demands.

Jessica Bennett (14:26):

Okay, so now you have to tell us what kind of demands those were.

Susie Banikarim (14:29):

One thing that seems very Miranda-like is that she needed her daily papers to be unwrinkled. So before she came in, her assistant would put her papers on her desk and she had to make sure she got only unwrinkled copies, which I’m not even sure how you guarantee that. I know she wasn’t ironing them, so that’s a very funny thing. She must have gone to the newsstand and selected…

Jessica Bennett (14:52):

Oh, unwrinkled copies of the papers. I thought you just meant papers in general. Oh, the newspaper.

Susie Banikarim (14:58):

The papers. Like the newspaper.

Jessica Bennett (14:59):

The newspaper. So she had to make sure she wasn’t getting the top one at the bodega. She had to dig deeper.

Susie Banikarim (15:03):

Yeah, she just had to make sure that whatever New York Times or New York Post she was picking up, they were pristine.

Jessica Bennett (15:09):

Hilarious.

Susie Banikarim (15:09):

And then we had a very intense rule that you would get in trouble for if you didn’t, when you sent an email, on the “to” line, the names had to be an order of seniority. If I sent an email to two people and one of them was junior, they had to be second on the chain, or…

Jessica Bennett (15:28):

I think that I do do that. I don’t demand other people do it…

Susie Banikarim (15:29):

I still do, too.

Jessica Bennett (15:33):

… but I think that I do do that because it just kind of makes logical sense. But I’m sure younger people where email was not their primary way of communicating or who came up on Slack, probably think that’s insane.

Susie Banikarim (15:44):

And I also do that still too, just because locked into my brain, I can’t get it out of my brain. But the other one that I think is particularly funny is if we had a cake in the office for someone’s birthday, the assistant had to make sure to hand out the pieces of cake in the order of seniority.

Jessica Bennett (16:01):

That’s so funny. So, true hierarchy to everything, very hierarchical.

Susie Banikarim (16:06):

It was this kind of obsession with order. Things had to be a very specific way, which just were not chill at all.

Jessica Bennett (16:14):

I will say though, that with so many of these stories, it’s like there are plenty of male bosses that do this kind of shit too. Maybe not with the cake. Maybe it’s like the menu just playing out in different ways, but we don’t necessarily call them demanding in the same way we just call them men.

Susie Banikarim (16:31):

Well, I will tell you a great story I know like this about a male boss at ABC is, I have a friend who was an assistant to an executive producer, and he used to make her follow him to the bathroom, and he would continue to shout notes at her through the door, and she’d have to take notes while he was peeing, which is disgusting. But yeah, I don’t remember anyone ever calling that guy a diva. And to be clear, this is a woman who I enjoyed working for enough that I went to work for her again. She was demanding and difficult, but I saw that as just the way you had to be, to be in these jobs. I didn’t have a lot of examples of people in these jobs who were kind and compassionate and wanted to coddle me. This was the deal.

Jessica Bennett (17:15):

And also, for what it’s worth, if you’re running a company or whatever the job may be, you probably don’t have time to coddle your assistant. On some level, maybe I’m sympathetic a little bit to some of this. Cancel me.

(17:40):

Am I remembering correctly that this movie was based on a book?

Susie Banikarim (17:43):

Yes, it was based on a best-selling book of the same name. It was written by Lauren Weisberger, and the book came out in 2003. And the book was itself a cultural phenomenon. It was really popular. It came out at the peak of the Chic-Lit era. And most relevant is that Weisberger had actually been Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue, which is why it was so widely understood that Wintour was the inspiration for Priestly.

Jessica Bennett (18:10):

It’s probably worth spending a little time, for those who might not know as much as we do, talking about who Anna Wintour is.

Susie Banikarim (18:17):

Yeah. She is not just the editor of a fashion magazine. She has literally been called the single most important figure in the $300 billion global fashion industry. As you might expect from a famous fashion editor, she has a very distinctive look, this classic bob that she’s had for years, with bangs. She’s often seen wearing sunglasses. She’s always flawless. And I was actually thinking, I wonder if I’ve ever seen her in casual clothes?

Jessica Bennett (18:47):

Yeah, I haven’t.

Susie Banikarim (18:49):

So I googled Anna Wintour and jeans, and apparently she does have jeans because I found some pictures of it and she looks great in them, but she is sort of, in your mind, if you’ve seen lots of images of her, which I have, and I’m sure you have too, this very polished person, and she became the Vogue editor in chief in 1988. Isn’t that crazy? Thirty-five years ago.

Jessica Bennett (19:11):

Is she the longest serving? That’s a huge amount of time for an editor in chief, to be clear.

Susie Banikarim (19:16):

I mean, most people last two years in a job in media. So the fact that she’s been atop the most famous fashion magazine in the world for 35 years is really an achievement. And just wild. I mean, she’s been in that job longer than a lot of people have been alive. And she was promoted in 2013 to Conde Nast’s artistic director. So she doesn’t just lead Vogue anymore. She is the editorial leader of all the titles of Conde Nast, which include The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, and Wired and a bunch of other things.

Jessica Bennett (19:49):

Yeah, I remember watching that documentary about her, what was it, The September Issue?

Susie Banikarim (19:53):

Yes. There is a documentary about her called The September Issue. It was released in 2009. And the thing about Anna is, she’s very much seen as a visionary, as someone who can see things coming down the line and lead rather than follow. So she’s credited with seeing the power of celebrity culture really early in the cycle and realizing before other people did that it made sense to put celebrities on the cover. It used to be models on the cover of Fashion magazine. It’s Anna who’s really credited with changing that.

Jessica Bennett (20:24):

And she runs the Met Gala too, which is the biggest celebrity event of all.

Susie Banikarim (20:28):

Yes, she throws the Met Gala, which is a benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

Clips (20:33):

It’s the first Monday in May, which means fashion’s biggest night is finally here.

Susie Banikarim (20:39):

Just running that would make her a huge cultural figure. Celebrities are desperate for invites to that. So it’s really hard to overstate her power and influence. But also she is famously inaccessible. She is famously kind of known to be someone with very high standards.

Jessica Bennett (20:55):

Isn’t the rumor that if you are an assistant or a junior editorial person at Vogue, you are not allowed to make eye contact with her in the elevator? That’s what I’ve always heard.

Susie Banikarim (21:04):

Yes, I’ve heard that you’re not allowed to say hello to her or make eye contact. And frankly, that’s been true of other bosses I’ve had. So that does not surprise me as a rumor. I feel like that could very much be real.

Jessica Bennett (21:17):

Okay. So how close to reality do we think the book and the movie and actual Anna Wintour are?

Susie Banikarim (21:23):

That’s a great question. The Devil Wears Prada is technically fiction. So I reached out to Samhita Mukhopadhyay, who worked for Anna Wintour as the executive editor at Teen Vogue and happens to also be the author of an upcoming book on women and work and ambition. Of course, Samhita was an editor, so she obviously had a very different job than Andy did in the movie. But here’s how Samhita describes being interviewed by Anna Wintour.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (21:48):

I was very anxious to meet her. It just was never a position I’d ever thought I’d be in, which would be to interview with her. And when I had that opportunity, unlike Andy, I researched like crazy for how I would show up that day.

Susie Banikarim (22:01):

You prepared.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (22:02):

Yeah, I prepared and there were multiple articles written about what to wear and what not to wear the first time you meet Anna.

Susie Banikarim (22:07):

So what are you supposed to wear and what are you not supposed to wear?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (22:11):

Well, interestingly, a lot of the articles say not to wear black, that she doesn’t like black. And this has kind of been a long rumor for her that she just prefers color and brightness. Upon meeting her, I don’t think it would’ve mattered at all what I wore. And so it was deeply humbling to be like, oh, this is this big character that exists that’s a larger than life character, but you are actually just a person that’s trying to make the proper business and editorial decision for this brand that you oversee.

(22:39):

It was a big wake-up moment because I planned so much for what I was going to wear, and I bought myself a Gucci handbag and I practically wore it hanging around my neck. None of it was necessary. She really just wanted to talk about my editorial experience and my taste in culture. So it was definitely one of those myth-busting moments where I was… And she wasn’t wearing sunglasses either, by the way.

Jessica Bennett (23:06):

Okay, I love all the behind the scenes interview stuff, but I have to say the points Samhita made about Andy not preparing for her interview is the least relatable thing to us as journalists. Why would you not prepare for an interview where you’re trying to prove you want to be a serious journalist?

Susie Banikarim (23:21):

Yeah, it’s so weird to me. You would at least just do some research. And also, it’s hard to believe that any woman in America who wanted to work in media would just not know who the editor of the biggest fashion magazine in the world was. That is still a big job in media.

Jessica Bennett (23:35):

Any person in America.

Susie Banikarim (23:37):

Yeah, it feels true. But the idea that Anna is actually a much more complex character than the cultural characterization of her isn’t surprising, right?

Jessica Bennett (23:45):

Or the cultural caricature of her in a way.

Susie Banikarim (23:48):

And that’s something that I feel like you discuss a lot in your work.

Jessica Bennett (23:51):

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that’s something we keep coming up against in this podcast, which is there’s often more complexity to the characters we are looking at, and especially with women.

Susie Banikarim (24:00):

Yeah, and I think we’ve seen that a lot with people like Robin Givens whose identities are so flattened by these characterizations of them, or Britney Spears who had her complexity denied and was just dismissed as crazy. And in general, I think that’s what’s really smart about this movie, going back to Devil Wears Prada, which is that it takes something that is also dismissed as frivolous and for women fashion, fashion magazines, and it explores the ways in which they’re actually serious and worthy of examination.

Jessica Bennett (24:31):

Yeah. Isn’t there a famous scene where Miranda Priestly sort of schools Andy in how she got her sweater or something like that?

Susie Banikarim (24:37):

Yes. The speech you’re thinking of is the Cerulean Speech, which is a color blue. They’re in a meeting and someone has presented Miranda with two belts and Andy has snickered and said, “those two belts look exactly the same to me.” And she’s sort of expecting everyone to be like, ha ha, yes. But Miranda is really icy in her retort.

Clips (24:56):

You select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

Susie Banikarim (25:13):

And it was introduced on this runway and that runway, until you fished it out of some bargain basement. It’s like a very funny moment. And that speech has become pretty famous because it does, in a really succinct way, explain why fashion does have meaning in people’s lives, why our lives are all impacted by the way fashion works.

Jessica Bennett (25:33):

Right, and so she’s basically saying, you think you chose that sweater, but actually let me tell you that sweater chose you.

Susie Banikarim (25:39):

Yeah, exactly.

Jessica Bennett (25:47):

Susie, I want to go back for a moment to the Miranda character in the book because the book is actually pretty vitriolic.

Susie Banikarim (25:54):

I mean, I reread the book last night actually, and it is so vitriolic kind of in a shocking way to me now looking back. At points, book-Andy calls book-Miranda a bitch. She talks about how much she hates her. I mean, my takeaway from the book is that the author hated working for Anna Wintour.

Jessica Bennett (26:15):

Okay. Not a lot of complexity. It’s like that’s what it is.

Susie Banikarim (26:18):

Yeah, it’s a pretty one-dimensional character and she’s just awful. And interestingly, the limo scene is not in the book at all. The ending plays out completely differently. So in the book, the way their relationship ends is that Andy says to Miranda, fuck you, Miranda, fuck you.

Jessica Bennett (26:39):

Wow.

Susie Banikarim (26:40):

She’s fired obviously for swearing at her boss, and the whole thing in the movie about how Miranda writes her a good reference and there’s kind of this redemption moment from Miranda, that doesn’t happen in the book at all.

Jessica Bennett (26:54):

So this is a revenge book.

Susie Banikarim (26:55):

Totally.

Jessica Bennett (26:56):

Essentially, she’s trashed.

Susie Banikarim (26:58):

It’s like a revenge fantasy. I don’t think this happened in real life. I see. So I think this is the book she’s written about what she wishes she had done when she left Vogue. I mean, that’s what it feels like as a reader for sure.

Jessica Bennett (27:11):

So do people like this book? Is the book bad? What’s the response?

Susie Banikarim (27:15):

I mean, the book is controversial. Much more so than the film, because it is really a takedown, and I guess at this time it was seen as sort of bad manners to gossip about your former boss in this way, which feels kind of quaint now in the post-Gawker era.

Jessica Bennett (27:31):

That’s like what literally everyone does.

Susie Banikarim (27:33):

But the New York Times actually had two negative reviews of this book, and the first one was written by famed critic Janet Maslin, where she refers to it as a “mean-spirited gotcha of a book.” And the other one is called “Anna Dearest,” and it has this line that is so interesting because I think in a lot of ways it encapsulates kind of what we’re talking about in a larger sense here. “She had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly.”

Jessica Bennett (28:11):

I bet that was written by a woman.

Susie Banikarim (28:12):

Yes, it was written by a woman. And I think it is the truth that these jobs do come with isolation and pressure. It is a reality that it’s not quite so simple. And so the movie really makes an effort to humanize Miranda in a lot of ways.

Jessica Bennett (28:30):

Right. Movie-Miranda is more complicated.

Susie Banikarim (28:33):

The director has actually said that early versions of the script even felt too vengeful. And I suspect what he is leaving kind of unsaid in that is that’s because the book was vengeful. It was this really mean-spirited book. So when it comes time to make the movie, the movie is being made by people who probably have had these senior positions. There are two scenes that give you a real window into Miranda’s personal life and what her career has cost her on that front in the movie. At one point, Miranda is having an argument with her husband, and Andy walks in and the argument is about how she’s missed a lunch with him.

(29:08):

And he says, “I could tell everyone was looking at me and thinking, there he is waiting for her again.” Which feels like a thing a lot of women go through when they’re more successful than their partner. And then later in Paris, there’s this very vulnerable scene where she tells Andy she’s getting a divorce. Miranda’s without her usual armor. She has no makeup on, and she’s in a robe. And she talks about knowing what they will write about her, dragon lady, career obsessed, snow queen drives away another Mr. Priestly. And she tears up as she laments what it will do to her daughters.

Jessica Bennett (29:44):

Actually, I had forgotten until you were mentioning the Harry Potter part of the movie that she even had daughters. That too is an interesting thing because you expect a woman of the stature or a woman who behaves like this to be this cutthroat careerist who doesn’t have a family.

Susie Banikarim (30:00):

Right, and what’s kind of interesting in this moment in the movie is that when Andy expresses sympathy for her and says, “is there anything else I can do?” Miranda kind of snaps back into being herself for lack of a better way of putting it. And she just says, “yes, your job.” And that is kind of the encapsulation, right? She’s had this moment of vulnerability, but then she has to keep going. What choice does she have? She is the editor of Runway at Paris Fashion Week. She can’t fall apart. And EW did an oral history of the film and the director said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that in his vision, Miranda is the heroine of the piece, not the villain, because it’s a coming of age story for Andy to learn about what it takes to be great at something. Isn’t that so interesting?

Jessica Bennett (30:49):

Oh, that’s interesting. Yes. So it’s really about how she, Miranda, was ultimately successful, not just a terrible bitch.

Susie Banikarim (30:58):

It’s really a movie about what it costs to be Miranda and teaching Andy that she may not think it’s okay, but eventually she’s going to have to make some of these hard choices too. And that is really why the limo moment is so critical to the film and why I chose it. It’s fundamentally a film about what it costs to have this kind of life, this kind of career, the isolation, the pressure. And that’s something I think Meryl Streep really conveys in this portrayal and why in a lot of ways, Andy feels hopelessly naive to me. Even when I saw this the first time, it seemed to me like Andy had a lot of growing up to do.

Jessica Bennett (31:51):

So Susie, we obviously both related to this movie, I think, when we first saw it in a different way than we might now. Back then we were aspiring journalists or young journalists, and now we are more the established journalists. So I was curious for you, I mean, you have run really big newsrooms. You’ve been a boss in a lot of these jobs. What do you think the costs of that success have been for you, if any?

Susie Banikarim (32:18):

I think for me, the costs are really personal in terms of just how I operate in the world. It takes a lot out of you just physically to do these jobs. You have to be willing to work just an enormous amount of hours and you have to be emotionally available to a very large group of people because you’re managing a big team and all of those things take a toll on you. I think there are people that can do these jobs that don’t have that experience, that learn to have a set of clear walls where they’re not taking in a lot of the energy around them. Or frankly, I think we know because there have been studies that a lot of leaders are actually sociopaths or psychopaths, I think, is what the studies say.

Jessica Bennett (33:10):

It says leaders are sociopaths?

Susie Banikarim (33:12):

Yeah. There’s one study I remember reading that claimed that as many as one in five business leaders have some psychopathic tendencies, so that’s 20%.

Jessica Bennett (33:20):

I don’t know why I’m so surprised by that.

Susie Banikarim (33:23):

So I think if you are able to have that kind of separation from you and the people whose lives you to some degree hold in your hands when you’re managing a large team, I think it can be a lot easier. But for me personally, that has been a real struggle and I think it kind of has reoriented me in terms of how I think about ambition and whether or not I want to have these big jobs, whether or not I think these big jobs make sense anymore.

Jessica Bennett (33:56):

Yeah, I mean I think that the headline here is that we hold women leaders to higher standards. I guess Miranda Priestly, I don’t know that she was in a position you were speaking of where she really cared about the emotional wellbeing of her entire staff. It was more like she was in charge and she had these assistants. But we expect women leaders to be nice, and we don’t expect male leaders to be nice. So was Miranda Priestly kind of a bitch sometimes? Yeah, but if she was a man, would we call her a bitch or would we just call her demanding.

Susie Banikarim (34:27):

Decisive.

Jessica Bennett (34:28):

And so she clearly put Andy or her assistants or whatever in precarious situations, but that’s happened a million times before. And so I think that what we know is that there’s this likeability trade-off for women. The more power they gain, the less we like them, statistically proven time and time again. And it applies to business or it applies to politics. And so women are always having to adjust their demeanor to try to make up for this. And I think what Miranda Priestly represents is someone who wasn’t willing to adjust her demeanor, and thus she was kind of like a frigid ice-cold ice queen bitch. But is that fair? It’s a little more complicated than that.

Susie Banikarim (35:11):

Yeah, and I do think this is something when you’re a woman in a leadership position, you’re constantly trying to thread the needle on, because on the one hand, you need to be somewhat decisive and you need to be someone who moves things through. You can’t just be spending all your time being emotionally accessible or whatever. But on the other hand, I think my entire career, I have been given the note that I need to soften myself. I need to be less blunt. I need to work a little less quickly and assume that people aren’t always following. Those are notes I’ve gotten repeatedly in my career. And I think I really struggle with that still because I am not naturally a very soft, sweet person. It’s like I am pretty blunt and straightforward, and I sort of think that’s one of my strengths.

Jessica Bennett (36:10):

Well, that’s kind of what you need to be a leader, in fact.

Susie Banikarim (36:13):

But as I’ve gotten older, I can see when it has an impact on someone, and I try and dial it down because I recognize that not everyone can deal with that.

Jessica Bennett (36:22):

Well, and that’s part of the pressure, right? You’re in charge of all these people and to some degree their wellbeing, but you have to discipline. There is hard stuff. Sometimes you have to do layoffs. Thankfully, I have never had to do that, but I can imagine that’s hard no matter who you are.

Susie Banikarim (36:38):

Oh God, I can’t believe you’ve never had to do a layoff that is really lucky in this media environment. But just even aside from those pressures, it’s just hard to show up as your best self every single day. Sometimes you just don’t. Or you make mistakes and the stakes feel higher because you’re the boss and everyone’s paying attention.

Jessica Bennett (36:57):

A bad day can have more extreme consequences.

Susie Banikarim (36:59):

Yeah, I mean, everyone I know in the leadership position struggles with that at times. And actually we have a friend who runs a newsroom who said to me recently, it’s not fun to be in charge anymore. And that makes sense to me. People are just so self-conscious all the time. They’re so worried they’re going to do something that’s going to get them canceled in some way.

Jessica Bennett (37:18):

Which I guess is good on the one hand that we’re all more conscious of creating the kind of workplaces we want to be in. But it’s also complicated.

Susie Banikarim (37:27):

I think part of the reason I have sometimes felt like I’m groping around in the dark trying to figure out how to be a good leader, is that there just weren’t a lot of great examples of leadership. Most of the leadership I saw was Miranda Priestly-type leadership from men and women. So it’s not like there were all these models for me that I could be like, okay, here’s who I’m trying to be. I was sort of trying to figure it out on my own. I’m still trying to figure it out to some degree.

Jessica Bennett (37:56):

And there’s still not great models, to be honest. I mean, I think that’s why we’ve seen a lot of women leaders who rise up really quickly and then immediately get shot down.

Susie Banikarim (38:08):

And that actually leads me to something I want to talk about, which is the whole “Girl Boss” thing from a few years ago. I’ve always joked that all these toxic Girl Bosses were just women who saw The Devil Wears Prada. And instead of seeing it as a cautionary tale, they saw it as a path to success. They agreed with Miranda Priestly that everybody wanted this life, that for better or for worse, she is a depiction of unapologetic female power. And we don’t see that a lot. So they emulated it.

Jessica Bennett (38:38):

Wait, should we define the Girl Boss? So this was a term that was popularized in 2014 when Sophia Amoruso, who had founded a wildly successful company called Nasty Gal, wrote a book called Girl Boss. And Girl Boss was framed as the reaction to Lean In, which was Sheryl Sandberg’s blockbuster book.

Clips (38:59):

Big debate being sparked by Sheryl Sandberg.

(39:01):

Her brand new book is generating a kind of feminist firestorm.

(39:06):

She calls it leaning in, gunning for the corner office, not the cubicle.

Jessica Bennett (39:11):

And so if Lean In was saying, go strive, rise up the corporate ladder, Girl Boss was saying, no, actually you can be scrappy. You don’t have to come from money. You can do it your way. And over time, there was this generation of leaders who rose really quickly and were very media savvy. They were all very attractive. They started populating the cover of every magazine, and they were sort of heralded as this new generation of women leaders, but a lot of their businesses failed. A lot of them were criticized for various things. And so ultimately that term now is more of a pejorative. It’s used on TikTok to criticize people who are seen as too ambitious. There’s that phrase, “don’t Girl Boss too close to the sun.” They had too much unbridled ambition and it came to bite them in the ass.

Susie Banikarim (40:02):

Right? Also, that meme Gaslight Girl Boss Gatekeep, right? It’s basically talking about how the Girl Bosses were actually also positions of privilege, and they sort of gate-kept other people out of the arena. But I feel like part of what the issue is there isn’t really a clear definition of what a Girl Boss is.

Jessica Bennett (40:22):

I mean, it’s a fake word. It’s a made up word that was created as a joke and then became a real thing. I’m like, why are we calling women Girl Bosses anyway? They should just be bosses. So I sort of am like, you can’t define… It came to represent a striver.

Susie Banikarim (40:38):

Like a very earnest striver who embraced a certain kind of corporate feminism.

Jessica Bennett (40:42):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (40:43):

And equality in this world was just getting to be the boss. You were an unapologetically ambitious woman like Miranda, but with a feminine twist. So if you’re a Girl Boss, you’re less threatening in a way. You’re certainly not the crazed, desperate career woman of the eighties we talked about in the Newsweek marriage episode, you’re not Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, you’re like a fashionable and millennial pink feminist.

Jessica Bennett (41:07):

Well, and in some ways the media and society has enforced that by adding “girl” in front of your title.

Susie Banikarim (41:20):

But ultimately, the Girl Boss, as you said, was pretty limited. And Amanda Mull wrote a great piece in the Atlantic where she talked about why that was. So there was some idea that there was equality just based on advancement. It kind of ties capitalism up with female equality, which I think feels inherently flawed. And then she said something that I thought was really smart. She said, “the Girl Boss argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-birds-one-stone type of activism. Their pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest for equality and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs would lift up the women below them.” But that’s not really what we saw. In fact, even the person who popularized the term Girl Boss, this woman Sophia Amoruso, she eventually resigned. The company went into bankruptcy a couple years after that book came out, and there were a number of complaints about discrimination and toxic management accompanied by lawsuits from her employees.

Jessica Bennett (42:24):

I mean, I think it’s slightly more complex. A lot of these stories and downfalls were flattened a bit in the media narrative. I’m actually profiling Sophia now for a piece for Elle. And so it’s been interesting to actually dig into what really happened versus how the media, though I hate saying “the media”…

Susie Banikarim (42:44):

Us, we are the media.

Jessica Bennett (42:45):

… yes, portrayed it, but certainly it represented something.

Susie Banikarim (42:49):

Right, and I think she wasn’t the only one. In fairness to her, there were a slew of other examples of female leaders who were lauded as Girl Bosses or who leaned into that branding, but eventually came under scrutiny and were forced to step away from the companies they founded. Just like off the top of my head, there’s the CEO of Glossier, the luggage brand Away, to that woman who ran Thinx underwear.

Jessica Bennett (43:11):

I think there was a shift at a certain point in what was perceived as acceptable boss behavior, particularly for these companies and these founders who had branded themselves as socially conscious, if not overtly feminist.

Susie Banikarim (43:25):

And I think also what you’re saying is that these power structures were built by men. So if these women were replicating these power structures, it wasn’t like they were doing something unique. It’s just the case that if you’re a woman, you’re more likely to face an immediate backlash. Look at Elon Musk. I mean, he has had a million of these kinds of complaints around him.

Jessica Bennett (43:47):

Right, or Adam Newman of WeWork or Travis Kalanick of Uber.

Susie Banikarim (43:52):

And all three of those men are fine. And actually, Samhita Mukhopadhyay who we spoke to earlier, and as I mentioned is writing a book about women, work and ambition also talks about the hypocrisy she sees in the Girl Boss downfall.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (44:09):

I’m always cautious when we too eagerly tear women down. I’m not going to All Women’s Matter this or something. Obviously women are capable of the same heinous atrocities and labor oversights as men. But I do think that when we go after women for a specific behavior that is considered completely normal in men, my eyebrows raise a little bit. I’m like, yes, no leader should be toxic. We should absolutely be creating environments that are equitable. We should not expect people to work and sacrifice everything.

(44:40):

None of those things are sustainable. They are not things that we should support in workplaces, but also they are a result of under-resourced environments. Often women-led companies don’t get as much money as male-led companies. Definitely true for startups in a ridiculous way. And then you add to that these kind of toxic dynamics or leaders that don’t have enough experience to successfully lead in those kinds of environments. Or a lot of times, people that would fit into this Girl Boss mold, the very characteristics that make them good for those roles are literally what make them bad as leaders.

Susie Banikarim (45:15):

Yes, can confirm.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (45:16):

So being judiciously committed to your vision, being really good on stage, being really good in the press, it’s like those people are monsters behind the scenes. But putting that to the side, the majority of women that are starting businesses aren’t these kind of “Girl Bosses.” They’re young women that are trying to find their voice and their name. Or a lot of times women become entrepreneurs because they hit the glass ceiling at work and they were not getting the recognition that they deserved, and so they decided to go out on their own. And so it is worrisome when you focus a lot on a small number of people when there’s this kind of broader ecosystem of women trying to create things on their own terms.

Susie Banikarim (46:10):

Samhita has written about how while the Girl Boss concept is flawed, it did provide a model for women who don’t always see a path to leadership, like women of color. And people like Samhita and I are often excluded from those kinds of spaces. So there are some things about this that weren’t all bad, but any model of female leadership generally does eventually face a backlash. I mean, we’ve just seen that in this country, any kind of female advancement eventually faces a backlash.

Jessica Bennett (46:40):

And in fact, I think we’re seeing that more now after these, so-called Girl Bosses toppled, a lot of the investment to female founded companies actually went down.

Susie Banikarim (46:51):

By the way, investment to female companies was always really low. And that’s also partially what was kind of interesting about this being a media-created story. Women receive, I think, less than 2% of VC funding. So there were never a huge number of Girl Bosses to start with. So the disproportionate attention they got in the beginning and then in the backlash is also indicative of something, which is, we love a story about a woman rising and then falling. That’s just a thing we love in this country.

(47:29):

Also, it’s probably worth noting that in terms of the backlash, the Miranda Priestlys or in the real world, the Anna Wintours of the world didn’t emerge completely unscathed, but interestingly, not really about their years of boundary lists or potentially inappropriate leadership styles. I think when Black Lives Matter happened, there was a lot more focus on the ways in which fashion and fashion magazines really reinforced a certain kind of whiteness. And Anna did have to apologize for that in June of 2020, after facing a lot of criticism.

Jessica Bennett (48:07):

Oh, that’s right.

Susie Banikarim (48:08):

She issued an apology for not doing enough to address diversity issues at Vogue. And she said, “I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers, and other creators. We have made mistakes, too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes.”

Jessica Bennett (48:29):

I mean, pretty big a deal that she apologized. She’s not the type to stand down or apologize, I don’t think.

Susie Banikarim (48:37):

Yeah, I don’t think so either. But I think this was obviously a more serious allegation in some ways.

Jessica Bennett (48:42):

Yeah. Well, and then also interesting that she was able to keep her job after that.

Susie Banikarim (48:46):

She kept her job after that apology, unlike the Girl Bosses who kind of toppled and then maybe found their way back in some smaller way, she has stayed on top of the Conde Nast editorial operation. And obviously I don’t want to conflate white supremacy and bias with slightly toxic or even very toxic behavior. This is obviously a deeper issue, but it shows that she had sort of gone from being immune to this kind of criticism. At the point in which The Devil Wears Prada is made, it didn’t lead to some kind of backlash towards her like, oh, I can’t believe you treat people this way. It was considered kind of charming or funny or whatever. And now she’s sort of gotten to the point where she’s not given a pass completely in that way.

(49:27):

And actually that same year in 2022, a few months later, the New York Times published a really lengthy piece asking if her diversity push had come too late. And former employees said that Anna had fostered a workplace that sidelined women of color, and she had helped set a standard that favored white, Eurocentric notions of beauty, which isn’t a surprise. That’s something you also see in the movie, right? There’s a real central focus in the movie about a very classic beauty standard. There’s a lot of focus on thinness. In the movie, there’s this famous line where Emily, the first assistant says, “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,” which is a thing me and my friends always jokingly say to each other.

Jessica Bennett (50:12):

I mean, people, yeah, everyone says that.

Susie Banikarim (50:13):

Everyone says that, right?

Jessica Bennett (50:14):

Or said. Maybe Gen Z doesn’t say right now.

Susie Banikarim (50:15):

Because maybe they have more sense than we did? And it wasn’t just Anna who set these standards, but as arguably the most powerful person in fashion, she did play a large role in this kind of centering.

Jessica Bennett (50:29):

The other thing too is that in particular for women of color, but really for any marginalized group, is that you’re often forced to represent your entire demographic.

Susie Banikarim (50:39):

So if you’re a gay leader, there’s also this expectation. If you’re a trans leader, it’s like you are doing more than just your job. You’re representing an entire category of people, and your success or failure carries that weight. And I do think to some degree, that gets back to this idea or this thing I was saying at the top, which is it does feel like you’re carrying a lot of weight in these jobs. You’re not immune to the understanding that you’re not just representing yourself. When I was given the opportunity to run newsrooms, I was almost always the only woman of color, or the first woman of color to have that opportunity in that role. So I was clear that I wasn’t just doing a job, but I was also representing a kind of progress. And if I did it badly or if I embarrassed myself, I was letting down much more than just my own mental health, you know what I mean?

Jessica Bennett (51:37):

More than just yourself or your employees, you’re letting down everyone who strived to be in a role like that and who maybe had not gotten the opportunity.

Susie Banikarim (51:44):

Well, and also the other thing I think is that you recognize that you are the representation for a lot of people. I recognize that in those roles, there were women in the newsroom who saw me in that role and were like, oh, I can do that too. So if I did it poorly or I was not a good example, that I was not setting a good example for them. I was not giving them a path. Because they were like, well, I don’t want to be that bitch.

Jessica Bennett (52:11):

Which is terrifying in a lot of ways.

Susie Banikarim (52:14):

Yeah, it does really weigh on you. I do think it does take a real toll. I’m someone who struggles with a lot of anxiety. I have in my life had very serious depression, and it is the case that when I am in these jobs, it triggers a lot of those issues for me. And the reason I often leave these jobs is because I’ve gotten to a point where I no longer feel like I can balance, and I need to sort of step away to re-center myself. And I think that is a good segue into kind of where we are now in terms of how we’re thinking about work as women and where women’s ambition is. Where does all of this leave us? If we’re not going to be the Miranda Priestlys, we’re not going to be the Sheryl Sandbergs, we’re not going to be the Girl Bosses, like what’s left now?

Jessica Bennett (53:02):

Lazy girls. Lazy girl jobs.

Susie Banikarim (53:02):

Lazy girls. Job quitting, great resignation. It’s like I feel like it’s kind of the end of ambition in my mind. I think, do we want to have it all? I don’t want to have it all anymore. I just want to have enough.

Jessica Bennett (53:15):

So as you know, I am very skeptical of all of these little phrases that enter into the same case.

Susie Banikarim (53:22):

And validly so, validly so.

Jessica Bennett (53:24):

No, it’s not the end of ambition. And also when we talk about ambition, are we really just talking about women’s ambition? Nobody asks, is it the end of ambition for men?

Susie Banikarim (53:31):

Yes, that’s true.

Jessica Bennett (53:32):

And yet, these trends, these memes, this kind of linguistic popularity of terms like, yeah, lazy girl jobs or quiet quitting or I don’t dream of labor. Everything that you see on TikTok these days, which is essentially anti-work rhetoric, is largely being pushed by people of all genders. So I don’t know. I think that gender bias even creeps into the way that sometimes I talk about this issue, but I also think that there’s a little bit of delightful, in a way, idealism when it comes to young people, but also naivety about the fact that, all right, kids, you got to work. Yeah, I want to be a lazy girl too. I’d love to bed rot all day. That would be awesome. I don’t want to have a job.

Susie Banikarim (54:26):

I know I’d be great at goblin mode all day, every day.

Jessica Bennett (54:29):

Let’s just self-care all day. Yeah. What other terms can we insert here? But you still need money to live, and I know that sure, we’d want to reject capitalism, blah, blah, blah, but we are still living in a capitalist society, and so I take some of this anti-work rhetoric with a grain of salt, though I do believe that hopefully by questioning things like this Girl Boss culture or hustle culture, or the way that we have devoted our entire beings and entities to work over the past 10, 20 years is a good thing.

Susie Banikarim (55:02):

Yeah. I want to throw to Samhita one more time because she had something interesting to say about this too.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay (55:07):

Workplace hierarchy isn’t really going anywhere anytime soon. We have to figure out how management structures that are equitable, that work, that play to people’s strengths, that support them in being as innovative and creative and impactful as possible. That’s why I think we’re frozen in time right now because we know that we don’t want this kind of unfettered ambition at any cost, toxic workplace, all bad words. We know we don’t want that, but we don’t know how to apply that in our lives yet.

(55:35):

I think that’s led to this trend in quiet quitting or lazy girl jobs or people really calling it in at work, which ultimately isn’t going to actually make people happy. What actually makes you happy in your life is living a life of integrity and authenticity and joy. When you’re checked out of something, you’re not finding joy in your life, and that’s fine. I think we all go through phases we have to do that, but that’s not a model for women’s advancement in the workplace, right? It’s a problem and it’s a wake-up call for working conditions. But it’s not ultimately a strategy that’s going to be successful or make us happy if that’s ultimately the goal.

Jessica Bennett (56:11):

I think Samhita is right, and this isn’t the end of ambition generally, but it’s hopefully a workplace shift that is happening. Susie, where does that then leave you?

Susie Banikarim (56:22):

I mean, I guess what I’m doing is projecting, to some degree. Because maybe it’s just the end of my ambition. Maybe the reason those memes speak to me is that I have come to kind of want a quieter career. One where I have less responsibilities, one where I get to chat with you.

Jessica Bennett (56:41):

But I will just say that’s not unambitious, that’s a different kind of ambition. And so I think part of the problem is that we have come to define ambition in these really rigid ways that involved climbing up the corporate ladder, being a boss, having a big team, being in management. And there are so many different ways to be ambitious. And so I guess that’s what kind of gives me hope to what you’re saying.

Susie Banikarim (57:05):

Oh, yeah, that’s actually a really good point. I’ve never thought about it that way. It’s true that I’m not lacking in any ambition. It’s just my ambitions have really changed. I’m not trying to get the bigger job. I’m not always trying to get the bigger paycheck. I’m just trying to do work I love and work that feels creative and work that I hope is kind of meaningful or is certainly at least meaningful to me, even if it’s not that for everyone else. So that’s actually a nice way to think about where that leaves us and maybe we leave it there.

Jessica Bennett (57:39):

Susie, I want to tease our next episode. We’re going to be talking about what it means for a woman to be “past her prime.”

Susie Banikarim (57:46):

Which I don’t think happens, for the record, but we are going to talk about aging and what that means for us, but also just how women are treated as they age in the culture. So I think it’s going to be a really interesting one. This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram at @Inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (58:17):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (58:27):

You can also find us on Instagram @JessicaBennett and @SusieBNYC. Also, check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club, and This Is 18.

Jessica Bennett (58:36):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeartPodcasts and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (58:50):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim…

Jessica Bennett (59:08):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out Inretropod.com. See you next week.

EPISODE 24 – GAY & HORNY TEENS ON SCREEN WITH EMMA SELIGMAN

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Emma Seligman (00:05):

I think that once I figured out that I was queer, had lived a little bit of a queer life for a few years, I think that that just changed every sort of movie that I dreamed up in my head.

Jessica Bennett (00:18):

I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:19):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:21):

And this is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (00:25):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (00:28):

Most of the time we look at the past, but sometimes we want to hear from someone who is changing the pop culture future. Today we’re handing over the pod to our amazing associate producer, Sharon Attia. She’s talking to Emma Seligman, the director of the delightfully funny gay fight club comedy, Bottoms, which Harper’s Bazaar called a horny masterpiece.

Sharon Attia (00:47):

Hi, I’m Sharon Attia. I’m the associate producer and researcher on the show, and I also happen to be Emma Seligman’s best friend. Emma is the writer and director behind my favorite movies of all time, Shiva Baby and Bottoms.

(01:00):

Shiva Baby is this claustrophobic indie hit that follows a college student who runs into her sugar daddy and ex-girlfriend while at a shiva with her parents. And Bottoms is a recent blockbuster about two lesbian losers who start a high school fight club to try and lose their virginities to the hot cheerleaders.

(01:16):

Since Emma’s films are redefining the canon of queer comedies, movies that we’ll for sure look back on in retrospect, and because these are exactly the kinds of things that Emma and I talk about, I invited her on to chat about movie making today, queer representation, and how that’s changing. Here’s our conversation.

(01:35):

Hi, Emma.

Emma Seligman (01:36):

Hello.

Sharon Attia (01:38):

That’s my intro for you.

Emma Seligman (01:40):

I love that. That’s such a sweet intro.

Sharon Attia (01:42):

So, for our listeners who don’t know your meteoric rise and just every amazing thing that you’ve ever done, maybe we’ll give them just some brief background.

Emma Seligman (01:56):

Yeah. Okay. I’m from Toronto, where I am right now. And I feel like I just grew up in a family of film lovers. No one in the industry, but in a community of people who love watching movies, which is honestly most of the city of Toronto, I would say, because of TIFF, the film festival here.

(02:16):

There’s just something about living here where everyone’s very culturally in tuned with what’s out. And I was always interested in movies. When I was nine, I submitted a movie review for this contest to become a juror for the kids’ film festival that TIFF ran.

Sharon Attia (02:34):

Do you remember what the movie was for, that you wrote the review?

Emma Seligman (02:38):

So my parents never took me to kids’ movies, and they barely let me watch kids’ TV shows if they were in the room because they were bored by them. So because this was my choice, because I got to see the movie, I really wanted to see this Ice Cube movie called Are We There Yet?

Clips (02:58):

A comedy about how far one man will go-

(02:58):

Hey, how you doing, baby?

(02:59):

I want to say hi to the kids.

(02:59):

Hi.

(03:00):

I love you.

(03:00):

… to become part of the family.

Emma Seligman (03:03):

And I ended up writing a bad review, which I didn’t expect to do, because I think I was so snobby from the tastes that my parents had instilled in me that I was like-

Sharon Attia (03:12):

Amazing.

Emma Seligman (03:12):

… “This was cheesy and unrealistic.” And I think I was the only kid that submitted a review that was a bad review. But yeah, I did that festival, and that was the first time I’d really seen a lot of foreign films and independent films. And so, I don’t know, I feel really lucky my parents encouraged me to watch movies whenever I wanted. I didn’t do sports or anything like that, so it was just like that was my hobby.

Sharon Attia (03:38):

Same. Girl, same.

Emma Seligman (03:42):

Girl, same. We all had to find something. And then I started directing theater in high school, because I really loved acting for fun. And then I just learned more and more about acting through our drama program, even though it wasn’t an art school, it just had good teachers.

(03:59):

And I was really lucky. My mom was very encouraging about me going to a US school, which is not an easy decision to make when you’re not from the US. But I just figured, if I got in and if they were going to spend that kind of money, then I really needed to be serious about whatever I was choosing to pursue. And then that’s how I came to movies.

Sharon Attia (04:22):

And how you came into my life-

Emma Seligman (04:25):

Oh, yes!

Sharon Attia (04:26):

… because you moved to New York to go to NYU. And we met, I want to say, within the first week of school, Welcome Week.

Emma Seligman (04:34):

Mm-hmm. That was the first time we hung out.

Sharon Attia (04:36):

And that was 10 years ago.

Emma Seligman (04:36):

I know.

Sharon Attia (04:38):

And since then, we’ve both come out as not straight. Love that for us. So let’s talk about the intersection of those two things, your queerness and your movie making.

(04:50):

So your first film was Shiva Baby, which was a short film, your thesis film. And then you went on to make the feature, the set of which I got to be on for a couple days, which was just so fun to be a fly on the wall and see you make that film.

(05:05):

But it was so different from Bottoms, and that was a tiny, nonexistent budget indie. And then Bottoms was this huge, your first big studio film. You have a huge cast, so many extras, these big high school scenes. But at its center are these hilarious, incredible queer characters.

(05:27):

And Shiva Baby, which also stars Rachel Sennott, also has a bisexual character as the lead. And so, did you always know that you wanted to make movies with queer characters at the center, or that just kind of happened organically?

Emma Seligman (05:40):

I think that happened organically. I think that, especially for Shiva Baby, what drew me to that story was the Jewishness of it. I’ve known that I’m Jewish for far longer than I’ve known that I’m queer. I think as a kid, I saw myself more in the Jewish characters and got more excited in seeing Jewishness on screen.

Sharon Attia (05:58):

That’s so interesting.

Emma Seligman (06:00):

I’d only seen Jewishness portrayed on screen with a little bit of hokeyness and-

Sharon Attia (06:04):

Yeah. Stereotype.

Emma Seligman (06:06):

… just super stereotypical characters, especially when it came to Jewish women, like the Jewish mom. So I’ve always been driven by telling Jewish stories because that’s my world. Those are the characters that I know the best.

(06:19):

Especially going into college before I really had a sense of myself and my identity as a young person or as an adult, or as a queer person or as a woman even, I think that I felt like, “Okay, I got this community down.”

Clips (06:33):

Mom. Mom, mom, mom. Who died?

(06:35):

Abby, Uncle Marty’s second wife’s sister. You remember her.

(06:38):

No, I don’t think so.

(06:40):

She used to play bridge with Bubby.

(06:41):

Really?

(06:42):

Yeah.

(06:44):

Oh, mom, I can’t eat that.

(06:45):

Why not?

(06:46):

I’m vegetarian.

(06:47):

You’re killing me.

(06:47):

I’ve told you it so many times.

(06:49):

You have not eaten a single thing all day.

(06:51):

That’s because we just got here.

(06:52):

You look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps.

(06:55):

Oh, my God.

(06:55):

And not in a good way.

Emma Seligman (06:57):

While developing the short film in school, like my thesis, it wasn’t about this bisexual love story. It was about this girl coming face-to-face with her lack of self-worth.

Sharon Attia (07:09):

And running into her sugar daddy at a shiva, which is this-

Emma Seligman (07:13):

Yes. Running into her sugar daddy at a shiva and-

Sharon Attia (07:16):

… incredible premise.

Emma Seligman (07:17):

… and letting that make her feel like a little child. And that was the main focus of that. And then I started getting more curious about queer characters in other genres of movies. I think Transparent really changed the game in terms of-

Sharon Attia (07:31):

Kind of that intersection of both of those things, right? Seeing Jewish characters and different types of queerness, and different relationships with sex.

Emma Seligman (07:40):

And real characters, too.

Clips (07:41):

Now that you want to be a woman all the time, do you still want to date women?

(07:46):

Yes. I mean, Shell, it’s still me.

(07:49):

So you’re a lesbian.

(07:51):

Well…

(07:52):

So we got gay married before it was fashionable.

Emma Seligman (07:56):

That was a real moment of feeling seen in so many ways, all in one. And at that point, I was out. I barely understood my queerness yet, but I was aware of my identity. And also, there’s characters in that show who are discovering their sexual identity. Many of them are discovering their queerness in different ways.

Sharon Attia (08:17):

And so with Bottoms, did you know that you wanted it to be this queer teen comedy, or did you want to make a teen comedy and the queerness just followed?

Emma Seligman (08:29):

I knew that I wanted to make a teen comedy and that I wanted it to be queer from the get-go. There was no, “We’ll see what the sexualities of these characters are.”

Clips (08:38):

We teach a bunch of girls how to defend themselves against the evil Huntington Killers. They are grateful to us. We build a community. We bond, we share, we connect. We’re punching each other. Adrenaline is flowing. Next thing you know, Isabel and Brittany are kissing us on the mouths.

Emma Seligman (08:57):

I think that once I figured out that I was queer, had lived a little bit of a queer life for a few years, I think that that just changed every sort of movie that I dreamed up in my head.

(09:08):

But I really missed the teen movies of our childhood, and of just before our childhood, that really honored the teen characters as humans and as people. And honored them with quality filmmaking that, at the time, I don’t think we appreciated.

(09:25):

Because teen movies would always get bad reviews, especially if they were female-driven, like, “It was cheesy and unrealistic, and they were repeating the same sort of storyline about a bet, or some sort of lie, or turning Shakespeare on its head,” or whatever.

(09:38):

So that was part of why I wanted to make a teen movie. And I think also, one of our producers, Elizabeth Banks, says something like, “You can’t underestimate how much young people want to see themselves on screen.”

(09:50):

I think that when it comes to seeing myself and seeing other queer people on screen, then teen movies were the first place that I went to, probably because those were the movies that I loved the most growing up and also feel the most universal. I think that no matter how old you are or what your gender is, or your sexuality is, everyone can relate to a teen movie to a certain degree.

Sharon Attia (10:17):

I didn’t even realize. I guess I had associated teen movies so near and dear to my heart because I watched them semi around that age. But in reality, I actually still hold them close to my heart because I think that that time in your life, the stakes feel so high.

(10:34):

And so, everything just feels important, and it is important. And so playing within that world and that genre is just so fun, because I think everyone’s on board.

Emma Seligman (10:45):

Well, that’s why Olivia Rodrigo music hits so hard for anyone of any age-

Sharon Attia (10:51):

Oof, love.

Emma Seligman (10:52):

… but older millennials especially, because I think-

Sharon Attia (10:54):

Olivia, if you’re listening.

Emma Seligman (10:57):

No, because it’s like that time just feels so unnecessarily emotional, and it’s easy for people to put themselves back in those… Or maybe not easy, but there’s a frame of reference that you can put yourself back in when you’re watching these youthful stories.

Sharon Attia (11:14):

Speaking of teen movies and how we’re growing up during what I would say is a golden age of the teen movie canon in the ’90s and early 2000s, can you talk to us a bit about some of your references for Bottoms or any sort of inspo that you had?

Emma Seligman (11:31):

Yeah. I mean, I do think the late ’90s, early 2000s, the Kirsten Dunst era, was the heyday of teen movies. Everything from the super campy cult classics like Drop Dead Gorgeous-

Clips (11:42):

I never liked her, but she didn’t deserve to die in the belly of a swan like that.

Emma Seligman (11:47):

… and Dick-

Clips (11:48):

You can’t let dick run your life.

Emma Seligman (11:50):

… Bring It On-

Clips (11:52):

This is not a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy.

Emma Seligman (11:53):

… Jawbreaker. There’s those campy, female-driven, often dark movies. And then there were the male-driven comedies like American Pie, which I loved growing up. And then-

Sharon Attia (12:08):

I loved American Pie.

Emma Seligman (12:10):

I mean, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That. I think that as we got into the mid-2000s, we were very lucky. And I mean it. She’s The Man and Mean Girls felt really female-driven in a strong way that was complicated, and fun, and silly, and stupid. And got to place these women at the center of these funny ensemble movies that had also a little bit of edgy humor to them, despite the fact that they were PG-13. Especially Mean Girls.

(12:45):

And then there were still more, not bro-y, but there were more boy-driven teen adventure movies also around that time. Like Kick-Ass is one of my favorite movies, and Scott Pilgrim.

Sharon Attia (12:57):

Yeah, you love an adventure movie.

Emma Seligman (12:58):

I love any saving the day, fighting to get the girl, fighting to save the world, and doing it with your friends and being stupid. And then of course, Superbad, which just changed the game in terms of just how funny teen movies can be. Just how funny the teen sex comedy can be. I mean, American Pie was hilarious, but Superbad, that changed the genre as well.

Clips (13:22):

This guy’s either going to think, “Here’s another kid with a fake ID,” or, “Here’s McLovin, the 25-year-old Hawaiian organ donor.” So what’s it going to be?

(13:31):

I am McLovin.

Sharon Attia (13:48):

I feel like a lot of the things that I’m seeing, because I famously will consume absolutely any piece of content that is both teen and queer, is that a lot of the storylines are moving away from showing sex or horny characters. And maybe this is because, for so long, that was the only thing that was focused on. People are just obsessed with, “But how do queer people have sex?”

(14:15):

So it’s either a coming out or a traumatic story, or it’s so dripping in sexuality that there’s no nuance and they’re not complete, human characters. Is that something that you’re noticing as well in terms of queer representation, horniness versus innocence, all that jazz?

Emma Seligman (14:32):

Yeah, definitely. I understand that critique of telling queer stories that go beyond what our sex lives look like and how sex works, and trying to explain that to a straight audience. But I think that when it comes to telling queer stories for young characters with young characters, I’m very grateful for the amount of progress we’ve made in queer representation over the last even five to 10 years.

(14:56):

But I think that there’s almost been a little bit of a course correction because for so long, not to get too deep into it, but queers were, in media or in our culture, seen as perverted, and mentally ill, and on the outskirts of society and fucked up.

(15:13):

And so, our media representation has done a 180 where we’re trying to showcase that queers, especially queer teens, are human too. And aren’t just sex-obsessed perverts, and have emotions, and have crushes, and have innocence, and have sweetness, and have problems in our lives.

(15:32):

But I just don’t know, especially in the world we live in today, any teens that aren’t having sex shoved down their metaphorical throats. Sex is everywhere and it’s talked about so much, and it’s fed to us through so much media when we’re young.

(15:52):

And the talking about sex, whether or not you’re having it, or wanting to have sex or not wanting to have sex, or thinking about the pressure to have sex or whatever, is so pushed upon young people.

(16:04):

So I can’t relate to a world in which you’re a teen and you don’t know about sex or have any interest in talking about it or thinking about it. And so, in telling stories about teens in general, I just think that that sex is part of it.

Sharon Attia (16:21):

You said that you definitely saw yourself in Jewish characters. But was there ever, even before you were out, any sort of queer representation that made you think, “Oh, that’s something else.”? Because I feel that way sometimes when I’m watching things now where I’m like, “I wonder, would I have come out sooner if I had all of these shows and movies?”

Emma Seligman (16:41):

Yeah. It’s not as simple as like, “Oh, I’m in high school and I see a gay movie, and I go, ‘Ugh, that makes sense. That’s me.'”

Sharon Attia (16:48):

Right, which is often the conversation about representation. It is so important and it does matter, but it’s not so simple as like, “And then I see myself represented, and now I know who I am and I’m okay with it.”

Emma Seligman (17:00):

And I’m so okay with it.

Sharon Attia (17:02):

No, it’s going to introduce a lot of questioning, existential crises. But was there anything that sent you spiraling like that that you watched when you were younger?

Emma Seligman (17:13):

I didn’t have anything that sent me spiraling, but I definitely felt like when I would catch moments of queer women on screen, it would freak me out and make me feel honestly disgusted a little bit. I would never say that out loud or anything, but I think that, one, that probably has to do with just a lack of representation. Queer men have been advancing on screen quicker or historically more than queer women.

(17:42):

And two, also because clearly there was something deep down that was ashamed or something. I don’t know. I remember catching bits of But I’m A Cheerleader or Debs on TV, and being like, “Ugh.” I think the biggest moment, which is such a cliche, but when I saw Jennifer’s Body in theaters, I think I was 12 or 13, and during that kiss between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, I remember feeling horny and was freaked out. I was like, “This is not good.” And I buried that away.

Sharon Attia (18:15):

You’re like, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Emma Seligman (18:17):

Yeah, exactly. I was like, “Mm-mm, this is not… I see men and women kissing all the time and I don’t have this feeling.” Not that I was thinking that consciously about it, but I was like, [inaudible 00:18:30].

Sharon Attia (18:32):

That sound.

Emma Seligman (18:32):

I think that I found it easier to watch and enjoy storylines with queer male characters because it allowed me to see something I hadn’t seen, where it was touching a part of my soul and heart, but it wasn’t so close to home where I saw myself and got freaked out.

Sharon Attia (18:56):

So as we’re wrapping up from the super fun and flirty convo with my bestie, I guess my question to you, Emma, is what do you hope to see from queer filmmakers moving forward? What are you excited about? What do you want to see on screen?

Emma Seligman (19:14):

Honestly, I’m just so excited for queer filmmakers to make whatever they want to make and to indulge in whatever their imagination wants to provide to us that we’re lucky enough to receive. I think that I would love to see more queer characters just livin’ their lives. I know that sounds so basic, but I think that the more specific the representation is, the more universal it is.

Sharon Attia (19:41):

For sure.

Emma Seligman (19:41):

I think I’m most interested in seeing queer stories that are highly specific, that give us windows and peeks into queer people’s lives, in their relationships and in their communities, and in their friendships. Because that is the way that I discover my queerness and more about myself, and what it means to be queer or be in a community that’s not part of the mainstream.

(20:10):

So again, I’m excited to see whatever it is that queer filmmakers want to do in the next generation. But I’m most excited, I think, in to continuing to tell intimate queer stories that feel highly specific, and therefore, more authentic and universal.

Sharon Attia (20:27):

I love that.

Jessica Bennett (20:29):

I love that too. Susie, you and I are back next week. What do we have in store?

Susie Banikarim (20:33):

I’ve been dying to talk about a scene in Devil Wears Prada that has me thinking about women, and work, and ambition. And honestly, my own ambition. So that’s what we’re going to get into.

Jessica Bennett (20:44):

Ooh, can’t wait.

Susie Banikarim (20:50):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected], or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (21:03):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (21:13):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also, check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (21:22):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (21:37):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (21:54):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

EPISODE 23 – FROM ‘MEAN GIRLS’ TO ‘GLEE’, A LESBIAN JOKE EVOLVES (Pt 2)

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett (00:00):

In 1986, in the middle of an episode of the beloved sitcom, the Golden Girls, a silly, simple joke-

Clips (00:07):

Not Lebanese Blanche, lesbian.

Jessica Bennett (00:12):

… triggered that classic laugh track, and a surprising legacy. That’s because those four Golden Girls had an unsuspecting power, the power to influence public perception about a topic that remained taboo.

Drew Mackie (00:24):

You have these four women living together in a chosen family. This is a really powerful relationship they have with each other, and I think that’s subconsciously really good modeling for anyone really.

Jessica Bennett (00:38):

In shoulder pads and caftans, the Golden Girls snuck positive gay representation into millions of living rooms across America, creating a ripple effect in writers rooms and on screens for decades to come. I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:53):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:54):

And this is In Retrospect, where each week, we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (01:00):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (01:02):

Today we’re talking about the Golden Girls’ first encounter with a lesbian, and the way it spawned an enduring gay joke. But we’re also talking about the creative ways that Hollywood has written and sometimes hidden queer characters for decades. This is part two. So Susie, we’ve been talking about the Lebanese lesbian episode of Golden Girls, which is actually called, Isn’t It Romantic, that aired in 1986. And in that episode, Dorothy’s friend Jean comes to visit after the death of her partner Pat, and she develops a crush on Rose. As we spoke about, that episode was ahead of its time for many reasons. It was a pretty tender depiction of a lesbian character, at a time when that was pretty rare. And as we have laughed about, its repetition of the word lesbian really drove home that that was a word we should feel comfortable with.

Susie Banikarim (01:53):

Yeah. And even the fact that there was a gay character at all was pretty significant for that time.

Jessica Bennett (01:58):

Yeah. And in order to understand how subversive that was for the time, what you really need to understand is the way that gay and lesbian characters were depicted back then. So I want to set the scene a little bit in terms of what was happening in this time. Prior to 1970, there really were very few, if any gay characters on screen at all, and that makes sense for the time. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973.

Susie Banikarim (02:28):

It was? I didn’t realize it was that late.

Jessica Bennett (02:30):

Yeah. In the DSM.

Susie Banikarim (02:31):

It was pretty recent. Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (02:33):

But then in 1969, Stonewall occurs. So the Gay Liberation Movement is bursting forward in the early 1970s, and representation on television begins to shift as a result of that. So in 1971, you have the first gay male character who appears on the sitcom All in the Family.

Clips (02:52):

But he thinks that you’re, I can’t even say it, Steve.

(02:57):

He’s right, Arch.

(02:57):

Huh?

Jessica Bennett (02:59):

And that’s interesting too, because four years later, that same show has a recurring drag queen character that’s actually played by an out drag queen.

Clips (03:11):

I’m afraid you don’t understand Mrs. Bunker. I’m a transvestite.

Jessica Bennett (03:12):

And then skip ahead a few years in 1977, you have a trans character that appears on The Jeffersons. And the plot line there is essentially George, who’s the patriarch of the Jefferson family goes to meet his old Navy buddy Eddie, only to find out that Eddie has transitioned to Edie.

Clips (03:29):

Look. You don’t understand George. I’m a woman. Deep down inside, I’ve always been a woman.

(03:35):

Even in the Navy?

(03:35):

Even in the Navy.

Susie Banikarim (03:36):

Oh. Interesting. And actually, in 1977 is the same year there’s that show Soap that appears with Billy Crystal playing a gay character. Right?

Jessica Bennett (03:45):

Oh. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (03:46):

And I think that show was also made by Susan Harris who made Golden Girls, right?

Jessica Bennett (03:49):

Golden Girls. Oh. I hadn’t realized that. Okay. So before the Golden Girls episode, she has already done this.

Susie Banikarim (03:56):

Yeah. And interestingly, that show initially got a lot of backlash for having an openly gay character, but then went on to become a huge success. So maybe that’s why she felt so comfortable.

Jessica Bennett (04:05):

Oh. So maybe that emboldened her.

Susie Banikarim (04:06):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (04:07):

Yeah. So 1977 was I guess a big year, because that also was the year that one of the first Black gay characters appears on television. And this is in an episode of Sanford Arms. I didn’t know this show, but it was a spin-off of the popular Black sitcom Sanford and Sons. Basically, the character in the show is this tall, handsome, civil rights lawyer. So very much a positive depiction.

Susie Banikarim (04:31):

It’s so interesting this is all happening in the 70s when you told me that just until 1973, it was classified as a mental illness. You feel like it’s a sea change in terms of the way people are starting to think, right?

Jessica Bennett (04:43):

Yeah. Actually, that’s a really good point, because what you’re seeing in the seventies is pretty progressive, but then there’s this backlash, or this erosion of that when you start to have the eighties emerge. Essentially by the time the Golden Girls airs this episode in 1986, AIDS is a crisis.

Clips (05:01):

A mystery disease known as the Gay Plague.

(05:04):

AIDS appears to be a virus transmitted through body secretions.

Jessica Bennett (05:07):

Ronald Reagan is president.

Clips (05:09):

I think that abstinence has been lacking in much of the education.

(05:13):

President Reagan was repeatedly booed at an AIDS research fundraising dinner last night.

Jessica Bennett (05:18):

And I think to some degree, Hollywood gets scared off from writing these fully rounded gay characters.

Susie Banikarim (05:24):

I think AIDS was used so much as a cudgel to push back on gay civil rights. Right? It was just a way in which people stoked so much fear around gayness, and gay people. So it makes sense that that actually pulled back on some of the games.

Jessica Bennett (05:39):

Yeah, pulled back. And then at the same time, if there are gay characters written into scripts, they’re typically White gay men, and the plot lines usually revolve around AIDS in some way. Anyway, it’s this very negative depiction.

Susie Banikarim (05:51):

Yeah. I guess it was either negative, or very sorrowful. So you just never got any depictions of gay joy, but also where were all the lesbians?

Jessica Bennett (06:02):

So to a large degree in the eighties, lesbian visibility on film actually reflects life. It’s very much in the shadows, even as lesbians are very instrumental to the fight for gay rights. A couple of things worth understanding are essentially how lesbians fit into the larger feminist movement, which was very charged at the time, in part because Betty Friedan called lesbians, “The Lavender Menace,” because she felt like they would derail the women’s movement’s other causes. And I love lavender.

Susie Banikarim (06:33):

I know. Why lavender? I love the color lavender. [inaudible 00:06:35].

Jessica Bennett (06:37):

Whatever. And lesbians felt marginalized within the women’s movement, but they also felt pretty marginalized within the larger gay community. The first Dyke March, which is the lesbian march that happens every year around Pride, it didn’t even happen or become a thing until 1993. And I think that also shows just how groundbreaking that Golden Girls episode was in 1986, because in fact, the lesbian character, Jean, the friend of Dorothy’s, as we’ve discussed, was just the second lesbian character ever to appear on primetime TV.

Susie Banikarim (07:10):

Really even in 1986 it was the second time they’d had a lesbian character?

Jessica Bennett (07:15):

Yes. And the first happened just a few years before on a cop show called Hill Street Blues, and the lesbian was a police officer.

Susie Banikarim (07:22):

I remember Hill Street Blues. Isn’t that the show that spawned, “Be careful out there.”

Jessica Bennett (07:28):

Oh my gosh, really?

Susie Banikarim (07:28):

Yeah, with the cops, they end the meeting by saying, “Be careful out there.”

Jessica Bennett (07:32):

I had no idea.

Susie Banikarim (07:32):

But I don’t remember this character. So it must not have been a super prominent character.

Jessica Bennett (07:37):

Yeah. That’s probably by design. I don’t particularly remember it either. But lesbian representation was also working against this thing called the Hays Code. Susie, I feel like you probably know what that is.

Susie Banikarim (07:46):

When you say that, I feel like I should know, but I don’t know what that is.

Jessica Bennett (07:51):

I don’t know that you should know. I just feel like you’re our TV film whisperer. But the Hays Code was a set of content guidelines for American movies that existed between 1934 and 1968.

Clips (08:04):

With movies at their lowest moral ebb, but riding high financially, a new name appears on the national scene, Will Hays.

Jessica Bennett (08:12):

And the Hays Code basically outlined moral codes for what could appear on screen. And they kept this list of topics that were not allowed to be shown, things like homosexuality, which was called in their words sexual perversion, interracial relationships, drug use, scenes of passion? That’s a funny one.

Susie Banikarim (08:31):

That feels like it could be very hard to define.

Jessica Bennett (08:34):

Nudity, ridicule of religion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the Hays Code was for movies, but the point is it seeped into television. It goes on to set the model for what becomes the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. That’s a mouthful, but basically that’s the code that prohibited depictions of homosexuality.

Susie Banikarim (08:54):

Wow. Yeah. I didn’t know any of this history, but it makes sense. A lot of those codes are still in place. There are a lot of things you still can’t say on TV. And didn’t you not used to not be able to say hell for a long time on television?

Jessica Bennett (09:07):

Yeah. And actually, I want to reintroduce Maya Salam here. She’s the culture editor at the New York Times who’s written about this, and who we spoke to earlier. And specifically, she’s written about how so much of this stuff ties back to the power of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t just words that you couldn’t say. It was subjects too.

Maya Salam (09:25):

So divorce, abortion, homosexuality, the church threatened to boycott movies if these strict regulations weren’t applied. And filmmakers in studios bowed to them. So that’s why characters were written as sissies, villains or sexual deviants is the way that it’s put. Then it was more acceptable. They would be more likely to allow it if they were cast in this really negative way.

Jessica Bennett (09:49):

So essentially, what Maya is saying here is that the only way to have content that the Catholic Church would disapprove of like representations of homosexuality was to write these characters as villains. So that behavior could basically act as a warning to viewers, “Don’t do this. Look what will happen to you.” And to get around that, writers and directors start doing something called queer coding, which is essentially create characters who appear to be queer, but couldn’t actually be out due to the codes.

Susie Banikarim (10:21):

That’s actually brilliant. So there’s ways in which they’re indicating that someone is gay, but not explicitly saying it?

Jessica Bennett (10:27):

Exactly. Here’s Maya again.

Maya Salam (10:29):

That’s when you really start to see the really clever ways that queerness was shown, and explored in characters. It was really this under the radar, only gays maybe might pick up on it, you don’t know unless you know representation. One of my favorites is Calamity Jane, which is a 1953 musical western with Doris Day. And there’s a scene in the movie where she walks up to who would be her crush, and she almost tries to look down her top. And she’s like, “Oh. I think I might be in love with you,” or something like that.

Clips (11:06):

Gosh, Almighty. You’re the prettiest thing I ever seen.

Maya Salam (11:10):

And there’s a wonderful song. It’s called Secret Love, first of all.

Clips (11:18):

(Singing).

Maya Salam (11:21):

And it is the gayest.

Susie Banikarim (11:38):

Jess, it sounds like queer coding initially was a good thing. It was a way to have gay characters hidden in plain sight, and give them an opportunity to be part of the stories.

Jessica Bennett (11:51):

Right. And Jean, the lesbian friend of Dorothy is on Golden Girls, is really a great example of this. Here’s Drew Mackie again.

Drew Mackie (11:59):

For a lesbian character, Jean is very femme. She looks like one of the girls. You would not look at her, and presume she’s a lesbian. So she is sneaky. And that sounds like a negative phrase sometimes. I’m using it as a positive here. They did their homework. They tricked the audience into giving a shit about a gay person, which is remarkable.

Jessica Bennett (12:19):

So the problem with queer coding is that in some cases, it’s easy for these characters to quickly veer from this wink nod example of representation, to tropes.

Susie Banikarim (12:30):

So this positive thing can turn negative when it becomes stereotypical. So what do some of those tropes look like?

Jessica Bennett (12:38):

One of them is what Drew and his co-host call the Angel Gay. It’s this idea that you have to be perfect, good in every way. You’re not allowed to have flaws if you’re a gay character, because you can’t possibly reflect poorly on your community in any way.

Susie Banikarim (12:54):

Oh. Interesting. So this is the equivalent of a Model minority?

Jessica Bennett (12:59):

Yeah. I think that’s a really good comparison. Here’s Drew talking about how this applies to that Golden Girls episode.

Drew Mackie (13:05):

In some ways, Jean is an Angel Lesbian in that she doesn’t really have any flaws, aside from the fact that she is lusting after Rose. And Angel Gays normally don’t get to want someone the way Jean wants Rose. So that’s probably the one exception to it-

Jessica Bennett (13:22):

Because they can’t show lust or desire?

Drew Mackie (13:24):

Yeah. You’re there to maybe make some snapping comments, and that’s it. Mostly you’re there to help probably a straight female character achieve something in her life, and then you’ve fled away, and you’ve never heard from again.

Jessica Bennett (13:36):

Mm-hmm.

Drew Mackie (13:37):

There is this thing that happens on sitcoms where usually in the second season, they’ll do an episode that tells the audience, “Despite how things might look, this character is not gay.” And this is an example of that where if someone was watching, “Why are these ladies living together? Are they some lesbians,” this is the episode that will definitively spell out, “They are not lesbians. Bea Arthur has that voice. She’s not a lesbian. They are all heterosexual. Don’t worry. You’re watching a straight show with straight characters.”

Jessica Bennett (14:05):

Do you have a name for that?

Drew Mackie (14:06):

I guess we’ll call it the Second Season Clarification.

Jessica Bennett (14:11):

Another trope you might recognize is called Barrier Gays.

Drew Mackie (14:13):

That doesn’t sound good.

Jessica Bennett (14:15):

The trope was originally used actually in books. It was a way for gay authors to write about gay characters without coming under fire for breaking laws. And you see this a lot in lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s and 60s. And the idea there was that they could avoid the censors, and the obscenity laws, because if a character was given a happy ending, it would set off alarms. But if you just kill one off at the end, then it becomes a cautionary tale.

Clips (14:42):

Oh God.

(14:43):

Tara? Baby?

Susie Banikarim (14:46):

God, it’s so insidious.

Jessica Bennett (14:48):

Isn’t that crazy? It starts as this sneaky positive, but not totally positive thing. But then it just starts to become a broader trope.

Susie Banikarim (14:58):

Meaning they just eventually start killing off all their gay characters?

Jessica Bennett (15:03):

Kind of. Autostraddle, which is lesbian website, has a list that they update every year of, currently it’s 230 dead lesbian and bisexual characters on TV, and how they died.

Susie Banikarim (15:14):

It’s interesting because that’s a trope we hear about so much in horror movies about the Black friend. If you’re the Black friend in a horror movie, you’re going to die first. But I didn’t realize this was also a thing, if you were a lesbian or bisexual character, you also were doomed.

Jessica Bennett (15:27):

That’s a really good comparison. And yeah. There are a few that I remember. There’s an example in 1997 in NYPD Blue where Kathy, who is a lesbian, is shot by a hitman hired by her girlfriend’s ex.

Susie Banikarim (15:38):

Very dramatic.

Jessica Bennett (15:38):

There’s another example on Buffy, which I think is more our generation. There’s this scene where you finally get to see longtime girlfriends Willow and Tara in bed together.

Clips (15:49):

I forget how good this could feel, us together without the magic.

(15:55):

There was plenty of magic.

Jessica Bennett (15:58):

And yet then in that very same episode, Tara is killed by a stray bullet. So you don’t get to see the relationship progress.

Susie Banikarim (16:04):

Wasn’t that a famous scene with Willow and Tara, because they had shared a historic kiss?

Jessica Bennett (16:09):

Yeah. That’s why I think it was so upsetting when she was killed off. But here, let me go to Maya again, because she actually talks about how this plays out in a couple of different ways.

Maya Salam (16:18):

There is the obvious the person literally dies, drops dead.

Jessica Bennett (16:23):

Mm-hmm.

Maya Salam (16:23):

But even if a lesbian character, or any LGBTQ character, even the Golden Girls character, in a way, they might not die, but you just never see them again. It’s one thing to come out on TV, or be on an episode. It’s a whole other thing to have a whole storyline, and continue to be gay. So it’s like one thing to come out, and be gay on TV, but it’s another thing to stay gay.

Jessica Bennett (16:54):

Okay. There’s one other phenomenon I want to mention here, which is the Lesbian Kiss, and in particular the Lesbian Kiss episode, which becomes a thing in television and film where a seemingly heterosexual female character will kiss a possibly lesbian, or maybe bi character. And in many of the instances, the potential for a relationship does not actually survive past this one episode. And the lesbian or suspected lesbian is never to be heard from again, and the other character goes back to their straight hetero life.

Susie Banikarim (17:30):

So this would be the lesbian kiss that’s really purely for the male gaze.

Jessica Bennett (17:34):

I think that’s exactly it. And one of the first big examples of this comes in 1991 on L.A. Law.

Susie Banikarim (17:42):

Oh. I know L.A. Law. I watched L.A. Law. I’m beginning to think this episode is purely set up to make it look like I did nothing but watch TV as a child, which is not inaccurate.

Jessica Bennett (17:51):

You did watch a lot. And maybe I didn’t watch enough TV-

Susie Banikarim (17:53):

It’s all I did, apparently.

Jessica Bennett (17:55):

… because I don’t remember this. But what happened is there’s a kiss between these two lawyers, C.J. Lamb and Abby Perkins, and it’s widely regarded as the first romantic kiss between two women on a major network. And this is interesting, because it’s historic in a good way in that it’s the first time two women kiss on TV, and also because neither one of them dies, or kills anyone, or is ostracized afterwards.

Susie Banikarim (18:20):

And I don’t remember this character being gay at all. So that’s fascinating.

Jessica Bennett (18:23):

And part of that is probably because it was never meant to be a real relationship that would develop.

Clips (18:29):

You kissed me back.

(18:30):

Yeah. I’d like to forget the whole thing.

Jessica Bennett (18:33):

Even later on as the actresses who played these characters were interviewed, they’ve described how essentially this kiss was included for ratings.

Susie Banikarim (18:42):

Of course, yeah.

Jessica Bennett (18:42):

It was not meant to be developed. It was not meant to be expanded on, and that was it.

Susie Banikarim (18:47):

Wasn’t there something similar on Picket Fences?

Jessica Bennett (18:50):

Yeah. So Picket Fences is another example where two teenagers kiss in 1993, and then one of the big ones that’s often referenced is 1994 on Roseanne. And this is a kiss between Roseanne Barr and Mariel Hemingway. And it’s in an episode titled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Clips (19:07):

You got to hang out more often.

(19:07):

I was thinking that too, but next time, let’s leave the wives at home.

(19:14):

Read my mind.

(19:16):

Huh?

Susie Banikarim (19:17):

I don’t actually remember this particular episode, but this must have been the Clinton era, right? Because Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was something he introduced in relationship to gays in the military, but it was very much part of the zeitgeist.

Jessica Bennett (19:28):

And this one actually ends up being a pretty big deal. The kiss lasts for three seconds.

Susie Banikarim (19:32):

Oh my God.

Jessica Bennett (19:34):

So of course, if you re-watch it, you can’t actually see either of their lips.

Susie Banikarim (19:40):

Now I’m going to have to go [inaudible 00:19:41] watch that, because I don’t know how you would have a kiss where you couldn’t see any lips.

Jessica Bennett (19:45):

But it becomes a big deal. ABC didn’t want to air the episode, and whatever we think of Roseanne Barr today, at this time, she, to her credit, threatened to take her sitcom to another network if they wouldn’t actually air it, which I think is part of the beauty of being in charge of your own show, which she was at the time with her husband.

Susie Banikarim (20:06):

I think that is the sad thing about Roseanne Barr, because that show really did break so many barriers, and was so progressive in so many ways.

Jessica Bennett (20:14):

And actually, that character becomes one of the first recurring bisexual characters on a show. So it really did have an impact. But for the most part, these Lesbian Kiss episodes were more just sweepstunts. And in many cases, these sweepstunts are dreamed up by straight male showrunners.

Susie Banikarim (20:32):

Of course they are, because straight male showrunners still run most shows, unfortunately.

Jessica Bennett (20:37):

And the thing is, these stunts are actually pretty effective in a lot of ways. They’re visual. They’re cheap. They’re controversial. So people talk about them. And then the other thing is they’re easily reversible. You don’t have to develop the relationship. You can, like you said, just go vanish into the night, and go back to the plot line as you had it before.

Susie Banikarim (20:59):

Right. So it’s like the lesbian sweeps in, gives you your sweeps numbers, and then sweeps away.

Jessica Bennett (21:03):

Exactly.

Susie Banikarim (21:04):

You know what this reminds me of actually is do you remember when Brittany, and Madonna, and Christina Aguilera did that kiss at the MTV VMAs in 2003?

Jessica Bennett (21:15):

I of course remember this moment, but I think I’ve forgotten the details a little bit. I remember there was a pretty lengthy kiss between Brittany and Madonna, and was Christina watching while that happened?

Susie Banikarim (21:25):

Well, I guess Christina was watching, but really what it was was that the three of them performed a song, Brittany, Madonna and Christina Aguilera. And at the end of the song, Madonna leans over, and gives Brittany a peck actually. It’s not a lengthy kiss, although there was a lot of debate at the time of whether or not there was tongue or whatever. And then she does the same with Christina, but most people don’t remember the Christina part, because the camera immediately panned to Justin Timberlake, because Brittany and Justin had recently broke it up. So all the audience cared about was his reaction, or all the director thought the audience would care about was his reaction. So Brittany wrote about this in her book about how this becomes a big cultural moment, and it’s for the same reasons. Right? It’s salacious, and it gets attention, because it’s two women kissing.

Jessica Bennett (22:12):

And actually, Maya said something really interesting about how growing up during this time, these random performative kisses felt so prevalent that they actually influenced how she felt about using the word lesbian.

Maya Salam (22:29):

I’ll admit that it has not always been the most comfortable word for me to use. Depends on the setting in the eighties, and nineties, and the aughts. It was a phrase that represented. It just went hand in hand with pornography, and what the word lesbian was a word owned and used by men to represent what they wanted to see.

Jessica Bennett (22:51):

It was titillating to say the word lesbian.

Maya Salam (22:55):

Exactly. Exactly. You don’t always want to conjure up images of lesbian sex in people’s minds when you use the word. So I used to just rely on using the word gay, because I didn’t feel like I owned the word lesbian in the way that I wanted to, the way that I feel like I do now.

Susie Banikarim (23:13):

But some real lesbian characters do start to emerge, right? In the late nineties, and the aughts, we start to see this improve in a way.

Jessica Bennett (23:23):

Yeah. There were a few. One that I really remember is on Friends where you have Ross’ ex-wife Carol who has an affair, and leaves him for Susan.

Susie Banikarim (23:31):

Yes.

Clips (23:32):

Friends, family, we’re gathered here today to join Carol and Susan in holy matrimony.

Jessica Bennett (23:38):

And Susan and Carol go on to get married, and the three of them co-parent their son, which is actually a really nice example of a blended family.

Susie Banikarim (23:47):

I really remember that it was often a joke at Ross’ expense that his wife had left him for a woman, but they did air Susan and Carol’s wedding nearly a decade before same-sex marriage was legal in the United States.

Jessica Bennett (24:00):

Yeah. So all of that was great in a lot of ways, but there were still limits. They didn’t kiss at that wedding. The wedding episode was banned in several markets. And like you said, the relationship was really used as a punchline at the expense of Ross sometimes in a funny way, but also as a punchline.

Clips (24:20):

It seems like Ross is the guy who would marry a woman on the verge of being a lesbian, and then push her over the edge.

Jessica Bennett (24:27):

Another thing that happened was later on, the actress who played Susan actually did an interview where she talked about how she was cast for the role, because basically she didn’t look like a lesbian. So she was palatable enough for the Friends audience.

Susie Banikarim (24:41):

That’s a parallel to Jean in the Golden Girls episode that in some ways it’s progress to have lesbian characters who don’t look like some stereotype the same way it’s progress not to have gay men who always have to be sassy best friends. But on the other hand, it’s also about making them accessible to a “mainstream audience,” I guess.

Jessica Bennett (25:01):

Yeah. Exactly. And actually, I want to go back to Jean for a moment, and that Golden Girls episode that started all of this, because yes, on the one hand, Jean is the perfect not too lesbian lesbian, but there are also some things in watching the episode now that really stood out to me. The first thing is that Jean’s character is pretty well-developed for a gay character at that time. She’s comfortable with her sexuality. She’s uninterested in hiding it. At one point when Dorothy is telling her that she wasn’t sure, she should tell the other girls, Jean says, “Well, I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of who I am.”

Clips (25:36):

Hey. You know your friends better than I do. If you think they’re the people who can handle it, I’d prefer to tell them.

Jessica Bennett (25:43):

And also, she’s always been a lesbian. She’s not just trying this on, which I think is how in later years, a lot of the gay characters were depicted as just trying it out, and then going back to the way they were. And even when she has the hots for Rose, it’s not treated in a predatory sense, or even so much a joke. And then when the episode closes, after we’ve learned that Rose doesn’t share the feelings, but she says this really lovely thing, which is she gently tells Jean, “If I were like you,” meaning a lesbian, “I’d be proud and flattered that you thought of me that way.”

Susie Banikarim (26:18):

That is actually a really lovely way to respond. I think we all wish that when we were presented with something uncomfortable, we would respond in such a gentle and sweet way.

Jessica Bennett (26:28):

And it’s interesting looking back, and trying to analyze I guess, what is going on here, and how much the writers were actually conscious of what they’re doing. Because on the one hand, Jean, she appears she’s very attractive. She’s super palatable. She looks like the other girls. She’s got her own caftan. She’s not butch. She’s not playing into the stereotype we might have of what a lesbian looks like. At the same time, the writers are not shying away from the fact that she is who she is. They say the word lesbian in that episode over, and over, and over again. If you were confusing Lebanese and lesbian before, you will not be confusing it after you watch this. And that was really not common at that time.

Susie Banikarim (27:12):

We’ve finally seen an evolution to some degree with how lesbians are depicted on TV, but I’m curious if anything else comes of the Lebanese lesbian joke.

Jessica Bennett (27:36):

Well, yes. So just to recap, after Golden Girls, the joke first re-emerges in 1991 on the Rosie O’Donnell Show in a conversation with Ellen DeGeneres. And then again, it appears in Mean Girls as a wink-wink inside joke about Janis Ian, the hot goth Lebanese lesbian. But this is the best part. The joke keeps coming up.

Susie Banikarim (27:56):

It really does have a life of its own.

Jessica Bennett (27:58):

It is again in a 2011 episode of Glee. This is an episode titled Born This Way, which is the Lady Gaga queer anthem.

Susie Banikarim (28:06):

Yes. I watched Glee.

Jessica Bennett (28:07):

I’m guessing you also watched Glee. Okay. Yes. Obviously.

Susie Banikarim (28:10):

I’m familiar both with Lady Gaga and Glee.

Jessica Bennett (28:13):

Okay. And in this episode, there’s this scene of Santana and Brittany, and Brittany gets a T-shirt made that’s supposed to say lesbian, but instead it says Lebanese.

Clips (28:23):

Wait, was that supposed to be lesbian?

(28:25):

Yeah. Isn’t that what it says?

Jessica Bennett (28:27):

And it’s supposed to be I guess this airhead moment, or mistake, but there it is again, Lebanese lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (28:33):

I probably watched this, and it didn’t register for me, because I didn’t know that this joke was a thing. So I probably was just like, “Yes. She’s very ditzy.”

Jessica Bennett (28:41):

Then later on in 2017, there’s actually an episode of Master of None. This is the show created by Aziz Ansari, and they devote this entire episode to the coming out story of Denise, who’s played by Lena Waithe.

Susie Banikarim (28:55):

We finally found a show that I did not watch, but I do remember that Lena won an Emmy for this. Right? I’ve been meaning to watch this show.

Jessica Bennett (29:02):

Yes. Lena Waithe won an Emmy for this. But the interesting thing here is that this joke appears again, but this time, it’s a little bit less of a joke. Here. I’m going to let Maya explain this.

Maya Salam (29:14):

I talk about this episode all the time, because I do think it’s pretty much one of the greatest episodes of television in the last 10 years. But in this episode, the Lebanese lesbian joke takes a little bit of a different spin, even though it’s used in a similar way, but it’s not as jokey. Lena Waithe is the adult Denise. But here, you have the teenage Denise speaking to Dev, the childhood version of Aziz Ansari’s character. But they have this conversation.

Clips (29:40):

Wait, are you trying to tell me that you’re?

Maya Salam (29:43):

She says, “I’m Lebanese.”

Clips (29:45):

Lebanese? Wait, you’re from Lebanon?

(29:47):

No. I don’t know how to. I’m not comfortable with the word lesbian.

Maya Salam (29:52):

And she uses that as a cover, because she’s not ready to use the word lesbian, or say the word lesbian, even as reference to herself, who she is, or in conversation, because she’s still grappling with that reality. So she uses it as a substitute word that she’s more comfortable saying.

Jessica Bennett (30:11):

I just love that so much, because it’s like, we’ve seen this play on words go from “Ha ha, wink, wink, that’s what she said,” joke to this actually really poignant moment that allows this character to say how she identifies without having to say it.

Susie Banikarim (30:29):

Yeah. It’s really sweet in a way that this joke that now that we’ve traced the history, started in a way that was throwaway really has become meaningful for some people.

Jessica Bennett (30:39):

Okay. I have one other thing to tell you, which is that as I was interviewing Maya, she had been watching RuPaul’s Drag Race where this joke came up again.

Maya Salam (30:47):

I couldn’t believe when this happened. It seemed like I was dreaming in a way, because it was so perfect.

Jessica Bennett (30:54):

And what was happening is Maya was watching this episode of Drag Race, where the queens are tasked in this challenge with giving some lesbians a makeover.

Maya Salam (31:02):

Ru and Michelle have this exchange where Michelle Visage asks, “Why are we remaking Lebanese women,” and Ru’s like-

Clips (31:11):

Not Lebanese, Michelle, lesbian.

(31:15):

Lesbian.

Maya Salam (31:16):

And then you really have the full circle moment where Michelle is like-

Clips (31:20):

That sounds like fun. Thanks, Golden Girls.

Maya Salam (31:24):

And she looks at the camera, and winks, and I’m like, “We’re living in a simulation.”

Susie Banikarim (31:29):

Oh my God. It’s perfect.

Jessica Bennett (31:34):

It’s almost too perfect. And I guess, I don’t know. Somewhere in writers rooms all over America, people are still deciding that this is a joke worthy of telling.

Susie Banikarim (31:44):

That is beautiful. And I have to say that going on this journey with you about this joke has made me love the Golden Girls even more than I did before, which I did not know was possible.

Jessica Bennett (31:55):

I love that, and I’m so glad. And I also have one more surprise for you, Susie, though it’s not actually for you. But do you remember when I told you that Maya, this is Maya Salam, New York Times culture editor, very established journalist, was once the proud owner of lebaneselesbian.com.

Susie Banikarim (32:15):

Of course. How could I forget such a thing?

Jessica Bennett (32:17):

How could you forget? Well, when we were talking, she confessed to me that she actually let it lapse, and I was horrified. Honestly, that’s pretty homophobic maybe even. And I did what a good ally does. I decided to buy it for her. So Susie, you’re now speaking to the owner of lebaneselesbian.com, which honestly is probably appropriate. So I need to figure out how to transfer this to Maya immediately.

Susie Banikarim (32:46):

That’s really beautiful. Congratulations, Maya.

Jessica Bennett (32:49):

And congratulations to Lebanese lesbians everywhere.

Susie Banikarim (32:57):

Jess, do you want to tell listeners what we have coming up next week?

Jessica Bennett (33:00):

Yes. It’s an interview with the director of Bottoms, the hilarious gay fight club comedy whose director happens to also be the best friend of one of our producers, Sharon.

Emma Seligman (33:10):

I knew that I wanted to make a teen comedy, and that I wanted it to be queer. From the get-go, there was no, “We will see what the sexualities of these characters are.”

Susie Banikarim (33:24):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about, and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected], or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (33:38):

If you love this podcast, please rate, and review us on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (33:48):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also, check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club, and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (33:57):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (34:12):

Our executive producer from the Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Suzy Banikarim …

Jessica Bennett (34:29):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

EPISODE 22 – HOW ‘GOLDEN GIRLS’ SPAWNED AN ENDURING LESBIAN JOKE (Pt 1)

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett (00:00):

The year was 1986 and Golden Girls. A groundbreaking new sitcom was in its second season. The show followed the escapades of four senior women living together in Miami as they navigated their friendships and their sex lives. That in and of itself was radical for the time, but the show also pushed boundaries in more subtle ways. Like in this episode where Jean, a college friend of Dorothy’s comes to visit the girls and they find out she is a lesbian.

Clips (00:29):

Come on. Now. I heard you laughing. What’s so funny.

(00:32):

For starters, Jean is a lesbian.

Jessica Bennett (00:34):

But there was some confusion.

Clips (00:36):

What’s funny about that?

(00:37):

You aren’t surprised?

(00:39):

Of course not. I mean, I’ve never known any personally, but isn’t Danny Thomas one?

(00:54):

Not Lebanese, Blanche. Lesbian.

(00:59):

Lesbian.

Jessica Bennett (01:01):

It’s a classic sitcom joke, a silly play on words and one that might’ve been forgotten over time. And yet that joke that punchline has lived on for nearly 40 years. I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (01:16):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (01:18):

And this is In Retrospect where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (01:24):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (01:26):

Today we’re talking about the Golden Girls first encounter with a lesbian and the way it spawned enduring gay joke. But we’re also talking about the creative ways that Hollywood has written, and sometimes hidden queer characters for decades. This is part one.

(01:43):

So, Susie, we’re talking today about an episode of the Golden Girls called, Isn’t It Romantic, but as I like to refer to it, the Lebanese lesbian episode. This episode aired in November 1986 on NBC, and it centers around a friend of Dorothy’s who comes to town to stay with the girls who happens to be a lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (02:05):

How scandalous.

Jessica Bennett (02:06):

And to set the scene a little bit, this was the Reagan era. Shoulder pads are gracing the runways and the workplace, and Golden Girls was this wildly popular show. Each Saturday night at nine PM, millions of Americans gathered on their living room sofas to tune into the lives of Dorothy, Rose, Sophia and Blanche, who are four women living together in Miami. And the characters, they were all widowed or divorced. And what’s so funny is that they were actually described in all of the media as elderly back then, even though most of them were in their fifties.

Susie Banikarim (02:41):

That’s worrying for me.

Jessica Bennett (02:44):

Right? And the show documents their lives while they navigate life and love and friendship and sex, and Blanche in particular has a lot of sex. Susie, did you watch The Golden Girls?

Susie Banikarim (02:56):

I did watch Golden Girls, yeah. I watched growing up, and I feel like we watched as a family a lot of the time. Our favorite character was Sofia, who was Dorothy’s mom who lived with the girls. And I think I always liked that because my grandmother lived with us, so it felt very representative of an immigrant family. And Sofia was Sicilian, so she told a lot of anecdotes from the old country.

Jessica Bennett (03:16):

I think that was really common. This was a show that a lot of people watched intergenerationally and the characters included Sofia, the Sicilian mother of Dorothy who was played by Bea Arthur. She’s this wise cracking substitute teacher who’s always wearing a caftan.

Susie Banikarim (03:34):

I know my hero.

Jessica Bennett (03:36):

And then there’s Blanche played by Rue McClanahan. She’s like the man-hungry Southern Belle who’s always talking about sex, and she owns the house that they all live in. And then of course, there is Betty White’s character Rose, who is this innocent farm girl from Minnesota who never gets the jokes.

Susie Banikarim (03:56):

It’s funny that they were in their fifties because I remembered them being very old ladies.

Jessica Bennett (04:02):

There was that meme going around comparing sex in the city, those women now to the Golden Girls then, and just the way they look side by side is so different.

Susie Banikarim (04:13):

I remember that meme because it was making the rounds on social media after that new Sex and the City reboot came out and fans realized that the actors are actually a little older than the Golden Girls were supposed to be back then, which really encapsulates how differently we think about women in their fifties now than we did then. They all had gray hair, I feel like.

Jessica Bennett (04:32):

Yes.

Susie Banikarim (04:32):

Or if it wasn’t gray, it felt like it was.

Jessica Bennett (04:35):

Well, and there were certainly the caftans, they were dressing like older women, but that was part of what made this show great. Golden Girls, I think was ahead of its time in various ways. For one, it was created by a woman, Susan Harris, but the characters and the women playing the characters were all women who might have been considered past their prime in other contexts. And not only were they supposedly passed their prime, but they were extremely open about their sex lives. I think in a lot of ways, the Golden Girls were the original sex positives.

Clips (05:12):

I happened to have an affection for bayous. Matter of fact, I became a woman in one.

(05:18):

I thought you lost it in a hot air balloon.

(05:21):

I thought you lost it at a pancake breakfast.

(05:24):

Well, those don’t count.

Susie Banikarim (05:27):

And they were always dating, which I think is also another thing that you don’t really see for “elderly” women that they have active romantic lives, and that was a huge part of the storylines.

Jessica Bennett (05:38):

Before we get into the episode itself, Susie, you’re a resident TV expert. We need to explain for people who didn’t live during this era, what you need to know about 80s sitcoms.

Susie Banikarim (05:49):

Yeah, I think the difference is that sitcoms were very much appointment television when we were growing up. You knew what time they came on. There was always between eight and 11 o’clock at night. And if you were lucky, your family let you stay up to watch them, and they were family friendly. You gathered round a television together and you watched and it felt like you knew those people.

Jessica Bennett (06:09):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (06:10):

And they also had this kind of famous laugh track, this canned laugh. It did just become the soundtrack of these shows. And so it helped cue you on what was supposed to be a joke and how it worked. I actually, I have to say I love sitcoms. It feels funny to admit this now, but we really love the Cosby Show in my family, and I even like some more current sitcoms. I loved Modern Family. So it’s very much, I think when you’re an immigrant family, one of the ways in which you learn about how America is supposed to work.

Jessica Bennett (06:42):

And that’s an interesting point because I think that these shows were catering to mainstream America, and so often they were really trying to reflect the cultural norms of the time, which sometimes were retrograde in some ways, but occasionally these shows would push against them either subtly or not so subtly. Like I love Lucy did this in the 1950s with pregnancy at a time when even just the word was forbidden on TV.

Susie Banikarim (07:09):

Why was pregnancy a forbidden word? It’s not a dirty thing to be pregnant. She was married.

Jessica Bennett (07:14):

We’re going to get into all of the weird rules-

Susie Banikarim (07:16):

Oh my god, amazing.

Jessica Bennett (07:17):

Around what you can and can’t say on television. But the thing is, when this episode, when Golden Girls was airing, there were really very few gay characters on television, and especially in the 80s, mid-80s, if a writer did Dare to create one, the plot line around that character often related to AIDS. And then within those gay representations, it was so rare to be almost non-existent to actually feature an out lesbian on a sitcom.

Susie Banikarim (07:47):

Yeah, I can’t remember one until actually much later. The one that comes to mind immediately for me is Grey’s Anatomy. But that was in the two thousands, so we’re talking about much later.

Jessica Bennett (07:58):

Yeah, there were definitely ones before that. But the thing about this episode is that it’s coming out at a time when Golden Girls is really at the top of its game. It has a devoted regular audience of 15 to 20 million viewers.

Susie Banikarim (08:12):

Wow.

Jessica Bennett (08:13):

And out of the top 10 most viewed shows, it ranks number five.

Susie Banikarim (08:18):

Oh wow. I mean, I knew it was hugely popular, but I don’t know that I realized it was so popular. But also the interesting thing is it’s become this cult show since I remember watching it when I was growing up, but then I have friends who are still obsessed with it. So it really has taken on kind of a cultural meaning beyond just that time.

Jessica Bennett (08:43):

Okay, so let’s get into the episode. This episode, as I mentioned, is called Isn’t It Romantic? And it airs in season two, and the real plot of the episode involves Dorothy’s college friend Jean, who is coming to visit the girls after the death of her long-time partner, Pat. Pat, note the gender-neutral name. It’s easy for the girls to assume that Pat may be a man.

Susie Banikarim (09:05):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (09:05):

And Jean is and has always been a lesbian, and Dorothy knows this, but she’s worried about telling the other girls. And then what ends up happening, which gets us to our Lebanese moment, is that we learn that Jean actually develops a crush on Rose. And so Dorothy then tells her mom, who gets a kick out of this, and they’re in the bedroom giggling and in walks, Blanche.

Clips (09:27):

Come on now, I heard you laughing. What’s so funny?

Jessica Bennett (09:31):

Sophia then tells Blanche that Jean is a lesbian, but Blanche thinks she means Lebanese. And so she asked if Danny Thomas, who is a popular Lebanese-American entertainer at that time is one.

Clips (09:43):

Not Lebanese, Blanche. Lesbian.

(09:47):

Lesbian. Lesbian. Lesbian. Isn’t that where one woman and another-

(09:57):

We already know what it means.

Jessica Bennett (10:00):

Dorothy then tells Blanche that Jean, the lesbian has developed feelings for Rose. And Blanche in typical Blanche fashion, she famously loves attention, is totally unconcerned that Jean is a lesbian, but she is very concerned that Jean is into Rose and not her.

Susie Banikarim (10:17):

It’s a classic Blanche, but actually I have to say it feels pretty progressive how well they’re all taking the news. How does this all end up playing out?

Jessica Bennett (10:25):

Yeah, it plays out in kind of classic Golden Girls fashion. Basically, Rose still doesn’t know that Jean is a lesbian, and she definitely doesn’t know that Jean likes her, but they’re developing this friendship. And then there’s this really funny misunderstanding where they’re staying up late and the other girls are asleep. And so Rose is like, “Well, Jean, you can sleep in my bed with me.” And so then there’s this scene where they’re in bed and Jean rolls over and tells Rose that she’s quite fond of her, and I love this line because it’s so sweet and innocent. But then you watch as this clicks in Rose’s mind, what’s actually going on here, and she in response, pretends to be asleep.

Susie Banikarim (11:06):

Do they talk about it eventually?

Jessica Bennett (11:09):

Yeah. So eventually this little bit of drama is all resolved and they have this nice conversation and the girls remain friends, but not lovers.

(11:22):

And so the Lebanese joke is not actually the focus of the episode itself. It comes midway through after we find out that Jean has the hots for Rose. And it’s funny, it’s well-timed. It’s not too heavy handed. It’s maybe not even that funny, but it seems to be playing on this idea that the words Lebanese and lesbian sound similar.

Susie Banikarim (11:44):

It’s a perfect sitcom joke though. Sitcom jokes are a little absurd and not riotously funny for the most part. They’re almost like a little punny or juvenile, it’s meant to be silly.

Jessica Bennett (11:56):

But okay, so for many reasons, this was an episode that really stuck in people’s minds and it was groundbreaking in a lot of ways, but it was not groundbreaking for the Lebanese joke. And so you might have thought that that joke would’ve whatever, it gets lost to history. It’s kind of funny. We move on. And yet then a full decade later, it appears again in a very public fashion on an episode of the Rosie O’Donnell Show where Ellen DeGeneres appears.

Susie Banikarim (12:24):

Oh, interesting.

Jessica Bennett (12:25):

You probably remember this time because they were rumors circulating that Ellen, her character on her sitcom and also Ellen the real person was gay, and that she was going to come out as gay, which she soon would in April, I believe, of 1997.

Clips (12:41):

Susan, I’m gay.

Susie Banikarim (12:44):

Yeah, I completely remember this. It was such a big deal because there had never been a gay lead on a sitcom or primetime television show before.

Jessica Bennett (12:53):

And so this appearance on Rosie’s show is before any of that happens. I’ll just walk you through it. So Ellen comes on stage, they banter. Rosie is asking her about rumors, about Ellen’s character on the show, and she gives her the opportunity to set the record straight. And so then Ellen reveals, “Well, we do find out that the character is Lebanese.” And so Rosie says, “What, just out of the blue?” And Ellen then jokes about how there have been clues that she might be Lebanese. She eats a lot of baba ganoush. She’s pretty good to hummus, and she’s a big fan of Casey Kasem, the DJ.

Clips (13:30):

Hi, his is Casey Kasem, American Top 40 has moved to a new-

Jessica Bennett (13:34):

Who I actually didn’t realize was Lebanese.

Susie Banikarim (13:36):

I did not know that either.

Jessica Bennett (13:38):

And so then Rosie says you, “I also like Casey Kasem, maybe I’m Lebanese.” And Ellen says, “You know what, Rosie? Sometimes I pick up that you might be Lebanese.” And basically the whole thing is just wink-wink, but like an obvious one. And Rosie ends by saying, “Actually good for the network. Many networks wouldn’t be so comfortable with different ethnicities.”

Susie Banikarim (14:06):

Okay, that’s amazing.

Jessica Bennett (14:07):

And then Ellen closes it off by saying, “Well, you know, Rosie, half of Hollywood is Lebanese.”

Susie Banikarim (14:15):

Oh my God, I love this. But Rosie wasn’t out yet, right?

Jessica Bennett (14:18):

No, Rosie was not formally out. She didn’t come out until 2002 after this talk show had ended. But I think people knew. That’s why it’s funny, that’s why the joke worked. And it becomes this whole wink-wink. We can have this whole conversation about our sexuality without actually using the word lesbian, and the audience is going to get it. And of course, this is at a time when it’s much less common to be out in Hollywood. And that’s what makes the joke.

Susie Banikarim (15:03):

Didn’t Rameen write about this moment between Rosie and Ellen in his book about the View?

Jessica Bennett (15:09):

Yes, he did. So for listeners, this is Rameen Satuta, our friend, who is now the editor of Variety. And he wrote a book called Ladies Who Punch, which is all about the juicy inside details of the View. And in the book he talks to Rosie about Ellen’s coming out. And there’s this really interesting quote where she says to Rameen, “I remember thinking, well, she’s going to ruin her whole career.” And then when Ellen came on Rosie’s show, Rosie said she had to figure out a way to, here’s the quote, “Stand next to her so that everybody in the know is going to know I’m not leaving her out there alone.”

Susie Banikarim (15:43):

Oh, that’s interesting, right? Because she doesn’t want to seem like she’s not in solidarity with her, but she’s also worried about her own career. It must have been very complicated, actually.

Jessica Bennett (15:52):

Exactly. And so they’re doing it in this way where it’s kind of like, if you know, you know.

Susie Banikarim (15:57):

But it’s actually kind of sweet, right? I mean, it makes that moment even more meaningful because it’s a way of her showing support and finding a way to do it in a way that’s going to get through the sensors, I’m sure. Had they seen the joke on Golden Girls? Is that where it came from?

Jessica Bennett (16:11):

Well, so that’s the thing, we don’t know. You have to presume. So I’ve gone up and down into nexus deep dive all the way trying to find the origins of this joke, and the first known use of it is on Golden Girls. So had Rosie seen Golden Girls? I’m not sure. Or was this something that was one of those things that was out in the ether where you don’t really know the origin? It reminds me of the lesbian U-Haul joke. What do you bring to the second date? A U-Haul?

Susie Banikarim (16:39):

Wait, is that joke from something?

Jessica Bennett (16:40):

I don’t know. We’ve all always heard that joke. It’s certainly appeared in various sitcoms and on television and pop culture, but I don’t know that anyone really knows the origin. Though, probably if our listeners are anything like New York Times readers, they’ll now fact check us on that, which I welcome. Please tell us the origins of that joke.

Susie Banikarim (16:58):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (16:59):

But there’s a lot of these wink, wink nod jokes when it comes to people’s sexuality. And actually, this makes me think of something that Sharon one of our producers point out, which is Jean in the Golden Girls episode is A, “friend of Dorothy.” Friend of Dorothy is a reference often used for a gay person that comes from Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.

Susie Banikarim (17:22):

Oh, that’s where a friend of Dorothy comes from?

Jessica Bennett (17:24):

And so this too is one of those jokes with unclear origins. Best I could find for why that is the case is because Dorothy was played by Judy Garland, who, though she herself was not gay, or at least not that we know of, was a huge icon to the gay community.

Susie Banikarim (17:41):

That’s amazing. Yeah, of course I’ve heard friend of Dorothy, but I didn’t connect it to this episode, but I wonder if the writers were doing a wink to that.

Jessica Bennett (17:49):

I feel like they must have been. There’s all these wink wink, nod nods. And so then the next time the joke appears, this is, I know a favorite movie of both of ours Comes in Mean Girls.

Clips (18:00):

On Wednesdays, we wear Pink.

Susie Banikarim (18:02):

Best Movie.

Jessica Bennett (18:03):

The best movie. And so this time, so this is again the Lebanese lesbian joke, and this time the plot point involves Janis. Janis is the gothy indie side character.

Susie Banikarim (18:14):

Well, she’s the one who takes in the Lindsay Lohan character when she doesn’t have friends in the beginning, right?

Jessica Bennett (18:19):

Exactly. And she’s this outsider, and her best friend is gay, and she presents as a lesbian in a lot of ways, which is something that Regina George then uses to make fun of her throughout.

Clips (18:32):

I was like, Janis, I can’t invite you because I think you’re a lesbian. I mean, I couldn’t have a lesbian at my party. There could be girls there in their bathing suits.

Susie Banikarim (18:40):

My God, Regina George is such a bitch.

Jessica Bennett (18:43):

So that’s Regina George making fun of Janis Ian, by the way, Janis Ian named after a famous 1970s lesbian singer songwriter. So that’s another underhanded thing there.

Susie Banikarim (18:55):

Oh, fascinating.

Jessica Bennett (18:56):

And so then you get to the very end of the movie, and Janis and Katie and everyone are at the school dance, and Janis, you’ll remember, is wearing this very androgynous suit, but she’s dancing with Kevin G who is one of the guys from Katie’s math team, and it’s clear that Kevin G is into her.

Susie Banikarim (19:13):

A fellow mathlete.

Jessica Bennett (19:15):

Oh, yeah, mathlete.

Susie Banikarim (19:15):

A fellow mathlete.

Jessica Bennett (19:17):

Mathlete. Yes. So she’s dancing with Katie’s Fellow Math Leap, Kevin G, and Kevin G says to her-

Clips (19:24):

“You’re Puerto Rican?”

(19:25):

Lebanese.

Susie Banikarim (19:27):

Wait, she wasn’t Lebanese?

Jessica Bennett (19:29):

No, she is Lebanese.

Susie Banikarim (19:30):

This is blowing my mind. I’m such an innocent. I was like, “Oh, she’s Lebanese like me. Middle Eastern.”

Jessica Bennett (19:34):

Well, no, she is Lebanese, and she talks about it at various points in the film, but-

Susie Banikarim (19:40):

She’s also a lesbian.

Jessica Bennett (19:40):

If you subscribe to the queer fan theory, yes, this is her confirming to those who know that she’s also a lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (19:49):

Okay. That’s amazing.

Jessica Bennett (19:49):

So there’s all these funny theories. You could go deep into Mean Girls fan theories, but one of the theories is that at some point, Janis says she’s Lebanese, and Regina may have misheard her, and so that’s why she thinks she’s a lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (20:03):

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that’s hilarious.

Jessica Bennett (20:05):

You could see the ending of that movie as her telling Kevin G, she’s Lebanese flat. That’s it. Or you could read it as her coming out. And so there are various interpretations of what that means.

Susie Banikarim (20:18):

Wow, this is blowing my mind.

Jessica Bennett (20:19):

So Suzy, if you can’t tell already, I got a little bit obsessed with this lesbian Lebanese joke, and I really started going down a rabbit hole that took way too much time. But I went on a journey because I needed to know where the origin of this joke was. And was it really as simplistic as it sounded?

Susie Banikarim (20:56):

Well, first of all, I love this about you. One of my favorite things about you is that you can come up against something that just seems simple and then spend hours and hours trying to come up with the origin.

Jessica Bennett (21:07):

Too long, too long.

Susie Banikarim (21:07):

And I do think it’s going to pay off. And I’m curious, what did you hope you were going to find? What was the thing you were searching for?

Jessica Bennett (21:18):

Well, I guess I wanted to credit the original author of the joke, but I wanted to know if there was something we weren’t getting. It just seems too simple. Is it really just a play on words? You seriously mix up the words Lebanese and lesbian? I just didn’t get it, and I thought there must be more to it.

Susie Banikarim (21:37):

This is very writerly of you to want to make sure that whoever came up with this had really gotten the credit they deserve. I love that.

Jessica Bennett (21:45):

So, okay, here’s where I began. I had a great place to start, which is with my friend Maya Salam. She is a culture editor at the New York Times. She is a Golden Girls Super fan. Her dog is named after Bea Arthur.

Susie Banikarim (21:58):

That’s amazing.

Jessica Bennett (21:58):

And on top of that, she is an actual Lebanese lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (22:02):

Oh, whoa.

Jessica Bennett (22:03):

So I figured she would be a good place to begin.

Maya Salam (22:07):

I have been thinking about it and obsessing about it, this very strange play on words for so many decades that in 2010 I actually bought the domain lebaneselesbian.com with high hopes of creating a blog. And the only thing I did on it was actually embed the clip from that Golden Girls episode at the top.

Jessica Bennett (22:26):

Amazing.

Maya Salam (22:29):

So this has been a long-running theme in my life.

Jessica Bennett (22:33):

So I was screaming on the phone with Maya because I had no idea when I called her that that website was a thing.

Susie Banikarim (22:42):

What a perfect thing.

Jessica Bennett (22:43):

The other thing is that Maya actually remembers watching that episode in real time. So I’ll let her explain what it was like to see that.

Maya Salam (22:50):

We had only been in the US for a couple of years. My family came to America from Beirut, Lebanon, and I took to watching a lot of TV as soon as we got here. It was my little outlet in a way that I learned a lot about pretty much everything I learned about American culture. And I was obsessed with the Golden Girls from the start. I still am.

Clips (23:13):

(singing)

Maya Salam (23:13):

I was sitting on the living room floor. I know my mom and at least one of my sisters was in the room.

Clips (23:20):

Not Lebanese.

Maya Salam (23:21):

And of course, they heard the word Lebanese and caught everyone’s attention.

Clips (23:26):

Lesbian.

Maya Salam (23:26):

But then they paused because they understood what the word lesbian meant, even though I didn’t. So it was sort of like I was this little girl cracking up at this joke, and they were frozen probably in fear that I was going to ask them what lesbian meant. At that young age, I didn’t know what a lesbian was, but to hear Lebanese, which obviously I am and was such a interesting word, and not one that I was hearing in my life, we were in Missouri at the time to hear it on the most popular show on television. It just made me feel so heard and seen.

Jessica Bennett (24:05):

It would be a number of years before Maya would actually come out as a lesbian. But I just love that image of her in the TV room watching this show so much.

Susie Banikarim (24:13):

Me too. I know from watching TV with my Middle Eastern family that anything that was even vaguely scandalous was so uncomfortable.

Jessica Bennett (24:22):

And so Maya has actually gone on to cover this subject as a journalist. And not just Golden Girls, but the idea of queer representation on television. So I thought for sure she could help me understand where this joke came from. This was a joke that had followed her entire life, but she didn’t know.

Susie Banikarim (24:40):

Oh my God, you’re never going to get to the bottom of this, but you will.

Jessica Bennett (24:45):

Well, no. So where did I go from there? Okay, so every lesbian I know receives a phone call or a text about this.

Susie Banikarim (24:52):

I’m sure they really appreciated that.

Jessica Bennett (24:53):

My resident owl got a phone call.

Susie Banikarim (24:55):

Wait, what’s an owl?

Jessica Bennett (24:57):

An old wise lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (24:58):

Oh, I didn’t know that was a thing.

Jessica Bennett (25:00):

She had never heard of it. I then was with my friends, Danielle and Sarah. And Sarah has a friend who is Lebanese, not a lesbian, but Lebanese. And so we texted her asking if she’d ever heard of it, and she actually said, “Yes. Oh my God, I’ve been so confused by this for years. This is a bad joke that people would say to me when I would say, ‘I’m Lebanese.'” And so I was like, “Wait, how does that look?”

(25:26):

And so she wrote this out on text. So her, “I’m Lebanese.” Guy, “You’re a lesbian?”

Susie Banikarim (25:32):

Of course. You can picture that at every frat party if you’re a lesbian.

Jessica Bennett (25:36):

It’s just a that’s what she said joke. And then I was in the middle of a deep research dig and realized I was late to therapy. So I paused for therapy. And then I asked my therapist, she’s not Lebanese, but she is a lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (25:51):

I like how we have to clarify for each person, now. Lebanese lesbian or both.

Jessica Bennett (25:56):

And she very much knew the joke. She knew immediately, but she too thought that it had originated with Rosie and Ellen, not with the Golden Girls. And actually she also made the good point that there are a lot of these types of jokes that persist. Another one that she uses with her friends is the toaster oven joke from Ellen.

Susie Banikarim (26:16):

Wait, I don’t know the toaster oven joke.

Jessica Bennett (26:17):

I had to look this up. But basically it’s a joke about how if you recruit a straight woman to the lesbian cause, they get a toaster oven as their reward.

Susie Banikarim (26:27):

The lesbian gets the toaster oven, or the formerly straight woman?

Jessica Bennett (26:30):

It was a gift of recruitment. I see. So in the common usage it’s like, “Oh yeah, did you give her a toaster oven?”

Susie Banikarim (26:38):

So I thought it was a reward for the person who had recruited the straight woman into the lesbian cause.

Jessica Bennett (26:43):

Well, maybe she deserves a toaster oven too.

Clips (26:47):

Susan.

(26:49):

There’s the toaster oven.

(26:50):

Thank you.

Jessica Bennett (26:52):

Okay, so that clearly got me nowhere. But finally, I reached out to Drew Mackey. He is a journalist and the co-host of an amazing podcast that I now can’t stop listening to called Gayest Episode Ever. And so here’s what Drew told me.

Drew Mackie (27:08):

I was really thinking about, this is the hardest question in the list of questions you sent me. I’m like, “Why is this a thing?” And it made me think of Lake Titicaca, where Lake Titicaca is like an easy joke in the culture of anyone who’s not someone who lives around Lake Titicaca because it sounds like something funny, even though it’s not that thing. And I’m like, “Is that it?” I really do think that’s it.

Jessica Bennett (27:29):

Wait, is it that simplistic?

Drew Mackie (27:31):

Lebanese sounds like this word that is sexual in nature and no matter how much studying and maturing we do, we are still little kids giggling at the thing that sounds like another thing, and I can’t think of another explanation for it.

Susie Banikarim (27:47):

It’s sort of like how kids laugh whenever you say Uranus, even though Uranus is not objectively a funny word.

Jessica Bennett (27:53):

Yes. Okay. Yes. On that note, before I get into how Drew helped me unlock the mystery of this joke, there’s a small but very important piece of his personal history that Susie I think you need to hear.

Drew Mackie (28:04):

I remember learning the word from Sophia and then using it at school. Did not understand what it meant, I just thought it was like a generic insult for someone that you don’t like. And then I had to have explained to me that just because Sophia says something does not mean that I should be allowed to say it, which was surprising to me. It was like, “Oh, she’s allowed to say that on TV and I can’t in school. That’s weird.”

Jessica Bennett (28:24):

Who did you call a slit, by the way?

Drew Mackie (28:26):

This girl named Aida and we were fighting over some sort of toy on the playground. I was like in second grade. And then she was like, “Mrs. Brown. Drew called me a slut.” And she was like, “What?”

Jessica Bennett (28:36):

And you’re like, “Sophia said it.”

Drew Mackie (28:38):

Literally. I can remember being like, “But I learned it from Golden Girls.”

Susie Banikarim (28:43):

It’s really funny that he actually learned the word slut from an actual grandmother.

Jessica Bennett (28:48):

It’s perfect. The show was not just groundbreaking, but it was educational in a really important way. And speaking of educational, Drew has actually written a very well-researched oral history of its episode.

Susie Banikarim (29:00):

Oh wow.

Jessica Bennett (29:01):

He did it a few years back for a now defunct gay magazine out of LA called Frontiers. But as part of that oral history, he spoke to this guy, Jeffrey Duteil, who was apparently the man who was actually responsible for writing that episode of The Golden Girls.

Susie Banikarim (29:17):

Okay, I’m genuinely impressed by how far down this rabbit hole you went.

Jessica Bennett (29:21):

Thank you. But also, we’re not done.

Susie Banikarim (29:23):

Oh, I know.

Jessica Bennett (29:25):

So I obviously had to get in touch with Jeffrey, but Drew couldn’t find his email. So then we began this game of telephone, which essentially was first I spoke to this woman. This is the behind-the-scenes reporting that you normally don’t put into the article. But since we’re on the podcast, we’re going to put it all in.

Susie Banikarim (29:43):

Yeah, I love it.

Jessica Bennett (29:44):

So first I spoke to Winifred Hervey, who herself is a trailblazer in many ways. She wrote an executive produced shows like the Cosby Show, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And she was a co-producer on Golden Girls. Oh wow. But she didn’t know the origin, of course. So she put me in touch with a guy called Barry Fanaro. He was a staff writer on the show during the time that this episode aired. And I spoke with him and he actually claimed that he had written the joke.

Susie Banikarim (30:07):

Oh.

Jessica Bennett (30:08):

But then, here’s the twist I finally heard from Jeffrey, he’s retired now, he’s 72, he’s a grandparent. And he explained in more detail that, yeah, he had been a freelancer at the time, and he loved Golden Girls. He was an out gay man. He knew Winifred from working with her on a past sitcom. And so he got this spec script to her, and the joke came to him in A, “Burst of creative luck.”

Susie Banikarim (30:38):

So I tend to believe Jeffrey here.

Jessica Bennett (30:41):

I don’t want to get into the middle of this. I’m sure that everyone had a hand in it. I’m not going to mediate between these two writers.

Susie Banikarim (30:47):

That’s very even-handed of you.

Jessica Bennett (30:48):

Many years have passed. But I did learn two important things from this series of conversations. First, as Barry reminded me, all of the characters on this show were a little naive. So it’s not that crazy to think that Blanche might have actually mixed up lesbian for Lebanese.

Susie Banikarim (31:04):

That’s fair.

Jessica Bennett (31:05):

And second, what Jeffrey explained was that there was actually an inside joke here too, and that was that Danny Thomas, who we spoke about before this famous comedian and actor who was Lebanese, is the father not only of Marlo Thomas, but of Tony Thomas whose production company ran Golden Girls.

Susie Banikarim (31:23):

Oh my God.

Jessica Bennett (31:24):

So on top of the wordplay, there was this poking fun at Tony Thomas because it’s his dad, and now we’re going to call his dad a lesbian.

Susie Banikarim (31:34):

Oh God, there are so many layers here we could never have predicted when we started on this journey. I love this.

Jessica Bennett (31:40):

Exactly. There’s another thing, Susie, that became very clear in talking to Jeffrey, which is basically that Golden Girls was always for the gays

Susie Banikarim (31:50):

Because it has a gay icon status.

Jessica Bennett (31:53):

Well, that very much is true now. There are Golden Girls cruises and drag shows and every kind of fun golden Girls themed event under the Sun now, which all sound amazing. I would love to go on a Golden Girls cruise. But I guess I didn’t realize was that Golden Girls has ties to gay culture that are much deeper and really go all the way back to its inception.

Susie Banikarim (32:16):

Oh, really?

Jessica Bennett (32:16):

So from the very first episode in the pilot, there is an out and proud gay character, Coco. I don’t know if you remember this. He was a houseboy. He was then written off. So like arguable how progressive that character actually was. But from the very first episode.

Susie Banikarim (32:32):

I don’t remember that.

Jessica Bennett (32:33):

And then there was this episode where Blanche’s brother Clayton comes out and he pretends that he has slept with Rose in order to disguise the fact that he’s gay. But the point of the episode is really that Blanche has to confront her own homophobia. So then a little bit later, the show took on AIDS in 1990, but not in the way you might have thought. In the episode, it’s Rose who’s told she may have contracted HIV during a blood transfusion. And this is an exchange between she and Blanche.

Clips (33:00):

I’m just saying that I’m a good person. Hell, I’m a goody two shoes.

(33:09):

AIDS is not a bad person’s disease rose. It is not God punishing people for their sins.

Susie Banikarim (33:17):

Wow, that’s really progressive. I think at that time there really was this right wing talking point that AIDS was punishment. So it’s impressive that they took that.

Jessica Bennett (33:26):

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a really poignant line. And then there’s this other fact that Drew alerted me to, which is another episode. It’s in Valentine’s Day episode, and many of these women are widowed. And so Blanche goes to this bar where she orders two glasses of champagne to commemorate her late husband. And while she’s there, she meets a young man who’s going to propose to his boyfriend. And all of this is to say that the episode basically ends with Blanche saying, love is love. The line love is love.

Susie Banikarim (33:57):

Wait, was that a political slogan at that time?

Jessica Bennett (33:59):

No, because this was 1989. And that of course is the phrase that became known as the slogan or part of the rallying cry for marriage equality.

Susie Banikarim (34:09):

That’s an amazing sort of little negative political history that ties to this.

Jessica Bennett (34:12):

Yes. Meanwhile, these were really big and overt moments of gay representation in the show, but there were also more subtle ones too. Here’s Drew Mackey, co-host of Gayest Episode Ever again.

Drew Mackie (34:24):

You have these four women living together in a chosen family, and the reasons that they’ve been separated from their nuclear families are different from what would separate a queer person from their nuclear family, especially back in the eighties. But the result is the same. They’re living together and they’re getting the stuff that you would normally expect to get from parents, siblings, extended family. They’re getting it from each other, even though except for Dorothy and Sophia, they’re not related.

(34:48):

And it doesn’t mean any less to these four women. This is a really powerful relationship they have with each other. And I think that’s subconsciously really good modeling for anyone really. And I think that is the genius of sitcoms, is that you don’t watch to relate, or you don’t certainly don’t want to learn. You just watch to laugh. And if this show is written intelligently enough, they will educate you regardless. And you may not ever realize that that show changed your opinions about anything, particularly gay people. But I think this show definitely did. And this episode definitely did.

Jessica Bennett (35:23):

I think it’s so interesting what Drew is saying here, which is that whether purposeful or not, these messages like chosen family, friendship, community, they really stuck with people and especially gay viewers. And actually, when I was emailing back and forth with Jeffrey, the writer of the episode, he described how the Golden Girls characters for him and for so many of the men he still hears from became these surrogate mothers. They were aunties and grandmothers.

Susie Banikarim (35:52):

Because they were accepting. These examples you’ve gone through are all examples of these women kind of coming to terms with whatever personal feelings they might’ve had and then embracing their loved ones no matter what their sexual orientation. That had to feel relatively unique back then.

Jessica Bennett (36:09):

Yeah, and so I think all of this plays into the way that the show was so embraced by the gay community. And so another thing that I didn’t know that I learned from Jeffrey, the writer, was that he, before he wrote this episode, when he was simply a fan, he would gather with his friends and his community in this communal, celebratory watching of The Golden Girls. So for him, that meant going to gay bars in LA on Saturday nights, and at nine o’clock when the new Golden Girls episode would air, they would turn off the dance music. Everyone would gather around the television, they would watch the show in the bar, and then it would end and they would turn the music back on. Everyone would go back to partying.

Susie Banikarim (36:51):

That sounds so fun, honestly.

Jessica Bennett (36:53):

And he wrote to me that he has now attended many drag performances of different episodes of the show, some of which include this episode. And he’s always pleasantly surprised when Scott, his husband of thirty-nine years, can’t wait to tell a new gay acquaintance that he, Jeffrey wrote the first Gay Golden Girls episode. And they immediately know which one, and they respond with, “Not Lebanese, Blanche. Lesbian.”

Susie Banikarim (37:19):

Oh, that is such a nice story. I love this story. Okay, that feels like a good place to end it for today. But Jess, what do we have coming up in part two?

Jessica Bennett (37:28):

Yeah. Part two is going to look at how queerness has been sneakily written into TV for decades, but also where that Lebanese lesbian joke is today.

Susie Banikarim (37:36):

I can’t wait.

(37:47):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (38:01):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (38:11):

You can also find this on Instagram @jessicabennett and at @susiebnyc. Also, check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This Is 18

Jessica Bennett (38:19):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (38:34):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (38:51):

Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more. Check out Inretropod.com. See you next week.

EPISODE 21 – SEX IN THE 90s WITH EMILI NAGOSKI (Bonus episode!)

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Jessica Bennett (00:00):

The 90s was a decade book-ended by Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky. It gave us MTV’s Boxers or Briefs moment, popularized the concept of the MILF, and spawned the first ever sex tape, one stolen from the home of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. It was an era that inspired a decade of boob jobs, popularized restaurants like Hooters, and gave us Girls Gone wild. But what did all of those things really teach us about love and sex back then?

(00:26):

And now, we ask a sex expert.

Emily Nagoski (00:29):

In 2019, Gwyneth Paltrow did not know the word vulva. She did not know that her vulva was not her vagina, which as I say in Come As You Are, calling your vulva your vagina is like calling your face your throat.

Jessica Bennett (00:47):

I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:48):

And I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:49):

And this is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Susie Banikarim (00:55):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Jessica Bennett (00:57):

Today, we’re joined by sex educator and bestselling author Emily Nagoski. Her new book, Come Together, is out this month.

(01:05):

So I’ve listened to your podcast and I know that on your podcast, which I think was a limited run, you talked about how you weren’t that into pop culture as a young teen, but in fact, I love that on one of my all time favorite shows, Sex Education, your book actually makes an appearance, which was huge, for me anyway.

Emily Nagoski (01:29):

I found out about that because everyone sent me the little clip of it happening, but we don’t have Netflix. That’s not a flex. We have lots and lots of everything. We just don’t happen to have Netflix.

Jessica Bennett (01:39):

You haven’t watched it?

Emily Nagoski (01:40):

I’ve never seen the show.

Jessica Bennett (01:41):

Never, ever? Not even your episode?

Emily Nagoski (01:44):

Nope.

Jessica Bennett (01:44):

Wow.

Emily Nagoski (01:45):

I’ve seen the five seconds of-

Jessica Bennett (01:48):

So funny.

Emily Nagoski (01:48):

… the person saying “You should read Come As You Are.”

Jessica Bennett (01:51):

I mean, I feel like they do an amazing job of breaking down some taboos and talking openly about sexuality. Though, when I was talking to my therapist about you yesterday in our session as happens, she was like, “Well, okay. But in the first season of Sex Education, they really confused the vagina and the vulva,” which I had totally missed.

Emily Nagoski (02:13):

What do they do well? What makes you just feel like, “Oh, this is better than it has been in the past.”

Jessica Bennett (02:18):

I guess I like that it doesn’t feel so heavy-handed. Sexuality is just a part… I mean, that’s the plot of the show, but they’re not making it like they’re forcing it down your throat or trying to teach you. I guess one of the things I remember from growing up in the 90s, which is what we’re here to talk about today, is that everyone was portrayed, or at least the teenagers I watched on television and movies, seemed to be portrayed as these sex-hungry maniacs where that was absolutely the only thing that they could think about.

(02:51):

I’m curious if you had that experience too. What were you consuming in the 90s?

Emily Nagoski (02:54):

I mean, what was I consuming in the 90s? I have never been anyone’s target audience. We literally didn’t even have cable television. I didn’t have cable television until I was in college.

Jessica Bennett (03:05):

I didn’t either, so.

Emily Nagoski (03:06):

I didn’t see any of the things that people saw.

Jessica Bennett (03:10):

What are the things you saw that other people didn’t see?

Emily Nagoski (03:13):

I mean, I watched a lot of PBS.

Jessica Bennett (03:14):

Okay.

Emily Nagoski (03:16):

When we finally did get the beginnings of cable in 1993-ish, I watched a lot of Inside the Actors Studio, but I read a lot. My primary sex education came from a combination of women’s magazines, especially Glamour Magazine and romance novels.

Jessica Bennett (03:35):

What did those teach you?

Emily Nagoski (03:37):

I remember very distinctly reading an article in Glamour Magazine where I learned that men really like it when women appear to be enjoying themselves. And so you should make a lot of noise and you should touch yourself, like touch your own breasts and your own body, and you should say how much you like it because men really love it when women appear to be enjoying themselves. So by the time I got to sexual relationships, my assumption was that it was my job to perform pleasure without any reference to whether or not something actually felt pleasurable.

Jessica Bennett (04:13):

Right. Right. Right.

Emily Nagoski (04:14):

It took some time for me to recognize that I was doing the stuff that they do in romance novels. Basically, there’s a script. You start with the face stuff, boob stuff. You follow the bases, you get to the genitals, your genitals get hungry to have something inside them. Your knees fall apart. You want penetration, and penetration happens and you spiral upwards, enveloped in a cloud of ecstasy.

Jessica Bennett (04:44):

Exactly how it happens.

Emily Nagoski (04:46):

It turns out that’s not how it happens, I was shocked to discover. I was doing the things that the romance novels told me I was supposed to do in terms of behavior. I was acting like a person who enjoyed those things. And within about six months, I started getting really clear that there was a very big difference between the things I was doing that I was told were pleasurable and the things that actually were pleasurable.

(05:10):

I got to college in 1995, and one of the very first things I did was ride my bike to the library and go to the sex section and read The Hite Report. It took me three or four days, but I read as much of it was there. There were literally pages cut out with scissors.

Jessica Bennett (05:30):

Really? What school was this?

Emily Nagoski (05:31):

Yeah. University of Delaware. Born and raised in Delaware. My one true claim to fame is that Jill Biden was my 10th grade English teacher.

Jessica Bennett (05:40):

Oh, my gosh, really?

Emily Nagoski (05:41):

Yeah. Delaware is a very small state.

Jessica Bennett (05:43):

Amazing.

Emily Nagoski (05:44):

So there’s only one copy of The Hite Report. A big chunk of pages had been cut out. Notice that I went back to the library over and over to keep reading this very large book because I was too embarrassed to check it out.

Jessica Bennett (05:56):

How did you know about The Hite Report?

Emily Nagoski (05:58):

I didn’t. I just looked for the largest book in the sex section.

Jessica Bennett (06:02):

Okay. And turns out everyone else had done that too.

Emily Nagoski (06:06):

Somebody had taken a bunch of pages with them.

Jessica Bennett (06:10):

To back up for a moment, you are a sex educator, but you at this point, I don’t think knew that you wanted to be a sex educator.

Emily Nagoski (06:17):

Not at all. I was a big nerd. By the time I got to college, all I knew is that I wanted to go to grad school for something, and I thought, “Oh, you need volunteer work on your resume so that you look like a good candidate for graduate school.” A guy living on my floor in my residence hall was pre-med, and he said, “Oh, come be a Peer Health Educator with me. You’d go into residence halls and talk about all kinds of health that includes sexual health, which is mostly condoms, contraception, and consent.”

(06:46):

And I was like, “I like health. Why not?” So I applied and I got accepted, and I got trained to be a health educator for my fellow undergraduates. At the exact same time that I was being trained to be a sex educator my very first year in undergrad, 1995-96, I got into my first sexual relationship, which ended up being abusive. He became my stalker, and I had to call the police and it was very bad news.

(07:12):

At the same time that I was having my first experience in that kind of relationship, in any kind of sexual relationship with someone who isn’t me, I was also learning all this stuff about sexual communication and sexual health and how periods work and the whole enchilada. I feel like it was an incredible privilege to be learning what it’s supposed to be like while I am doing it. I mean, I made every mistake. I did everything wrong.

Jessica Bennett (07:41):

Like what?

Emily Nagoski (07:42):

Unlike the students I taught when I was teaching undergrad, I didn’t know as an undergrad that your early relationships are very likely to recapitulate the dynamic of your family of origin.

Jessica Bennett (07:52):

I didn’t know that.

Emily Nagoski (07:53):

As a child, your body learns what love looks and feels like. So if you think back to what your family was like when you’re approximately four years old, the relationships of the adults around you when you’re four, would you love your life if those were similar to the relationships you have as an adult?

Jessica Bennett (08:09):

No.

Emily Nagoski (08:10):

If you answer yes to that question, then your earliest relationships are probably going to be kind of great.

Jessica Bennett (08:15):

Okay. Okay. Oh, interesting.

Emily Nagoski (08:16):

I did not. My early relationships were not kind of great.

Jessica Bennett (08:24):

Okay, so this is ’95. What was happening politically in sex education? Set the scene a little bit for me from your expert perch about what was happening in the culture then around sex.

Emily Nagoski (08:37):

We were just coming out of the AIDS crisis. Effective medication for controlling HIV we’re brand new, which means that everyone was really eager to forget as soon as they possibly could. I didn’t know the term GLBT. On my campus in 1995, it was GLBT.

Jessica Bennett (08:59):

Yeah. Yeah.

Emily Nagoski (09:00):

Which it would soon change to LGBT in honor of the role that the lesbian community played in caring for the gay community who were much more heavily impacted by the AIDS crisis. I heard lesbian and heard bisexual for the first time in 1995 because it was on college campuses that those conversations were happening. I had nothing of that in my high school or junior high sex education.

(09:27):

I did get enough sex education in Delaware, a comparatively progressive state. In the eighth grade, I learned that HIV could not be transmitted through a drinking straw or by sharing a can of soda, or by sitting on a toilet seat, which was great. I remember correcting my grandmother who wanted us to squat over public toilets so that we didn’t get AIDS. I could tell her because I had had some sex education-

Jessica Bennett (09:54):

You should learn it. Okay.

Emily Nagoski (09:55):

… that you can’t get HIV that way. She did not believe me.

Jessica Bennett (09:58):

Okay. Well.

Emily Nagoski (10:00):

But she was my grandmother. She was raised in the Depression and change is slow.

Jessica Bennett (10:06):

To what extent did you learn about your own body or about women’s sexuality, if at all, in your sex education courses?

Emily Nagoski (10:15):

I feel sure that I learned more than most people do, because I was really curious without knowing why I was curious. In the sixth grade, there was a book giveaway of “Here are all these textbooks we’re no longer using. If you want to take these textbooks, children, feel free.” And I took all of the reproductive health books.

Jessica Bennett (10:33):

You did?

Emily Nagoski (10:34):

Any I could get my hands on. I was very interested.

Jessica Bennett (10:37):

There were a lot of signs of your future profession, you just didn’t know them yet.

Emily Nagoski (10:42):

I had no idea why I was interested, but it was all biology. It was all the menstrual cycle and nocturnal emissions, as it always is. In the sixth grade, we got divided by group. I had already started having my period by the time we had that. So I was just like, none of this is describing what it’s actually like.

Jessica Bennett (11:02):

What was happening politically at the time? I just keep thinking about, okay, so the 90s was book-ended by the Clarence Thomas hearings, which are typically referred to as Anita Hill hearings, but he was the one that was being questioned. Then the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was in ’98. Which was, I think for me, a real sex education. I specifically remember reading The Star Report in high school, sort of sneaking behind the lockers and looking at different lines.

Emily Nagoski (11:32):

Okay, wow, that’s nerdy.

Jessica Bennett (11:37):

I mean, yeah, Seattle in the 90s, man. So yeah, we were reading The Star report. But the cigar, I mean, I learned that that cigar [inaudible 00:11:45].

Emily Nagoski (11:45):

Yeah, that was your Hite Report.

Jessica Bennett (11:46):

Yes, exactly.

Emily Nagoski (11:47):

Yeah, learning that a cigar could be inserted into a vagina and people might think that was a sexy thing to do.

Jessica Bennett (11:55):

I think that I only know this because I then later profiled Monica Lewinsky and have done a lot of research on it. Cigar sales went through the roof.

Emily Nagoski (12:02):

Yeah. Yeah. So you know how you were talking about how the sort of representation of teenagers in the movies was that teenagers were all super horny?

Jessica Bennett (12:09):

Yes.

Emily Nagoski (12:10):

I think of the 90s as sort of the transition from second to third wave feminism, and there was this sort of cluging around sexuality, which never really got resolved in second wave feminism. There were the Sex Wars, and we never really figured out a position to have about sex as a good or a bad thing, porn as a good or a bad thing. I have many things to say, but I think what happened in the 90s is that popular culture took the idea that sex could be a good thing for women.

(12:45):

It took the sort of Sexual Revolution as far as it had gone so far and said, “Okay, so teenage girls are just as horny and wacky as teenage boys,” because in order for men and women to be equal, women had to be like men. And so the way teenage girls’ sexuality got represented in the media was as if it were the same as every teenage boy’s fantasy, which is to say just the same as theirs.

(13:16):

Easy, fast, vaginally-oriented. American Pie gets talked about a lot. Thank the good Lord for Eugene Levy. But so the flute scene…

Jessica Bennett (13:27):

Okay, please, because okay, this came out in 1999, so I was a junior in high school. We all obviously watched it. People were talking about it, the pie scene. He masturbates with the pie. Everyone now knows this. I feel like so many things came out of this movie, including the popularization of the term MILF, which was Stifler’s mom.

Emily Nagoski (13:48):

That, I did not realize.

Jessica Bennett (13:50):

I mean, I don’t think the term originated there, but that’s when I learned it. And it was played by Jennifer Coolidge. Anyway, that’s another thing that came out of that. I was in the orchestra. I played the violin. There is the scene in American Pie where we learn that the flute player has masturbated with her flute.

Emily Nagoski (14:10):

Did you masturbate with it? Because here’s what I remember her saying is that she put her flute in her vagina.

Jessica Bennett (14:16):

Interesting. Yeah, actually, fair point.

Emily Nagoski (14:19):

And as a sex educator, I hear that, and I do not hear masturbation. I hear experimentation with a phallus-shaped object when I know that only very roughly 10% of people with vaginas masturbate with vaginal penetration.

Jessica Bennett (14:35):

So interesting. See, that’s the kind of context-

Emily Nagoski (14:37):

I think she was just messing around.

Jessica Bennett (14:38):

… we need. Yeah, she was messing around. But of course, that then became the thing that… I could never go to orchestra again without all of the guys snickering every time one of the women would play the flute.

Emily Nagoski (14:49):

Yeah, of course, of course. Because the whole function of that story is not to talk about her sexual experience or her sexual pleasure, but to create a visual image for the boys to masturbate to. I mean, just like what I learned from Glamour Magazine in the 90s, women’s sexual self-expression exists for the pleasure of men.

Jessica Bennett (15:16):

I was just talking to one of my editors about Glamour. I was working on a piece about Britney Spears and hair, the politics of hair, because she talks in her new book about thrashing her hair, and when she shaved her head and how it made her ugly, and for the first time in her life, she was not sexualized.

(15:35):

We were talking about remembering some of those sex tips that we learned from magazines like Glamour, where they would tell you to use your hair during the sex act, like either twirl it or run it down a guy’s chest or something, which is just so hilarious to think about now. But back then, we didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know that that was anything but a weird thing that Glamour had made up. I mean, I guess if you’re into that, go for it.

Emily Nagoski (16:03):

The brushing of the hair, your partner’s body might respond well to the sensation of your hair brushing against them under the right circumstances. It’s not the same as play with your hair, perform your hair.

Jessica Bennett (16:14):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emily Nagoski (16:15):

For the other person to witness.

Jessica Bennett (16:17):

Right.

(16:34):

This is one of the things that I find so refreshing about your work is that you take these commonly-held assumptions or things that we have heard, and then you basically debunk them or unravel them to reveal what is actually going on.

Emily Nagoski (16:49):

It’s one of the reasons why even now when I have lots of different channels for viewing pop culture, kind of don’t watch a lot of it, because when it involves sex, the thing goes off in my head and I have to be like, “That’s not how that works.”

Jessica Bennett (17:07):

Yeah, it’s like we need the annotations from you while we are watching the thing.

Emily Nagoski (17:10):

Yeah. Like PS, this is fine. And also, just know that it’s actually really rare for a person to be able to go instantaneously from being very stressed out to feeling very turned on. For most people, that’s not how it works.

Jessica Bennett (17:23):

What are the things that you remember consuming in the 90s that made you think twice, or as an adult you realized that that’s actually not an accurate representation?

Emily Nagoski (17:34):

There’s Something About Mary. Oh, Jesus.

Jessica Bennett (17:36):

What bothered you about that one?

Emily Nagoski (17:38):

The thing from There’s Something About Mary is that Cameron Diaz uses ejaculate that is dangling off of… She’s like, “Oh, it’s hair gel,” and she puts it in her hair. Anyone who has actually-

Jessica Bennett (17:53):

Touched.

Emily Nagoski (17:54):

… touched any ejaculate knows that it just does not bear any relationship to the texture of hair gel. It’s a silly idea, but as a nerd, I just find it totally unbelievable and it reflects negatively on the intelligence of Cameron Diaz’s character that she could possibly mistake the texture of ejaculate for the texture of hair gel. And also, can she not smell it? It doesn’t smell like hair gel. There’s no hair gel that is ejaculate-scented.

Jessica Bennett (18:32):

Fresh scent. Yeah. Wait, you mentioned Eugene Levy earlier.

Emily Nagoski (18:38):

Oh, yes.

Jessica Bennett (18:38):

Do you have some fun fact about Eugene Levy in American Pie?

Emily Nagoski (18:42):

Well, so from what I’ve heard, he was initially not very interested in playing the father, and he worked with them pretty intensively to shape the character into what a father might actually do. I love the way, as a dad, he does not play into, “Yeah, son, go get as much of that pussy as you can get,” but he also doesn’t dismiss his son’s sexuality.

(19:06):

He wants to protect him from the inevitable embarrassments of being a teenage boy, like “We’ll just have to tell your mother we ate the whole thing,” and brings him porn, which you know what, for the mid-90s, fairly progressive to be like “Here. Here it is. This is a normal part of life.”

American Pie Clip (19:29):

This is Hustler, and this is a much more exotic magazine.

Jessica Bennett (19:33):

Are there common sex myths that you still come across today? Are you teaching at the moment? I know that you are generally teaching, and so I’m sure that this comes up in class.

Emily Nagoski (19:45):

Yeah. Since the pandemic in particular, I have spent more time training professionals, training therapists, and it is sometimes distressing how many of the same misunderstandings and myths stay in their minds as I meet within college students. Several years ago, I talked to a woman who was recently out of college. She came to a talk and she said, “So this thing I learned in high school was that if you masturbate, if you teach yourself how to have an orgasm by yourself, you won’t be able to have an orgasm with a partner.”

(20:22):

And she’s a full-grown adult and is asking this question. I was like, “Yeah, that’s the opposite of true actually, if as a young person, you learn how orgasm works in your body, that means how orgasm works in your body so that when you’re with another person, which is a much more complex situation where part of your brain might be tuned into what’s happening in your body, but part of your brain is also tuned in to what’s going on for your partner.”

(20:48):

“And so with your attention split like that, it’s actually more difficult to focus on pleasure and let your body have an orgasm. So it’s great if you’ve already got the groundwork laid, so to speak, for knowing what the path is to get to orgasm in your body, then you can teach your partner how to follow that path.” I got asked almost exactly the same question by a therapist in a training five years later.

Jessica Bennett (21:16):

Was this a sex therapist?

Emily Nagoski (21:18):

No, no, no, no, no. This is a marriage and family therapist, couples therapist. It makes you feel slightly better, but you do worry.

Jessica Bennett (21:26):

Right. Are there other things that you remember consuming in the 90s? I think you mentioned the X-Files.

Emily Nagoski (21:38):

Oh, yeah. Probably one of the very best episodes of the X-Files is Small Potatoes, which is an episode about a shape-shifter.

X-Files Clip (21:47):

Sunday, on an all new X-Files, how do you find someone-

(21:51):

We’re looking for a man who can appear to be his own father, or anyone else.

(21:53):

… who can transform himself-

(21:55):

Is everything okay?

(21:56):

… into anyone?

Emily Nagoski (21:57):

Who these days would be called an incel, except that he was not celibate because he would shape-shift into the forms of more attractive men who had partners, and he would have sex with them, the women. He got found out because they were having babies with tails. Now, this is actually on reflection, a story of a serial rapist, and it is treated as comedy. I mean, it’s a farce.

Jessica Bennett (22:31):

Right. Right. Right.

Emily Nagoski (22:33):

In the 90s when I watched it, all I focused on was the comedy, because that is how they framed it. In retrospect, actually, violent sexual perpetrator. Yikes.

Jessica Bennett (22:48):

Right, right. I mean, there’s so many examples of that. If you look back, we just did an episode on Dawson’s Creek-

Emily Nagoski (22:55):

Which I have never seen. Is it terrible? What happened?

Jessica Bennett (22:58):

More power to you. It wasn’t great then. It’s not great on re-watch, so I know there are a lot of fans, and I did watch it. There’s this one storyline where Pacey, who is the off-lead character, he’s the best friend of Dawson who the show is named after, begins a relationship with and loses his virginity to his English teacher.

Emily Nagoski (23:20):

Oh, right. Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (23:21):

And she’s a grown woman, and it’s just portrayed as super hot. I remember as a teenager being like, “Oh, I want to see what happens with this relationship. That’s so hot.” And obviously in retrospect, that was a statutory rape.

Emily Nagoski (23:33):

Right.

Jessica Bennett (23:33):

So many portrayals like that. I was even thinking back to just basic things that I internalized in high school that it took me years to realize were not true. I just learned, I think in the last six months from Twitter, thanks Twitter, I guess, that blue balls are not real.

Emily Nagoski (23:56):

When did you just learn this?

Jessica Bennett (23:57):

Like five seconds ago.

Emily Nagoski (23:58):

Oh, boy. Okay, let’s

Jessica Bennett (24:02):

I’m married to a man and he was like, “Babe, yeah, of course. They’re not really…” I was like, “Wait, what?”

Emily Nagoski (24:09):

I would be interested if you could find out where you learned it, because I don’t remember where I learned of it either.

Jessica Bennett (24:14):

I mean, maybe just people talking about it or being in sexual contexts where you… I don’t even think a guy would’ve said it. I think it was like oh, we all knew that it was going to be so, so painful for a man if you somehow aroused them and then didn’t finish it.

Emily Nagoski (24:37):

Right. Yeah. So again, I had the good fortune of being trained as a sex educator even before I started being sexual myself. I explicitly remember being told that some guys will try to use this narrative of blue balls as justification for trying to persuade a partner no, they have to continue doing a thing or else harm will come to them. And so the deal is no. Can it be uncomfortable to be aroused for a very long time and not have an orgasm? Yeah.

(25:08):

There’s a reason why those Viagra commercials say, “If your erection lasts more than four hours, seek medical help,” because it can be really uncomfortable. Nothing bad happens to you. There’s nothing dangerous about it. It’s a little bit like getting a Charlie horse, so it’s not real comfortable. But the underlying narrative behind it is that boys have a sexual imperative, a need, and because it’s a biological need, they’re entitled to have that need met or else something bad could happen to them.

(25:43):

This is a narrative that has been in place for a very long time. If you go back and read sex manuals from the late-1800s, the 19th century, you’ll begin to see the split between the people who say men have a biological need for sexual release. And they use that as an argument in favor of legalizing prostitution, as a matter of fact, in order to spare all these men’s wives having to have all the sex that men need. Or else.

(26:16):

Then you have on the other side, right at the turn of the century, you begin to hear from sex educators who were like, it is not a biological need. Nothing bad happens to men if they don’t have any sort of sexual release. Men just need to learn how to control themselves, and they use it as an argument in favor of abstinence. Only until marriage.

Jessica Bennett (26:36):

Right, right, right.

Emily Nagoski (26:38):

You do kind of look back and wish that either side could have found something better to do with their time. Biologically, it’s not a need. I don’t think that that’s an argument in favor of abstinence only before marriage. If you’ve read Girls by Peggy Orenstein, her book, Girls and her book, Boys, are both jaw-dropping.

Jessica Bennett (27:00):

Girls and Sex.

Emily Nagoski (27:01):

Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex. Thank you very much. One story that I remember from Girls is from a teenager that she interviewed who said, “This guy came over to my house and we were making out, and that was sort of all I wanted to do, but he wanted to have sex. And so I gave him a blow job so that he would leave my house.” On the one hand, hooray for survival strategies. Hooray for finding a way out of that situation where she was not putting herself in the path of physical harm, which is a potential thing.

Jessica Bennett (27:36):

Did she feel in danger were she to leave or did she-

Emily Nagoski (27:39):

She felt like she had no other way to get him to leave the house. She wanted him to go. He kept saying, “No, I wasn’t going to go. He wanted to have sex. Oh, come on.” All that stuff. The only way to get him out of the house was to give him something. But on the other hand, that’s deeply not okay and none of us would want a daughter of our own to be in that situation.

Jessica Bennett (28:00):

I mean, that reminds me of another lesson that I think I learned and internalized as a teenager, which was no does not mean no. No means convince me. The number of times that played out… I think that that was very prominent in teen films at that time.

(28:19):

Even in Superbad, I think the guys there are talking about if you get her drunk enough, she’ll say yes. Another one of those lessons. I guess I’m curious how much of your work is almost about re-education, re-educating us on how things actually work after years and years and years of being misinformed?

Emily Nagoski (28:42):

98.9% of my work is simply like that thing you learned before. That’s not true. I understand why you believed it. It was the thing you were taught, and why wouldn’t you believe the thing that you were taught? Some of the things are about facts, like blue balls, that’s just like a biological reality is that no tissue damage occurs to a human in the absence of sexual release.

(29:05):

That’s just a fact. When it comes to things like no means no, and if you have sex with someone who’s drunk, that’s sexual assault. That’s like a cultural relearning where you’re shifting people’s norms, even people’s morals and their understanding of what it means to be a sexual person, how to be a good sexual partner. Ultimately, it’s deconstructing this gender binary, like rejecting the whole idea that men have one sexual script and women have another sexual script, and those are the only sexual scripts that exist.

(29:41):

And you have to follow the one that you’ve been given. There is a complexity here, because on the one hand, no means no. And having sex with a drug person is assault. Because the script for girls is that you’re not allowed to initiate, even though you’re supposed to really enjoy sex, and you’re supposed to have a great time when you have sex, and you’re supposed to be a sexual person who is good at the sex, you also are supposed to not want sex. You’re not supposed to initiate sex, and you are not supposed to say yes because wanting it and liking it are not very feminine.

(30:18):

We have both of these competing scripts simultaneously. For a long time, girls in real life who were exploring their sexuality, trying to find out what it is they want in life, didn’t feel cultural permission to go ahead and say yes to the things that they wanted and liked. Maybe they would say no and do things that they wanted to do, but they were saying the no they felt they were supposed to say. I think there has been a complexity and a grayness. There’s been controversy over the Christmas song, Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

Jessica Bennett (30:53):

Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Yeah.

Emily Nagoski (30:53):

Yeah. Where she’s saying no, but she’s saying no because she feels like she’s not allowed to say yes, and she actually really wants to say yes.

Jessica Bennett (31:03):

Yeah. Wait, what are the lyrics?

Emily Nagoski (31:05):

I really can’t stay. It’s cold outside. I got to go away. It’s cold outside. This evening has been so very nice and warm.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside (31:15):

(Singing) I ought to say no, no, no.

(31:20):

You mind if I move in close?

(31:20):

At least I’m going to say that I tried.

Emily Nagoski (31:21):

But it’s cold outside. She sings it too, but it’s cold outside.

Jessica Bennett (31:25):

Yeah.

Emily Nagoski (31:26):

So there’s ambiguity.

Jessica Bennett (31:27):

You are describing cultural scripts, which of course are an important part of this, but it’s almost as if the more factual things you’re discussing, the things that we learned in the wrong way, get talked about less.

Emily Nagoski (31:57):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (31:58):

In reading your book, Come As You Are, I was so struck by how many basic facts I was learning for the first time or relearning for the first time. While you think that those would be easy things to re-teach or correct, it’s almost as if we’re talking about the patriarchy and cultural scripts and what consent means much more often than we’re talking about these literal facts.

Emily Nagoski (32:21):

Yes. Literal, actual, just biological facts about the lack of correlation between how your genitals are behaving and how you personally feel.

Jessica Bennett (32:31):

Are there a few basic facts that I should have you debunk for us right here while we have you? What are the things we need to know?

Emily Nagoski (32:42):

Can we start with virginity since we were talking about American Pie?

Jessica Bennett (32:46):

Please.

Emily Nagoski (32:47):

Virginity is not not a biological thing, biological fact of any kind. It cannot be… What the heck? What the heck is virginity?

Jessica Bennett (32:57):

The idea of the cherry.

Emily Nagoski (32:59):

And in biological terms, the hymen, the hymen is a fold of tissue. It is like all of our tissues. If it gets damaged, it heals. A hymen can be stretched, but there are people who have given birth who have intact hymens. My husband laughingly calls it a freshness seal.

(33:21):

Just that whole thing, all of it derives from several hundred years ago, medieval biologists, medical practitioners, looking at a fold of skin, sort of over the mouth of the vagina and deciding because they live in a culture where a woman’s body is literally a man’s property, and her lack of having had a penis in her vagina yet matters insofar as a man wants his property to be in good condition.

(33:53):

He wants not to invest his resources in raising someone else’s offspring. You never can fully get control over a woman’s sexuality, but at least that fold of skin is some assurance that that vagina is fresh. It’s all biological nonsense because you can’t tell based on the presence of absence of a hymen whether or not anybody has ever had anything put into their vagina before.

Jessica Bennett (34:19):

Okay, so that’s virginity.

Emily Nagoski (34:20):

Yeah.

Jessica Bennett (34:21):

What’s another common one?

Emily Nagoski (34:22):

Blue balls, of course, would definitely go on the list of this is not a thing. Attached to it, the idea of sex is a biological drive. Hunger is a drive. If you don’t have adequate energy intake, you can literally die. Thirst, biological drive. If you have inadequate balance of water and sodium, you can literally die. Sleep is a drive. If you do not get adequate sleep, you can literally die.

(34:46):

Sex is not one of those. Sex is an incentive motivation system. And no, I’m not under a delusion that we’re all going to stop saying the simple and easy sex drive and start saying sexual incentive motivation system. But if we could all just get real clear that we do not mean that sex is a biological need without which anybody will die, that would be super good.

Jessica Bennett (35:07):

Is there one sex myth that if you could just do one thing and eradicate it?

Emily Nagoski (35:14):

Can I choose a cluster of myths-

Jessica Bennett (35:16):

Sure.

Emily Nagoski (35:16):

… around what I’m going to colloquially call women’s orgasm?

Jessica Bennett (35:21):

Please.

Emily Nagoski (35:23):

The research, here’s my gender caveat, virtually all the research on women’s orgasms is done on cisgender women. I see no reason why all of this doesn’t apply to anyone who’s a woman, but know that the research is talking about cisgender women.

Jessica Bennett (35:39):

That’s the caveat.

Emily Nagoski (35:41):

First of all, as I said, only about 10%-ish of women who do so with any kind of vaginal penetration. That’s been shown in study after study, after study for the last 50 years. Only a quarter to maybe a third of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone, or as it’s called in the research unassisted intercourse. One of my favorite technical terms. The remaining two-thirds to three-quarters are sometimes, rarely or never orgasmic from vaginal stimulation alone.

(36:16):

The only reason why I still get asked like, “How do I have an orgasm during sex,” is the way people say it. They mean during penile-vaginal intercourse. “How come I’m not having them?” The reason you’re not having them is because approximately two-thirds to three-quarters of people with vaginas, that’s not a very good way for them to get the kind of stimulation they need to get to orgasm because the vagina’s pretty far away from the clitoris, which is for most people, not all, but for most people, the most efficient path to getting to orgasm.

(36:48):

The only reason people still care about this is because I think of frickin frackin Freud whose influence on psychotherapy will not die, saying that clitoral orgasms are immature and vaginal orgasms are mature. That is an extremely convenient line for the patriarchy and the misogyny and a world in which men would really benefit from women being orgasmic from the kind of behavior by which heterosexual men are very reliably orgasmic.

Jessica Bennett (37:22):

It’s so interesting though, because, okay, for people who haven’t studied Freud, these myths persist. Why do they, I mean, besides the patriarchy, why do they persist?

Emily Nagoski (37:33):

Sex is a big deal, and women’s bodies in the world of the gender binary have to be controlled because a whole lot of the genetic destiny of our species happens inside of uteruses. We have to control the uteruses, which means we have to control the women, which means not only making laws about it, but having cultural narratives about right and wrong, about beautiful and ugly, about disgusting and perfect that train us all to be good from very young, to be good at being the right kind of sexual person.

Jessica Bennett (38:17):

What about the role of pop culture to perpetuate or to teach us healthy sexual habits?

Emily Nagoski (38:25):

Yeah, because pop culture is so powerful, because these narratives form our framework for understanding how our own sexuality works. And I say that as someone who, even though I have all this education and all this experience, I still find myself falling into the same self-critical traps of comparing my sexuality to other people’s sexuality or to the cultural narrative of how sexuality works.

(38:52):

Like now, as a perimenopausal 40-something lady married to somebody, when my sexual desire isn’t like when the spark isn’t still alive in my marriage, I think, oh, no, there’s something terribly wrong. I wrote a whole book about how, oh no, nothing is terribly wrong. I know exactly how to fix it. And still, my first response is still to panic that I’m doing it wrong, that I’m broken, that I’m an inadequate wife.

(39:19):

I think it clearly is very powerful. It embeds narratives in our head of how sex is supposed to work, and only by having an enormously diverse range of stories, only by having a whole lot of different narratives about ways that you can be sexual and do sex right, do we get a liberating pop culture narrative is when there’s dozens of them. Does that make sense?

Jessica Bennett (39:46):

Yeah, absolutely.

Emily Nagoski (39:47):

I had a lot of feelings and then words happened, and I don’t know that any of them formed sentences.

Jessica Bennett (39:52):

No, that’s amazing.

Emily Nagoski (39:53):

But I really meant it.

Jessica Bennett (39:56):

Is there anything out there you think does it well?

Emily Nagoski (40:01):

Of mainstream pop culture? I would be really interested to hear from listeners, what have you seen that you feel like does a good job of representing sexuality in a way where it shows a world that you would want your kids to grow up in or that you wish you had grown up in?

(40:17):

One of the episodes in the podcast that I made with Pushkin was on Ted Lasso. They picked it because it’s one of the few shows that I watch, and I feel like that show did a pretty darn good job with sexuality. I feel like it was extremely silly in its relationships, but the sexual relationships such the little bit that they showed, were pretty great, actually. The communication was on point. The equality of different people to be able to initiate sex and say no to sex, it was really good, but there just wasn’t a lot of sex in it.

Jessica Bennett (40:53):

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That’s actually a perfect place to end it, with a call-out to our listeners posed by you.

Emily Nagoski (41:01):

Yeah, so I can know when somebody asks me, but what can I watch that’s good, that I’ll be able to be like, “Here’s a list.”

Jessica Bennett (41:08):

Before I let you go, could you say a few words about the new book?

Emily Nagoski (41:13):

Oh, sure. It’s called Come Together. I was very proud when I thought of that title because it is about how couples sustain a sexual connection over the long term, couples of all combinations and all structures, whether they’re monogamous or not. It comes from the fact that writing and promoting Come As You Are, diminished my interest in sex to less than zero.

(41:36):

When I got done with that project, which you’d think writing and thinking and talking about sex all the time might make it easier, turns out, no, I had zero interest for months at a time. When that was over, I started looking at the research, of course, because that’s what I do on how couples do sustain a strong sexual connection over the longterm.

(41:55):

What I learned changed my own sex life, and I wrote a book about it to help other people in a similar situation.

Susie Banikarim (42:04):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (42:18):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (42:28):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also, check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This Is 18.

Jessica Bennett (42:37):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (42:51):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (43:08):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.

EPISODE 20 – COUNTDOWN TO CHRISTMAS!

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

 

Susie Banikarim (00:04):

Everything is very soothing in a Hallmark movie.

Jessica Bennett (00:07):

Like fires.

Susie Banikarim (00:08):

Fires are always roaring. Ice skating is always happening.

Jessica Bennett (00:12):

Mittens.

Susie Banikarim (00:12):

There’s tons of hot cocoa. I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:17):

And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:19):

And this is In Retrospect where, each week, we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett (00:24):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Susie Banikarim (00:26):

Today we have a special holiday version of In Retrospect where we’re going to talk about the past and present of Hallmark Christmas movies. Jess, have you ever watched a Hallmark Christmas movie?

Jessica Bennett (00:40):

Susie, I’m proud to say the answer to that is, no.

Susie Banikarim (00:44):

Well, I cannot say the same. I have watched-

Jessica Bennett (00:47):

How could I have guessed?

Susie Banikarim (00:49):

… so many Christmas movies this season that the other day Mike walked in on me watching one and said-

Jessica Bennett (00:55):

Mike, your boyfriend?

Susie Banikarim (00:56):

Mike, my boyfriend, and said, “How many of these have you already watched this season?” And I did not like the judgment in his voice.

Jessica Bennett (01:07):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (01:07):

I was like, “What is that tone, mister?” No, he was actually laughing. He thought it was hilarious, but I feel some judgment about it. So I thought it would be interesting to query why I am so interested or into these movies.

Jessica Bennett (01:18):

Okay, I want to hear that. But also, what is a Hallmark movie? What makes something a Hall…? Are these movies produced by Hallmark? What am I missing here?

Susie Banikarim (01:26):

Okay. Yeah, this is a great question. Hallmark Christmas movies are made by Hallmark-

Jessica Bennett (01:31):

Like the card company?

Susie Banikarim (01:32):

Yeah, the card company. The backstory on the Hallmark channel, which is where Hallmark Christmas movies are aired is-

Jessica Bennett (01:38):

What channel is that? That’s a channel on television?

Susie Banikarim (01:41):

That’s a channel on television as part of your cable package.

Jessica Bennett (01:44):

Like cable? Like cable, okay.

Susie Banikarim (01:44):

Yes.

Jessica Bennett (01:44):

Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim (01:46):

And-

Jessica Bennett (01:46):

I didn’t have cable growing up, so that makes sense then.

Susie Banikarim (01:49):

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense that this is very confusing for you. So actually, it started as the combination of two religious channels that came together and became a Christian network called the Faith and Values Channel.

Jessica Bennett (02:02):

Oh my God, that makes sense why they’re so strident.

Susie Banikarim (02:04):

Yes. Well, they’re not actually strident. They’re very soothing, but we’re going to get to that.

Jessica Bennett (02:08):

Okay. Okay. We’ll get to that.

Susie Banikarim (02:10):

And so it started as a religious thing. Then there was a rebrand in 2001, and that’s when it became the Hallmark Channel. And the original content had very explicitly religious and traditional themes. And it wasn’t really until the 2010s when the channel began to be known for these made for TV movies, romance, comedies. And then really, it began to be known for Christmas movies in particular when it started this thing called Countdown to Christmas in 2009.

Clips (02:44):

Countdown To Christmas, coming this October. Only on Hallmark.

Susie Banikarim (02:48):

And that is literally, every night to Christmas, they premiere, I don’t know if it’s every night, but they premiere all the new Christmas movies of that season.

Jessica Bennett (02:58):

Okay. So you’ve been really busy.

Susie Banikarim (03:00):

I’ve been very busy. That’s one way of putting it. And the idea is that these movies evoke the same warm traditional values that Hallmark greeting cards, and I don’t know if growing up, you ever went to a Hallmark store, but I always loved the Hallmark store.

Jessica Bennett (03:15):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (03:16):

They have greeting cards and ornaments, and so it’s supposed to evoke those same feelings in you. And I should say, that I’m not the only one watching these movies because that’s how I feel-

Jessica Bennett (03:28):

Talking to me.

Susie Banikarim (03:29):

Yeah, exactly.

Jessica Bennett (03:31):

So, I think I’m the minority here. People love these.

Susie Banikarim (03:34):

To give you an idea of what a big business it is, it is literally, defying the fate of most other cable channels. Hallmark is one of the most popular cable channels on television. New York Magazine recently did a piece called Nobody Told Hallmark Channel that Cable is Dead. And in it, it mentioned that it is not uncommon for Hallmark to have the most watched program in all of cable on any given night, especially during the holiday season.

Jessica Bennett (03:59):

Wow, okay.

Susie Banikarim (04:01):

And per Nielsen, Hallmark Channel is the number two most watched entertainment channel of 2023, just behind HDTV, but ahead of other channels that people watch a lot, like TNT and USA and Food Network. And also, in the last week of November, they premiered seven brand new Hallmark Christmas movies. And that pushed the channel to be the number two most watched channel across all of cable, not just entertainment cable, meaning, that it beat Fox News. And of those seven movies, six of them were watched by more than 1.7 million people on their premiere night. So that’s just the people who watched it on the first run. Most of these movies are run over and over again. And they’ve made for this season 40 original movies just to air in 2023.

Jessica Bennett (04:51):

So what are they about? Is there really that much to say? Why are there so many movies? What are they about?

Susie Banikarim (04:57):

Well, they’re all very formulaic. They’re all very similar. They have a lot of rules. There’s a standard story format. Now, some of this is starting to change a little bit as these shows have become more popular and as there’s more diversity and inclusion. But the traditional formula is basically this. A relatable single, sometimes very recently single, like a girl who’s just literally broken up with her boyfriend or isn’t single, scandalous, but her boyfriend is a big dumb jerk and you hate him right away. And it’s clear you’re supposed to hate him.

Jessica Bennett (05:36):

It’s always a boyfriend.

Susie Banikarim (05:36):

It’s always a boyfriend, yes. And so this single girl has lost faith and love. She’s pursuing life in the big city, and somehow, she ends up in a small town for some reason. She’s either going home for the holidays, sometimes she’s a reporter who’s working on a story about a secret Santa that nobody knows the identity of.

Jessica Bennett (05:55):

Okay, okay.

Susie Banikarim (05:56):

Sometimes she has an accident and she has amnesia-

Jessica Bennett (06:00):

Oh my God. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (06:00):

And she’s in this small town and she falls in love, but she doesn’t know who she is. It’s always some excuse for why she’s now in this idyllic town-

Jessica Bennett (06:08):

With snow.

Susie Banikarim (06:10):

There’s snow everywhere. And a thing that Hallmark actually says themselves, is that a classic Hallmark Christmas movie has to have Christmas in every frame. Meaning, every single shot of the movie has to have some element of Christmas like an ornament or a tree or a cookie. There has to be something visually, that indicates it’s a Christmas movie.

Jessica Bennett (06:31):

That’s so crazy. Okay, so there’s no Jews in Hallmark movies?

Susie Banikarim (06:34):

Well, now they’re are Jews. Now they’ve released a few Hallmark movies that are Hanukkah movies.

Clips (06:40):

Aha. So the Matchmaker was right.

(06:42):

Hanukkah on Rye on Hallmark.

Susie Banikarim (06:46):

But that is fairly recent. So again, we’re just talking about the basic formula that has existed for years.

Jessica Bennett (06:51):

So funny.

Susie Banikarim (06:51):

We’ll talk about what’s happening now, later. So here’s this girl, she’s in this small town and she meets a handsome local man, a kind of modern Prince, charming, and almost always he is also single, but sometimes he also has an awful girlfriend who doesn’t appreciate how sweet and perfect he is. And his job is always something like baker or-

Jessica Bennett (07:13):

Oh my God, are you living a Hallmark movie?

Susie Banikarim (07:16):

I’m kind of living a Hallmark movie because my boyfriend is a baker.

Jessica Bennett (07:18):

Your partner is a baker, so just saying.

Susie Banikarim (07:21):

He really rejects that comparison, because trust me, I’ve made it.

Jessica Bennett (07:24):

Yeah, don’t tell him I said that.

Susie Banikarim (07:25):

But yeah.

Jessica Bennett (07:26):

All right. So they’re bakers or they’re like-

Susie Banikarim (07:28):

Bakers, or they’re a firemen or they are the owner of the local Christmas tree lot. They’re usually small business owners or small town charmers. And while she spends time with this charming stranger, he reminds her of the simpler joys of small-town life.

Jessica Bennett (07:48):

Okay, got it.

Susie Banikarim (07:48):

So community and warmth and comfort. Everything is very soothing in a Hallmark movie

Jessica Bennett (07:55):

Yeah, like fires.

Susie Banikarim (07:56):

Fires are always roaring. Ice skating is always happening.

Jessica Bennett (07:59):

Mittens.

Susie Banikarim (08:00):

There’s tons of hot cocoa. It’s just showering in hot cocoa.

Jessica Bennett (08:04):

Yeah, like caroling.

Susie Banikarim (08:05):

Caroling, there’s always caroling. So often there’s also, I just want to say, a child involved. Sometimes the man has a child and his wife has passed. They try not to talk about divorce a lot, but sometimes he’s divorced-

Jessica Bennett (08:17):

Widowed, okay.

Susie Banikarim (08:18):

… and less often, the woman has a child and the child is always adorable and precocious. And the way the formula works is there’s also kind of a formula to the story structure. So she gets to the town, she meets the stranger, somewhere, they start to get to know each other a little bit better. There’s a near kiss about three quarters of the way through the movie.

Jessica Bennett (08:40):

Okay, you can time it.

Susie Banikarim (08:41):

Yeah. And then eventually, there is a challenge they face or a challenge to their relationship or a misunderstanding that briefly pulls them apart and then they’re brought back together by the end. And there is one perfect chaste kiss at the end of every movie. And that is the happy ending.

Jessica Bennett (09:02):

And that’s end. That’s it.

Susie Banikarim (09:02):

And that’s the end.

Jessica Bennett (09:17):

So wait, tell me some of the ones you’ve watched so far, this season.

Susie Banikarim (09:21):

The thing is, I can’t really tell them all apart, so I won’t be able to tell you all the names. I’ve watched so many of them.

Jessica Bennett (09:25):

But were they all romantic? What’s the general plot?

Susie Banikarim (09:29):

So yeah, there’s really a romance component to all of these, but I want to say that the fantasy isn’t really just about romance. I mean, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s also just kind of an idyllic world where everybody loves their family and everyone’s really supportive of each other and everything is incredibly optimistic. It is a world that is very different from the world we live in. And so there are these rules that govern this world. And some of these rules are explicit, Hallmark executives have talked about these rules, and some of them are less explicit, but clear, if you are a consumer of many of these films, which I am. So here are some of the rules that I have put together for you.

(10:17):

So it always has to be two conventionally attractive, very classically American, traditionally white main characters. In recent years, there’s been some diversification in race and sexuality, but that’s kind of the standard setup. And then, a lot of the stars are not super famous, but they’re recognizable from some sitcom or teen show you watched as a kid. So like Lacey Chabert of Party of Five fame and Danica McKellar from the Wonder Years, who played Winnie Cooper. Holly Robinson-Pete from 21 Jump Street was the most prominent black actress on the network for a long time. Now there are others. Even Meghan Markle was in two Hallmark movies when she was just an actor from Suits and not married to Prince Harry.

Jessica Bennett (11:04):

Okay. Do these pay a lot of money? Is this good money for actors?

Susie Banikarim (11:09):

Yes. Actually, a lot of actors compare the Hallmark system to the old school studio system because actors can sign exclusive contracts with these networks. It just means that there’s steady work, good pay, decent hours. It’s the kind of thing where, if you get into the Hallmark system, which is actually not easy to do, then you can have steady work every year. And these movies shoot fast so it’s a very efficient process.

Jessica Bennett (11:35):

It’s like a journalist doing corporate work on the side-

Susie Banikarim (11:37):

Kind of.

Jessica Bennett (11:38):

… to fund their art.

Susie Banikarim (11:39):

The Christmas movies generally get shot in 15 days. There’s minimal takes. It’s really efficient and affordable.

Jessica Bennett (11:46):

It’s like doing ads.

Susie Banikarim (11:47):

Yeah. Most of them are shot in Canada, so they use existing locations. They don’t have to use sound stages. So there is a whole industry around this that just churns out these Christmas movies, and it’s a year-long process because they have to all be made and ready to go.

Jessica Bennett (12:05):

And if you’re an actor, is this the kind of thing where you’re like, “Don’t put that one on my website”?

Susie Banikarim (12:10):

I think actually, a lot of these actors get really into it. There’s an annual convention every year called Christmas Con, which I wanted to go to for this episode, but they rejected me. They said they didn’t have room for podcasters this year. I’m just very offended by that.

Jessica Bennett (12:24):

Rude. Wow. Too many podcasts, man.

Susie Banikarim (12:27):

But a lot of the actors from these movies have been posting from Christmas, like Jesse Metcalfe, who’s one of the male stars who used to be an actor on Desperate Housewives, he was posting from there just a couple days ago. Chad Michael Murray from One Tree Hill is one of these actors.

Jessica Bennett (12:42):

Okay. All right. This is basically a world that I just had no idea.

Susie Banikarim (12:46):

No idea existed, but it is a whole universe.

Jessica Bennett (12:48):

Okay, so they’re proud.

Susie Banikarim (12:50):

So they’re proud of it, I think.

Jessica Bennett (12:51):

I don’t mean to dismiss them.

Susie Banikarim (12:52):

No. I mean, I’m sure there are some people who wouldn’t be, but I think, if you’re a working actor, and it’s been a while since you’ve been cast in something and you get plugged into the system, this is a great way to have regular work, and I think they all become friends.

Jessica Bennett (13:06):

Like wear a lot of chunky sweaters.

Susie Banikarim (13:08):

Yeah. I think they’ve become friends. It’s like uplifting content.

Jessica Bennett (13:11):

Okay, great.

Susie Banikarim (13:12):

Okay, so let’s go back to the rules. So the rules are the vibe has to always be uplifting and a little magical. There’s no darkness in this world. The world makes sense here. There’s no evil, no war, there’s no famine.

Jessica Bennett (13:25):

Okay. That sounds kind of nice.

Susie Banikarim (13:27):

Yeah, it’s kind of nice. So very deliberately, there are no politics. The former CEO told the New Yorker for an article once that, “The only thing we promote is pet adoption. We make no apologies about that.” It’s very clearly apolitical. And I think that’s because the accusation was always that they were conservative because they came from a religious background, but they’re actually trying to stay out of politics. I want to mention another thing, which I think makes them very soothing, which is, there’s rarely economic hardship of any kind.

Jessica Bennett (14:00):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Susie Banikarim (14:01):

Small towns and small businesses aren’t doing great in the real world, but in these small towns, the small businesses are-

Jessica Bennett (14:08):

We’re not talking about Detroit businesses on Main Street, shuttered or whatever.

Susie Banikarim (14:12):

Yeah. Everything is viable. Sometimes there’s a challenge like business is down or dad wants to retire and sell the business, but that challenge is always met and everything is fine by the end of the movie.

Jessica Bennett (14:23):

So soothing.

Susie Banikarim (14:24):

And another thing that’s interesting is that, there are usually some hijinks and disagreements, but they literally cannot be too angry. When the New Yorker reporter who did that article I mentioned was on set, she witnessed a scene where the guy seemed really angry and the director was like, “Cut. You got to take it down a notch. You’re too mad.”

Jessica Bennett (14:48):

They’re not doxing each other on Twitter?

Susie Banikarim (14:49):

Nobody’s doxing each other on Twitter. Nobody’s having a crying jag and throwing things. It is a very civilized world, and the relationships are all basically, healthy. Sometimes there are madcap misunderstandings, but at the root of this are good people who just love each other, families who get along, all the children are adored and cherished, parents are either kind of saints or imperfect, but only because they’re misunderstood. And it’s very important to note that there’s also very little sex in these movies.

Jessica Bennett (15:28):

Right. Just like a few kisses.

Susie Banikarim (15:30):

Just like chaste kisses, near kisses. But there’s no heat in these movies. It’s all very safe.

Jessica Bennett (15:36):

Do they get a rating?

Susie Banikarim (15:38):

No. I mean, if they got a rating, it would be family friendly.

Jessica Bennett (15:40):

I guess TV movies don’t get a rating.

Susie Banikarim (15:41):

Yeah. No.

Jessica Bennett (15:42):

This is PG though.

Susie Banikarim (15:43):

Yeah, but I mean, think it would be less than PG. I don’t know what less than PG is, but it would be less than PG.

Jessica Bennett (15:48):

Got it. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (15:49):

And I mentioned the Christmas in every frame, and what that means is, that there have to be heartwarming holiday themes all through the movie. Christmas tree decorating, cookie baking, cocoa, Christmas lights, snowball fights. There have to be a million cliches about Christmas thrown in. And then ultimately, there’s always the happy ending.

Jessica Bennett (16:24):

So why do you like these? I mean, let’s be real.

Susie Banikarim (16:28):

Let’s just get down to it.

Jessica Bennett (16:28):

Well, this sounds horrible. This sounds so corny. Why do you like these?

Susie Banikarim (16:34):

Okay, this is a great question. So first of all, yes, it’s incredibly corny, and obviously, I know you well enough to know that you hate corny things, so I knew that you would find this hilarious, but also disturbing. And so I have spent a lot of time thinking about it in the last couple of weeks as I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to talk about. And I think, for me, it just represents a certain kind of Americana and small town life, which, as an immigrant, is what I thought America was. That idealized version of America is what you imagine America is. When you come here and your life is nothing like that.

Jessica Bennett (17:10):

Right. Right. Right.

Susie Banikarim (17:10):

You Come from a world where there certainly is war and politics and danger, and your life has just been completely thrown into disarray, and you’re far from your family. You don’t have this sweet world, and you imagine that that’s the world everyone else has. So I think, for me, they represent this kind of comforting idea that there is a part of the world that makes sense. And I feel like-

Jessica Bennett (17:38):

That makes a lot of sense until you realize, unfortunately, it’s not. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Susie Banikarim (17:46):

Yeah. Well, what you’re saying is, is that it’s a fantasy, which of course it is. So now I obviously know that. I mean, I think I always kind of inherently knew that, but the reason I think it’s kind of important around the holiday season is, I think that’s a time where people really feel not having those fantasy family lives. If you’re someone who doesn’t have a big family or doesn’t have a family or lost your parent or whatever, this is a time where you feel very alone. The holidays can feel really isolating. And so I think a lot of people just watch these movies as a way to feel the warmth that they’re not getting in their personal lives. And I think also, the formulaic nature is very appealing to me, if I’m honest. I don’t really have to be watching. It’s a perfect second screen activity.

Jessica Bennett (18:36):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (18:39):

I usually just put it on, and I know the basic plot points are always essentially the same. So I can be doing other things. I can be texting or doing a crossword puzzle or whatever.

Jessica Bennett (18:49):

Yeah, I was going to ask because I feel like maybe the few times, I don’t know, I’ve been in other people’s houses where they’ve been playing, they’re on in the background, and you can go in and out.

Susie Banikarim (18:55):

It’s kind of background noise in a way, and sometimes they’re good. You’re like, “Oh, this is actually kind of entertaining me.” And so you dial in. But for the most part, it’s just this sign of soothing Christmas background

Jessica Bennett (19:08):

With some nice music.

Susie Banikarim (19:09):

Yeah, some Christmas music gets played, some adorable children come out in costumes. It’s just a nice vibe to have in the background. It kind of makes my brain feel smooth, like butter.

Jessica Bennett (19:21):

Okay. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (19:22):

That’s how it feels. I have a lot of anxiety as you know, and so sometimes I just want to watch something that just irons out all the kinks in my brain. But I thought what would be funny would be for me to describe to you the plot of the most popular Hallmark Christmas movie of all time, because it’s fairly deranged in ways that I find really amusing. This is definitely a movie I’ve seen more than once. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it start to finish, because the other thing about Hallmark Christmas movies is, I have cable, which a lot of people don’t have, but if you have cable, one of the benefits of it is that, you just happen upon them. It’s like, you’re just flipping through channels and you’re like, oh-

Jessica Bennett (20:07):

Are they on other channels too?

Susie Banikarim (20:08):

No. But they did make a deal this year with Peacock, and so now some Hallmark movies are available on Peacock, and now lots of other people make Christmas movies. But it’s kind of one of those things where if there’s nothing else on, I’ll just default around Christmas to Hallmark and just have it on in the background.

Jessica Bennett (20:24):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (20:24):

So this movie, I can’t just wait to tell you all about it. So this movie is called Christmas Under Wraps and it stars Candace Cameron Bure, who is arguably, the queen of Christmas movies. She has been in so many of them. She has starred in four of the 10 most viewed Christmas movies on Hallmark.

Jessica Bennett (20:47):

Okay.

Susie Banikarim (20:48):

This movie debuted in 2014, and it, to this day, holds the record for Hallmark’s highest ever broadcast premiere. It is credited by Hallmark executives as being the breakthrough moment for Christmas programming on the channel, and it re-airs every year. So an important thing to kind of understand about the ecosystem is that they make all these new movies every year, but then they mix in all these old movies that you remember. And that’s also part of the appeal. It’s like when people watch friends over and over again, it’s kind of familiar and soothing to have one of these show up.

(21:25):

So here’s the story of Christmas under Wraps. After a breakup, Dr. Lauren Brunell, played by Candace Cameron Bure, is forced to move to Alaska for a new job.

Jessica Bennett (21:40):

Okay. Alaska, love that. So she’s been passed over for a prestigious fellowship in Boston, and her boyfriend breaks up with her.

Clips (21:48):

Everything I’ve worked for my entire life is gone.

Susie Banikarim (21:50):

She temporarily accepts an offer to go practice in a small town called Garland.

Clips (21:56):

Garland, Alaska.

Susie Banikarim (21:57):

Get it? It’s got a Christmas theme.

Jessica Bennett (21:59):

It’s a real town?

Susie Banikarim (22:00):

No, the towns are never real.

Jessica Bennett (22:01):

That’s not. Okay, got it.

Susie Banikarim (22:02):

The towns are always like, Evergreen or whatever, fake names.

Jessica Bennett (22:05):

All right, got it.

Susie Banikarim (22:06):

And this job is supposed to be temporary while she waits for another chance at the Boston Fellowship. When she gets to Alaska, she meets Andy, who is a handsome local handyman.

Clips (22:18):

Welcome to Garland, Dr. Brunell.

Susie Banikarim (22:19):

She quickly starts to fall in love with Garland, but as Lauren becomes more familiar with the town, she starts to notice some odd things. Most people in this town actually work for Andy, the adorable handyman she met when she arrived. His father, Frank, who owns a warehouse business called Holiday Shipping because their last name is Holiday. And Frank likes to eat cookies for breakfast.

Jessica Bennett (22:48):

Oh, wow.

Susie Banikarim (22:49):

And she can’t quite figure out what Frank’s business exactly is, beyond shipping. But she starts to get to know Andy better and it turns out that he used to be an architect in Seattle, but he moved home because his dad really needs help with the family business.

Jessica Bennett (23:07):

Okay. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (23:08):

What is the family business? Still unclear.

Jessica Bennett (23:10):

Santa. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (23:11):

Yeah. Okay, shh.

Jessica Bennett (23:13):

Christmas.

Susie Banikarim (23:14):

Wait, just wait. He confides in Lauren that he’s ambivalent about his future, and here is the almost kiss moment. And then later, there’s an emergency and Lauren is summoned to the holiday home. But when she gets there, she realizes it’s not a medical emergency that she’s been summoned for, but there’s a reindeer.

Jessica Bennett (23:38):

A reindeer emergency?

Susie Banikarim (23:39):

Yes. And the reindeer’s name is-

Jessica Bennett (23:39):

Is injured?

Susie Banikarim (23:40):

… Rudy, presumably short for Rudolph, who is injured. His ankle is injured, and it’s a crisis because they need him to be well, for the Christmas Eve-

Jessica Bennett (23:51):

Yeah, duh.

Susie Banikarim (23:53):

… Festival.

Jessica Bennett (23:54):

Okay. Okay.

Susie Banikarim (23:55):

So still she’s like, things here are strange, but-

Jessica Bennett (23:58):

She’s like, “I don’t get it.”

Susie Banikarim (24:00):

“I don’t get it. What is happening here that feels odd?”

Jessica Bennett (24:03):

What could this be?

Susie Banikarim (24:03):

What does it all mean? But she’s smart, so she’s starting to become suspicious.

Jessica Bennett (24:09):

Is she, though?

Susie Banikarim (24:10):

Something strange is afoot. Well, she is a doctor. Right?

Jessica Bennett (24:13):

Interesting. Okay. So did she know how to fix Rudy’s foot?

Susie Banikarim (24:17):

She patches up Rudy’s ankle.

Jessica Bennett (24:18):

Oh, she does? Okay. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (24:20):

Yes, and everyone is extremely grateful. And then some other things happen I won’t get into, but it’s important to note that somewhere in all of this, Andy gets Lauren a Christmas tree and they decorate it together.

Clips (24:35):

This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had.

Jessica Bennett (24:37):

And then they kiss.

Susie Banikarim (24:38):

Nope, the kiss doesn’t come until the end. It’s just near kisses until the end. I’m sure they bake some cookies or go ice skating, I don’t remember all the fun Christmas activity, but that’s how their romance unfolds. And then, right after all of that, comes the challenge. Lauren finds out that a spot has opened up in Boston after all. So she tells Andy-

Jessica Bennett (25:01):

Oh, her job, okay.

Susie Banikarim (25:01):

… that she’s leaving and she can’t give up what she’s wanted her whole life-

Jessica Bennett (25:03):

Her dream.

Susie Banikarim (25:03):

… and they’re both really sad. And the question here is, Jessica, is this going to be the first time that a Christmas movie doesn’t have a happy ending?

Jessica Bennett (25:13):

Okay, but maybe the happy ending is getting her executive job.

Susie Banikarim (25:18):

Okay. You are clearly wrong about that.

Jessica Bennett (25:19):

A girl boss.

Susie Banikarim (25:21):

What are you even thinking? The happy ending is never that the career girl goes back to her career. She always discovers that small-time life is better than her New York career.

Jessica Bennett (25:33):

Okay, so what happens?

Susie Banikarim (25:34):

So that’s so silly, but obviously, I’m wrong. There will be a happy ending. Before Lauren can leave, Andy gets a call that his father has collapsed, and so they rushed to be by his side. And Andy is so worried about his father’s health that he realizes that he has to help his dad with the business. Again, no one is being explicit about what the business is, but in seeing him and his dad come together, Lauren has a realization of her own. She’s decided she’s going to stay in Garland. She turns down the fellowship and she goes to find Andy at the Christmas Festival to tell him, and then they kiss. And it is a happy ending after all. But one last thing, it turns out that Frank is, in fact, Santa Claus.

Jessica Bennett (26:21):

Okay. So does that mean, I guess, she’s not going to be Mrs. Claus?

Susie Banikarim (26:25):

One day.

Jessica Bennett (26:26):

Anyway, she’s going to be a homemaker now.

Susie Banikarim (26:27):

One day she’s going to be Mrs. Claus, she’s going to be a doctor and Mrs. Claus. And the way we find out that Frank is, in fact, Santa Claus is, he comes out in a full Santa outfit in a sleigh being led by Rudy the reindeer, and then it goes up into the air.

Clips (26:44):

Let’s get this show underway.

Susie Banikarim (26:46):

And that’s how the movie ends.

Jessica Bennett (26:49):

Are these… Okay, this is kitsch, this is like, “LOL, this is so ridiculous.” Or this is like, I don’t get it. Why would you want to watch this?

Susie Banikarim (27:00):

Good question. That’s a great question.

Jessica Bennett (27:03):

Maybe it’s just like you’re trying to get away from your family over the holidays-

Susie Banikarim (27:06):

Well, I think that’s some of it.

Jessica Bennett (27:06):

… and this is something to do.

Susie Banikarim (27:08):

Some of it is, you’re just trying to look for entertainment anywhere you can find it. I think that for a lot of people who watch it, for me, it is kitsch. I find it hilarious. It’s unintentionally a comedy for me, right? I’m like, “He’s Santa Claus? That’s the story?”

Jessica Bennett (27:22):

Yeah. Okay. It’s funny when you tell it, yeah.

Susie Banikarim (27:25):

Right. But I don’t know that that’s how it’s intended, but it’s certainly how I receive it. So I think I would love to hear from people who have different reasons why they love these movies. For me, it’s always hilarious. And the more deranged the storyline, the more I love it. ‘Cause I’m just like, “What’s happening now?”

Jessica Bennett (27:41):

Okay, that’s fun. I could see that.

Susie Banikarim (27:42):

You can kind of see that, right? And I think there are people who play Hallmark Christmas games, like drinking games, where when something happens…

Jessica Bennett (27:49):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (27:50):

There’s a lot of ways to make it fun. But I think what’s interesting is that Candace Cameron Bure herself is a really interesting part of the Hallmark universe because she really is the queen of Christmas or the Queen of Hallmark Christmas, but I don’t know how much you know about her, but she’s quite conservative. She’s an openly conservative celebrity, obviously, of which, there are not a ton. And she’s been creating content for the channel since 2008. And her first Hallmark movie was called Moonlight and Mistletoe and just FYI, Tom Arnold was in it-

Jessica Bennett (28:29):

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (28:30):

… just in case you’re wondering. But in 2022, she announced that she was ending her contract with Hallmark, and she was going to go to this other channel called the Great American Family Channel, which she claimed was more in line with her traditional and religious values. And this created a controversy because it seemed very much like a veiled way of saying she rejected that there were now LGBTQ themes and more diversity in the stories. And this is what she said at the time, “My heart wants to tell stories that have more meaning and purpose and depth behind them. I know that the people behind Great American Family were Christians that love the Lord and wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment.”

Jessica Bennett (29:12):

Were there some gay uncles in Mistletoe and Mischief? What was it called? Holiday Mistletoe and whatever.

Susie Banikarim (29:22):

So they had started to introduce characters that were obliquely gay, like they would have two men who were friends. They would never explicitly talk about there being gay, but you could kind of get a sense. But at this point, they make movies where there are two leads who are gay and who end up together. There has been a push towards more diversity and inclusion on the channel. And there was kind of this scandal because at some point, there was an ad on the channel from a wedding registry site where two lesbians kissed and a conservative group started to organize a boycott. And initially, they pulled the commercial, but then, there was a boycott of the channel from the other side. And competitors like Netflix and other streamers who now make these movies touted that they have more LGBTQ diversity. So Hallmark reversed its decision and said it would reinstate the advertisements and work with GLAAD and other LGBTQ groups to have more inclusive programming.

(30:21):

All of that happened in 2019. So that was before she kind of made the statement that made it clear that she wanted more love of the Lord in her programming. And she said this thing, which was very coded, but clear, which is, she was like, “Hallmark is now a completely different network than when I started thanks to a change in leadership.”

Jessica Bennett (30:45):

Bye Candace. Bye Candace. See ya. Creative American Family or whatever.

Susie Banikarim (30:51):

I mean, honestly, I don’t miss her, but this was a big thing in the Hallmark universe.

Jessica Bennett (30:56):

So I have no connection to Hallmark movies whatsoever except for one thing, which is that my friends that I grew up with, Neil Bledsoe, we went to high school together. He’s a pretty well-known Hallmark actor or this type. I’m still-

Susie Banikarim (31:14):

I’m sure I’ve seen all his movies, yeah.

Jessica Bennett (31:16):

… Great American Family versus Hallmark, whatever. He was a successful actor in other realms, then he started doing Hallmark movies. He starred at one point in something with Winnie Cooper, whose name I forget, but who you mentioned earlier.

Susie Banikarim (31:27):

Danica McKellar, yeah.

Jessica Bennett (31:29):

Oh yeah, Danica McKellar. And then when this all was happening, he took a stand and was like, “I’m out. If you can’t support LGBTQ issues, that’s not a network that I want to be involved in.” And so there were all these headlines about Neil, my high school dance Tolo date, being the right kind of ally. So that’s where my-

Susie Banikarim (31:50):

Okay. So, I just Googled this, and you’re right. So this is actually exactly what we’re talking about. Neil, I guess, had also gone over to Great American Family. So basically, Great American Family was started by this guy who used to run Hallmark, this guy Bill Abbott, who sort of created-

Jessica Bennett (32:05):

Oh, so he left [inaudible 00:32:06] this other channel?

Susie Banikarim (32:07):

… this concept. And after all of this stuff happens with the lesbian ad, he abruptly leaves the channel in February of 2020, and he starts trying to recruit the famous actors of Hallmark to come over to Great American Family, which he sort of strategically says is going to be more traditional, but never explicitly says that it’s not going to have inclusion or LGBTQ, et cetera. So when Candace makes these remarks, two years later, it becomes a controversy. And Neil was, I guess, signed on to make some films with the Great American Family Channel, and he said he would no longer do that. So hopefully, he’s still making Hallmark movies and wants to come on and tell us all about that ’cause I want to hear everything about that experience, but…

Jessica Bennett (32:58):

Yeah, I’m curious. I don’t know.

Susie Banikarim (32:59):

Yeah. See, now, aren’t you more curious about what it’s like to be part of this world?

Jessica Bennett (33:03):

Kind of.

Susie Banikarim (33:05):

Not really. Well, Neil, I really appreciate you, even if your friend Jessica from high school can’t understand why.

Jessica Bennett (33:14):

No, I appreciate what he did. I just don’t know that I need to watch the movie. Anyhow. Okay. So is there a movie that you’re currently watching right now?

Susie Banikarim (33:26):

Oh, I mean, don’t always even watch a movie to the end. Sometimes I’ll just watch an hour of it and finish. I’m not like DVRing the movie.

Jessica Bennett (33:35):

I got you.

Susie Banikarim (33:36):

I’m not in the middle of a movie. I’m trying to think if I watched anything last night. I mean, I’ll just sort of flip through channels and sometimes there’ll be one that I know. There’s another famous Candace Cameron Bure one where she plays twins. She plays both parts.

Jessica Bennett (33:49):

Right, right.

Susie Banikarim (33:49):

They’re sisters that are estranged and they swap lives. And for some reason, even though that movie is very bad, I love it. So whenever that’s on, I watch it. There’s a lot of themes around royalty.

Jessica Bennett (34:01):

Oh, interesting.

Susie Banikarim (34:01):

So it’ll be like small-town girl gets asked to be a nanny in fake European country, like Genovia. And she’ll go there to be the nanny and she’ll fall in love with her charge’s brother, who happens to be the Prince.

Jessica Bennett (34:18):

Okay, got it. Got it, got it, got it.

Susie Banikarim (34:20):

There’s a lot of these-

Jessica Bennett (34:21):

These are all like fairy tales in one way or another?

Susie Banikarim (34:22):

… fantasy, fairy tales. Yeah. I mean, essentially, that’s what it is. It’s a fairy tale about what life could be like in a fantasy. I remember once I actually brought this up with my therapist, it was a holiday season where I was feeling a little depressed and I was like, “Why don’t I have a family like this?” And she was like, “What are you talking about?”

Jessica Bennett (34:42):

Yeah, that’s deranged.

Susie Banikarim (34:45):

“These are fantasies. Nobody has families like this.” Like, “This is not the real world.” And I was like, yeah. I mean… Honestly, what I thought in that moment is, I can’t believe I have to pay someone to say this to me.

Jessica Bennett (34:56):

You better move to a small town. Like, “Get out of New York City, you careerist.”

Susie Banikarim (35:04):

Yeah. Do you think that if I-

Jessica Bennett (35:06):

You can take your Baker boyfriend with you because clearly, he belongs in a small town. Open up your little bagel shop.

Susie Banikarim (35:13):

Okay. I just want you to know that I do want to move to a small town and open up a bagel shop and Mike is like, “No, I want to live in New York. Why would I want to go to some small town?”

Jessica Bennett (35:23):

I don’t know.

Susie Banikarim (35:25):

He’s just refusing to participate in my fantasy. But I guess, that’s a happy ending of its own because I’m pretty sure if I ended up in some small town, I’d be tearing my hair out in a week.

Jessica Bennett (35:36):

Or maybe you would love it.

Susie Banikarim (35:38):

Maybe I would love it. I think we can leave this episode here. Do you feel like you know everything you need to know about Hallmark movies?

Jessica Bennett (35:44):

Yeah, I think I know enough and I will file this away in my head and I’m still never going to watch them.

Susie Banikarim (35:53):

Okay. All right. Well, I feel like my job here is done then.

Jessica Bennett (35:56):

Great work.

Susie Banikarim (35:57):

Happy holidays.

Jessica Bennett (36:02):

Susie, just before we wrap this episode up, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some of the ideas that our listeners have been sending in. So every week, we’ve been asking you to tell us what you think we should explore. And as we wrap up season one, we’re getting ready to tackle all of these new subjects for season two. And we love some of these ideas that have been sent in.

Susie Banikarim (36:24):

Yeah, I mean, we’ve had such great response and I just want you guys to know we read every email and-

Jessica Bennett (36:29):

We really do.

Susie Banikarim (36:31):

… every DM, and I love all of them. And I always say that I kind of want to write a thank you note, like a handwritten thank you note to all of you. So if you DM me your address, I probably will do that. But yeah, let’s go over some of these ideas ’cause we have great episodes coming up, but hopefully, there’ll be an opportunity to incorporate some of these.

Jessica Bennett (36:48):

One that I am really excited about came from Beth Lipton, who actually sent a couple of great ones about Lilith Fair and the Riot Girl era of the nineties. I was always so upset I didn’t go to Lilith Fair.

Susie Banikarim (36:59):

I know, me too. I mean, I have seen Indigo Girls in concert five times, so I feel like it’s kind of the closest you’re going to get to Lilith Fair. But I am really sad I missed it.

Jessica Bennett (37:08):

And there has been a funny TikTok going around recently of a young person being like, “What? There was a festival that was all women. It was called Lilith Fair?” So I think, good fodder for us.

Susie Banikarim (37:22):

Yeah. And also, maybe it will inspire someone to make another Lilith Fair. I would totally go to that now. Beth sent in another good idea about doing something around Sandy’s transition in Grease, like how she had to become a bad girl to get the guy-

Jessica Bennett (37:35):

Oh, yeah. The big hair.

Susie Banikarim (37:36):

… and I always loved that. There’s a great thing in here about something I don’t know about, but I feel like I should do a lot of research on, which is Mariah Carey’s Glitter meltdown. I’m like, I want to know everything about that.

Jessica Bennett (37:48):

I don’t remember what that was.

Susie Banikarim (37:49):

I don’t know what that is either.

Jessica Bennett (37:50):

Okay, that came from Maddie Lambert. So thanks, Maddie. We’ll look that up.

Susie Banikarim (37:53):

Yeah, I think that’s a good one.

Jessica Bennett (37:56):

But all of these are so great and we hope people and listeners will keep sending them because we really do look into them and maybe we’ll pursue them. So thank you.

Susie Banikarim (38:05):

Yeah, thank you so much. We really love all of you.

(38:10):

This is In Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can’t stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @inretropod.

Jessica Bennett (38:24):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (38:35):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (38:44):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart podcast and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derrick Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (38:57):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe and Mike Coscarelli. Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (39:15):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.