It Was Fun While It Lasted!
The podcast ends but new adventures begin!
Last Call: The Femsplainers Ends After 150+ Episodes (And Many More Cocktails!)
It wasn’t an easy decision — but it was time, as they say.
Despite going strong into our fourth year with our new network, PodcastOne, I’d already begun to feel the nagging urge to do something different. Those of you who have followed the pod from the beginning know it was launched with the concept of two best friends — Christina Hoff Sommers and me — chatting about women’s issues in a not-the-usual-politics way. The first episode’s title, “How We Met & What We Drank,” set the tone for what would become an ongoing, weekly, and often uproarious conversation, punctuated with the company of fabulous and interesting guests.
Our original motivation to do the podcast stemmed from the rise of #MeToo. Christina and I had both written popular books in the 1990s, questioning and challenging many of the feminist shibboleths of the time.
Still available on Amazon! Click here for Danielle’s book and here for Christina’s.
And during that decade, we frequently found ourselves on debate panels, paired as a team (in the first episode we describe our encounter with feminist matriarch Betty Friedan, who at one point lunged across her podium at me! However her rage was temporary as she subsequently asked me to address one of her classes at George Washington University).
In the years following, Christina and I drifted into other topics, but never away from our friendship. When #MeToo ignited, it sparked a renewed interest in both of us to engage in the conversations about feminism with a younger generation of women — and a podcast seemed the best way to have those conversations.
Since then, we’ve done that and more (including podcasting through a pandemic). Then, Christina decided to retire from her public life last year — and so I regrouped and reformatted the podcast with a revolving panel of wonderful friends and co-splainers: The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Cox Gurdon, and Irshad Manji of the Moral Courage Project. I’m grateful to all of them. I’m also deeply thankful to our listeners — especially those who supported us on Patreon. You sustained the podcast and became part of our Femsplaining community. And a big thank you to the fantastic guests who’ve joined us over the years, and to PodcastOne, for hosting us. I owe an especially big shout out to my son, Nat Frum, who had the double torture of editing the podcast while listening to his mother’s voice for hours and hours on end.
(He also frequently saved me from myself:
“I thought that was funny!”
“Trust me it wasn’t.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”)
In this final podcast, Christina and I reminisce about some of our favorite episodes and guests, and whether our thinking about various issues has changed over the course of the podcast. And as always, there are digressions …
So: What Next?
Like so many emerging from the fog of the pandemic, I’ve had a lot of time to brood about how I’d like my “afterlife” to be. Absent of a weekly deadline to produce the podcast, I’m keen to return to my first love, writing. The urgency of so many of the issues we raised on the Femsplainers has not declined, especially for Millennials and GenZers trying to figure out how to have successful, long-term relationships. I’m revisiting an idea I’ve had to update my first book (above) — published pre-Internet! Pre-smart phone! Pre-online dating! Pre- … well, so much, including the fact I’ve come out the other end of motherhood. The book was written when my eldest children were still very small, and I’d yet to bear or even contemplate our third. I remember rousing myself at 5 in the morning to get a head start on my manuscript before the daily tsunami of waking demands. Like many a wizened parent looking back on the early trenches of child-rearing, I’m not sure how I — we! — got through them.
My husband David and I just sent our third off to college on the other side of the continent, after a delayed start due to COVID. The house now feels like a battle ship dry-docked after a long mission. Emptied of troops, it currently occupies a couple of workmen who are repairing and preparing it for whatever comes next. Dinner is a quiet affair. No one is going through a vegetarian phase, or won’t eat fish, or is avoiding carbs at the moment. I miss my troops, but I also love watching them unfold as adults. Our son is engaged and there’s a wedding to plan. New missions beckon.
So with all this in mind, I’m keen to return, as a fiftysomething, to many of the themes that pre-occupied me in my twenties and thirties. I recently had a chance to share some of those thoughts on a different podcast, hosted by Dan Riley. You can listen to it by clicking on the image below (and yes, that is a highly outdated photo of me — not the result of Kardashian-levels of airbrushing).
Which leads me to…
Let’s Keep Our Conversations Going!
If you’ve enjoyed the podcast and the newsletter, please don’t cancel your subscription! My plan to write more includes keeping up this monthly dispatch, re-invented as a place we can continue to explore Femsplainer-y topics together.
I’ll introduce you to authors, podcasts, links, and articles I think will be of interest as well as post my own musings on various issues. Also please feel free to post comments and questions. I love hearing from you and together we can continue to build our community. Look for new dispatches on the last Friday of every month.
And should you wish to contact me directly, please reach out via email to Danielle@femsplainers.com.
Onwards dear Femsplainers!
Like many, many, many people, I loved your podcast, Danielle!!!