You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Welcome to mummya out loud where women come to debrief. I am Jesse Stevens, I'm mea Friedman, and I'm Amelia Lester. And here is what's on our agenda for today, Monday, the fourteenth of July. Everyone's talking about Lena Dunham's new show Too Much, which dropped on Netflix last week. And the girl's creator is suddenly everywhere. So where has she been? And have we finally stopped being weird about Lena Dunham.
We've also got some scurrellous gossip about a secret meeting between Teen Charles and Team Harry. I was eating this story up over the weekend. We want to know what it means and also who tipped off the paps?
And you are not imagining it. Women really are posting less on social media and they're lurking more so are we heading towards posting zero?
But first, in case you missed it, if you find yourself dreading mondays or finding them harder than any other day of the week, it could be because of this phenomenon called identity lag. Speaking to Mamma Mia, a psychologist named doctor Marni Lishman said, the shift from weekend you
to work you can be very emotionally jarring. There is also a concept called role fragmentation, which, according to Stylist, is what happens when we spend the weekend exploring parts of ourselves that sort of go they're not expressed during the work week right, and then we turn up on Monday and we have to transform right into our LinkedIn selves immediately. There's this experience of sort of whiplash, Amelia, do you relate.
I'm about to confess something which probably makes me sound horrible, but I actually look forward to Monday's.
Because you like that identity more.
I find it easier to inhabit. So I have two children, and on the weekend there's a lot of chaos and a lot of noise, and we don't have routines, whereas during the week I have routines, and I love that routine. And I'm often very tired on Sunday nights. And I remember when I had very little kids, people at work would say to me, have a good weekend, and I would hate them because I knew that my weekend might be fulfilling but was not going to be fun or easy,
and now I feel that less. But even so, Monday brings routine and normalcy and talking to people who are rational and professional.
But you work with mea the people, how about you.
I really related to this because I think we all wear a mask at work, and we should in many ways, because you know, you shouldn't let it all hang out at work. Also for me, sometimes I take my medication during the work week, but then I didn't on this weekend, and I did feel quite different. I do inher habit too,
sort of slightly different personas. But this morning I'm sort of fighting off a cold over the weekend, and I thought I didn't want to call in sick because I knew Holly was away and all of that stuff, and I wanted to do this show, but also I wanted to inhabit this persona. I knew I could stay home and continue with my weekend persona, which was unwashed hair. Yeah, but I wanted to lift and be in this persona.
Don't you reckon when you turn up on Monday, though, I find it hard to get my head in the game, like my head somewhere else, at least for the first half a day. And then when you look around, there's a sense of everyone's sort of cose playing work. I
found this. I remember when everyone came back to the office after COVID, and I think identity lag can be something that happens with significant life changes that you're still People came back to the office and they were still work from home identity, and you could see everyone kind of cose playing, sitting there, working meetings, using lingo to try and get themselves.
Kind of a lot with the mask back back.
After holidays or after Matt leave or any Yeah, starting a new job, I always find you just sort of codsplaying, trying to work out what your new identity is in that workplace.
You could argue that the whole world's kind of going through identity like post pandemic.
Yeah, I think it's still happening.
I spent the weekend binging on all ten episodes of Lena Dunham's new Netflix series Too Much. She's the writer, of the creator, and the director. She also has a supporting role in it, playing the sister of the main character, but she's not the star of this show. The show is semi autobiographical. It's about an American woman in her thirties who leaves New York after a bad breakup to move to London where she meets this musician and they fall in love. It's a rom com. It's got a
phenomenal supporting cast. The main character is played by an actress called Megan Stalta, who she plays Kayla in Hacks. She's kind of the assistant. She looks a lot like Lena, and she sort of acts a little bit like Hannah Horvath.
Thin Girls.
We're going to talk about too much on Friday Show, but today we wanted to talk about Lena.
Girls was obviously her breakout hit.
She was only twenty five when she wrote and directed and was the showrunner on that show, and she was everywhere for the six seasons. That Girls was around six or seven seasons. It was the sort of the mid twenty tens, and we just wanted to have a little bit of an explainer about her place in the culture and why. You might remember she seemed to be so controversial back then until she basically was so controversial she
imploded and disappeared. She's done a lot of things since then, but she also did move to London about five years ago and met this musician and got married and he's the co creator of this show with her, and I just wanted to recap because there's two kinds of people, the ones who know all the law and who watch Girls and who are huge fans, and then there are those who didn't and who are a little bit foggy. They've heard of Lena Dunna, they've heard of Girls, but they don't really know the details.
A lot of people have forgotten but know that Lena Dunham was somewhat exiled, whether that was like a self appointed exile or she was sort of passed out from Hollywood, But I don't think people can remember the point at which she was sort of what.
Did she do and who was she? Amelia for those who were a bit vague.
Yeah, So I actually remember the very first time I heard about Lena Dunham, and it was in twenty ten, and I was working at the New Yorker magazine and we had these ideas meetings every week and people would bring ideas about things that people were talking about, pitched them essentially as stories, and this extremely switched on, very very cool young man came to the meeting and he always had the best ideas, and he came to the meeting, and he said, there's this young director called Lena Dunham,
and she has written and directed a movie called Tiny Furniture. And I thought, that is such a strange name for a movie, and because I am evidently not an especially good magazine editor, I passed on that story, which is sort of like when all those people passed on signing
the Beatles when they shopping their first album around. Because very shortly after that she did become extremely famous, and it's easy to forget quite how exciting it felt to watch that ascent happen so Tiny Furniture it became very famous very quickly because, in addition to being a very interesting sort of movie about a woman coming of age in New York, there was a sex scene which took place in an abandoned tunnel in Brooklyn, Oh, And there was this frank depiction of sex that we had never
seen before. I can't stress how revolutionary this was. It was a sex scene in an abandoned tunnel. It was not glamorous. The parts did not fit together like tetris, which is often how we see sex scenes and certainly used to see sex scenes on film. It felt very real and gritty and quite literally dirty because it was in an abandoned tunnel, and there was something incredibly exciting about seeing a young woman's vision of sex, which is
sometimes profoundly and fulfilling. Sometimes it doesn't always in orgasms, and in fact sometimes the man can be a real jerk afterwards. And you hadn't really seen any of that from a woman's point of view. So if I sound excited, it was because it did feel like a new way
of thinking about young woman. Yeah. And so then unsurprisingly shortly after that, she teamed up with Judd Apatow, who was everywhere at the time the director of The Forty year Old Virgin and This Is Forty and other movies like that, sort of you could argue taking that same
no holds barred approach to men. He teamed up with Lena Dunham, who was doing it for women's lives, and then they made together Girls, which premiered, as you said me, and when she was just twenty five and twenty twelve, everyone called Girls the millennial generation's answer to Sex and the City. It was sort of everything Sex and the City was, and it was also about four women in New York. But these four women were really going through
messy struggles. It wasn't glamorous. They were not drinking cosmos in bars. They were kind of like taking gin shops in their sort of like hoveled apartments in Brooklyn. It felt very different. It had lots of critical acclaim millions of viewers. The second season was greenlit before the first was even over. But then even as Girls was this
huge touchstone moment. Over the course of the six seasons that it was on, I remember that you started to feel Lena Dunham slipped down the mountain, as we so often do the women, we build them up, and she became the voice of her generation. People often quote this line from the pilot of Girls, where her fictional character Hannah Horvar says, I may not be the voice of my generation, but I feel that I am a voice of a generation. But in fact, over time she became the voice of millennials.
Can we talk about her body though? And I, you know, I just think we'd be remiss not to, because part of what was so transgressive about that show and about her starring in it, is that she didn't have the kind of body we were used to seeing, even in the sex scenes on sex and the City or on shows like Friends, the female lead was always a side
zero and looked a certain way, and she didn't. And it's so funny looking back now because like a lot of people, I'm rewatching Girls and it's almost like when you rewatch Bridget Jones and all of the talk about how fat Rene Zellwiga was, and there was all this talk about Lena Dunnam and how brave she was or how shocking it was to see her having sex and not talking about her body. Her body was incidental and when you look back now, she'd be what a size ten to twelve maybe.
Yeah. There was even an episode of Girls where she has this kind of sexy weekend with a stranger that she meets and he's very, very handsome. Yes, And there was this whole discourse because this is what we did back then, where everyone was saying that it was an unrealistic plot because he was too good looking for her.
Yeah, she was this lightning rod in that she was being criticized by the far right for being what they saw as not conventionally attractive or to work or whatever. But then I think she pissed the left off to the same degree, and often because the show was criticized for not being diverse. It was very white. It wasn't maybe self aware about class that show. It wasn't possible for it to be all things.
To all people.
Yeah, shall we get into some of the controversies. I see some of the things that tipped her down the mountain, because there's a couple of interesting ones to revisit. I think. So, she had a huge memoir deal with Random House in twenty fourteen. Her memoir came out and they had paid three point five million dollars for it, So there was a lot of excitement about that when it came out. And in it she talks about being curious about her
siblings Vagina when her sibling was a toddler. She talks about opening it and putting some stones in there, some pebbles in there, and also trying to kiss her sibling on the lips when she.
Was changing her siblings naprsing, and she was My memory is that she was only seven. No, she was seven and her sibling was like three.
A toddler. Yes, So the alt right, which was rising at the time, because we didn't even really have the phrase back then, I think we probably would have described them as sort of conservative provocateurs. But this rising alt right really seized on these anecdotes as evidence that Lena Dunham was a sexual predator. And it might sound a bit absurd now because her siblings spoke out and said this was not a problem and she was a toddler,
but it made no difference. That was really the start of her fall from grace.
You know, you would never put that in a book now, right, because it was those early years of when things were being weaponized offhanded comments, and Lena Dunham was very unfiltered. Her character was as well, but she was then called to sort of as the voice of her generation to speak about all these different things and girls was it was back when there was more of a monoculture.
Everybody would watch it and.
Every week there would be these big discussions, and it was also the rise of women's websites and blogs like Jezebel, so everything would be sort of picked apart every Now.
There was this quote by Kevin Fallon where he said it was the discourse apocalypse, which I think is a really good description of that hot tame of that time, and the book I think fits into this. What's worth acknowledging is that it was absolute cultural saturation because while there was girls, there was also the memoir, the personal essay, which you know has disappeared people do not.
Well, and that was part of her breakthrough, was that disclosure and women talking frankly about these most private things was seen as a liberation rather than sort of a liability.
Yeah, and then there was Lenny Letter, There was Women of the Hour, there was interviews, there was social media early on everywhere.
She's incredibly prolific, and it's interesting strife is set at this time too, very deliberately because it was the beginning. It was the rise of women's media and a lot of women's voices in the media, like Lena Dunham. But it was also the beginning of cancel culture, when the left started to be very censorious of particularly outspoken women.
And let's get to that, but also the idea of so we've talked about why the right kind of seized on her. She was a messy woman who was also in their viewer, sexual predator. On the left, there was
also this rising sort of criticism of her. You mentioned Lenny Letter, that was her newsletter, and that was also she has always been ahead of her time, podcasting Before a Time newsletter Right Before a Time, And in this newsletter, Lenny Letter, she wrote an essay once, a personal essay about going to the met Gala, and she wrote that she was sitting next to this football player called Odell Beckham Junior, and I'm just going to quote from it.
It was like we were forced to be together. And he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie because Lena had worn a bow tie to this met gala. I was like, this should be called the Metropolitan Museum of getting rejected by athletes. So the whole point was how fat and ugly she felt sitting next to Adell Beckham Junior, who was not interested in talking to her. This was at the time when intersectionality not a new concept, but one
which was rising in value and in prominence. At the time, people felt like a white woman was saying that she was entitled to attention and affection from a black man, and that was a real lightning bolt moment.
Do you think would you say, Amelia that it's when Because she's always done a lot of personal disclosure, and so her authors and artists since the beginning of creativity, but it was the time when the personal was being very politicized. So everything she would say personally, whether it was about playing doctors with her sibling or this personal experience of how she felt next to this man, suddenly everything was taken and overlaid with this political context that was often used to cancel her.
Well, I'm quite literally political because the other thing I'm going to throw into this heady cauldron of cancel culture is Hillary Clinton. So twenty sixteen, she starts basically part time to full time campaigning for Hillary Clinton's presidential run. And there was that whole idea around them that this was going to be Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling
in her pants suit. Remember pants suit Nation. This idea of women felt jubilant that finally they were going to get a woman in the Oval office, and Lena really spent the year campaigning for her. Along the way, while she was on the campaign trail, she said that she was she had an abortion, another reason why the left did not love her, And of course the left didn't really love Hillary Clinton. She was a centrist candidate who happened to be running for the left.
But I know what she was trying to say like that is just such an example of how the conversation changed. So as part of her podcast, she'd done an episode about abortion, and someone asked her in an interview, have you ever had an abortion? And she said, no, I wish I had. But taken out of context, what she was trying to say is she was trying to be silly.
And you know, self, step.
Think that what you're speaking to as well is that we didn't know how to take her because she was this character, this classic to uncouple Hannah Horvath from Lena Dunham, I still think we don't quite know how to do that, and.
That's why she's cast someone else as in this new exactly.
And I think that activists now almost have to adopt this earnest tone because if you are an activist, if you have something very serious to say about the world, you can never joke. So she would clumsily say things, she would joke about something that.
Was very seriously because she's very funny.
She's very funny, and girl was very funny, brilliant writer, and so she'd say things tongue in cheek, even on girls that were then weaponized because we were like, well, what are you about? Are you a feminist or are you And it's how feminism became this like stick to beat women with, because sometimes she did and she did make real mistakes. Like I think it was just after the Me Too movement when someone was accused.
Of Yeah, we should just talk briefly about that, because that was I think the fine or nail in the coffin Fellina Dunham. The left and the right just couldn't handle her anymore. So what happened was in November twenty seventeen. So yeah, during the metre movement, there was a girl's writer named Mary Miller a man, and an actress named Aurora Perry No accused him of sexually assaulting her. This was back in twenty twelve, but the allegation came out
in November twenty seventeen. Dunham responded to the accusations and she said, Nope, I know him. He did not do this. She said. While our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story, our insider knowledge makes us confident that this accusation is one of the three percent of assault cases that are misreported every year. Now I remember reading that on Instagram, do you I do I think. I talked about it at the time, and I was devastated
because it just felt like a real betrayal. And I don't identify with either the far left or the far right, but to me, she lost me in that moment. I have to appear right. She lost me and I was a huge fan of hers. So then after that she went very much to ground. She basically left public eye. There were some health reasons for that. She had a hysterectomy, Judah endometriosis, and she wrote about that very beautiful lest
for US Vogue. She also was diagnosed with Ella's dwan Lows syndrome, and so she does now identify and describe herself as chronically ill. She moved to London in twenty twenty one. She went to rehab. She went to rehab.
She was addicted to prescription medication and she broke up a long term relationship through almost the entirety of girls.
She was dating Jack Antonoff.
Who's Taylor Swift's co collaborator, Lord's collaborator Margaret Qually. He's married to Margaret Qually, and that was a very defining relationship obviously in her life at a very defining time.
In her life, and.
There are a lot of biographical similarities. There's a character very similar to him in Too Much, which is which is also very interesting. But she's also very good friends with Taylor Swift, who she no doubt met through her relationship with Jack Antonoff and who she remains friends with to this day. Taylor Swift was actually at her wedding too. She was a brise man, yeah to this musician Loue Felder,
who's her co creator on Too Much. And she was part of remember that whole squad, Yeah, with the nineteen eighty nine tour. It was all of these supermodels and Lena Dunham And she spoke afterwards, even though she's still friends with Taylor, how that wasn't very good for her self esteem.
Oh, it wasn't very good for Taylor's self esteem either. They both suffered from eating disorders around that time that they've spoken about. She moved to London. She did make some films, none of them really hit. And now there's this She.
Has a I think it's a fifty five million dollar deal with Netflix, so she's made Too Much, which is a ten episode series which I assume will go to a second season because I think it's been pretty well received. She's also currently directing I think it's a rom com with Natalie Portman in New York.
Called Good Sex.
She's got a ton of different projects on the boil. I think she's so talented, like crazy talented. She's like one of the most talented creators of our generation.
She's a beautiful writer, and I suppose you can compare her almost to a bo Burnham. He's a male comedian of the same sort of age, and he does something really interesting, which is he releases a special, whether it's stand up, whether it's on Netflix, like Inside, and then he disappears for years. Is that a privilege that's afforded to men. I don't know, but I was thinking about, like,
you're Jerry Seinfeld, You're Larry David, You're Ricky Gervais. I think that men are allowed to create, star in develop these personas who are imperfect and funny and play with that in a way that we don't allow women to. I think there was a lot of misogyny, a lot of fat phobia in our treatment of Lena Dunham. I just think it's very interesting that she's been invited back to the party.
And what I'm so glad she has. What I'm loving about this is that jen Z seems to be able to rediscover her and girls without bringing the subsequent baggage to it. They can appreciate it as the brilliant show it was and celebrate her storytelling capacity without then having to assume that she has to mean something politically to them.
So we'll be talking more about too much. If you want to get it into your eyes, it's on Netflix at the moment.
You can watch all ten episodes.
In a moment. An inconvenient truth about alcohol and what we're meant to actually do about it. Should Australia mandate cancer warnings on alcohol? And how much labels on anything really even matter?
So?
In January of this year, the United States Office of the Surgeon General recommended that warnings about alcohol's cancer risks be displayed on drink packaging. We are, as often cited, much to Maya's disappointment, not doctors.
We're not. Man, we're not.
You're not.
But according to a study in The Lancet, alcohol is responsible for five thousand, eight hundred new cancer cases per year in Australia. That is more than I would have assumed. It has been found that any level of alcohol use increases the risk for several types of cancers. Now we're going to leave the medical studies to the side, because the question is how best to communicate this information given a lot of Australians actually aren't aware of the risk.
So in Australia and the US there are warnings on alcohol, about its impacts on unborn children and about operating heavy machinery. Right did you know the pregnancy warning labels only became mandatory in twenty twenty three in Australia.
Did not know that?
I thought they'd always been there.
Is that the one with the picture of the pregnant woman? Yes? I think so.
Yeah. So Ireland is the first country to have a mandatory cancer label on alcohol. It hasn't come in yet, but they've made the sort of policy and Australian health bodies want us to follow suit. My question is do we reckon that labels make that much of a difference, Amelia, What do you think?
I went on a real journey here because my instinct was to say, no, they're white noise and we tune them out and we want the drink. But then I read about California. So when you go to California, you see labels everywhere. They're on like everything from pleather jackets to drink cans, like like soda cans.
What kind of labels?
Subway seats there are these huge labels that say, essentially, this product may cause cancer. I cannot stress how widespread these labels are. But what do you like on a subway seat?
Yes, because of the plastic that's used.
Because of the plastics. So there was this law in nineteen eighty six which basically identified nine hundred chemicals that could be carcinogenic. So it was a pretty low bar, and they decided to slap these giant labels on any product that contain these chemicals. We're talking big labels too.
See my response to that, I imagine that if I lived in that context, I would stop seeing it. And I'm feeling this already, that there's a new study every day about a new castinogen, and I just have to go, Okay, everything's carcinogenic. I'm not taking it.
That's exactly what I assume too, because as a consumer, what can you do about it? So you get a car seat, for instance, you rent a car and you get a car seat, and on the car seat is a giant label that says that the car seat that, by the way, you are legally mandated to put in the car and news may cause cancer. And you think to yourself, well, that's unfortunate because I have to use it. Yeah, but it turns out that they've had this unexpected consequence
that no one was really thinking about. So there was a recent study done that said, let's look into what sort of effects these labels have had, and they talked to both consumers and to companies. And you're right about the consumers because again, using the car seat example, there's nothing I can really do about it. I have to use the car seat unless they fashioned one out of bamboo, which I don't think would be legal. Legal. Yeah, So
they are the companies. And it turns out that eighty percent of the companies that this survey interviewed said that the law had prompted them to reformulate their products. So think about, for instance, nail polish remover, like, yes, you can make it with the carcinogenic substance, or you can
try and something else that maybe doesn't cause cancer. And so what I think is fascinating about this in the context of this debate about Australia and the labels and alcohol, is that obviously you know something either has alcohol or it doesn't. It's a little bit different. But on the other hand, I think we are seeing a trend towards people wanting lower alcohol beverages or maybe even those fancy non alcoholic beverages that people are increasingly using for mocktails
and as a substitute in social events. So I wonder if it is going to prompt companies to innovate more to make lower alcohols or no alcohols, like a phoney Negroni for instance. That could be a positive.
This is also being discussed in the US around highly processed food and wanting to have clear labels about what's in the food, and it has been adopted in places in South America and apparently has had an impact on firstly the knowledge and secondly the choice whether or not to buy it. I think Australia has sort of messed this up a bit with the Health Star rating because I've started to ignore that. Do you actually take any notice of the health Star rating?
No?
And in fact, my child looks at the snack and it has one star, and yes, well, it's got a star.
It's got a star. And what a lot of people don't know about your health star rating is that it's been compared to other foods in the same category. So you're not comparing yoga and chips. You're comparing chips and chips. So your four star actually isn't healthy, right.
So it's interesting. I didn't know that.
So there are some labels that I've stopped seeing. But the difference with alcohol, I was thinking, is most of the context in which I consume alcohol, I have absolutely no proximity to the label. So I am at a bar, a restaurant, even if I'm at work and someone pours me a drink, I'm at dinner and someone pours me a drink. My behavior around alcohol is that I don't generally have it in my house. But I wonder if that's going to make any difference if it's being poured
at a venue. Whereas with cigarettes, for example, where we know that the label had made a big difference, there's no such thing as getting a cigarette as distinct from its packaging, you know what I mean? Like alcohol exists is a very specific type of consumer good in that often it's not linked to its packaging, so I would never see that label, Like do you read labels on things?
Like?
I don't read the fine print, But if it's an actual label, yeah, I mean I do. I guess I do if it's warning me of something. I'm also a little bit wary, you know. I like being educated. I like knowing so that I've got choice. I think that a lot of people don't know the connection between alcohol and cancer. Everyone knows the connection between cigarettes and cancer. But I don't think that's a bad thing.
I wonder too, if the cigarettes and the alcohol. So, for example, the two messages on alcohol at the moment are about pregnancy and unbond baby and operating heavy machinery.
Right.
There is enormous stigma about those two things, and the stigma I think comes from it impacting another person.
Ah, that's fair.
So if I sit there at the pub and my friend has had four drinks and picks up their car keys horrified, you simply wouldn't let it happen. And that's been a change in a generation. That's been a really positive thing. Same with drinking. The idea that you would if a heavily pregnant person was sitting there with the bottle of wine in front of her, you'd get looks. But cancer impacts you, and so I wonder if there will ever be the same amount of stigma around that
even with cigarettes. My issue with people smoking in public is the passive smoke of like it impacting people around them, you know what I mean.
I'd be interested to know whether the because obviously the photos that are on cigarette packets are extreme and they're not like your regular warning label. They're very, very graphic. I know that some people have actually black humor, name the people and name the photos, and there's a sort of a oh, this is Jerry with the lungs, or this is you know, Jane with the fingers, whatever it is.
But it would be probably hard to measure that because over the same period of time, the price of cigarettes has gone up a huge.
And advertising was pulled.
Yeah, which is a different kind of detern.
I think that's a really interesting point. You make me out. I'm a bit stuck on it, the idea that we all now understand that cigarettes cause cancer. We read articles just constantly telling us about the direct links between alcohol and cancer. Why do you think it's been so hard for us to internalize that as a society.
I think that alcohol is so much part of our culture and so connected to celebrations, whereas they don't have a celebratory cigarette. I mean, you know, there used to be that cliche after really good sex, you know, people would say, I feel like a cigarette. But it's not like, Oh, it's you've got a promotion at work, let's all have a cigarette.
There's never been that row and it's your one cigarette a week. Yeah.
That smoking I think was that widespread in say my parents' generation, like it was something that everyone did, and you see it even in films. It's like the easiest way for them to sit to wait themselves. Within the context of the seventies is that everyone has a cigarette in I've.
Seen a lot more smoking in popular culture, like on and just like that, for example, the way same as smokes, the way carry sometimes smokes.
There's also been this wishful thinking about the idea that young people are going to understand just how bad alcohol is and not drink, And there's been this rising trend of articles about how gen z have rejected alcohol as a social lubricant in the way that past generations loved it. It turns out that really was just wishful thinking. A new report and the Financial Times says that seventy three percent of Gen Z admitted to consuming alcohol in the
past six months. And so it turns out the reason why they weren't drinking was because they weren't in the workforce and they didn't have money to spend on alcohol. But now that they're aging into the workforce and earning real money, it turns out that they like a drink just as much as any other generation. I think it's time for a bit of scurrillous gossip, just to lighten the mood here a little bit. Prince Harry and King Charles may be working towards making amends, and I am
so relieved. I've been very worried about this.
What do we know about this? Because I saw the headlines over the weekend, what steps have been taken?
It's actually not even that scurrilous. There's photos. So the Mail on Sunday had the scoop. They said that the Monarch and the Duke of Sussex's aides met for a secret peace summit in London last week and there were photos in fact of these high level officials leaving the meeting. So It took place at a place called the Royal Overseas League. That is a private members club that was
set up to promote wait for it, international friendship. Oh across the pond overseass two words for some reason, and I can just smell the other bound books in their car. It was very the Crown. I want to go to their people, shaman might say, who is there? So I'm glad you asked that, mere because we've got their names. Meredith Mains who was Prince Harry's new CEO, Liam McGuire, who was the Sussex's pr lead. That's a busy job,
isn't it. And Tobin Andre who was King Charles's communications secretary. Now what I really want to know is who leaked this? Which side do you think has more interest in leaking that these talks are happening?
May I the're the pr expert.
I think it was a joint decision to leak it, because it's almost a leak off, right. I imagine that the terms and conditions by which this meeting and any future meetings would happen, because part of the reason they haven't happened until now is because no one trusts the Sussexes anymore because every text message, every phone call, every conversation, a lot of these really private exchanges have become fodder
for interviews, for books, for Netflix documentaries. So I think for anyone to feel safe having these conversations, the leaking policy would have had to be very much laid out, So I think it was probably mutual decision.
I also think Harry has a real incentive here to patch things up fast. Now I'm going to get a little bit pragmatic and maybe a little bit more, but about this, Charles is in his mid seventies. By all accounts, William is determined not to let Harry get away with any of this royal ish funny business anymore. So for
instance calling himself the Duke of Sussex. Jamie Kern Lee mckho was the first person to have Megan on a podcast as an interview guest showed on her Instagram that Meghan had sent her a gift using the HRH nomenclature, which William is simply not going to allow. So when William becomes king, all these royal sort of trappings are
going to go away. So I think what Harry wants to do is shore up what he can use and what he can't use now, because soon enough it's going to be very hard for him to get away with it.
He's so completely excommunicated.
As soon as I saw this headline, my first reaction was concerned for Charles because I went, oh, he's sicker than we thought because he was diagnosed with cancer in February last We do not know what type of cancer that is still there was Also, when Harry recently did that interview following the court case, he said, I.
Don't know how long my father, Yeah, but they were very upset about that.
They weren't set about that.
Firstly, he doesn't know, and secondly that's a pretty awful thing to say.
But for Charles to come to the table here, I just thought, there is nothing like mortality to kind of bring potential or an attempt at reconciliation.
You know who wasn't represented at that meeting, William No.
And nor will he after the break?
Has posting on Instagram and Facebook become cringe? And are we heading towards posting zero?
What unlimited out loud access? We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for Mum and Maya subscribers. Follow the link in the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week, and a huge thank you to all our current subscribers.
I just came back from Greece, so I definitely would say I insufferably overposted on that holiday, both grid posts and stories. Most of the time, though I probably consistently post Instagram stories grid posts probably more, maybe once every two weeks.
I do not post a lot to my main kind of like Instagram or TikTok feeds. But what I do use social media for a lot more is stories. I kind of like that it's temporary and there's less pressure I feel to get it right. You don't have to curate anything, you don't have to get a caption. It can just be a lot simpler. So I do not post regularly on social media. Maybe once a year if that.
If we've been on holidays and I want to post a photo, I feel this weird pressure about getting the caption right and do I need to ask a friend to edit the lighting?
And like, who am I.
Doing this for?
Because I don't care, and in my real life I.
Don't care if you know anybody who's on holidays at the moment, particularly in Europe. You might be struck by how surprising it is to see this almost retro use of social media where they're posting his what I ate for lunch, Here's me in front of a landmark, Here's what I bought in a shop. I've got a few friends who are overseas at the moment, and it's such a stark contrast because it feels like what social media isn't anymore. And I only realized that when I started
seeing those photos again. As social media has evolved, the baseline expectation for posting keeps rising. We've been posting, well some of us for fifteen years now, and it started off with sort of dashed off tweets. Then it became carefully composed Instagram photos, which were replaced in turn by TikTok clips, which are increasingly showing the production value of television. Have you noticed that it's now and you flick through,
everything's moving towards short form video content. So there's very few pictures of people's breakfasts, very few pictures of sunsets, very few pictures of people's dogs or selfies or their families. And women, we know that women are posting less and lurking more and there are three. There are actually four reasons for this, which I'm just quickly going to go through and tell me if any of these resonate with you.
The first one is with everything going on in the world, a lot of which we see via social thanks to the algorithm, people are feeling self conscious about posting just sort of mundane, benign updates about their life because you know, there's a lot of shouting and a lot of assumptions are being made by what you don't post.
Or what you do post.
I think specifically in a context where there is discussions around Gaza and what is happening in the US with Ice at the moment, that anything you post does look tone deaf beside the worst thing happening in the world right now, and therefore people are sort of opting out whether you post or you don't post, that will be weaponized.
Because those things didn't used to be on Instagram so much, but now there's so many brands posting and creators and influencers they've sort of taken over, and news brands as well. The second reason, which I alluded to earlier reels it's now whether it's on TikTok or whether it's on Instagram, even on Facebook, people are posting these kind of movie trailer production quality values, and social is a place of work for a lot of people, influencers, creators, and brands.
So these are big budgets. It takes a lot of time to edit and produce and film these reels, and.
Not everybody's up to it, right, And that's not an accident.
I think, as you say, the average person, women are posting less and less, and that is because of a very intentional algorithm change that happened, which was we are going to present your content to strangers. This is no longer about friends engaging. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about that on Instagram. Initially it was like I was sharing with my community, and now it's been like who.
Chose to follow you?
Now they were interested in what Jesse had for breakfast, or maybe that you've got a haircut.
Now you're performing to strangers. And therefore it is the erasure of context, which brings it back to your I suppose either you post about everything all of the time or you post about nothing.
That context is really important. And that's the next point is that millennials who grew up on social media. Like you two, you're moving into middle age and seeking more privacy in your lives. You don't want to be perceived all the time, that sense of I don't want to show the world what I'm doing. It's almost like everybody's woken up from this collective fever dream of why were we just sharing all the private moments from our lives?
Firstly with a bunch of people who we might you know, the person who went to school with, or an ex boyfriend or an ex boyfriend's mother.
That still follows you.
And now it's literally why would I want to share those things with strangers? And that idea of being perceived by people either who you don't know very well or you don't at all. And then the fourth reason is group chats. This is relatively new over the last few years. If you wanted to share an observation about something, a picture about something, some news that you've got a promotion, or that you'd had to put your dog down, you
would do that on social media. Now you're much more likely to do it in a group chat.
I think there's a fifth reason ai as Ai scraped the internet for fodder. People are understanding you don't want to put your baby photo up there because your baby's going to end up being used by AI to make a completely unrelated video.
So Jesse, I was reading this amazing piece about posting on we which is kind of like everyone's feeling a bit weird about posting.
It was in The New Yorker this week.
I certainly feel that way. I used to do insta babbles on Instagram all the time, where I just sort of chat, you know, spontaneously while I put my makeup on a couple of months ago, I felt uncomfortable about doing that, and I stopped doing that. And I used to post lots of sort of getting ready videos and stuff. I don't do that anymore. And I loved the idea of understanding why. And it's said in this article social
now is just used for punditory provocation and promotion. Does that ring truth for you?
Yes? And it is my greatest concern, like reading this about who we're leaving social media too, because I think it's a very skewed vision of who people are, what they care about, morality, ethics, tone, discourse, all of those things being left to the content creators now. When someone uploads something onto social media. It's sort of like, oh, are you trying to be a content creator? You kind of don't know why else.
It feels vulnerable because people talk about feeling cringe when they post something.
But why is that bad? Why don't we just leave it to the professionals.
I suppose the reason why I worry about leaving it to the inadverted commas professionals is because of the tone of that conversation. You get the extremes on both sides. You get the people like exactly what it said here, get people who are provocative on.
Purpose professionals, and we don't want to do it anymore. You haven't posted on social for a long time.
Have you? No?
But like normal people, sometimes I have to go on to TikTok and I scroll and I scroll, or I scroll on Instagram and I go The normal people aren't here. The normal people have left this party. The normal people are all watching. It's like, you know what, it's like.
It's a party and it's four am, and all the normal people with normal lives went home and you look around and you think all parties are like this all of the time, And people are throwing things and there's vomit in the corner and there's like people on the hard drugs and you're just looking around, going this is this is terrible.
People telling me about Amazon Prime sales.
People being way too intense.
Yeah, and it's descended into chaos, and you go, what has happened to parties? And it's like, no, no, no, it's not the party, it's the people.
Who are left.
But on the flip side, Jesse, I'm going to attempt a more optimistic take on this trend, which is maybe the normal people quote unquote I have just realized that real life is much better than social media, and now they're prioritizing IROL experiences. This is my theory as to why we've all suddenly become obsessed with tennis. Have you noticed that, yes, I know you always liked. Yes, Yes, everyone's watching the Wimbledon front row this year so much
more than they ever have in past years. And I feel like the hype around sporting events, around the eras tour, around live music generally is because people are turning to real life more. They're valuing it more. And I've noticed that even in my group chats, particularly with American friends, because the enormity of what's going on is difficult to summarize and get at. People are even retreating from group chats, or maybe they're just not talking to me. Either way, Yes, I can't.
Believe you haven't said the word capitalism.
That's the thing, right, is that these social media companies couldn't charge any of us to be on it, right, And in fact.
There are those pictures of our breakfast.
Yes, that incredible documentary called The Social Dilemma made the point that it is one of the widest used products that every one would refuse to pay for. In fact, most people not only wouldn't pay a dollary use that, they would pay a dollar not And the only people who have upheld these companies is advertisers. And I think that that's eroded trust. But the reason why Amelia, I think your optimism is totally misguided is because people have not left the party and gone home. They are standing
by the windows, addicted to watching what's going on. If you looked at the time people are spending on social media that hasn't gone down, that has not gone down.
That's the thing we're not posting. We're lurking.
Now.
Men have always been lurkers, right, Women have always been posters, commenters, likers, sharers, but now women aren't doing that anymore, not as much. And as Jesse said, we're looking through the window and the problem with that. If we've just left the party, that's different. Let them, you know, eat, But because we're watching it, it's skewing our idea of reality.
The other element to why millennials in particular stopped posting is because we watched as the dumb stuff that the famous people posted got dug up.
So the dig which we've talked about on this show, it was weaponized.
It was all weaponized.
So I think what happened was Trevor Noah, Yes, when was that he was named to the Daily Show chair after John Stewart left, So that was when the Daily Show was absolutely at its peak. Trevor Noah was named the new chair and people dug up all these sort of fat phobic, fat shaming tweets.
How many careers like have been I mean destroyed might be too big a word, but have been impacted.
What's that idea of social excavation, which is why you know, when Lauren Sanchez Bezos got married, she wiped her Instagram. It's this idea and if you look at a gen Zeta or Jen Alfa's social they'll only have on Maine, which is in their feed. They'll only have like three or four posts. For millennials and gen X's it was like a record of everything.
Every time we didn't avocado toast in a sun dappled room.
You go back and it was a record of our relationships. It was almost like a public diary. But this idea of being perceived and not wanting to be perceived, that's something that gen Z's and jen alf Is are much more savvy about because they don't want people drawing conclusions about them because of something they posted two weeks ago, let alone two years ago.
That's why Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift have never followed each other on Instagram because they know that the unfollow would be such a big story.
Which I find it interesting that jen Alphas and Z's have pulled back because when I look at my own social media usage, and if I'm being entirely honest with myself, I think it was indexed a lot on whether or not I was courting, like in my single life. So I wonder if too, if you're on sort of hinge or you're on bumble and.
You're but it's it's more curately dating. It's more curated and with less shots.
Because you won't be paved when you're seeing You.
Don't want someone going back and seeing pictures of you with your exes, or you don't necessarily want to be known in that public way, whereas our generation it felt like we really wanted to be known. It's like remember my Space, which it was like what are your favorite books? What are your favorite movie?
It happened quickly, Like I remember, I had my first child in twenty eighteen, and practically the first thing I did was post a picture of him on Instagram. By the time I had my second child in twenty twenty, I was not putting a photo of her on the internet ever.
Yeah.
Wow, A big thank you to all of you the out loud as well. We we are done. That was great for listening to today's show and our fabulous team for putting this show together. We'll be back in your ears tomorrow. Bye.
Shout out to any Muma Maya subscribers listening. If you love the show and want to support us as well, subscribing to Mom and Maya is the very best way to do so there is a link in the episode description.