Afleveringen
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To celebrate 3 years of podcasting together, we are going through some amazing questions our listeners posed! The results ran a little long, and so this is only the first part of the resulting mailbag episode (this one is main feed, the next one, in a few weeks, will be Patreon-only)! We decided to delve into more general questions first, so the topics under discussion include: Problematic faves, updates on Moira's squirrel, Adrian's adventures in art history exam taking, some thoughts about student AI use, and the pronunciation of Adrian's name!
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For the third installment of our TERF Island series, we use the case of JK Rowling herself to trace TERFism's "march through the institutions" in the UK and beyond. It's an episode about TERF self-staging as singular and "deeply personal" apostasy from "gender orthodoxy", which belies an increasingly sophisticated, well-connected and well-funded network pushing anti-trans talking points in public.
This is a PREVIEW, if you'd like to hear the remainder of the episode (and the previous episodes in the series), please head over to patreon.com/inbedwiththeright to become a supporter!
PLEASE NOTE: we recorded this episode before the latest re-emergence of Rowling as TERFism final boss with the release and subsequent suppression of the Amnesty International report on anti-trans hate groups. But that imbroglio certainly made us even happier we're doing this series behind the paywall.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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It's Hot California Summer over here on In Bed with the Right! For this first installment (of probably three), Moira and Adrian delve into the work of noted California-native and inveterate California-explainer Joan Didion, whose conservatism was a central part of our episode on San Francisco in the conservative imagination. The episode's focus is on Didion's 2003 book Where I Was From, a brilliant diagnosis of, and only intermittently self-aware display of, a particular California ideology. It's an ideology that continues to shape how the world views California, and how California views the world.
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For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the troubled and troubling story of congresswoman Nancy Mace -- a moderate who first became MAGA, then a vicious transphobe, and then became a gendered apostate from that movement (while remaining hugely transphobic). Trigger warning: While we initially thought this would be an acerbic deep dive into an unusual MAGA politician, the portrait that emerged was instead pretty complicated, and Mace's story turned out to be incredibly dark.
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For this episode, Adrian and Moira discuss the life, career and (many, many) opinions of Lena Dunham -- creator of Girls, writer of memoirs and the face that launched a million think-pieces back in the 2010s. They touch on the gendered attacks, questions of maturity and accomplishment, nepobabydom and the Apatow extended universe, as well as on the conspicuously different reception Dunham's new memoir has received when compared to her earlier work.
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In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the history of Mifepristone. Developed in France in the 1980s, this medication (which, together with Misoprostol, is used to end pregnancies) has been a flashpoint in Europe and the United States pretty much since it was first created. Today, it is the only way for millions of Americans living in states where abortion is illegal or impossible to get to safely terminate their pregnancies safely. This episode dives into the attack on Mifepristone, the history of medical abortion and what the future might look like.
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In this episode, Adrian walks Moira through the strange politics of plagiarism hunting -- an (initially non-partisan) German preoccupation that became another line of attack in the right wing assault on higher education in the United States. The episode details how legitimate concerns about academic fraud were fused with a broader populist critique of "university corruption", which effortlessly fused with anti-woke and anti-"DEI" critiques of the university.
NOTE: As he feared, Adrian was indeed incorrect on one particular point: German dentists do not have to write a dissertation, though a surprisingly large percentage of them do.
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For a while now (though mostly on Patreon), Moira and Adrian have examined a strange canon of films and texts about. powerful people being taken down by forces of social justice. Many of these take place on college campuses or near them (Oleanna, Deconstructing Harry,The Human Stain, After the Hunt); others center figures of the art world (Tàr). There have been a few new entries in this genre, and they tell us a lot about where our culture and are politics are with regards to consequences, impunity and powerful men. The focus in this conversation is the HBO show Rooster starring Steve Carell and Outcome starring Keanu Reeves.
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For this episode, Moira guides Adrian through the life, career and legacy of Marilyn Monroe, and the role gender played in all three. Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926 -- so her centennial is coming up in a few weeks. We touch on Monroe's suffering, her canny manipulation of her own image, and the political dimension of her public persona.
Here are some of the books and articles we refer to in the episode:
Joyce Carol Oates, "Blonde"
Norman Mailer, "Marilyn, A Biography" (NOT an endorsement)
Gloria Steinem, Marilyn Monroe: Norma Jeane
Jaqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times
Lois Banner, "Marilyn Monroe: proto-feminist?"
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In this episode Moira and Adrian discuss the natural law tradition -- its origins, its long varied history, the many uses to which it has been put, and the way conservatives are trying to revive it in our own day.
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In recent months, the call to repeal the 19th amendment and rescind American women's right to vote, has proliferated as a hashtag, meme and a shibboleth in certain far-right spaces. But how serious are those championing the cause? In this episode, Moira explains to Adrian that while we needn't worry that the 1920 amendment is going anywhere soon, this demand is about jockeying within the masculinist coalition that brought Donald Trump to power. While the supposed "arguments" for a repeal don't really bear engaging with, the history of the demand and its proliferation at this moment tells us a lot about gender and the (far) right: specifically about an alliance and a competition between tech bros and religious fundamentalists.
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For this episode, Adrian and Moira talk about gender and food -- specifically about the figure of the chef, visible and invisible labor and masculinity. Their main exemplar is Guy Fieri, the self-declared Mayor of Flavortown, but they also discuss 2022's The Menu, Anthony Bourdain, #MeToo in the restaurant world, and the baffling appeal of Gordon Ramsay. Please note: this is a preview for a Patreon-episode, to hear the whole thing, please go to our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight.
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For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902). Famous as a pioneering feminist intellectual and crusader for women's suffrage, Stanton is today also remembered for the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that dominated the second half of her incredibly long career. We explore how these two go together, and what Stanton's life tells us about the effects of political disappointment.
Find Ellen Carol Dubois's new Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life here.
Read (or "reëncounter") Moira's review essay in the New Yorker here.
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In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange, disturbing world of looksmaxxing. We try to spend less time asking where this phenomenon comes from, less time gawking at the weird terminology and rituals of this subculture (though we do spend some time, we're only human!)--but our main question is what a phenomenon like looksmaxxing says about masculinity, right-wing gender politics, and heterosexuality.
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This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis-metaphors, the Best Little Whorehouse in Grailland, and the final split in the bromance known as Nietzgner (probably? We're talking about Nietzsche and Wagner).
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Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do with what you think of as persecution. Sam's book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany will be out in April and can be preordered here.
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In the second half of our two-part series on one of In Bed with the Right's bêtes noires, Adrian and Moira chart the resistible rise of Bari Weiss's from her time on the canceled-person circuit to the pinnacle of American news media. Topics covered: the rise of the Free Press and the decline of the free press; how a certain kind of Silicon Valley creep fell in love with what Bari was selling; how she rode the "vibe shift" among tech elites to maximum profit; and why the Trump-era may well prove her undoing.
Some of our sources for this episode:
On Bari's reign of terror at CBS: Clare Malone, "Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS"
Radley Balko's takedown of the Free Press piece about George Floyd: "The Retconning of George Floyd"
If you read German, and want to know more about the tech elite's "vibe shift" around 2020, you can check out Adrian's new book! (Or you can wait until September 10 to get the English version!)
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It's the first half of our (possibly? hopefully?) two-part series on In Bed with the Right final boss, Bari Weiss: reactionary centrist extraordinaire, #MeToo backlasher and the woman who parlayed a grifty "cancel culture" Substack into running pretty much 90% of the news you're still allowed to air on TV. This first episode deals with her origin story, up to her high-profile exit from the New York Times.
CONTENT NOTE: Yes, we know we're mispronouncing her name. It's really hard to get out of the habit, but we promise promise promise to get better at it before Part 2! We meant (in this one very specific instance) no disrespect.
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Last week, Adrian and Moira went to the movies and watched director Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (trailer here). In this episode they explore the gender politics of the novel, of this adaptation and what it says about the fate of romance fiction in the 2020s.
Here are some of the texts we refer to in the discussion or used in preparing for it:
Elizabeth Hardwick, "Working Girls: The Brontës"
Georges Bataille, "Literature and Evil"
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Madwoman in the Attic"
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One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira, herself a graduate of Bard (Class of 2012, baby!) walks Adrian through what the Epstein/Botstein friendship can tell us about the last 50 years of anti-feminist politics.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of articles we refer to in the episode:
-- Botstein's 1999 op-ed "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood" can be found here
-- Botstein's book Jefferson's Children can be found here
-- Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable can be purchased here
-- Reporting on the various lawsuits and Title IX investigations against Bard and its president can be found here (2015 case), here (2016 case), here (2020 case), here (2022 case)
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