You can listen to an audio recording of this post at the link below. I mistakenly identified Ladylike as a Vice show; apologies for that. In my defence: who can tell the difference these days? Still, apologies.
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For the past month or so, I’ve been busily culling my Facebook list of friends to remove people I either don’t recognise, have lost touch with or who are dead— and that last category is somehow simultaneously sad and something else. There are also a lot of people with whom I simply have nothing in common anymore even if we once saw ourselves as sympaticos.
I’ll have a separate post on the exact reasons for the mass purge but for now I thought I’d make a few notes about an odd phenomenon I’ve noticed while going through my “friends” list: that a lot — a lot — of people on the left nowadays are involved with podcasts, and the vast majority of these are dominated by men.
Let me pause here and issue a caveat: this is not based on any extensive research but entirely on what I see in my feed. As such, this is an observation which may or may not be verifiable with facts and data. I have no doubt many reading this will sneer, “Humph, well, haha, maybe she needs a new set of friends.” To which I’d respond, well, yes, hence: the cull.
At any rate: I’m somewhat well-known on the left (though there are many parts where I appear to be like Voldemort: She Whose Name May Not Be Taken) and my feed of what was once nearly 4000 “friends” is something of a cross-section of sorts. Not a representative cross-section, at all, in a world of seven billion, and given that most FB accounts are either fake or hardly used (I found a surprisingly large number of people who had not been on the site for years or months), I don’t offer my — again, observations — as anything other than speculations.
But. As I cull people, I make a point of checking to see if they’ve made direct contact with me, and I look at their walls to see what they post about. And this is where I come across many, many podcasts. An unnerving fact about my FB feed is that so many — too many — are men. And they’re all obsessed with podcasts, it seems. Phil Wang, a Malaysian-English comedian who is deeply unfunny but coasts along on the fact that he’s Malaysian-English (still an exotic identity in the U.S) has made only one funny joke in his life, during a forgettable Netflix comedy special: “At thirty-five, all my friends think I need to finally grow up and do what’s expected of me as an adult: I need my own podcast.”* It’s true: the logic seems to be that if you don’t have a podcast, you either have nothing to say or you are a nobody. The podcast is to the rising Public Intellectual what the Blog was (and still is) to writers.
To be clear: I’ve grown to love podcasts, as have we all — the ongoing pandemic ensures that they’re here to stay. But as I scrolled through all the podcasts I encountered on these feeds, I was struck by how many were not just hosted by men but seemed to only feature men. We’re not talking about liberal or progressive podcasts but hard-core lefty podcasts, many of which might have titles with words like “Class” and “Marxism” and “Revolution” and “Proletariat” or phrases like “Die, Ruling Class Pig” and “Guillotines For All!**
And yet all of them are testosterone-filled enterprises, with manly-manly menfolk expounding in manly-manly men ways about economics and climate change and inflation and housing prices and transportation and unions — as if women simply did not exist, as if they have nothing to say about these issues, and as if all this doesn’t have very specific effects on women. They don’t feature women, their hosts are nearly all men, and they seem to mostly sit around and grunt and chortle at each other. The overall impression is of dudes in dark and stinky man caves, scratching their bellies and talking about, well, who knows what. Five minutes of the man-talk, and I turn them off.
You might ask, “Well, so what? Just make your own! And why does it matter whether or not there are women on these podcasts?”
For starters, it’s not as easy as you might think, to simply make a podcast. Sure, the technology has improved immensely since audio recordings outside of radio became a thing. Once upon a time, I was reduced to tears by Garage Band, which is impossible to edit. Today, Zencastr and other platforms make it all much easier to record and upload conversations. But the problems for women go beyond access to technology: they have to do with issues that have not been fixed, even a couple of hundred years after whatever we call “feminism” came into being.
Some years ago, I hosted one of my then-regular and in-person salons, this one on the topic of women and the workplace. Not one of the women in our group was able to attend. Due to a peculiar confluence of circumstances, each one of them had some kind of crisis that required her to tend to it: caregiving for an ill relative, childcare, a sudden family emergency, and other such reasons. We will rush into the year 2067 (if there’s a planet left then), and women will still be unfairly saddled with the essential responsibilities of both the home and the workplace. What this means is that matters like podcasting are, even for young and upwardly mobile women who are not married with children, a luxury. In a recent episode of ICYMI about The Try Guys,*** Devin Lytle talks to the show’s Rachelle D’nae about what it was like to host the Ladylike series on Buzzfeed in the shadow of that other show: the men — let us admit that the vibe is distinctly “boys” — got far more money while Lytle and her crew had to constantly work at getting anything like what Guys had in terms of, for instance, funding. Mind you, this was happening at liberal shows run by Buzzfeed, a giant media company that is flush with money (at least for people at the top) and where those things called “expense accounts” — which most of us know as long-ago unicorns from the past, as seen on Mad Men — exist. If this is happening on an enterprise with that kind of money, imagine what happens on a different scale and on independent podcasts.
When you combine a general institutional lack of support with the particular conditions that make it difficult if not impossible for women to achieve success, it’s not surprising that there aren’t that many women podcasters on the actual left. On top of this, the left — and here I do mean all of the left, everywhere — still cannot fathom how gender is integral to any vision of a left utopia. Consider abortion: even now, the left hedges from emphasising the fact that this is an economic issue, and not just one about “the right to choose” or “bodily autonomy.” Deny people the right to abortions — for free, at any time, on demand — and you are forcing them to have children and endure lives they don’t want. The fact that Elizabeth Bruenig — notoriously open about her opposition to abortion rights — has been able to pass herself off as a socialist and float around in various prominent outlets (the Washington Post, the New York Times, The New Republic, and The Atlantic) is yet another sign that abortion is too often considered a personal matter, not a political one. In a sane world where left politics meant anything, no one would be taken seriously as a socialist with even a hint of anti-abortion politics, but here we are. (Refreshingly, the tide may finally be turning against Bruenig, but we shall see: she may yet become Our President).
The left in general has never been a great place for women. Even just a few years ago, when the Shitty Media Men list appeared, one kinda famous Lefty grumped about his inclusion in it. To which, another kinda famous Lefty responded with a hearty Congratulations, and that was the general mood at the time, in 2017: we tend to forget that lefty men have long made it difficult for women to be a part of the left because they only see the latter as sexual playthings or believe that they’re only there to literally wipe up their puke and shit after racuous meetings.* When I taught at a university, one of my undergraduate students came to me for advice. She was looking for a left community to join and was considering the International Socialist Organisation (now thankfully defunct), a group comprised almost entirely of men, mostly white, and where the, ah, womenfolk were mostly appendages who hung around to serve them (and they all had really shitty politics that consisted of little more than memorising and repeating tracts of text from yellowed copies of ancient, crumbling ISO newsletters). As a woman who had spent enough years fending off the lascivious advances of ISO men at various political gatherings— those dudes saw all women as walking vaginas — I hesitated. When your searingly bright 19-year-old student expresses an interest in the ISO and you know it’s full of weirdo men, you want to tell her, “Oh, hell, no, don’t even think about it, they’re all men who will treat you as a sex object and never take you seriously.” But I also had a responsibility to her as an educator and a mentor: I needed to give her my full and unconditional support, warn her as best as I could without overdetermining her experience so that she could learn what these kinds of communities were like, on her own. I was as allusive as I could be and said something like, “A lot of people have reported that the men are a particular type, but you should try it out and see how it works. And I’m here if and when you need me for more.” A few weeks later, she returned, shell-shocked: “Those men are sexist pigs!” We laughed about the lot, and she moved on.
Finding left community is hard, in real life or online. The pandemic has pushed us into intellectual and social spaces that have, of necessity, become lifelines to sanity and whatever it is that we think of as “normal.” Podcasts are an integral part of that. I listen to quite a few to keep up on events but also gain a range of perspectives that I would otherwise be getting from friends and comrades in and at coffee shops, dinner parties, restaurants, and several kinds of public gatherings — all of which I have had to forego in a country that now relentlessly refuses to accept that the pandemic is not only ongoing but steadily killing millions. So it’s a particular disappointment when podcasts on the left can’t, it seems, be bothered with even the nominal show of representation. On Facebook, David Flowers wryly notes on my wall that perhaps podcasts dominated by white men aren’t even worth listening to anyway, and he’s right on that count: I haven’t even begun to think about the race and ethnicity issue. Class? Pfft, darlings, that’s an entire post unto itself: the failure of the left to think about class beyond reductive stereotypes.
I wish I could say that there’s a generational issue here, that these podcasts are all created by hoary old men who are just out of touch. But the shocking truth is that the vast majority of these podcasts are run by people in the 30-40 age range and this is unsurprising. My experience with the left is that, sure, older lefties tend to be lechy-grabby men walking around with dicks in view and who, when confronted with evidence of their misogyny, can’t even begin to comprehend the problems with their behaviour. But younger lefties suffer from a different kind of misogyny: they’ve somehow absorbed the gender inequality that exists in the world around and carry on blissfully unseeing the state of things. It’s virtually impossible to explain to these men why and how their podcasts are a problem because they fail to understand the many ways in which the lack of women in their vicinity isn’t about the personal choices these alien-to-them creatures have made, but the economic structures that still operate to exclude them.
Anyway. Lefty dudebros, do better. Step out of the way. If you feature women on your podcast, do more than just lob soft questions to while the time until the next podcast when you can go back to chortling with your boys. Everyone on the left needs to think more expansively about how gender issues aren’t just ancillary to left politics but integral to them. If you don’t know how to talk to people who are not just men-men-men, you are probably a really shitty co-worker, partner, friend, lover, boss, whatever.
Do better.
Here’s a short list of podcasts to listen in the meantime:
Amy Westervelt
* I forget the exact phrasing, but I’m not putting myself through that special again.
** All of this is made up: please don’t come after me if this bears a resemblance to your podcast. Get better names.
*** No, I can’t explain what all of that is about, mostly because it’s about stupid hetero hypocrisy; you’ll have to listen to the (short) ICYMI episode.
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