You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.
And I just wanted to point out that you should always wear underparents if you're regardless of the length of your LaBier when you were wearing taigi.
Yeah, because it would shave.
Welcome to Mama Mia Out Loud, our first show of twenty twenty five, and if you want to know what the hell Miya was just talking about, you're going to have to keep listening.
I'm Holly Wayne Wright, I'm Mea Friedman.
And I'm Jesse Stevens.
And on the show today, We're back. We are back.
I am busting to be back. I'm so excited to be back. There are so many chats that we've been kind of half having in our WhatsApp group. We're like, no, no, no, we save it for the show. That's the rule.
What about how many out louders?
Because we had our emergency episode with Justin Baldonian Black Lively and then it was like, should we have another emergency episode?
They were like, metas made this announcement, how about this Megan? This that Megan? She did a post and we're like, look, we got to save something for the first show back. This is going to be a cracker of an.
Episode, so we have got lots of that coming up. But also in the subscriber episodes on Tuesday and Thursday this week, we're going to be saying all the things we were dying to say to each other about all the news stories that have happened over the break, So make.
Sure you subscribe Golden Glow ready. Justin Baldoni update and I am des stopped to talk about I can't believe they did this, but there was an essay that dropped in the cut by doctor Lily j. She is the woman whose husband left her for Ariana Grande and it is the most stunning ess I can't wait to dissect her with you both.
Yeah, that was amazing. Did you all have a good holiday?
Really good holiday. It's a push, Paul, because I missed you both and our team, and I wanted to talk about all these things. But also I just love doing nothing. Me too. I did three weeks of nothing. I'm sorry everybody, as much nothing as you can do when you've got children and family and friends visit. But like it was glory.
I got to last night. I thought I could do enough three week Todt get me wrong.
I could keep holiday, except we had to come back to talk about Meghan, because that lad has kept.
To costing us in the streets.
I was literally I was in Sydney last week and I was out and a lady came up to me, a very nice person, but she said.
When are you going back to work?
I was like, it's okay, Monday. She's like God anyway. On today's show, the celebrities being scolded over their California wildfire tears and the eerily familiar blame game playing out across the devastation. Also why we love to argue about Australia's most popular beach accessory, the Little Cabana, and with love Megan, with the announcement of the Duchess's cooking show, is our weight for jam. Finally over, I'm afraid not friends, but first Mia.
In case you missed it, if you noticed a guy appearing across your feeds talking about how fats are so twenty twenty four and it's now going to be the wild Western meta, you weren't hallucinating. That was actually Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which of course includes Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp.
Here's a little bit of what he had to say.
Here's what we're going to do. First, We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X. Starting in the US, after Trump first got elected in twenty sixteen, the legacy media wrote NonStop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried, in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the
arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trusts than they've created, especially in the US.
You know what, no one ever says I'd like things to be more like they are on X except for Mark.
He says that, so look, what could possibly go wrong. The subtext of this, of course, is that Donald Trump is in power, and over the last few weeks all the tech billionaires have gone to kiss the ring. The other thing that Mark Zuckerberg announced is that the head of World Wrestling Federation, a guy called Dana White, is now on the board of Meta, and it's basically saying all bets are off.
This is now bastling match. Correct, Because I read that Mark Zuckerberg donated one million US dollars to Trump's inauguration fund, Correct and.
Jeff Bezos paid forty million dollars to make a documentary about Millennia Trump.
Right, So my issue here, I actually think fact checking is really really complicated. And free speech and how you allow conversations to happen that need to happen without projecting your politics onto it. I think that is a really complicated discussion. But I reckon it's fair to say that we don't want our platforms, whether it's X, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, being aligned with any political party. I don't want them to be pro Biden, and I don't
want them to be pro Trump. They might be, but I don't need to know that because I think a platform needs to be bipartisan. Is that a fair thing?
Well, the problem is he's not talking about being partisan now factor is considered partisans.
Yes, But what I'm saying is that knowing his relationship with Trump, now, knowing that he's kissing the ring, knowing that Musk is in the inner sanctum, what we're really seeing is all of these companies go, well, our facts are going to be determined or at the very least influenced by the current candidate, who we all endorsed.
Now, I don't want to spread conspiracy theories because that's the kind of thing that happens on X. But also when Trump was in power last time, at one point he threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail. He has also at different times threatened to try and work out how to dismantle Amazon because he didn't like bees os and what was going on at the Washington Post. So it's quite fair to say or so that these guys are protecting themselves.
They're protecting themselves because regulation in Silicon Valley is a big thing, especially for like AI, like open Ai and all of those. They don't want to be regulated. So the more that you suck up to try, the more he'll say, do what you like. We're not watching finger in ow. He is la la la la lah.
It's interesting the way it's been framed, and it's you know, very calculated obviously, and very clever and very smart from a you know, the CEO of a publicly listed company worth billions and billions of dollars and that potentially the most powerful person on the planet. He's framed it quite literally. He said the words there will be less mistakes, meaning that some posts were taken down that shouldn't have been
taken down because fact checkers were overzealous. Less mistakes and more free speech.
Does that mean I can put my nipple up?
No?
No, not no.
Can we just very quickly mention that.
But you can't say that gay people are mentally ill now? And that's fine, but no go it.
As you mentioned, Maya, he also has a startling new look, so Zuckerberg. He also went on Rogan. Did you see that? He did a whole three hours on Rogan again in his new In England, they call it a road man. Look like he's got a chain and his hair's all scraggy, and he like he looks he's all jacked because he's so into his fighting now. And it's very interesting. The midlife crisis is looking very interesting in Silicon Valley.
Since January seven, a series of wildfires have burned through Los Angeles, so far, claiming sixteen lives. Experts believe they are likely to be the most destructive natural disaster in modern US history, forcing nearly one hundred and eighty thousand people to evacuate their homes. Damaging or destroying more than twelve thousand structures, with the cost estimated to be at
around one hundred and thirty five billion dollars. A fire intensified by a windstorm burned through the Pacific Palisades at the speed of three football fields a minute. Entire suburbs have been decimated. So why and how? It's winter in LA. This is not a time of year when fires are even expected. Usually, A number of factors have conspired in including severe drought. Parts of southern California have had the
driest start to the rainy season on record. Hotter weather coupled with extreme wing conditions means the risk was unprecedented. Of course, meteorologists environmental analysts could explain the conditions far more comprehensively than I can. But what's interesting is how political the discussion around these fires has quickly.
Become while they're still burning. Right.
Yeah. On the one hand, broadly speaking, the left want to talk about climate change. This happened in Australia as well. We were warned about extreme weather events and here they are. On the other hand, the right want to talk about
government incompetence. Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted they prioritized dei over saving lives and homes, which he's suggesting that the Democrat propensity to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion has distracted fire departments and left a state woefully unprepared for this kind of desire. There's been this ridiculous focus on how the three people in the fire department that are running it all happen to be gay women, as though that's all relevant.
That's clearly why the fire started.
Get yeah, exactly, I read it on XT.
California obviously is a blue state that's a Democrat state, has been for a very long time and was the focus of a lot of the Trump Musque Rogan rhetoric even way before this leading up to the election, that the Democrats had ruined California, etc.
Yes, so a clip has gone viral of the leader of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power saying that their number one priority is equity, and that probably hasn't aged well because it is now being criticized. Alongside the knowledge that fire hydrants were empty, there were serious issues with water systems, putting the diversity point to the side. The reality is, as was outlined by Claire Limb and over the weekend, both climate change and government in competence
are to blame. Environmentalists and fire departments of been saying for years that we need to prevent climate change, but we also need to be prepared for it. She quotes an Australian volunteer firefighter named Joel Shepherd, who said, when conditions are bad enough, no amount of firefighters can stop it, and that's what we've seen in LA. The other discussion has, of course been the celebrities who have lost their homes
at the time of recording. Paris Hilton, Adam Brody and Layton Meister, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins and a Faris, Tina Knowles, Rebel Wilson, Mandy Moore, Jamie Lee, Curtis, Billy Crystal, Eugene Levy. They are just a handful. Some say they're rich. We don't want to hear the stories. It's a distraction. They can afford to replace everything. Here's Spencer Pratt. He used to be on a show in
the twenty tens called The Hills. Here's him responding to the commentary in the wake of losing his home.
Funny thinking about the Internet is most times people are always trying me, like saying how broke we are, and like, oh, you're so broke. You TikTok battle like you're broke and our house burns and everyone's like, oh, you're a millionaire. You're a millionaire, You're so rich. Like which is it? Are we broke or are we millionaires? Trolls got to figure it out.
Holly, where do you sit in terms of whether we should have compassion for the celebrities.
Well, I think we should have compassion for everybody. Like, broadly speaking, I mean the thing that's really confronting and different about this. So Australians broadly we know about fire, right, we absolutely do. The twenty nineteen twenty twenty fires here were world news for their ferocity, for their scale, for their loss. Right. In fact, listening to the Quickie this morning, there was a woman, an Australian in La who says that walking around La at the minute is absolutely like
walking around Sydney. Then, in terms of the black skies, the air quality, the masks, remember when our kids were allowed to play outside at school. It's that, but it's on steroids because of the urban setting of this. Right, So we're used to seeing fire devastation, but we're not really used to seeing entire cities, suburbs wipe down and city buildings burned, took the ground. So that's really different.
The other thing that's really different is these fires are happening in basically the center of our culture, our pop culture. I mean, so where a lot of our news and our content creators and our high profile people are is on fire. So my daughter, for example, knows everything about this because it's just her TikTok feed and every creator that she follows is posting about it, and not everything on there is true. So she came to me very
confidently saying, I've seen the Hollywood Sign burning down. It's gone. It isn't gone. There was just a very good AI video of that. And equally with the politicization, as with everything, as we were just talking about with Facebook, there are lots of different sets of facts. So Donald Trump immediately posted about the empty fire hydrants. That sounds terrible. There wasn't enough order in the fire hydrants. When you read a little deeper, Just like with everything, there are a
million reasons why there weren't. At that time, it was keeping up with the unbelievable demand. It's about the fact they turn the power off to stop fires. There's a million different reasons of why. But this natural disaster is playing out in a place that we are always watching, so now we get to watch this. And in terms of the celebrities, what I'm mostly seeing is celebrities doing
really good stuff. I'm seeing lots of celebrities volunteering and shining a light on what needs to be done, like volunteering down, folding up clothes, sending money and then saying you should send money to and again that's Australians did the same thing in the fires. Remember Celest Barber raising all that money for the firefighters that then became controversial
within itself. Remember lots of high profile people going and packing essentials boxes to send down the New South Wales coast or down to Victoria and then encouraging other people to do that. I'm generally seeing high profile people using their profile for good in this in the middle of losing everything themselves.
So I think probably LA has a sort of a brand problem in that people do associate it with celebrity, and of course people who live there. The vast majority of people who have lost their homes. Are not celebrities and are not rich necessarily, and I also think there's a difference between being famous and rich, and that's what Spencer Pratt was sort of getting at. Losing your home is losing your home. It's so unimaginable, it's so devastating,
and Australians know that better than most. There was a great, really affecting post by John Mayer who posted an image of it was like a photo album, and he said that what's lost in fire is you can talk about stuff and possessions, but sometimes it's proof of life. It's proof that people even existed. In this album where pictures and documents related to his father in this incredible life
he lived. When that's gone, there's no proof your mother or your grandmother even existed, and that is something that people are grappling with in this town, famous or not. I've found the rhetoric of just like boohoo, celebrities losing their homes really confronting because it's like we think compassion is a pie something and you there's a finite amount. Rather than going, oh, that's really sad. I feel also really really horrible for the people whose insurance lapsed so
the insurance premiums. Either insurance went, we're not going to ensure your home this was last year, or we're gonna make it, you know, three times the cost. So a lot of people went can't afford it, and people who have had homes for thirty years just burned down. What do you do then, like, oh, my goodness, But I think you can feel sorry for everyone.
At the same time, I'm reminded that we're very uncomfortable with feeling sad or scared or despairing, and it's much more energizing to feel angry. And we see this again and again and again when something you know, unavoidable, larger than anyone can control, something that's arguably nobody's actual fault.
I understand natural disaster. Right.
It's almost like the beginning of COVID where everybody he was singing in the balconies and it was all like, wow, it's so combaya on the internet. This is so weird. No one's angry. And then straightaway, when it went on for too long and we didn't like feeling sad and scared, we became angry. And then it became wildly politicized, and we see this happening earlier and earlier in the news cycle.
I think you made a really good point, Jesse, about the difference between fame and wealth, and I think that what fires do are beyond measure of just money, you know. I was just talking to Michelle Battersby, who's in the office working on something for us, and she lives in LA and she's out here with her son and her baby. She said, three women in her mother's group who've just had new babies, they've all lost their homes.
And I keep.
Thinking about what happens when literally everything's gone where you've got nowhere to go back.
To, Like, literally, what do you do?
You've got no clothes, you've got no documents, your children have nothing. You might be ensured, you might be not. But even if you are insured, even if you're wealthy, literally what do you do. You don't have a toothbrush, you don't have a face cream, you don't have your birth control, like your medication, you script, like all of those things. Where do you even begin? And it feels
like there's just no space for that. Mandy Moore, the actress who's married to a guy in a band, her house burnt down, her brother in law and sister in law who lived next door. Their house burnt down too, and they'reabout to have a baby. And she posted a go fund me for them that someone had made and got slammed for you've got all these millions of dollars, why don't you just buy them a new house.
I'm sure she's what she can.
She did, and she rightly pushed back, and she actually said, fuck off. You can't just google what you think someone is worth. Believe that, and then, of course we are helping, but I'm sharing a go fund me and you have no idea. Everybody has lost everything. And when people are looking at what they can do. I saw Jean Smart just one of Golden Globe for her work on hacks.
She posted on Instagram saying, I hope that we are going to cancel all the awards shows that are coming up, and there are so many, from the Grammys to the SAgs, to the Oscars of course.
And many more.
I hope all of them will be canceled and all that money will go to fire relief and supporting the victims. Now people feel very conflicted about that, as they should. In one hand, it seems obscene to be let's go and put on one hundred thousand dollar dress and wear diamonds and walk on a red carpet and talk about who did our hair while people literally sitting in rubble. But on the other hand, it is a work in town la and it's not just the people on the
red carpet. It is the stylus, the cater is the people who supply everything the way stuff. So if you do cancel all of that, you're crippling those communities even more.
As you say, Jesse, compassion has no limits. I feel terrible for anybody. There is no doubt that if you have the means to get out of the fire zone, be staying somewhere else, and you know you've got people with you, and you at the Beverly Hilton or whatever, you're doing better than lots of people who can't do that. Right, There's no question that there are degrees of devastation. But the thing is, as you've said, me about what natural disasters do. And plenty of people in Australia know a
lot about this. If you've been in the flood zones in Lismore, if you were in the burnt out towns in southern New South Wales, in those years. You know the amount that the emergency services have to do to help you when you have literally lost everything. That's a
massive operation that costs a lot of money too. And one of the things is, I mean, I think we all remember very well that after those fires when Scomo Scott Morrison, the Prime Minster of the time, probably the thing that put the biggest nail in his political coffin was that I don't hold a hosemte comment that he made after that when he was on holiday when that happened. And a similar thing has happened here where the mayor of California she wasn't on holiday, but she was on
a trip overseas when this happened. And everybody needs somewhere to put their anger, as you've said, Mia, and some of those places are valid because it is true that now we do live in a time of climate catastrophe, whether all sides of politics want to admit it or not. We've got to think much harder about where people live, where people rebuild, what you do in these circumstances. But Scomo said I don't hold a hose, and then he went and turned up at some of these places and
people refused to shake his hand. They were furious with him, because when you have lost everything, you need to feel like everybody thinks that that is the most important and terrible disaster as it is.
I'm also reminded that we live in the era where everybody has to have a hot take. It's like, quick, what's your opinion, what's your hot take on this situation?
Or I see everything through the prism of ex world events, which a world event needs to be seen on its own terms.
I think, yeah, the other thing is and this is not true of course for all of the celebrities and the wealthy people in those neighborhoods. But one of the other things that is increasing the anger are the stories around things like private firefighters. Can you explain that this first came up in the last round of well not the last round, but another round of fires in twenty nineteen, where Kim Kardashian and her then husband Kanye West were found to have employed a private team of firefighters to
protect their home during the blazes. Now, at the time, she came out and said, yes, but they also put out fires all around us and help my neighbors and whatever. But private firefighters are a big thing in wealthy communities in fire zones, because if you can afford to pay somebody to come and sit outside your house in these special white fans I've seen the imagery and fight your fire, then you might do that if you are as rich as Kim Kardashian is. Oprah Winfrey famously did this in Hawaii.
She got absolutely smashed for it. The arguments are obviously that that takes resources away from the public resource and that you know, we're playing a game of whose house is worth saving who isn't. So I understand some of that frustration, and there is no question that the people who are always worst off in any natural disaster are the most vulnerable people. But it does just seem very ungenerous to be in any way sneery or smug about seeing what we term privileged people suffering.
In a moment slipslop and slap downs at the beach, we're dusting off the sand from Summer's beach Kabana drama after the break.
Well, that's not on one of the great things about Australia. Unlike some parts of the world. You go and you've got to pay to go to the beach. Here, everyone owns the beach everyone. It's a place where every Australian is equal, and that's a breach of that principle really, to think that you can reserve a little spot as just yours.
If you had one eye on the news over summer, you might have been a little bit confused to see our PM Anthony Arbernezi wade into a war that broke out over beach cabanas. It was a pretty compelling piece of summer drama when Australian beaches became this battleground for what locals are calling cabanagate, which is this turf war over beach real estate. That caught everybody's attention, including our beloved m Vernon, who wrote about it for Mamma Maya.
She said, the sound of calming waves she was talking about being at the beach has been replaced by the loud, slapping noise of fabric against wind. I could hear a man yelling, oh, we need more sound for the weights. I could also hear a kid yelling can I help. I could hear a girl around my age again yelling, I reckon, we'll fit into this spot. Annoyed and curious, I opened my eyes to see what this sudden commotion was about. And that was my first experience with a gang,
a gang of cabanas. She talks about how the cabana gang come in herds of two to ten people. They're lined up side by side, not just shielding them from the sun, but also building the view from everybody else. There's this big drama about it, which I hadn't realized was happening. I don't spend a lot of time on the beach. I don't mind being near the beach going like literally, I walk across the sand, jump in the water,
and then leave. I don't linger on the beach. But I did notice these little mini cities were at the beach for a little while. Jesse and I up the north coast of New South Wales, and it was like a mini city of all these stripe cabarnets.
I have such strong feelings about this. I have always sensed that there is hear me out something slightly classiest about this discussion. So I grew up in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Right, if I were going to the beach as a kid, yeah, it was taking us an hour at least, right, especially on a hot summer's day. It's taking you a really long time. This can to take you an hour to get to the beach. Yeah,
you do something called a beach day. I've had this discussion with my husband before because he grew up close to the beach and he doesn't have a concept of a beach day for him. You go to the beach, you duck in, and you get out because the beach has always been something close to you. If you're someone who is not close to a beach, you have a beach day. And a beach day requires you to bring an eski with food in it. Yeah, all of your things, save up for parking because that's going to cost you
three hundred bucks. And you need shade. You need shade because you are going to sit on a beach, probably with kids, for a really long time. And I love Australian beach so I think they're the best beaches in the world. Don't have a lot of shade. A lot of them really really don't. You have lots of sand and no shade.
But what I don't understand is why this is new, because I remember growing up in the seventies and eighties we had igloos, so they were like these little dome things new because it were the same.
Because if you look at these cities, they're all the same thing. It's one brand of cabana. They are not cheap. So although I agree with you about the classest thing there about proximity to the beach Jesse, they're also a bit of a state of symbol because they're very lovely to look at their color.
They're black, a few hundred bucks.
Yeah, they're all cool cabana. They were designed by a guy in the Sunshine Coast who is now richer than God because.
They needed to invest in it.
They are one hundred percent of state of symbol.
Safer than umbrellas because that we also used to have umbrellas, right, and then they would impale people when the wind.
Gets Yes, that's safer than umbrellas. And as a thirty four year old who has two sizeable scars from skin cancer, I don't care what you're doing if you're under some sort of shade, and then these families often you know you've got rashes, you've got the sunnies, you've got sunscreen on. That's how Australians need to be going to the peach.
I agree with that, but I also instinctively agree with Albo right, because the thing about the cabana is they're big, much bigger than an umbrella. The way that shade works is you put it up. The shade is not directly under your cabana. Very often the shade is behind it, or to the left or the right, depend on where the sod is. So you have now bought your a three meter square part of the beach and all the surrounding shade because you own that shit, because you turned
up and pitched your tent. So you are pushing everybody else out of your zone. And although I agree with you Jesse, you're a one hundred percent right about the fact that if you live further from the beach, it's a mission to get there. And therefore the great Australian dream of being able to just grab your towel, a book, your sonny's, some sunscreen and walking to the beach or jumping on a bus and going to the beach is kind of dependent on distance. We are making every outing
and everything we do so high maintenance. Now that you have to have a cabana and the eski with three frozen water bottles and the sandproof beach towels and inflatables for the kids and beach cricket, and it's like everything doesn't have to be such a big deal. And also you don't get to own that bit of the beach. It causes tension every time.
I reckon that we don't know how to share public spaces anymore.
Well we do. What you do is you don't steal shade from the person sitting next to.
Even steal shade, steal mean some of the beach. You put up a cabana.
Do you feel if you put your cabana up and someone you don't know comes and sits under it, you would not like that a second.
I'm putting a picnic rug down on a pack and someone comes and sits on.
But beach is two. It's like taking up six.
This is the thing, even like I see images of Bondai, a woman in the North Coast Australian beaches very big, very big. I was at one over the break where I looked and I went, oh, there's no more room for a cabana. There really isn't. But that's how public space means. That strangers annoy you. That's what going outside.
Of your home is your beach cabana. That's meaning I can't sit there.
You can sit there to my right, to my legs, because.
I'll get there earlier of them. So although I totally get it right, I've seen the fight in the out louders group. I'm someone with children. Loads of my friends have these. We go to the beach and we put them up and the kids. I get it, But do I like them? No? I don't because I don't want to go to a beach and just see a whole load of basically building.
What about skin cancer?
Go sit in the shed, or don't spend on the beech shade at the beach. Go and find a tree, sit under a tree, or don't spend the whole day at the beach.
I have found this. I'd look cover up t shirt since I've had a baby as well, and you need a different level because you're so conscious when it's a baby. I have not been able to find any shade on a beach pretty much. I've always had to bring like even if it's a I don't have one because I wouldn't know how to put it up. But I've got like a little thing that I sometimes use with her. I actually reckon that a lot of this, and I think this was in how you're introducing it. Maya. You
said something about the word locals. I think in Australia there is this tension between my beach my local. I hate it when tourists. I hear it in Bondi, where I like the time, and people hate the idea that people from that suburb is coming over to my place with their ten This is.
Sorry, but there are plenty of Bondai people who have cabanas like they are quite a cool chee chee thing to have that posh people have, so I don't Although I agree with you to a point, I also think that it's not that simple. My question is, as the sun moves, because that's how the world works, and your shade moves around, do I have to keep moving so that I don't steal your shade?
Yeah? I don't understand how that works either. But what it is like is when I lived in Italy, my boyfriend at the time was so excited to take me to the beach one day and we drove after we'd been clubbing, and we slept in the car and we woke up in the morning and it was just like, you have to pay first of all, and it's just all these structures that you rent and beach chairs and to this sad little trickle of gray water. And I was like, guys, come on, this is not a beach.
This is pathetic. It's true, and I think that that's one of the things that people are reacting to.
Isn't it about bags?
Rightly or wrongly, people are reacting to you are de australianizing the beach.
As long as a beach is free, it is Australian.
My understanding of what Albow was saying is that what people are really objecting to are people who go and bags a bit of sand. Like they go and they squat and they.
Put it up, but all the same surrounding it.
But what I will say about that is that they put their thing down and maybe they go and dip into the water. But people aren't putting up their kabana and then going on the bus home like people are around the beach. They're also allowed to go into the water. It's not like you can't leave your capara.
The thing is one more thing. See how hated. This is the reason people are upset is because it's changed. You know, how you were saying, is it different. It is different because it's like looks different if you consistently go to the beach, whether it's for a day or for a dip. In the last three years, this is a new thing, and I think that we're like what I didn't think that's what we did. I think that's what people are reacting to.
In case you missed it, actress and model Brookshields was given a vaginal medical procedure without her consent. In her upcoming memoir called Brookshields is Not Allowed to get old thoughts on aging as a woman, the fifty nine year old shared a story about consulting a gynecologist because she'd been having ongoing dis comfort with her labia since her teenage years, which included bleeding and chafing.
She wanted a reduction reduction.
Yes, so her doctor recommended that surgery. She then underwent that surgery, but when she returned for her post operative checkup, her male surgeon told her very proudly that he'd performed an additional procedure without her knowledge, called vaginal rejuvenation, also known as vagina plasty, which tightens the vagina. She felt she couldn't sue the doctor because it would have been on the front page of every newspaper. Wowowow why would the assumption be that a woman would want this?
She said she felt really ashamed and she didn't want to tell even her husband about it.
Fun fact, you might remember.
That Brookshield's one of the things she first became famous for after Blue Lagoon, was an ad she did with cumclin jeans and it was her sort of with her legs spread in a pair of jeans, and the line was what comes between me and my calvins?
Nothing? And I just wanted to point out that you should always wear.
Underparents if you're regardless of the length of your LaBier when you were wearing Taigian.
Yeah, because it would shafe out.
Yeah, that seems irrelevant. But I don't even understand. Is this Like we've run stories on Mama Maya before of people saying, after they've given birth, they've torn. Yeah, and they've torn that the doctor said, I've given you what we call husband's stitch. We've run stories on a Mare about that.
Do you want an extra stitch for the husband?
Like?
Which is this horrible idea of exactly this? But of course you would want me to tighten that thing up. So that's what happened to Brookshields without her asking. That is shocking. Do you think that he thought, oh, she's getting labiaplasti, So she obviously is concerned about the region, like.
Because some women get labiaplasty for aesthetic reasons because they just don't visually like the way it looks. Because, for example, most vaginas that women see in labias that volvers that women see are in either pawn or you know, we don't realize that flaps come in all shapes and sizes. Quick plug for Ellie said toix book, she's a volver photographer.
I interviewed her on No Filter. She has just released a coffee table book which is at my house now, which I keep making my children look at God.
It's just of photographs of volvers. They come in so many different shapes, so many.
And that's what someone should have sent Brook. Although no, Brook did have actual chafing reasons because of perhaps the genes, and he was.
Sent it to her doctor. But like, it's okay for everybody's vagina to be a bit different.
But then this is this, this is the inside.
This is the inside, and I think what it really is is that the doctor wasn't concerned about what Brook wanted and the husband's stitch. You're not concerned about what the woman wants.
It's about how it feels for anyone going in there. Sacually.
It's the epitome of misogyny and medical misogyny.
After the break, you knew we were going to go there. Megan Mirkale's big news show has been delayed. We're getting you up to speed with with Love Megan.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, we drop new segments of Mama and Me Are Out Loud. Just remember me as subscribers follow the link in the show notes to get your daily dose out Loud and a big thank you to everyone who is already subscribed.
The California fires are a tragedy on an enormous human and environmental scale, but they have also robbed us of one of the little glimmers of delight. For January twenty twenty five, Megan the Duchess of Sussex's long awaited TV show, Let's Go.
I've always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it, surprising people with moments that let them know I was really thinking of them.
What this is probably one of the most glamorous moments of my life's m I've been.
Waiting for Megan's jam now for ten months. I don't know it's with me wait for jam. That's how long it's been since her company, American Riviera Orchard Now came on to Instagram and said they were going to make jam. They never did, But what happened in the first week of twenty twenty five was movement. It was exciting. Meghan came back to Instagram. She first of all, sure you all saw it. If not, what have you been doing with your year so far, just released a black and
white video of her running onto a beach. There were no cabanas there, Jesse, No, that's probably your own and riding twenty twenty five in the sund And.
It was also her own Instagram account. Yeah, Megan, wonder how she got that. That's a true crime conversation story. I don't know who she how much she had to pay to get that handle anyway.
And then she announced her return to the public kitchen. Finally, fucking finally, I thought, here we go. Meghan's back. Her Netflix show is happening. We've been hearing about this Netflix show for a long time and people said there was a film crew, and they said it was going to be live, but none of us really believed in its
existence until Now With Love. Megan was meant to be launching on Wednesday this week, dropping eight episodes of Judging by the trailer, delightful, kitchen, pawn diaries were cleared, diaries, work schedule, We already, we booked the studios, we're convened. It's safe to say it looks like this show is her making food, picking vegetables and freezing tiny flowers into ice cubes with her famous and fabulous friends.
Now, Mindy Kayling was there.
She announced today as we're recording this that she is going to postpone it. The launch has been postponed to March out of respect for the devastation of the fires.
I'm very relieved about that.
Well, it would have been a bad look. Oh the weight goes on. Mia. What do you make of Meghan's actual real life show.
I'm just so excited to be back and talking about it because I think that my overall impression with the New Year's Day black and white Instagram video on the each and all I could think was how many times did you have to do it? To get that right, and the perfect blow dry and everything, and then the dropping of the trailer and then sadly her dog Guy died.
Why do I earn the name of a dog? I need have to stepupsetting anyway.
My overall impression is that the esthetic and the vibe is very kind of twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. It's that, you know, drawing things in the sand, highly produced, very reminiscent in fact, of the Kate's cancer video.
So I disagree. I think it's reminiscent of a formal lifestyle brand called The Tig, which is twelve years old. I saw it.
No, but that was just a blog.
To be clear, that was a blog that wasn't really video and it was just a nothing little Everyone had blogs back there.
No, it wasn't a nothing little. It was big, yes it was, and it had its own Instagram, and she produced content. It was lifestyle content, it was food, it was travel, it was all of it. This is how Megan started. This is kind of what she did with.
Those a little hobby projects.
Oh that is you are so dismissive of Meghan. I won't have it. I simply won't.
Say what we're arguing about here is whether this is true to her brand right, because you have said me interesting pivot. I think it is going back to her roots. Yeah.
And the first thing I thought when I watched the trailer was I wish I'd been in the Netflix strategy meeting when they decided that they would do the Martha Stewart documentary at the tail end of twenty twenty four to kind of nostalgically have everyone reminisce about the Martha Stewart days, to then release Meghan Markle with Love Meghan as almost position her as the new Martha Stewart, because I think that's exactly what they're doing.
Do you think that there's an appetite for a Martha's Stewart? Absolutely? Absolutely, Look, it's like Ballerina Farm.
The biggest, well, the biggest argument I had over the holidays was exactly that someone saying this is a nod to the tradwife phenomenon. We've got women baking cakes. There was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald where the writer basically said, you know, most people baking cakes aren't doing it in front of a camera crew with their famous friends. That's like saying most people to drive cars aren't on formula one like it's television. Of course, it's
more beautiful, flamorous, of course. But whether or not you work, or you have kids, or you're rich or you're poor, you've got to put dinner on the table, so most people.
But do you have to put teeny little flowers in ice cubes?
No, you don't. But I think that when I watched the Martha Stuart documentary, I thought my grandmothers, who didn't have all the resources in the world, cared about their home gardening. Men and women for since the beginning of time have been doing these things, and I think that the way we pooh pooh them, or we turn our nose up is actually is a new way of us denigrating anything that we see as feminine.
I agree, not everyone who make the salad as a trad wife. Let's be honest, right, it's not a trad wife thing to make some food like that. Most women are doing it every day, baked.
Biscuits, exactly right, And you're.
Not a trad wife yet. But I think that there is definitely a bit of a shift at the moment back to the home, and I think that that's something that often happens in uncertain times, and there is no question that we live in those, right, And the idea of what you can control is within your four walls, and you can make things lovely there, and you can. She talks in the trailer about you know, moments of joy in your life, right, and if you are the kind of person who gets joy out of having a
flower in your ice cube, then here we go. Megan's here for us.
I think the Internet's going to really take that on board. I was thinking about the difficulty back in Martha Stewart's day, like you either liked Martha Stewart or you weren't into Martha Stewart. If you weren't into Martha Stewart, you didn't buy a magazine, you didn't watch your shows. She kind of you knew she was, but she didn't really affect your life. Now it's like everything is a referendum on
what it is to be a woman. Like the fact that some people are saying, well, Megan very big pivot from archetypes her podcast and all her talk about being a feminist, and now she's being a homemaker. And I think two things can be true.
I saw a tweet which I thought was actually very true. It said, we're criticizing Meghan for being out of touch for baking, and then it had an image of Kate and Will on thrones being held up by colonized people, and I was like, yeah, the woman can't win.
Also, it's not anti feminist to make a cake like that's ridiculous one of the things that I have because you're right, Mare, she's going to get slammed for it, etc. But the thing is that she is going to get slammed whatever she does. There is no world in which whatever Meghan's TV show or Next Business or project or Instagram account or not Instagram account is not going to attract an enormous amount of conversation and criticism. So you might as well do something that you want to do
and you like doing. And that is probably smart and savvy, because all of these threads will start to come together if the jam ever fricking drops, which is that we've already heard that we've trademarked under American reverer Orchard and Duchess of Sussex. Tea towels, jars, candles, like all kinds of things which will presumably all be in her show product placement. You can buy this stuff. That's clever, clever, clever. You could argue that if you were going to do it,
what's the least controversial thing you could do? Make a few cakes. Yes, except that one of the other things that people get upset about about the Martha Stuart vibe and now the Gwyneth vibe and the Megan vibers, it's putting a lot of pressure on ordinary women who are putting flowers in their ice cubes. But you know, again, whatever she does, she's going to cop that. One of the things that perturbed me the most is that she came back to Instagram book with all comments switched off.
Now I entirely understand why, because she's one of the most trolled humans on the planet right, Absolutely no question, she is trolled more than possibly any other high profile person. But what that does declare to me, and we talked about this in a subscriber episode at the end of last year, is saying the quiet part out loud about what social media is for now is this is not about community building. This is not about having a conversation, This is not about doing anything that's two way. This
is a billboard for me to sell by Wares. I entirely understand why she's done it business. She's come back. She's made three posts, including the Lovely Dog one. I wanted to comment on the Dog one. I wanted to share my condolences about guy whose name I also knew about having to do and.
Looked at it and I was just told Wainwright Holly liked this, and I was like, Holly, Megan, it's not your friend.
I couldn't have liked it more times. I know how it feels to lose a dog. Anyway, The point is, what do you think about that? What do you think about the return? But under very controlled circumstances, and really, is there any other way she was ever going to do it?
Well, you know what I was saying about the esthetic and the vibe felt very sort of twenty fifteen. I don't mean that in a derogatory way, because I think that's what everybody was doing back then.
But the current.
Vibe, which is good news for us, is very low fi. It's very hot mess. And that's been brought about in no large part because of TikTok, which was very different to the Instagram aesthetic. The Instagram asthetic was always perfect TikTok came along and it was much more you know, undone, and that is kind of the Internet's vibe.
At the moment.
You know, you look at the top podcast in the world for women, Alex Cooper's call her Daddy. She wears a hoodie while she's interviewing and track. I know she's uncommonly beautiful, but it's still that's an affected version.
But it's still aspiration. It's just like, I don't think aspiration has gone anywhere. I just think it looks different. I think that Alex Cooper is still as you say, skinny, gorgeous, white botox, with an inch of her life, no criticism, but like it's just she's perfect. So it's not really undone.
It's almost like so undone.
It's kind of like how everybody said last year about the Brat summer, like how cool. The Charlie xx Is vibe is just this green with some like black let us thrown at it, and then you find out that they went through two hundred and sixty five shades of green, so it's bullshit. The non aspirational vibe is also very created, curated, fake, so really manufactured author inter.
I think this year the snark about Megan. It's got to go. It's got to go. She's not hurting anyone. You go make a cake and you go do your gardening, and I'll tell you who will like that?
Is Wayne right? Holly? Well, except I'm gonna get real jealous of a gud. This is going to be the first time I'm really going to turn on her.
Oh well, maybe Maya will finally let you have a gardening podcast if you luck eat.
Horrific more gardening contents the world needs.
Have you loved having us back out loud as? That's the ques fun? If you have, you've got a chance to buy tickets to our shows? Is that correct?
As your students you do. Every ticket for Perth is gone, but more tickets have just been released for Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. I know that a few people were worried because I couldn't get them.
Who's going to be top of the leader board? I mean, Perth already smashed everybody out of the path. My money's on Brisbane.
We've got some very social out louders there. They had a.
Catch up there on the weekend organized by Champion out louder Zoe Robbins, which was all about laughter and wine, which is very on brand for us.
I loved the fight Oheit. It brought me so much joy.
Thank you to all of you out louders who are coming to the show, who are planning to come to the show. There's a link in the show notes of where you ca and buy tickets, and thank you for being here with us today. We're going to be back in your airs tomorrow. Happy twenty twenty five.
Bye bye bye.
Shout out to any Mamma Mia subscribers listening. If you love the show and you want to support us, subscribing to Mama Mia is the very best way to do it. There's a link in the episode description.