You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on Hello and welcome to MoMA Mia. Out loud what we've been are actually talking about? On Monday, the eleventh of August. I'm Holly Wayne right, and it just occurred to me I might be shouting. Had some feedback this week that sometimes when I talk, I wake a baby.
And that I can be too quiet. So I'm working on my loudness on the podcast.
But when I just jumped in and went hello, oh, I suddenly thought shit, I've just wokened the nation's babies.
I apologize.
I'm Jesse Stevens.
I'm Amelia Lester and here's.
What made our agenda for today. Does every group chat in your life spawn two more group chats?
Yes, LUs as some issues just not up for debate. As a former high school debater that will suppose no one, this is personal for.
Me and the surprising reason why divorce rates in Australa are at a fifty year low.
But first, Jesse Stevens.
In case you missed it, Instagram just launched a new feature that shows all your followers where you are right now? Hey, So this rolled out in the US last week, with lots of users claiming that they were shocked to find their whereabouts was being shared to their followers without their knowledge. The head of Instagram, his name is Adam Mussori, released a statement in response, assuring users that to start, location sharing will be off, but you can opt in so
you can better connect with your friends on Instagram. It is likely that this feature will come to Australia very soon, which comes with a whole host of concerns, including things like tech based coercive control. One in five young adults, according to recent research, believe it is reasonable to track a partner's location. So that's just become the default. So if it's on an app that everyone's watching where they are,
then it becomes sort of conspicuous if you turn it off. Holly, Why why would anyone want their followers to know where they are right now?
I have no idea, but it's really interesting because I saw this and quite a few people shared it with me on the weekend. Because I'm on the record several times as saying I hate location sharing. I don't track anyone in my house.
You won't let me attract you. She tries, she tries to put like little tags around Inta and you're like, nah, she's dropping.
Air tags into her pockets. Yes, I am allergic to it. I don't really know why I need to prosecute this at some point, but generally speaking, I just think privacy and none of your business, not even big safety concerns, just like you don't need to know where I am and what I'm doing. Nobody needs to know that.
I think secrets are a basic human right. I don't even have them. I just think I have the right to have them exactly.
And it's interesting because, I mean, you just sort of mentioned this about how it's become table stakes and relationships. But the New York Times run a story recently that like, are you at location sharing level? It's like going Instagram official, you know, changing your status in your whatever update and location sharing. It's supposed to be the ultimate intimacy. And I cannot understand it. But I think we know why the tech platform would do this.
Why why would Instagram want to do this?
So A, they believe their audience want it, but more pertinently, the more information they have about us, the more things they can sell to us. We all know that right data mining is the number one thing that tech companies like to do, and if they know where you are, they can target you better with ads of all kinds.
Okay, because this came at an interesting time, which is I think just in the last week, there was this massive lawsuit that wrapped up in California. Have you sayen this, no tell me? Meta a legally collected data from another app so that it could specifically target people. That other app was Flow, which I have on my phone, the Period Appeah, the period app. So it is a health app. It is I think the most downloaded women's health app. Now why would they information on where I am in
my cycle? Why would they want that? Well, my mood changes, there are concerns about weight, or maybe I have a breakout. Do you want to sell me a special cream? Maybe you notice that at my lucial phase I have less impulse control, So we can start kind of putting those ads out. It's been a massive, massive deal and they've been punished for it, and a lot of Flow users have gone hang on this, you know, starts a lot of privacy concerns. But this is why people are very suspicious of Meta.
It's interesting because Instagram called this and I love this phrase, a new lightweight way to connect, which sounds so nice. But you know who doesn't want to connect and share his location? Mark Zuckerberg. There was a fascinating expose this weekend in The New York Times about how he's basically brought up an entire suburb in northern California outside San Francisco because he doesn't want anyone near him, so he
lives in one large house. He has also bought eleven houses around his house for a cost of they estimate about one hundred and fifty million AUSI dollars. Now he is worth two hundred and seventy billions, so don't worry too much about that. But he's even opened a private school in one of these eleven houses, which goes against all the zoning regulations for his two daughters and ten
other children. And neighbors say they can no longer walk down the street, they can't use the footpath outside his house without being asked to move along by men in large SUVs privacy, and they're always having parties and blocking driveways, and they've even had the city like block off streets successfully so that no one can get near the parties, so someone's not interconnecting.
Ah, that's not about connecting.
You know what though, as you know, I have this allergic reaction to location sharing. But certainly my daughter and her friends don't even blink about it. They don't even think about it. They think it's so normal because they can all look at where each other are at all times.
And the only reason that they can see for turning off your life sharing on snap maps or whatever is that you would be literally doing something that you shouldn't be doing, or something that you know your friends would get mad.
With you about.
So the set expectation is, unless you are behaving badly, you should have no reason for privacy. And I wonder if you know the people who like us, well not necessarily us, but me who are arking up about this are just outsiders in that generation where it just is the most normal.
Thing in the world, because this is snap maps, right like this, this is what we do, just like TikTok kind of makes video and then they instagram goes really hard on reels like this is the kind of thing you do. But you hear stories of people going, oh, I discovered that my friend is back with her ex boyfriend because on snap maps I could see where she was. You just wait, Matilda, you wait until you have secrets like the rest of us.
It's true, and of course we should point out there are genuine safety concerns with this kind of location sharing being used in bad relationships, bad faith actors, and stalking. Like it's really really interesting. I'm not going to try and break it down on an intellectual level. I just find a check that's been with way too many guys. I find that unattractive.
That important contribution to knowledge, to the exploration of the human condition came from Dean Wells, an expert on masculinity. No just kidding. Dean Wells was on season five IF Married at First Sight, but he did appear last week on an episode of SBS's The Feed. The Feed is a current of THEIRS show, and this episode made people very upset. It was called Men Debate Masculinity, and it was a forty three minute debate that dropped on YouTube
on Friday. SBS introduced the segment, perhaps justified what was to come by saying, these are claims and opinions that are being debated online. What I love about that is literally everything can be put under the umbrella of claims and opinions that are being debated online, and we heard the opinions certainly run the gamut from acceptable to not
so acceptable. Frankly, the first contention put to the group of six panelists and which Dean was trying to answer, and that clip you just heard, wasn't actually about women. Despite the fact that Dean was talking about women. The contention that was put to them was having lots of sexual partners is tied to your status as a man. Here's what Clayton Harrop, who was billed as a men's coach, had to say about women with what he called a high body count.
It's the same as a car, Like this is a quick Women are not cars.
Women are not cars.
Do you take care of your car?
Like?
Do you do really when it's yours and yours alone?
We take a little I want know other people driving my car put it that way, not.
To say that she's less because of it, but.
In terms, but it is it is inherently.
That I'm most offended by how terrible that argument is. Like I know that the nature and like what he's actually saying is deeply offensive to women, but the quality of the argument is so poor.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's not tremendously revealing. And that's what I want us to talk about here today, because I want to talk about whether there's any value in airing out views like this. I watched this so you don't have to. At another point, Dean Well said, we need men to basically stop being in therapy because it's over feminizing them. And Clayton, the guy who compared women to cars, kept talking about women's purity like we're a cleaning product. It upset me, and it upset a lot
of other people. Mia Finlay accused SBS of rage baiting, and interestingly, one of the panelists, Jeff Kasubi, wrote later about the experience on Pedestrian and I just want to read a little bit of what he wrote. He said, from the moment we sat down, it became clear that nuance was not the priority. Who knew reaction took precedence over care. The loudest voices in the room were often
those most unwilling to listen. Particularly the opinions of men of color were dismissed, and they were dismissed under the excuse of it's just my opinion because I should say that another one of the panelists rang Chorla, who was an anti violence campaigner whose sister was murdered by her husband. He came out afterwards and said he did see value
in participating. He said that if just one man starts to question the culture that we've built as a result of his participation in this show, then there is value in that. Do we think that a debate of this sort ever changes minds?
Holly, No, I don't think it changes minds, because I think that a lot of people just hear what they came here to hear. So I watched quite a bit of this this morning, and I wasn't particularly surprised by some of what some of these guys were saying, because I hear it on the internet all the time. Do I think it's dangerous that it got aired on SBS's YouTube channel.
No.
Do I think that it was a sort of cheap and not very evolved debate.
Yes.
I also think that SBS were clearly trying to hedge their bets because, for example, when Harrop was talking about purity, they put up a little box at the bottom that said context, and it said purity culture can be damaging because blah blah blah, and every now and again it would flash up a fact check or you know, another context box or a helpline or whatever. So they obviously knew that this was going to get a lot of criticism.
The thing that was a bit disturbing to me to watch, and thank God for Terrang, you know, who is a
tireless campaigner for women's safety. But is that what you were watching kind of felt a little bit like you could divide that panel into these three kind of very physically big masculine guys who did, as Jeff Kasubi said, they did shout the loudest, they did talk over everybody else, and then it became a very it was sort of like an ugly parody of what it was supposed to be debating, do you know what I mean.
I felt that SBS did a decent job of addressing that. At times they jumped in and they said, oh, we haven't heard from Trang, and in that way, I think the moderation was useful. I actually really support this format for a few reasons. The first is that I really liked that they didn't have an audience. I think that when you have an audience, it totally changes the nature
of the debate. Because people are speaking for applause and for clout, they might say something that sounds really effective, but when you actually drill down onto it, they haven't actually said anything. I found that in a lot, and I'm thinking about the trend, particularly in the US, where it's so and so, schools so and so, and they go and you know, speak to a college student or whatever, and you hear people in the audience booing or gasping, and I think that really throws people. And I don't
think that that's conducive to good debate. So I quite liked that they just had the six men.
Do you think it was a debate though? To think, I don't. That's my problem with this, And I know we're moving on to some of the other forms of debate we're seeing everywhere at the moment, I don't know that anyone was listening to each other.
They weren't. They were speaking at each other, not to each other. And this is the issue with plucking people from their social media bubbles. Like you, Holly, I actually think put Dean Wells on that platform. I think that was a good call. And I think that it's like if you think that Dean Wells doesn't already have influence and already have a platform. You're wrong. He's got eighty four thousand followers on Instagram.
He likes to comment on what we talk about quite Oh.
Yeah, he's slipped into my DMS great debata. So if you put him in there, at least hold him to some sort of account, And I think he was probably on slightly better behavior than he normally would. I think what it uncovered is that a lot of these men don't actually have an argument. There was no substance to their argument. Dean Well's hearing at the beginning him trying to say, I'm not going to try and break it down on an intellectual level. I mean, that's the purpose
of a debate, but no one was listening. The whole point of a debate is that there's curiosity, and there's humility, and there's leaning in and trying to understand and engage with the other side's points. But there wasn't any there There a lot of the time it was just them talking about how they like chicks who have had sex with less people like that's not an argument, and that's not the feeds fault.
I don't criticize the feed, except for as I said, I found the sort of context boxes and stuff a little bit like we know what people are going to say, so let's say it first. Yeah, some of these men who are obviously out there talking on the internet all
the time. As you say, Jesse, we're using very manisphere terms like body count for how many people you've slept with, very specifically how many men women had slept with, and high value men and high value women, which are very coded and are out there everywhere in the kind of content that kids are seeing on YouTube. I want to know, especially as you said to me at the beginning, that you,
like Jesse, did a lot of debating at school. When you just said, Jesse, the point of a debate is to lean in and be curious and be interested, is it, or is the point of this kind of debate it's a competition.
Yeah. And I also worry that we're paying too much attention to people who don't have very interesting viewpoints or who are not moving the debate forward. And we've started treating debater as entertainment. Yeah, when it's meant to be about edification and about sharing informed viewpoints and finding consensus in those viewpoints. So I want to bring in another
upsetting YouTube debate that I watched last week. This one was from Jubilee, which is a company that's arguably done more than I would say any other company to turn debating into a competitive sport. So they have this format that they call Surrounded. Someone sits in the middle of a circle of twenty people who disagree with them, and they literally race to debate against this poor person in the center of the circle.
It's with Jerry Springery in a way, it feels I kept waiting for violence to break out.
Yeah, this particulars a victory Springer. So this one I kept hearing about it and how dramatic and extreme it got, so I did watch it. Ten million people watched it along with me. British born American citizen Mehdi Hassan was surrounded by what Jubilee called twenty far right conservatives, and Hassan definitely held his own I mean, he's written whole books about debating and how to be an effective debater,
and he is an extremely effective debater. But what he said afterwards is that but he was prepared for a lot of really extreme viewpoints. He was not expecting over racism, and that is what he got. One person yelled him
to go back to where he came from. Another one sat down and immediately started asking him about what his ethnic heritage was, and he happens to be of Indian descent, but he couldn't understand the relevance to that they were meant to be talking about Donald Trump, and so Hassan, I think interestingly, started to regret participating in this event. He is someone he is a professional debater, and he walked away from that thinking what did I achieve there?
And at one particularly tense moment in the debate, he simply stopped debating. He refused to debate. It was because he found himself speaking to someone who's self identified as a fascist. And later he said, that's my line. Fascism is violence. It is not about solving political disagreements through talking and consensus and elections. And I will not speak
to someone who identifies as a fascist. So when even the professional debater is saying I'm done with debating, I wonder if we've reached this point where it's becoming almost impossible to have a civilized debate. And I wanted to throw this back at the two of you a bit. I remember that in fairly recent history on this podcast, you've celebrated the fact that you were able to disagree with one another respectfully and correct me if I'm wrong.
But I feel like over the last couple of years I've noticed a bit of a pulling back on that messaging. Is that because our times have become so polarized that we don't even want a debate amongst people who we basically agree.
With, I feel as though our tolerance for disagreement might have gone down a little. People might feel as though everywhere they look in their feeds, at their dinner tables, there is just constant disagreement. And in saying that, I think that we often do disagree about things on this show, but when the stakes of something is very very high, and the potential of seriously hurting someone is there, I
think we're probably more careful than we were before. I think it's probably because this show has grown and our platform has grown, and with that comes more responsibility. But I was thinking, Amelia, you kind of clarified something for me there, because what a lot of the analysis has said is that you've got Ben Shapiro for people who don't know him he's kind of a right wing conservative voice in the US, and he, I would say, popularized
the fight me like that. I think it's almost the wwe of debating, of using debating as entertainment but also as sport. Like he's this guy who will say abortion is wrong, fight me, and then he speaks really quickly, doesn't listen to the other person at all, and then owns them in capital letters, and then the video goes viral. The new version of that is Charlie Kirk. And Charlie Kirk goes to universities. You've probably seen him on your feed.
Someone says something and he'll go, but what is a woman or something, and then that's kind of like, oh, he wins him ram booze and it's just this kind of spectacle. And a lot of place in the US have said even the Jubilee, the guy who created Jubilee, people have said, well, why aren't your platforming the left wing version of Kirk or Shapiro, And he's like, point to them, there isn't left wing versions. What you clarified for me is the cost of doing that if you
are not a white straight man. The thing about Shapiro or Kirk is that they feel they can play with ideas in a way that if you are any minority, it becomes about your identity, so people will start to mock you. This happens in the public eye. Remember Hamish McDonald on Q and A. His trolling wasn't about his ideas, it was about the fact that he was gay, like it was homophobia. Same with anyone in the public eye, Walid Ali or any woman. It just becomes about their identity.
Or maybe his son on Jubile exactly.
So what happens is it becomes white men shouting at minorities or feeling like they can have debates because doesn't really impact them, maybe the outcome, or.
So they're not viewing it as sport. Like I think there is danger to the fact that this has become entertainment. It feels like the new Colosseum, the new Gladiate. Like we watching the bits of this that I watched the Jubilee conversation. There's a point at which one of the guys who's sitting opposite Hassan says, what's going on in the US right now? And the guy who's saying this is one of the far right guys. He's saying it's tribal warfare. Right, He's saying it's tribal warfare. That's where
we are. The thing is is that that's how this is all set up. It's set up as fun and games, and it's not fun and games for so many people who are directly affected by these arguments.
Right.
So I can't say that I think that the left have a completely clean slate on this. I mean, I can't remember his name, but there are plenty of late night TV guys who, during a various election cycles, get a lot of sport out of going to Trump rallies and interviewing people and making them look dumb and broadcasting that and making like, let's all loll at the stupid rednecks.
That's kind of their trope, and that trope has been out there for a long time, and plenty of people think it isn't a coincidence that a lot of the so called stupid rednecks and inverted commas have got sick of that, feel empowered by it. Now they want to own the Libs and own the feminists and it's all ugly and it's all competition and there's no respect. And
to the point about respectful disagreement. I think I would still defend that position, but I think that there's a very crucial component you need for any disagreement to be respectful. I remember someone saying to me ages ago about out loud. They said, one of the reasons why you can disagree respectfully is that although you disagree about lots of things,
you share values. Like we can argue about various things, but nobody's sitting here genuinely thinking, you know, as some of the guys on the surrounded clearly did, that they are fascists, that they believe that white people are superior.
You know that the very basics of the values that they're talking about are too extreme for debate to the point here, you know, whereas I think, to disagree respectfully you have to kind of agree on the basic parameters of what we all think humanity is and what we all think the way that a civilized society should work.
Which is why Maddie has Son refused to debate the fascist because he says, well, we don't have that common ground anymore.
But should he have agreed to go in that circle in the first place. It's interesting because it's self promotion for him, like with all respect. I mean, I genuinely the first five minutes of that.
I thought, what a brave guy.
But he's got his own news platform, he's promoting it. It's all this is all sport. It's all sport, it's all show, it's all gladiators. It's not actually, you know, when you said earlier, Amelia, the point of actual debate, what it's supposed to do. That's not what any of this is about.
So what do we do though? Do we all just yell into our own voids? Because social media has deteriorated the standard of discourse so so much that it is not about you know, I was reading something the other day that said, go hard on structures, go easy on people. We don't do that anymore. We do the complete opposite. And everyone wants to present monologues into the void and ignore anything that comes back. We are now just doing that. In person.
I agree.
I'm struggling with it because I remember when we talked about adolescence, the Netflix show on here, and the importance of talking to men. It's not just a women's problem that there's violence against women, and there's not just a women's problem that women continue to be discriminated against. We've got to talk to men. Well, I guess SBS decided to take us up on that and talk to men. And so I'm reluctant to sit here and then criticize
men for speaking honestly and openly about what they really think. However, I do want to make a pitch. We talked about how debating has become sport. I am watching Unreal on Netflix, which is behind the scenes of WWE weirdly compelling. Oh yeah, if each is actually an Australian woman, Rhea Ripley, who is the world champion in women's wrestling. It's sort of like the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary bit for wrestling. Watch wa E when you want to see people duke it
out in the ring using violence. That's great, doesn't hurt anyone most of the time. Debating should remain boring, just like it was when we were in high school and everyone made fun of us for being nerds. That's how it should be.
Well, politics should be boring, like leading is boring, governing is boring. We've just seemed to have. Everything has to be entertaining now and everything has to be thirty seconds in a moment. Does everyone in your group chats have another group chat about the group chat? Maybe two or three? Yes, we're talking about the Great DM contagion. I made a new group chat last week. This is unusual.
It's not like you.
No, I'm not generally the instigator of group chats. I'm generally the person who is added to them against my will. Within three hours, that group chat had spawned another separate group chat with two extra people in it. And then there was obviously the direct chat with the person who was the subject of the group chat in the first place. So I had by Tuesday afternoon, I had three new conversations going that I didn't have going on Monday, and
yet the same amount of hours in my day. The Great group chat Contagion was the subject of a Guardian column by Polly Hudson this week, who wrote, you can mute, but you can never leave. Why have WhatsApp groups become so stressful? And in it, she said, she gave this example of how group chats just spawn more and more
group chats. A friend of mine has a group with five moms from her daughter's class, and another whittled down to four of them, then more with three, two and one how she keeps track without the use of murder investigation board with red strings pinned to photographs is genuinely a mystery. And then, of course there is the very particular anxiety of putting the wrong thing in the wrong chat. I was trying to come up with a cool name for it. I haven't really got one. Chat anxiety. I'm
not going to make that happen, Jesse. Why the chats spawn chats spawn chats? And how the hell do we feed and clothe ourselves with so much communication to be attended to at all times.
Mine do not have three offshoots, which suggests to me I'm not invited to them. So I am concerned that, for example, our out loud WhatsApp that's all I got. There is no other one. I feel like there could be a Maya Holly. Maybe there's a Meya Holly, Amelia.
We have a group chat with the hosts, yeah, and then we also have one with our ep ruth, so that's two.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm just worried.
I just want to point out I'm not in it, not even the prime.
We're gone already.
Amelia and m is maya homework where she sends really obscure leaders, and then we feel guilty that we haven't read them, and I go, oh wow, I'll read that. Look, we talked about this at our live show a few months ago, because this is a uniquely female phenomenon, as I have discovered. I decided before our live show, I was like, I'm gonna look at Luca's group chats because I swear that man is not He doesn't have a part time job group chatting, whereas I feel like I do.
And there are not four minute voice notes in Lucas group chats like there are for mine. There are not poles, There are not the enthusiastic performance of upcoming event, which I feel like women need to do. There are not the constant offshoots. They just they are so much less pressured, Like women are the backbone of WhatsApp and Messenger and all of our difference. Someone I feel like someone's making
money every time we make a new group chat. Someone at WhatsApp is rubbing their hands together, going what would we do about exactly right, exactly that he can use for histtle enclave. But it's like women feel like they need to water their group chats like little plants while men are. When I went through Lucas group chats, I would find like he'd send a TikTok and then someone would say I don't get it and then never respond again.
There were maybe a pole that had nothing a twenty seven second phone call, like there was just no trying to the same degree that women are. Why do women feel this pressure and this stress to be so actively social in our group chats and then to make all the offshoots.
There was a very funny Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David was basically being schooled in the fact that you have to heart or thumbs up messages that women just routinely do. But he needed to be told, no, you must acknowledge this important message where someone is telling you they just got engaged or just had a baby, you got to give it a heart. But I don't think that's instinctive for a lot of men.
No, it's absolutely not. It's like they're not there. I find often you set up a group chat, like with a family, and then what you do is the next day you make the group chat with just the women, because why were the men even Yeah, like you don't even keep them across.
I have a friend group like that, we have a group chat for the friend group, and then we have one with just the women in the friend group, because I wonder if the men have one for just the men in them.
They don't, I don't think, Holly. When you introduce this segment, I admit I felt a little bit paranoid, because are you saying that part of the group chat this morning is about people essentially bitching about other people in the group chat?
Not in my world, but of course, and of course not. But I think that yes, certainly, even if it's not bitching.
The thing about big group chats, so say, think about the classic one, which might be the school group or the football team you know, for parents, right this is, or in a non parent environment, the one for somebody's NDU, birthday, dinner, whatever, and like, lots of people are in there, and some people you know and some people you don't, and so within that group there are messages that are for everyone, and then there's a little bit of chat you need
to have on the side, not necessarily about them. But say when I had a group chat going for my friend's fiftieth she had fifty people in that not all of them needed to be weighing in on what the present should be, but like a core group did so, then we needed another group chat for that see another the things that happened in that had to be reported back in the big one, and then you kin'd ever leave that group even though the fiftieth birthday was six months ago, because it seems a bit rude.
I've got group chats that are quite big, like let's say they've got twent people in them, and then I see that four of those people went to dinner last week, and I go okay. At some point the new group chat was warned and it was decided that these four would make this particular dinner arrangement. How did I not make the cup?
This happened to me recently. I have a group of friends from high school and they decided to go on a trip to Melbourne together. But it was at the time when I was out of the country. Unclear whether they decided or not, but I respectfully asked them to take the planning for the Melbourne trip to another chat. Yes, start a new chat, because I don't want to hear how excited you all are about getting the massages at the hotel. Did you ask them to do going to dinner.
Did you ask them to do that in the group? I did so in the group, you said.
Take it elsewhere, ladies get a room.
Get a room.
And now I think they're just over there because the there's new in jokes and they're all just making the in.
Jokes and from the trip. The hour spent last week for a show that I'm doing for mid which is my other podcast that has group chats too, Jesse, I asked people for friendship dilemmas, and one lady sent me a friendship dilemma that she was very angry that one of her friends in her group chats never replies in a timely fashion and she was making her feel like she didn't care about her, so that she'd say she might put some personal news in there, like quite serious
personal news, and the other people would all jump in with like, oh, I'm so sorry, or I hope you're okay or whatever, but this one person yes thefations of but then I think that's me.
Yeah, Oh, so what advice did you give? I just relax.
My advice was everybody's got a different communication rhythm. But this woman was very upset about it, As she said timely fashion several times, So I just would like us to clarify what a timely fashion is.
I would literally give someone three or four days. I reckon when we're over a week, it's like, Okay, you saw it and you forgot to reply. And sometimes that does get offensive and you feel especially when you know that four day.
I'm sorry. Everyone has their phone at all times, and I know you're taking them to the toilet. No, three or four hours is what I expect.
The first cut of Wuthering Heights, the latest movie adaptation of Emily Bronte's gothic masterpiece, has reportedly been shown to a test audience in Dallas, Texas. Would you like a sneak peek? And you don't get to say no, yep, because I know you might.
Since when do we go to test audiences and then get leaks?
Well, this is the thing, so lots and lots of movies are tested. Obviously they test big movies. But it seems to be a bit new that now there it's all leaking out. I read all about this on a blog called World of Real. I don't even know how real World of Reel is, but they apparently interviewed all the people who came out of the test screen.
I feel like you would have signed some sort of non disclosure thing, but.
Okay, they weren't named. This is what Word of Reel reported. Audience reaction inside the theater was largely mex with some visible well maybe they were in there, maybe World of Reel were in there, with some visible restlessness, while others were won over. The film, described by one attendee as aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive, leans hard into Ferinelle's now
familiar brand of stylized depravity. If you're wondering how depraved, I apologize for what I'm about to say, or rather for what World of Reel said, And if you have a little around you, you might just really need to press pause. But anyway, grown ups, stay with.
Me, because Emerald Fanell is the criti director, and she did Saltburn, and she did Promising Young Woman.
Yes, and Saltburn was a wonderful film in many levels, but all anyone ever wants to talk about her the really really rude bits.
Yeah.
The film opens with a public hanging that quickly descends into grotesque absurdity as the condemned man ejaculates mid execution, sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy. A none even fondles. The corpse is visible erect.
World of Reel had fun with that word fondles. I really did, I seel.
And it is one of my favorite books. So why don't I remember the nun and the erection in Weathering Heights?
Oh look, I really missed the days when all we knew about this Wuthering Heights was that Margot Robbie was wearing a lovely, slightly eighty styled wedding dress in it. Remember those blurry picks. That's all we knew, and it sounded promising. And now I just feel like we know too much about movies before they come out.
Yeah, so I fundamentally don't believe in pre promotion of anything. I think hype is finite, and if you start the hype too early, by the time we drop the film, I'm over it and I have fatigue.
But do your book publicists agree with that? Good question?
There's a lead up where you kind of go, book is coming, But I would say that you can go book is coming too many times, and it's like, stop telling me that until I can buy the book.
You really go hard on the book promotion wants pre order.
Zed, Yeah, when someone can do it the same.
Time, you need to give them action. The thing that's interesting about this is you're right, Jesse, because the other thing that might happen, and this is also happening at the minute in the culture with the Devil with different different I don't think there are any nuns erections fondling
going on in that. But we've all seen We've all seen the photos or I imagine we have, and in some cases video of Anne Hathaway and our very own Patrick Brammel walking down the street and she's twirling around a lampers and he's like looking very sharp and skinny in a suit. Like I already feel I know too
much about the plot of that movie. Is one of the dangers of this much excitement preprint emotion, for example, that I've already made my mind up that I don't want to go and see Wuthering Heights by the time it comes out.
Oh, we know way too much about Devil was prior to too. Do you know we know the code name that they're using the movie on the New York sets? What's Cerulean, which is brilliant, referring, of course, to the famous scene in the first one where Meryl Streep's character talks about how she sets the tone and picks the colors for the next season. I do think movies need
a bit of mystery. I heard it said once that good movie stars retain a sense of intrigue, and that's why you put on your hard pants and you go and pay to go to the movies to see a movie star, because you want more of them than you're getting. And they're always having to toe this line between reminding you that they exist and not getting too overexposive. There's no mystery, and the quintessential movie star is, of course Tom Cruise. And Tom Cruise is a movie star because
we literally don't know where he lives. It might be England, we don't know what it could be.
Us, it could be And I think that perhaps they've always taken pictures on set, right, that's not new. What's new is the ubiquity of those images is that I can't go through my feed. I actually do not care about the Devil Wears Prada two spot. I don't care, not even about Patrick Bramle, not really. And I've been bombarded with images and actually spoilers that they've managed to gauge through all of it, but by the time it comes out, it's just like, where's the interest?
Are you more interested in? The is the best advertisement for a film I have heard in a long time, because there is not.
Much we haven't seen that I haven't seen.
The World of Reel went on to be like, they seem to have great chemistry, these actors they're talking about Jacob A Laudie and Margot Robbie obviously, but the characters are so cold and unlikable. Again, I do remember that in the book I Do.
The World of Reel has this. This is their watergate.
My favorite thing about this whole conversation has been Amelia saying, putting on your hard pants, Oh your hard pants, the ones that don't have a stretchy.
Waste to the movies all the time. After the break, the surprising reason that people are choosing not to get divorced.
One unlimited out loud access. We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for Mamma Mia subscribers. Follow the link of the show notes to get us in your is five days a week and a huge thank you to all our current subscribers.
Australia's divorce right is the lowest it's been in fifty years. And the question I have is why do people just love each other more?
That's a question.
If you think that it is because we are somehow better at relationships, or that ever since Amelia and I got married the love is stronger, you would be very, very wrong. One significant factor is the cost of divorcing. So a cheap marriage dissolution starts upwards of ten thousand dollars.
Really, I thought you could just do it online at divorce dot com.
I actually did too, I didn't know it.
It's also just all the knock on. And then also the other big financial consideration is obviously for a great number of families, imagine in this economy harving your income and yet still having all the same expenses. Well, actually having expensive business, Well that's the most expensive of all exactly now have to pay for two months yet, ceter So it's an expensive business.
And it's prohibitive for a lot of couples. So one growing trend is living a part together, where a couple live separately but in the same house, often for the sake of the children and Now, the reason divorce is lower is because of a practice called relationship testing prior to marriage. So this is about cohabiting before marriage, where you might live together for five or ten years. Therefore you know whether you live well together, which appears to
lead to greater success. Jnity really, Charlie Kerr, Oh no.
Why not?
Well, I did not live with my partner before marriage. Now that could have had something to do with the fact that he was in Washington, DC and I was in Sydney. But I choose to lean into the idea of purity.
That's why Dean Wells would be like, you are a high status woman.
This is the most shocking thing I've learned about Amelia.
Like this ever saw me in hard pants until if to be all married and then I pulled out my tax fuits. Oh my god.
It was the soft pan, big reveal. I get the logistics of that. But you could have still when you finally did merge your lives, you could have done that with cohabitation. Had you cohabited before. And so you're I know, I'm getting very personal. I do hope cohabited before, and that's why you were like, no, put a ring on it.
The answer to that is in two parts. Yes, I had cohabited. That's a hard word to say, isn't it. That's really why I didn't you. It's too hard to pronounce I had. But also, well, you know, I was in my thirties. I was ready to get on with it.
I just aw nothing that such a romantic notion to me that you'd go. So let's jump straight in.
Tiny bit of condescension there, I'll take it. I'll take it. I promise not.
I just mean more, you know, as Jesse's saying, it's very common.
Now.
I don't know what the stats are exactly, because obviously it changes with cultural you know, all kinds of cultural things. But it just seems like a very romantic idea.
Let's jump it's.
Right in, no try before you buy all that stuff. I am impressed. I promise I'm not gone.
Because that's that's the other stat as well, is that people are getting married later, which yes, yeah, often means that they've had relationships before, or they've had the opportunity to live with each other. The institution has evolved and adapted in a way that, say, in the nineteen seventies, you might not have thought because no fault divorce came out, and the marriage rate, we should say as well, has halved since nineteen seventy one, meaning that there are also
less divorces because there are less marriages. Holly does marriage appeal.
Yet, one way to not get divorced is to not get married in the first place.
Life Life, you heard it here first.
Yes, because obviously I'm the opposite of Amelia in this regard, in that my partner and I've been living together for twenty years.
If you're ready.
From the beginning and on once started that way, I think it's really interesting because I'm seeing this being reported around a lot as a cause for great celebration, and of course it is if it's sparing anyone heartache, pain, you know, the level of disruption, economic hardship exactly, and all of the things that come often but not always
come from divorce. But divorce rates themselves are a bit of a blunt measure, as you've already said, Jesse, when you're spelling out these stats, because they don't necessarily reflect happiness or success like a successful marriage. You know, commas like I don't know if you listened to the No Filter with Sally Hepworth last week.
Soo yeah.
So Sally Hepworth obviously one of Australia's most successful fiction authors New York Times bestseller, She's got a book coming out soon, but she went on No Filter to talk to Kate Langbert, but not really about her book, but about her divorce. And it was a brilliant conversation because it was very respectful. It wasn't kind of sledging anyone.
But she did say, going through what she's gone through after being married for well over a decade, three kids, divorce was the hardest thing that she has ever happened to her in her life. She talked about how canmpletely devastating it was, and that it's changed her view of marriage, and she said, now I look around at people's marriages, and obviously she's the caveat as you never know, but she said, whose marriage would you want? And she looks around and goes, oh, like I.
Could think that made me so depressed.
Yeah, She's like, I could think of like one or two of So this is what I mean when I say I think the divorced stat in itself is a blunt measure because it doesn't necessarily mean that all the people who are not getting divorced a happy, healthy, harmonious whatever. And also I think that in the same way we have many more choices about how to live together now, we also have many more choices and how to separate.
So I know lots of people who've separated but haven't divorced, you know, and they may be separated for five to ten years. There are all different ways of doing it. So just the divorce stat in itself, I'm not sure if it tells us that we're getting better at love. Do you think it does?
No. I think that's a really good point, and I picked up on that in that conversation too. That idea of the divorce almost took her by surprise, how hard it was and how isolating it was. And it reminded me of two divorce memoirs that have come out pretty recently. One is Leslie Jamison's Splinters, and the other is Sarah Manguso's book Liars, which is pitched as a novel, but
it's pretty clearly a memoir about her divorce. Both these women were very successful writers, just like Sally Hepworth, who traveled the world and who had written about love many times in their professional life. And both of them highlighted how isolating it was to go through a divorce because I guess because it is now less common in certainly
certain social millieres. They found that their friends withdrew from them, and that there was a sense that divorce was contagious, that if their friends gave them too much support, or if they let their friends in too close during that chapter, their friends were worried they would somehow catch the divorce. And it's interesting because I looked into this and yes, divorce is a bit contagious, it turns out in social groups,
but so is marriage. And there's this phrase, the marriage bug that means that you're more likely to get married if people around you are getting married. And what's interesting is that among young Australians there has been a trend towards getting married a little bit earlier than we might expect, and that's because they think it's sort of this contagious element. Marriage is contagious and divorce is contagious.
I wondered that in the Sally No Filter interview, and I wondered if it was a life staged thing when she said you look around and go whose marriage would I want? Does that ring true to either of you. Do you think that there's yes.
The thing is that the more you do know about other people's relationships at and again, I don't want to sound like a cynic, because I'm genuinely not like I am a romantic in lots of ways, but I think
that we set ourselves an impossible target with marriage. We set ourselves an impossible target in long term relationships that you know, happily ever after till death do us part, and we'll always be happy and everything will always be great, and this person will be my best friend, and you know, we'll co parent brilliantly and we'll have the same ambitions and what we want from each other will never change.
And the older you get and the more life lived and the more things you've seen around you, you just realize that that is it's like almost impossible, Which is why I think that, you know, the happy, successful marriages you do see around you are definitely worth celebrating because it's really really hard. It's very very hard to live most of your life with somebody else. But I don't know,
I think it's interesting. Sally said this, and also my friends who've been through divorce will tell me this is that when you are going through that and have been through that, you know how you were saying, Amelia, is it contagious? Suddenly everyone comes and tells you the truth
about their relationships. You know, you don't go and tell your friends who looks like they've got a perfect marriage, like, actually we haven't had sex in two years, or I'm thinking of having an affair, or I'm really unhappy, or he's awful to me or whatever it is. You don't say that to your happily married friends. You say that to your friends who you can see have found a way through it. And maybe you're on the other side
of that. So I think that probably people who are divorced and separated, I know a lot more about it in a way.
You know, Jesse, you said something interesting too, when you said that marriage has evolved in ways that we might not have expected. Sort of surprising, how tenacious the idea of marriage remains, even when we have evolved in so many other ways to sort of reject traditional institutions. It was interesting because apparently there was a recent survey donogen Z Australians between the ages of fifteen and twenty four, and seventy percent of them said that marriage was still
an aspiration. They said, it's not essential for raising children, which is what we used to think of as the reason why people got married, but that they still wanted to get married. And it's fascinating that among all those traditional institutions, think of the church, or think of the idea of women staying at home, marriage is the one that's really clung on.
I like the idea that it's evolved, and there was an article in the Atlantic about it and had a lot of research. And obviously these are generalizations and there are lots of different exceptions, but in terms of loneliness, apparently it can be really good for men and women. And to think that it's this institution that's been around for a really long time. Yet what the research suggested was that the nineteen sixty marriage bears very little resemblance
to the twenty twenty five marriage. And even though of course there are still domestic inequalities with things like child rearing and housework and all of those things, there are changes. And when they asked people in marriages what contributed to a happy marriage, equality was one of the biggest things, them saying that they felt like there was a quality within that marriage, which would not have been the answer.
In the night well when they got married in the nineteen sixties, the woman wouldn't have been able to open a bank account on her own.
Hold her job. I think the reason that seventy percent of young people want to get married is for the GRAM. It's taken care of your content for at least six months. A massive thank you to you out louders for listening to today's show and to our fabulous team for putting it together. We're going to be back can your ears tomorrow.
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