You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Hello and welcome to MoMA Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about On Wednesday, the eighteenth of March. I'm Holly Wainwright and we have some big news that was embargoed until nine am today. Who wants to share it?
Holly? I kind of think you have to be the one to share it. I think you get statistically the most credit for it.
Oh okay, we are, for the second month in a row, the most listened to podcast in all of the land. In the whole king.
They have been telling like people who don't need to know this fact, this fact Like I was at the supermarket and I went into that you know, the line where you get to talk to a person versus scanning.
Like I managed to work it in. I'm Amilia Lasta. By the way.
You may know me from Australia's Number one podcast. It's funny because in the office you act very nonchalant about it on the number one whatever, I mean number one before.
Well, I'm not on Fridays, so I feel like I can't take full crew.
Come on now, and who are you?
Oh?
I'm clos Stephen definitely taking credit.
I get a little bit of credit now, Yeah, I will be rubbing it in Jesse's face saying we're number one without you, even though she was on the episodes. But whatever, I'll find a way to read.
The chart comes out once a month, if you wondered what we're talking about, the podcast chart, and for the second month in a row, we are at number one. Sometimes we're number two, sometimes we're number three, but not anymore anyway, let's move on. It's not about us, yes, n b D. Here is what's on our agenda for today. Queen Mary is touring Australia. Yes, the woman wants known as Our Mary is coming to Royal Meat and greets near you. So why isn't anybody talking about it?
Plus you're seeing peptides all over your socials, and we went to find out what they actually are and why the trend of injecting them is really dangerous.
And why reference man might be making you cold.
But first, I'm bringing some scoreless gossips. Some of it is oscars related, because you know, we're still mopping.
Up the little bits.
Of that poor one out for Timothy Challa may As. We have talked about a lot on the show. He didn't win the oscar on Monday. In fact, he lost it, and forty eight hours after the event, we now know just how mad he was about the whole I'm not going to win the Oscar today thing, because it was
kind of clear by the time he sat down. The reason we know this is because a lip reader has translated what he was saying to Kylie Jenna when he was sitting in his seat and he was like, his leg was jiggling, he was smiling, but he looked.
Like, oh kill me now.
And indeed that's what he said, because according to the lip reader, he said.
I hate this.
Before Kylie Jenna said to him, We're all right, okay, and he goes yeah, and she says, I hope.
So can I ask a questionion about lip readers?
Where were they like five years ago, because now they're everywhere.
Did they have jobs five years ago?
Well, I think they might have had proper jobs five years ago. There are all these influencers, so there are lots of like non professional lip readers, but there are also quite a lot of influencers who make their content on TikTok translating what celebrities are saying to each other. And it's now become so much of a big deal that celebrities and royals in particular are being warned about it and being told by their agents that just treat the whole world like a hot mic at all times.
Taylor Swift has famously been doing this for a while now, where she just does not talk in public unless she's hiding her mouth.
I am on the side of TikTok that has all the lipreaders, so I love that it will be every just event with celebrities and a lipreader telling me what they're saying. And then other one I get is psyekicks, So I feel like I really know a lot. The other thing about Timmy that got lip red was his sister comes up to him, Pauline and Kylie sitting behind him and the lip reader, and you know, the lip reader is one hundred percent accurately. Let's just just put that.
Science says they're thirty to forty anyway.
Okay, Timothy says to his sister, could you go easy on her, referring to Kylie as supposed to, and Pauline says okay. Then Timothy reiterates, I want you to go easy on.
Her, because what was she going to do.
And I believe it so hard because I'm like, that is exactly what my brother would say to me if he had a girlfriend.
By then you might be going up to him being like, why are you wearing? Yeah, what's with the keyhole? Am I supposed to put something in.
That key hole?
Royals are in lots of trouble with the lip readers. Recently, King Charles was getting into his carriage and apparently that suck.
Me after his nation.
Remember the pin Remember his pen that ran out of ink and he was really cranky. I don't even think that was lip reading. I think you could hear it. He's so cranky.
He's really cranky. But anyway, pour one out for them, because they can't even get drunk and have a good time anymore without everybody going I can tell what you're saying. I need to talk about some actual scrorellous gossip you might be seeing around your feeds. That Nicole Kidman, who was definitely relaunching at the Oscars, particularly at the Vanity Fair party. She looked unbelievable in that yellow dress at the Vanity Fair party after the Oscars, and she was
very main character. I mean, of course, she is, she's thick.
She photo bombed Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchezos, which I loved.
Yeah, because it's like only one of the people in this photo should be here star power.
And the camera just followed her away from Jeff Lawrence. Must have been very humbling for them. But anyway, the rumors are that she's got a relaunch of another I'm going on. You might have seen that she is dating our own Simon Baker. Like three people showed this to me in the kitchen this morning, showed me an Instagram title of her holding hands with Simon Baker on a red carpet, and we're going, is this true? Because obviously they know that.
I know you'd know.
First my close personal friend Nicole Kidman. Woman's Day reports they debuted their romance on the scarpeta red carpet and it has Nicole's ex husband, Keith Urban.
Really the tabloid's just like they only flaunt their pins.
They're looking at it sitting on a stools.
In terms of whether or not we think this is true, they are in a show together at the minute in which they play a husband and wife.
Is this Scarpeader scarpet?
It's on Prime.
Have you heard it's yeah, because it's based on the Patricia corn Or novels about the forensic psychologists, and I love those novels. So I was tracking the reviews closely.
But are you going to watch it?
I don't think so.
The reviews are quite bad.
That's bad. Anyway. They're in it together, and they were at the launch and they're standing next to each other in a group of people, and indeed they are holding hands. But let's get some context here. A, they're actors. B. They've known each other for thirty years. Nicole is the godmother of his children. She was Besti's with his ex wife.
The fact that they are holding hands on a red carpet could mean that the popular romantic trope of friends to love Us has life, or it could mean that they would like to stoke a little bit of rumor to get people to watch Keith to reel, get Keith to reel, or to get people to watch scarpettit because, as Amelia says, the reviewers are not encouraging them to or they could just be mates promoting a show.
Nicole is very I think she's very clever and strategic about this stuff. I think she'd be holding Simon Baker's hand because she knows it's going to get attention. And if I was next to Simon Baker, I'd want to hold his hand.
I have famously talked on the show about the fact that he was the most lovely celebrity I've ever met.
I mean, among the only celebrities I've ever met.
You met him.
I met him at a press event.
He was in the car with me and he introduced himself and he said, hello, I'm Simon Baker and put his hand up.
And you said, you don't need to introduce yourself to me.
He said, if I shake that head, can we hold the.
He was reeling somewhere. What did the lipretors say? That's question true.
We need to enlist them. I don't think they've been on this one.
Well, look, I want to bring something from the Oscars that will make your day. And it's a very short clip and it's Ethan Hawk talking to Amelia de Moldenburg on the Oscars Red Carpet. No further explanation needed.
Do you have any advice for someone who also has a bit of an unrequited love theme in their life?
The one who's in love always wins.
Okay, yeah, it doesn't matter if you get your heart broken. You're living when you're when you're feeling, you're alive. You know, the sun doesn't care whether the grass appreciates its raise, Right, it just keeps unshining.
I mean actual chills, right, actual chills.
Sorry, it's the most profound thing, liver, profound like the sun doesn't care, It doesn't care. It just like it makes me feel so much better about my ears.
Abounrequired always wins. Mean I am so here for the ethan Hawk renaissance. I don't care that he allegedly cheated on him with herman, with the nanny who we then married.
I don't even know if there's an alleged in that sentence anymore, but.
He does deny it.
Holy, yeah, he's wise. Now.
I think he's a savior of gen X men, because we all know that a lot of gen x heart things have not let Johnny. And the thing is is that, yes, Ethan Hawk has a few questionable stories in his past, but every time he's interviewed, he's real. He drops something wise, he's deep sea. He's a bit embarrassing, but he doesn't mind. He's aging like a fine, he really is. I think he could be, and he kind of has that. He has the gen x sort of arty anti establishment he thing that was the best of us.
Did you even know that he writes novels no one reads them, but he continues to see them.
And he makes documentaries about weird shit, and he's Mayahawk's dad.
I just think he seems like a good dad because I like my hook.
Let's allow him to give us all our wisdom from here on in.
If it sometimes feels like the world just wasn't built for you, that's how I feel every single day. You'd be right. For example, something that I notice all the time is every time I'm on a train, the handholders are really high, and even if I can reach it, my shirt like rides up, so I'm just exposing my belly to everyone on the train.
Are you not getting offered a seat on the train?
You're obviously grave and state Okay, I have a whole theory about this. People have become too politically correct and they don't want to say would.
So you're not getting it?
Do not know yet? I don't think I would look at you at this moment and go definitely pregnant. I would put you in the borderline. I could offend her. I offer her the seat category you need to wait till really near the end, when no one's going like she might hit me.
And yeah, well anyway, I do have opinions about how I wish people would take more consideration. But it turns out everything from public transport to cars, to medicines, to phones to the temperature of your office was probably designed with a specific person in mind. And his name is reference Man. He is a white male, twenty five to thirty five years old, weighing around seventy kilos and he's
about one hundred and seventy centimeters tall. In an article for ABC titled women are often an afterthought when it comes to designing products, Nicole Kharms who is a professor in the Department of Design at Monash University and she's founding director of the Monash x y X Lab, which
leads research into gender sensitive design. She tells reporter Amelia Moseley reference Man was created in the mid nineteen seventies, and he became what I would describe as a kind of default or standard human that was the measure for everything.
I think lots of podcasts have made for reference man.
I think a lot of.
I had quite a lot of movies that one. Things at the Oscars were also made for reference.
That's my problem with one battle after another, it was the reference man movie. So the problem is that for a very long time, women, despite being half the population, weren't part of the research studies that informed design. And what happened was they'd use men. And I remember learning this at UNI. It's also because it would be men who were the UNI students who would participate in all the studies, but they would then just scale everything down
thirty or forty percent for women. They were basically saying women are just short males, which didn't take into account all the differences in women's body shape and bone density and body fat and muscle mass and blood pressure and resting heart rate and all of that. So here are a few of the consequences of reference men that I didn't know about. Musical instruments can be more difficult for women to play, for example, the flute because they're designed for male.
Hands, big fingers.
Yeah, and so women sometimes get a flute and they can't like separate their fingers enough for the.
Whole That's definitely why I can't.
I was gonna say, that's a great excuse for my lack of musical skill. Women's clothes will often have no pockets, or pockets that are so narrow and small they're almost useless. PPE wasn't designed to fit women. Even though women make up seventy percent of frontline healthcare workers. Women are up to seventy five percent more likely to experience adverse reactions to prescription medicines. I reckon, I've had this to be a problem. Yes, I reckon, I've had this because they
give you a dose and they go, oh sorry. We should have actually adapted it based on the fact that, like, according to this, you're actually half the size of reference man. Anyway, in some country, studies show women are more likely to be injured in a car crash than men, and air conditioning in offices feels really intense to a lot of women, except for Holly, which we'll get to.
I'm turning into reference man. I turn that air cut up.
I wanted.
Because it was based on the metabolic activity of a forty year old seventy kilo male and women generally have lower metabolic rates, which means we generate less heat. Holy I'm actually with you on the aircon. I love a crispy cold air cold the moment.
Holly, what other parts of reference?
Man? Do you think you're going to quiet? You can start listening to Carl's podcast. I feel like that's very referenced.
Yes, what else I could do?
John Grisham novels, Yes one hundred.
This is very good advice for me in a moment?
What is a peptide?
And why are you suddenly singing them everywhere.
Out louders? Hey, it's Mia and m Vanam.
We weren't invited for the Oscars episode where we that was really holy. Amelia and Claire did on Monday, so we comment did the mics and.
Did our own Oscars episode.
But we only wanted to talk about the fashion. Really, there was some judgment, but it was done with love, I think, and kindness. We not only talked about the Oscars Red Carpet but also the Vanity Fair red carpet. I had a small rant, but we also did talk about our best and worst.
I'm not quite passionate, sneak peek.
My worst is all the women who couldn't walk, or eat or breathe in their outfits. But there were also lots of bests, weren't there so many? So if you want to hear us, and you're not already a subscriber, there's a link in your show notes and you can listen right now. And if you are a subscriber, you've probably listened to.
See you Sam.
You may have seen this on your social feed recently, someone is injecting themselves with something they claim is the fountain.
Of Youth, which they call a peptide.
The ABC has reported that kids as young as fourteen are ordering what they think are peptides online because of reported health benefits. Joe Rogan reference man himself, urged, Matt Damon also a reference.
Man, definitely a reference man.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He said to them.
That they should take a so called wolverine peptide on his show recently. Joe Rogan. Look, he's not a doctor, and neither am I. But we are not here to recommend that people do this. Instead, we want to talk about what peptides are, why you're seeing them everywhere, and why this social media driven trend, because it is very much social media driven, why this trend is so dangerous? Okay, FIRS, just a tiny bit of science for you. They are already peptides in your body. They're already there.
They are the building blocks of proteins. They do lots of different things. They kind of tell the body what to do.
They're in your metabolism, they're in your growth systems, they're in your immune system. But the peptides we're talking about today are outside of your body, and they are being created in labs.
Some of them are in a really nice looking jar, yes, at my favorite beauty shop, which is fine, being sold to me by my friend Gwyneth. Yes, is that.
Okay, I can't speak to those specific ones, but I will say that the problem is that there's a whole bunch of so called peptides floating around which have not been studied, not approved by the TGA, which is the Therapeutic Goods Administration which regulates medicines in Australia. It may not even be peptides because they're being sold online and are not being regulated. And there are lots of people on the internet, including our friend Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
as well as a lot of influencers. There are a lot of women talking about this too. They're making wild claims about what these peptides can do for you in terms of health and well. A stat that blew my mind is that the TG says that it took down more than thirteen thousand advertisements in the twenty twenty four to twenty five financial year online which were including peptide advertisements.
And the reason they're.
Online is because none of these are actually approved drugs, so they can't be advertised in any form to the general public, and experts are pretty unanimous in saying that this is extremely dangerous. Before I get into why, I want to know, Claire, have you seen this phenomenon online?
Yes. Luckily I am on the side of the internet where the first stuff I saw was people criticizing peptides. But then I was like, what are you criticizing? To find out more so then I would look at I searched it and found some of the influencers who are promoting it and was gobsmacked. I just even the idea of injecting yourself without having been shown how to do that biomedical practitioner.
I'm not knowing what's in and not.
Knowing what's in it, and apparently there can be like heavy metal. I mean, they can be all sorts of things because it's completely unregulated. The other thing that I saw was some of the Robert F. Kennedy Junior stuff, and I thought, it's very, very fascinating what he is apprehensive about injecting versus what he's very means injections. Vaccine, no, not crucial for health. Peptides, on the other hand, Oh yes, we'll get though.
And apparently in a lot of these social media posts, they point out that the labels on these peptides say things like for research purposes only.
Or not for human use.
But the TEGA specifically wants people to know that this is not some kind of get out of jail free card for the people who are producing these peptides or so called peptides. It doesn't change the fact that they are not approved and should not be used.
If it says not for human use, why are you allowed to sell them to humans? I just don't understand.
That's a question for reference man, who I'm sure is currently thinking about taking them. But the thing is that a doctor who's interviewed for the SITNY Morning Herald said that best case scenario, you're injecting water. If you're doing this, worst case scenario. You're injecting heavy metals and contaminants, which doesn't sound good to me, and there's a risk of cancer, of lethal hypothermia, and a lot of risks we don't even know about because again we do not know what
people are injecting. Holly, have you seen the marketing around this? And why do you think people are being seduced by this incredibly unsafe trend.
It's cottage cheese. So this exists in my world. This exists in the overlapping Venn diagram of midlife women and teenage boys, just like cottage cheese and creatinine.
Right.
So I'm seeing fancy ladies on the internet doing it as part of their morning routine. American fancy ladies on the internet like giving themselves little jab And then I know teenage boy moms who the boys are trading this stuff at the gym? Really so gym's at the moment, it's very like teenage boys in general. There is a massive gin trend huge like muscles are in. Weightlifting is in again overlapping with the middle aged ladies. We're like
weight train, weight training, forget the cardio. It's same for teenage boys. A lot of pressure about that, right. The people I know who are most concerned about this are actually mothers of teenage boys who are as young as the thing said, in their early teens, who are legally buying it online, and they're worried about what they might be injecting. It's interesting because these are very different fears to what my mother might have been worried about what I was injecting in my teenage.
But it is.
It's real. It's definitely real, and it's sort of everywhere and scary. But it is interesting that it these things just pop up and suddenly every woman of a certain age is saying peptide, peptide, peptide, and every teenage boy is saying peptide peptide, And you're like.
Where did that come from all?
And I think what's so pernicious about it is that, as we've talked about, there are peptides already out there in drugs that are approved for prescription use and also in things like skincare, and they're also in our body. So there's a sense that like, maybe this is a bit of a gray area, but it's not a gray area because the ones that people are injecting are not approved or safe for human use.
They're kind of leveraging the efficacy of those drugs to suggest that all of these unregulated ones will be just as effective. The thing that I mean, I just am overwhelmed by is the scale of marketing on social media and the tone of it. So they're called they call them stacks, and it's like there'll be a glow stack and as you say, a wolverine stack, and all those things are so it's like it's appealing to like our
base instincts of what we want. And the glowpack there's one that like is meant to make you, like, does something with melanin makes your skin darker? It's good for skin and your hair growth and all of that. Apparently there's no scientific evidence, but that's what it is, marketed as some kind of biohack. And you just think, so these people are talking like that about something for which there is no clinical approval for their use. But I was like, imagine if people did that about something that
there was clinical approval for, like antidepressant. Can you imagine being like these will make you hot and happy? Like it would just be completely bizarre because that's not how you talk about health products, right, right, The thing is.
Most of us have no idea. Most people have no idea about the science of any of this stuff. I don't freely admit that a lot of the expensive skin care that I am easily seduced into buying, I have
no idea what it does, no idea at all. So the thing is is that when that takes this step into invasive, intravenous or whatever, it is, like, I totally understand why people are just like, she looks great, yeah, you know, like or he looks stacked, like it just is so so you know, we're kind of just very easily seduced.
Yeah.
Look, if you are curious about peptides or think you want to explore them, we've been asked to emphasize that you really need to talk to a doctor about it.
After the break, we used to be obsessed with this royal couple, but now they're in Australia and no one seems to care. There are some royals who seem to really capture the public imagination, and some of those aren't even royals anymore. But I remember when Harry and Meghan visited Australia in twenty eighteen, and every new site was wall to wall with stories about exactly what they were doing at any given moment.
I mean, I think you've mentioned it on this podcast as much as I've mentioned my Simon Baker and Trader.
I know, I know I was really driving.
Moment in your life. I really was.
But right now there's a high profile royal couple in our own backyard and there's just not that much of a fuss. Queen Mary and King Frederick of Denmark were in Central Australia over the weekend before traveling to Canberra and Melbourne. In Melbourne, they're on day two of their royal engagements, focused largely on renewable energy and sustainable development. Well found mistake very important doing something worthy. Yeah. Yeah.
When Queen Mary, who was then known as Mary Donaldson, met Frederick, the Crown Prince of Denmark at the Slip Inn in Sydney during the two thousand Olympics, it was our very favorite story that ever happened. It was they had a long distance relationship and then the following year Mary moved to Denmark. They were engaged, then they were married in two thousand and four and we had our very own Australian fairy tale. Remember, there was like the was it a television series or a television movie?
There was a movie.
I think it was a movie.
Also the fact that they met at the Sydney Olympics. For anyone who was lucky enough to be in Sydney during those two weeks, I think it was the greatest two weeks of human civilization.
And it was so it felt right that there was this serendipitous love story to come out of.
It, and it was very It could have been made.
Oh and it was there's something very sex in the city about everyone's like real estate agent just having cocktails with her girls, like oh, handsome prints, like it's very it was we ate that up with the sting.
Think about I can't count the amount of bad Netflix movies I've watched that are based on that premise. It's like, isn't there.
Also like an Anne Halfaway movie about almost exactly the.
Yeah, and it was that movie. Like Fred would have pretended he wasn't a Danish prince for it. It would have just been like, hey, I really like boats that by Jumper. That's not what happened. When I was working in gossip Mags, she was it. We would stay up all night to cover whatever she was doing. Everyone was always trying to get to her friends, her exes like she was it.
It was just this classic story of a girl from Tasmania marrying a prince, which just isn't meant to happen. That's why we loved it so much. Now they have four children, and in twenty twenty four, Mary became the first Australian born queen consort of any country after the abdication of her mother in law. So why aren't we following their every move in Australia? Why aren't they ever in the headlines? Why aren't I lining up at the opera house to see her?
Why aren't you?
I have a theory, But first, Holly, what's yours?
I have a theory. My theory is it's about age. Like Mary is now a middle aged mother. Nobody likes those. She has four children, she's married, she's fifty ish. I think she's fifty four. Maybe she's not interesting anymore because that's the way.
About okay, and she's got three.
I think this is interesting because I think that one of the things about and I want to be clear to the people is we are not being me. We're not saying nobody cares about Mary's She's boring. I'm like, we're examining why why the interest wanes? And I think there is a tale here about if you can wait out the mania, you know, a sort of Megan Kate Carolyn Bissett, Not that she was ever able to do that, but if you can wait out the mania, when you become a middle aged woman, nobody's going to want to
look at you anymore. I just I think it's sort of sad but true. Also I think that they are We talk about this quite often, is that the Danes have a very different model of monarchy than the UK royals, and it seems to be generally a healthy one that people like. So in Denmark their approval ratings are generally in the late eighties early nineties, which is huge. Like King Charles, who's popular Ish is very lucky if he's
getting around sixty percent in any kind of poll. And it's because the Danish royals are seen as being more down to earth, less privileged. In some ways, they're famously called the bicycle Royals because you might actually see one out and about and I think that all of that is really good and healthy, but it isn't as exciting.
Do you think it's also because when they got together and there was all the digging around, there was no there there.
Yeah, I was about to ask you about that, Holly, do you feel like when she was it, when you were working in women's mags, do you feel like you ever got like kind of the dirt.
So there were rumors, right, there were rumors at the time, and I'm not proud of any of this, but like Mary Donaldson was, I'm going to get this wrong, but she would have been early thirties, late twenties, so she'd like been dating like a proper woman for a while, and the journos of the gossip mags of the day were digging hard, and they were all kinds of rumors
she used to date an AFL player, for example. There were all kinds of rumors that, like all the images from those times mysteriously disappeared from a hard drive, and you know, like that there was almost a conspiracy to clean up any backstory. She had some friends who were in the media, you know, Sydney people around town, and we used to try very hard to court them for gossip, but they were quite tight lipped. So I think that a she was a pretty normal and inverted commace person.
But also there was a very effective and it was a simpler time in terms of what in terms of what you could dig up, no social media footprint, all that kind of stuff. There was quite an effective whitewashing of any problematic possibilities, do you know what I mean? So I think that all of that spoke to its time. But there's just no question I think that glamorous young women are more interesting. Like I was thinking about this, I was looking at Mary's social media following, for example,
and she doesn't caught it. She's not playing in the attention economy. So this is all good for Mary, right, She's getting worthy headlines about environmental issues, not endless speculation about every little bit of what she does. But she has about one hundred and twenty three thousand followers on Instagram. Now that is not shabby, but that is not stratospheric.
Let's remember that Kylie Jenner, for example, has three hundred and ninety million followers on Instagram, and Megan even has four and a half million, and she, as you say, isn't royal anymore. Because they are playing in the attention economy and Mary isn't to be clear, like Mary is a gorgeous, glamorous princess, but she's just not as catnip to the social media crowd as she would be if she was a twenty nine year old.
And I think she's good evidence that, to some extent, you can avoid all the speculation and all the media obsession if you keep your head down and just keep doing your job.
But how does this fit with the fact that there was a scandal not involving her directly, but involving her husband relatively recently.
Because I think for me, and I hate to say this, but I do think my fairy tale bubble got popped a little bit when the rumors started about how Frederick had cheated, because for me it.
Was allegedly has always denied it, and the woman in question sued yes.
But I think I had this idea that their love story was so uncomplicated and so beautiful that I know I really did. I was like, they're superhuman. And in twenty twenty three, rumors started to circulate that he had an affair with a Mexican socialite and there were photos of them together in Spain. For some reason, this story really stuck with me and blew up in my head. And when I went back and looked at it, the photos are so innocent, like there really was no smoking gun.
But I really became attached do it, and I really lost hope. I thought, maybe no one's really about happy?
Yeah, but where But since when there's a whiff of achieving scandal ever made people less interested in right? Like normally that ramps up the entry. Everyone would be like, let's read the body language.
Let's see if no one's slip reading them, even though there was this marriage scandal, And that's really interesting.
And is it simply that you can choose to not be in the headlines because she didn't. Mary didn't engage, Like if she had gone out and made some big statement about it, or if they had made I don't know, a bit more of a fuss about the whole story, perhaps it would have become this fixture.
I do think that we have to give Mary some credit for this, because the discipline it must have taken her to be in the public eye for more than two decades and to basically have never said anything that blew up is extraordinary.
I know.
And to have your kids not do anything that has particularly blown up and I wouldn't know what her kids look like.
Really, yeah, I'm afraid I would, but that's because of my background. I think that all of that is true. But I think in terms of the does it show that you can avoid the headlines? I think, as I said before, I think the Danish royal family are a different kettle of fish because Kate Middleton, well what do we call a princess? Catherine has tried that. Remember she tried that with the whole photo scandal, the whole unedifying obsession with where she was for a while that ended
up being that she had really serious health problems. She tried never complained, never explained, which has always been the British royal family's mantra, and it didn't work under the pressure of the attention economy. Whereas Mary and Fred, as you say, they rode out those rumors and everyone was obsessed with it for a minute, but they've disappeared. They're barely mentioned now. There is something really interesting in that,
maybe you can chew sort of. I think most people respect her a lot and admire her in terms of going what a woman. As you said, Amelia, she's really carried herself so well. But you don't get the frenzy and that's probably really great. Or you're a bit more complicated and a bit more out there and you're getting that you're courting the press all the time and your life's a bit miserable.
She's looking amazing in her a Kubra's and Zimmerman on this trip.
I know she was kicking a football at the MCG today, which is exactly that's peak royal tour. That's exactly the kind of stuff you have to do. And her kick was freaking great.
Of course it was.
Can I say the idea of looking at Mary now and seeing that she is doing this too, She's talking about something really important and there's not all the because you could see it as distraction that all the other stuff is like, it's not actually courting attention that any of them want. No, I'm finding that the older I get, the more I enjoy and am looking forward to becoming more and more invisible.
Oh yeah, No, To be clear, in the conversations that midlife women have about invisibility, it's a double edged sword. There is a lot that is so great. I look at my teenage daughter. I've talked about this a lot. There is a lot that is so great at having the eyes of the world turn away from you. Like, there's a lot that's kind of sad about it, but there's also a lot that's incredibly freeing. I'm not suggesting that Mary is sad that she isn't being papped at
every turn anymore. You know that she isn't being stalked and her friends are being harassed. I bet she's delighted about it.
I think there is so much power in that. I was at a comedy show recently and a bunch of comedians and one of them who got up is an Aussie comedian who's in her sixties, and she got up and I went, you are the most powerful person in this room because you don't that. Her whole energy was I don't have to impress you. I'm beyond that. I'm
beyond being judged by you. And I think as a woman, it's a really, really exciting place to be and you probably get to explore a whole lot of things and passions and possibilities that you've wanted to and may have been distracted from.
Look, that's a nice way of looking at it, to think of it.
No one's told me to smile recently. Yes, it's not because I'm smiling.
Smiling, No, it's because they're like, we don't care. I think you do have a point, Holly, that it's sort of also that Denmark is a bit of a not a boring country, but it seems to like have its shit together politically a little bit. So I think the British royal family, like Megan being the American connection, all of that, really we kind of maybe apply all the drama of those countries to those people, whereas for Mary and Frederick it's very much it's just not as much.
No, they're just enjoying their four years of parentally yeah, exactly. Also to learn the language, this notoriously complicated language where there are like lines through O's to the point where she's talking English with a Danish accent. I mean, I can't romantic.
I think that's impressive.
My theory that nobody's interested in middle aged women, which obviously is a self deprecating theory from where I sit, and I hope it isn't true, And there is one sign that in fact it is not in the least bit true. Well, one is that we're obsessed with looking at them on the red carpet and trying to decide what they've done to their faces obviously.
Is another sign. Is another sign that this is the number one podcast in the country and.
One of us is old. But also Shonda Rhimes, the queen of TV and of knowing what people want to watch. She is obviously the brain's behind grays Anadoamy. She is Bridgiton brain. Says that if there's going to be another spin off, because you know, she did a Queen Charlotte spinoff from Bridgton, I never watched.
Oh no, it was really good because it was like loosely historical, like it made me google, like was that guy crazy? And I really liked the young actress and the old actor. Yeah. No, it was really good.
So that went like into the backstory of Queen Charlotte.
Correct.
She says that if she does do another, it will be about Violet, like Lady Bridgeton, who's the mum character in that. And one of the things that people have really liked about the most recent series of Bridgeton is that instead of just being the stressy one who's always trying to find people for her children to marry, which is the point of the show, she fell in love. I guess we would call it. I'm definitely in lust with a very handsome man and was having quite a
lot of sex, and people really liked it. And obviously Shonda, who is no fool, is like, that's where we go next.
I don't know.
I just Violet. I'm a horrible, horrible person. But I just don't think i'd watch that.
You know what.
It's just occurred to me. They probably would go into her backstory, wouldn't they. It would probably be a young Violet.
She really loved her husband, didn't she?
She really did, and they had twenty five children together. But it's interesting because when you say I wouldn't watch that, I know what you mean. But do you think we genuinely are a bit programmed to not be interested in the love lives of middle aged people?
Well, big little lies would beg to different. That's true.
Yeah, that's horribly true.
The horrible thing to consider is do we care about the love lives of middle aged people when they look like young people? Do you know what I mean? Like, big little lies, you've got.
I do think they have to be rich. I think that's important.
That's important because I'm also thinking there was that mum like she was maybe in her forties, bloody gorgeous, and there was an Aussie guy it's called sex something.
Oh yeah who lived downstairs.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Well, everybody's saying that midlife sex is getting a big comeback after all fours and all those things. There are lots of books about it, but I still think there's a difference between a book and TV. I don't know. I would love to think that we are getting better at confronting our own ageism about whether or not we're interested in whether or not fifty something women are having sex and having excited relationships. Back kind of feel like we're probably.
Not holy one thing.
I think you're onto something with this theory, But I still don't get how it fits with Kate, because Princess Kate has three children, she's well into her forties at this point, and we're all still indisputably obsessed with her. So how do you square that circle?
Do you think we are? Though? We were obsessed with the story of when she you know, when she disappeared, in what had happened, and obviously with her health journey, and I think that that has also made people much more sympathetic to her or most But do we look at her as an icon?
Do we?
I think so and I am.
And if they came, would we be lining the street?
Yes?
They are categorically more popular than Charles and Camilla, and more popular than Harry and Meggs.
And arguably, arguably when William becomes king, arguably more influential in our lives. But I have never cared as much about anything as when William allegedly cheated with Rose. Like I cared, so I was like, don't do that to my Kate.
Isn't that just a cheating story?
Yeah?
Yeah, look you well you might well be onto something there, because I think people are obsessed with her, But I yeah, I just I don't see her as quite as grown up yet.
Look, we may not be as interested in Mary as we once were, but I have a sneaky Wednesday recommendation to end the show today, which is the book Air Apparent by Rebecca Armatage.
I've seen it every I'm interviewing her soon.
It is a I read.
It on a plane, and I feel like books you read on a plane, there's a really high bar because you've got like all this terrible TV to watch and you're just not concentrating. I read the whole thing on a plane. She's a former ABC journalist who clearly knows all there is to know about the history of the British royal family. And what happens in the story is that a Tasmanian girl marries into the British royal family.
It's very clearly based on Harry and William, but with this Aussie twist, and it's just a tremendous look at what it's like to be inside a royal family.
See Mary's still inspiring us the fairy Tale.
The fairy Tale Lives on out Louders thank you for making us the number one podcast in the country. We appreciate you so much. And we've got a little treat for Mamma Mia subscribers at the moment, We've got an exclusive bonus for anyone who subscribes to me. You can get twenty five percent off Nala bras Now. Nala is a brand that we've talked about on out loud before. When EMM was doing her bracommendations. Recently she recommended Nala.
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