Woke Toddlers, Angry Puritans, Closeted Nazis, Swinging Parents, Mommy Dearest, and a REAL Witch
(That Was Our New Fall Season!)
Why Hello, Hollywood!
Visiting the PodcastOne studios in Los Angeles
… and hello to our listeners via our first newsletter since we broke for the summer! Apologies for the lull in communications. After our last episode for the season in June, The Femsplainers changed networks to PodcastOne. It’s very exciting to join one of the largest networks in the country, and I wanted to take some time over the summer to re-evaluate the format of the show going forward on this new platform. I reached out to many of you (especially our loyal subscribers at Patreon) for suggestions: Who were some of your favorite episodes? What features or aspects of the podcast did you like best?
Your feedback was super helpful. Almost unanimously, you told me that what you enjoyed most about the podcast was it’s weekly variety of topics and guests. You like the surprise of coming across interesting stories and subjects you don’t find elsewhere, and our in-depth, good-humored, and largely partisan-free discussions. When we DO take on controversial issues, you appreciate that we explore them in a fair and open-minded way. A few of you expressed disappointment that my founding co-splainer Christina Hoff Sommers retired during Covid. I miss her too! But the good news is she will continue to join occasionally in our new “up top” cocktail segment, where I have a virtual drink with an interesting person whose company I think you’d enjoy. And the substance of the podcast — the main interview — remains the same. As always our goal is, as our website says, to provide a “weekly girls' night out with some of the most fascinating and fabulous women on the planet.”
You can help us by continuing to download, share, and “like” The Femsplainers on whatever platform you find us on (including here directly at PodcastOne). Recommend us to your friends. And please consider becoming a “friend with benefits” by supporting us at Patreon. All our subscribers receive a bonus monthly episode, Last Call, in which you get to ask our guests questions. You’ll also automatically receive this newsletter and be invited to our monthly exclusive virtual cocktail party. And for $10/month, you’ll receive an early, ad-free version of the weekly podcast. It’s a great community, and we’d love to have you join it!
Now onto highlights from October and September. You can watch the short outtakes on our YouTube channel by clicking on the boxes, or go to the full episodes by clicking on the buttons below.
Woke Toddlers, Angry Puritans, Closeted Nazis, Swinging Parents, Mommy Dearest, and a REAL Witch (That Was Our October!)
As the nation streamed back into post-pandemic classrooms, parents of grade-school kids suddenly had more to worry about than social distancing. The politicization of college campuses is now happening in lower and secondary schools, according to Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder of the non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and author of Undoctrinate, How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It. She joined the podcast to tell us exactly that: how parents can recognize it and deal with it. Christina Hoff Sommers was our cocktail guest for that episode (told you she’d be back!). She weighed in on the worrisome decline in male applications to college (and for my sake, ALSO debauchery amongst the Royals and other less serious topics!).
Next up, Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum rejoined the podcast to discuss her essay in The Atlantic about the “New Puritans.” Are we all in danger of becoming modern-day Hester Prynnes at the mercy of online mobs? As our cocktail pairing for that episode, Tina Nguyen, star columnist of the new website Puck, described her journey from young right-wing recruit to chronicler of the right — and offered some surprising revelations.
The 70s are remembered for the sexual revolution and the women's movement, but rarely are these events told from a child's view. Erika Schickel, author of The Big Hurt, joined to discuss her powerful, painfully personal memoir of the time when moms and dads took a pass on parenting to live for themselves — and the long-term repercussions that had on the subsequent generation. Handily, my husband, David Frum, happens to have written a definitive history of the '70s (How We Got Here: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life). With a bribe of a gin and tonic, he agreed to join me up top to explain why everything seemed to be going to hell when we were both kids — and to put our childhoods in a larger cultural & historical context. Such as: Why were the cars so ugly? Why were we suddenly all wearing polyester? Etc…
“Mommy Dearest” legendary singer Eartha Kitt was NOT. Having survived a harrowing childhood as the daughter of a raped sharecropper, she was determined not to impart any misery to her own little girl, Kitt Shapiro. Shapiro has now written a compelling and admiring memoir, Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black & White of her mother that highlights, among many important truths, the complexity of identity politics — and why Eartha rejected being defined by them.
And for Hallowe’en, how could we resist interviewing a real witch? And by witch we don’t mean Wiccan. The last in a line of Bohemian witches, Veronica Varlow now teaches spellcasting to celebrities and at corporate retreats. Well of course that’s what a modern witch would do. She shared some spells and, uh, tips — such as the one below…
Highlights From Our September Shows
It was a short but intense month for the pod.
Our season opener featured investigative journalist Vicky Ward, whose new podcast serial Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Jeffrey Epstein’s Shadow recently debuted on Audible. Vicky has been reporting on the Epstein world since 2002, when she was first assigned to write a profile for Vanity Fair of the then-mysterious friend to Manhattan’s uber wealthy. Vicky knew Ghislaine back in the day as well, when she floated around British ex-pat circles in New York. It’s a brilliant, gripping, and deeply reported series on the rise and fall of both Jeffrey and Ghislaine: what was their relationship, really; where did his own riches come from; and … do we believe Epstein killed himself or was murdered? Maxwell goes on trial this month. In this clip, Vicky speculates on his accomplice’s probable jaw-dropping defense strategy. And for a completely different mixer, The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan joined with a “cherry coke” for this episode’s cocktail session, mainly to bitch about cancer shaming and Canadian vacations (but wait, she loved Tim Horton's!).
Our other podcast for September focused on twin erasures of “women”: the Taliban’s war against women after the US pull-out, and in the West, the trend to define one's sex by "gender identity" and not biology. I was joined by The Economist's Helen Joyce, who argues the latter is leading to the erasure of women's rights on many important fronts. But, as she warns, few dare to challenge this radical re-definition of what it means to be a woman (or for that matter, a man). As for the Taliban, the women they will be attempting to send back to the Dark Ages are not the same as they were before the war. The Council on Foreign Relation's Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who has extensively chronicled this new generation of strong and empowered Afghan women, suggests the Taliban may have a bigger fight on their hands than they might expect.
A Shout-Out to Our Fall Sponsors
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Incoming Femsplainers for November!
We have spectacular guests coming up including “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua, media powerhouse Bari Weiss, and best-selling author (& mansplainer!) Laurence Leamer, who will dish on his latest book, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song of an Era. Plus MUCH MORE!
KEEP UP! Follow The Femsplainers podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Check out our videos on our YouTube channel. Find out more about us at our website. Find all our episodes on iTunes (don’t forget to “like” us!) and PodcastOne. Share your feedback with us at contact@femsplainers.com.