You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Mamma Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about. On Monday, the sixteenth of September, I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm MEA Friedman.
And I'm Jesse Stevens.
And on the show today, unpicking the conspiracies from the dog whistles on Planet Trump as he apparently survives another attempt on his life. Also unpacking the Perfect Couple and why Nicole Kidman is very much in her rich lady who lives by the sea era and do you want your partner to know where you are in your cycle? The endless inventions to handle our hormones and whether they're always helpful. But first, me a Freedman.
In case you missed it, Prince Harry celebrated his fortieth birthday over the weekend, which will make you feel very old. If you remember Kim being taken out of the hospital in the arms of his mother, she had says Diana in a little blankie.
Thought of that, but of course I'm under that.
Yeah, the big question in the lead up, of course, was would King Charles and Prince William acknowledge it? Because they haven't since twenty twenty one. I shouldn't laugh. I think the word to use is estranged. But this year they did acknowledge it.
You can't ignore the big ones, so you can ignore thirty eight who cares whatever, but you can't ignore them.
Well, they sort of acknowledge it. So the Royal Family official social media platform, which is like Buckingham Palace and Charles and Camilla's people, they posted a photo to the grid of a smiling Harry and the caption read wishing the Duke of Sussex a very happy fortieth birthday today. Exclamation mark emoji of a cake.
Oh, I love it.
I think the exclamation mark is very encouraging. I think it seems very authentic.
The shade came a little bit later in the day when William and Kate they have their own account called the Princeton Princess of Wales, and they reposted the grid from King Charles's page, but to their stories, and we know if it goes on the stories. That's the first piece of shade. The second piece of shade is that they paraphrased the caption out of their own and said, wishing a happy fortieth birthday to the Duke of Sussex. No exclamation mark, no kke emoji, no very happy happy.
They took the emoji off to post it to the story.
Well, they did their own caption, but it's almost like it is your birthday today.
And I heard reports that Charles is planning on giving Harry little birthday phone call, and so is Kate. Allegend this is Red and the tabloids.
Jesse after the things that he said about her in Wah his memoir, There's no way.
She would exclusively told the post. So Kate is going to phone to wish him well on his birthday, but William will not be mad.
I know what I think that is when you ring someone and you just hope that it goes straight to voicemail and you're like, please pick up, please don't pick up, please don't pick up.
A happy birthday, Sorry to have missed you.
And have you also heard that he's getting a cheek a little inheritance.
How much money is he getting for his birthday?
Look reports very but I'm going with sixteen mil from the Queen mother. She had a thing where when you turn forty you get a pot of money. He's getting another pot of money, another pot of money. So I love little birthday present for Harry.
That is shade right if you just post it to the stories, oh, because.
It's going to disappear. And also okay, it's me as birthday right. Holly shares a happy birthday to mayor to the grid, to the grid, I just reshare Holly's happy birthday.
Which isn't mine to share with the sad caption. With a sad caption, you can share with it.
I can ever do.
I hate you.
Yeah, thank you for that translation.
Donald Trump says he's safe and well after reports of gunshots described to have been fired in his vicinity.
There has been another assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life, at least that's certainly how it seems as we're recording this at Monday lunchtime. Here is what's being reported by reputable sources. Trump was playing golf. I don't want to be mean. I don't want to start with negativity.
Busy, no, no, no. He likes to play golf. It's what he does, clearly a lot, barely. Apparently he's very good at it.
I'm not running for president, and I would find it hard to find time for how long does golf take?
A golf is for board people.
Anyway, let's put the shade aside, because this is quite serious. He was playing golf in Florida at Palm Beach and apparently a rifle poked through the fence of the golf course, and it's not clear if they got any shots off, but the Secret Service shot back. At least four shots were fired, and the gunman ran away but then later got caught. It turns out his preliminary identification is he's a guy called Ryan Ruth and that he has been very vocal on social media criticizing Trump, and he's very
pro Ukraine. So he's said in captions that he did vote for Trump in twenty sixteen but has been deeply disillusioned by him and he I mean, you don't want to diagnose from social media captions, but the man appears to be rather unwell.
He's fifty eight, and his sons come out and said that he hopes that media reports are overblown. All he can say is that his father is a hard working and loving father. I think he's also from Hawaii.
So if you've heard about this, and Trump is fine, though he was not hit or injured in this encounter, and it's been roundly condemned of course, that there is no place for this kind of violence in politics, from everyone from Harris to Biden and so on. If you've heard that story, you've probably also heard though some of
the skepticism around it. Now we're not endorsing any of that, but some of the kind of points that are being shared are, is Donald Trump going to get someone to pretend to shoot him every time his ratings go down? And so on and so on. It's getting harder and harder to pick the conspiracies from the truths. So it's hardly surprising that the first reaction to this and almost any event, actually is did that actually happen? Is it actually real? Trump's team are especially good at this.
I wanted to.
Talk a little bit about the Eating Dogs and Cats debarcle of the past week as an example. The world has been laughing at that since the debate last Wednesday. We spoke about it obviously on the show on Wednesday and on a special subscribers episode on Thursday.
And on the weekend, I shared this song to the group chat thinking that it was funny. Have a listen to.
This in Springfield, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.
They're eating the pets.
Of the people that live there.
They're eating the dogs.
That's a remix by DJ the Kidner's I'm sorry it was quite catchy, but I do appreciate it's also quite serious.
Everybody's been laughing about that and making cool remixes of it and using it broadly as an example of how Donald Trump lost his mind and had some sort of brain explosion in the debate. But actually that's not what has happened, and there isn't that much to laugh about, because what this eating dogs and cats thing that Trump exploded with during the debate has actually done is send the world's media to a small city in Midwestern America
that has recently had a large injection of Haitian immigrants. Now, the real story about Springfield, Ohio could definitely be seen as a good one. The town was really languishing, you know, It's manufacturing had moved on, like the story in lots of small towns across America and Australia. Indeed, and after COVID and lots of incentives from the city authorities for businesses to come and set up businesses, their factories, manufacturing
and so on. There was a labor shortage, so people were encouraged to move there, take the jobs, and reinvigorate the city. It's estimated that somewhere between twelve thousand and twenty thousand Haitian immigrants from other parts of the US and who have relatively recently arrived from Haiti because there's a lot of unread in Haiti, have moved to Springfield to take these jobs. Right now, any smallish town that has a sudden population shift like this is going to
face issues. And indeed Springfield has infrastructure issues like around healthcare, housing, schools, and roads. It is not necessarily caught up yet right with this population injection, and there are some legitimate issues, none of which have anything to do, of course, with anybody eating cats or dogs. But what Trump and JD.
Vance's literal dog whistle did while all of us lefties were laughing, or all of us in our anti Trump bubble were laughing, was exactly what it set out to do, which was to highlight a place that has a few legitimate issues with population growth and hand amc to resentment and fear, this kind of hum of do you want your town to be overrun with strangers, foreigners, people who
are different to you? And no one was talking about Springfield before Tuesday, and now this deeply racist undertone has been legit.
I hadn't thought about it like that, And it's.
What Trump wants. I want us to consider every time we're like laughing about him and thinking like that guy's crazy, what an idiot?
What?
His team and him probably are smarter than we give them credit for, because that ridiculous comment in the debate has played right into their hands using a conspiracy theory like that. Jesse, do you think we need to better understand conspiracy theories?
Yes? I mean it's hard, right because it's like, well, how are you meant to react? Like to take it seriously? Almost feels more offensive to immigrants, like and it was fact checked at the time, and that is.
No evidence of anybody eating any dogs or cats.
Yeah, but what we need to do, I think is follow up with the real world consequences. Because the mayor of Springfield confirmed to reporters that elementary schools have been evacuated because of threats directly to the community. If you were someone an immigrant from Haiti and you were living in Springfield right now, how genuinely scary would it be.
Like her to cancel community events?
I guess the question is also like who's the butt of the joke here? Because to a lot of immigrants, I think you would feel like the butt of the joke. And jd Vance said as much he was speaking.
He's got to stop talking about cats. Yeah, what's wrong with that man?
He's obsessed.
He's obsessed with who's got cats, who doesn't have children? What they're doing with it?
What?
Just sure?
She's he was speaking, and he said that he is willing to create stories, and he was pressed on it, and he said, basically, the Republican Party at this point is willing to create stories so that the media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.
And that's exactly what has just he.
Knew this wasn't true. Trump knew this wasn't true. It didn't matter if it was true, because it told a story they wanted to tell about unrest caused by immigrants. The damage has been done. No amount of fact checking or whatever is going to make any difference. And the other thing that they've done is the earpiece. Did you guys see this over the weekend? I saw I was, you know, just on social media and you can get pulled into it really quickly.
They just what they tried to say is that, Okay, what you've got to understand about Trump is I'm going to challenge you on one thing, Holly, which is he knew what he was doing. Trump never has a strategy, right, He's pure id He's just pure. If you think of him as a toddler. Toddlers don't have strategies, They just react in real time. This was a strategy to the moment. I think.
Strategy.
But what I was going to say is that the people around him, this is why he's so dangerous as a leader. And what Kamala Harris was trying to point out, he's so easy to manipulate. So I'm not saying that his people around him didn't know what to feed him. But when there's a fact that he can't handle because it doesn't align with his view of himself as a tough man, a winner, or powerful almighty, he just makes up something else because that's what he has to believe.
Because it was roundly agreed even by Fox News that he lost the debate, and he can't really get away from those headlines, just like when he lost the election. He has to find a way to make that not true, and it is questioning the moderators, and he has since said that they should be criminally investigated, the moderators of
the debate. He's now saying that Kamala Harris had ear pieces in her earrings and was being coached in real time about what to say and fed the questions in advance by the corrupt abe his news.
But the thing is he didn't start that rumor right like it started on X oh yeah by someone else, and then of course he does jump onto.
It, grab anything to soothe himself, and his supporters love that because that's a much more interesting story than Kamala Harris is just an accomplished smart woman who whipped his ass.
And the more you ever explain, the guiltier you sound. There's every article and fact check out that's gone. She's worn these earrings once a month for years.
And as soon as she then releases a statement ye denying that it's like the sharing the tailor for Trump deep fakes. As soon as you have to deny it. You're dragged into the gutter and dragged into his news cycle, and that's what he loves.
It's interesting, though, because you know the cats and dogs. Trump's team are sharing all these very stylized AI cat memes of him and JD. Vance on planes fuls of cats, and it's very clever. It's very clever. It's got smart people around terrifyingly dark because it's playing into it a deliberately racist trope one hundred percent. It's putting actual, real life humans in danger in Springfield and other places, and it's giving everybody lots of fodder to extend this ridiculous conversation.
I don't know. I wish there was a way to avoid being pulled into his version of that.
But he loves that for two reasons. Firstly, what he understands better than anyone who's how to dominate the news cycle, That's what I mean exactly. And also it's who's around him, So he tends to surround himself by people who know how to play him. And he loves conspiracies because you can always invent a conspiracy to explain why something you don't like isn't true. And so what's alarming, and we're going to talk about it more later in the week
with Emelia Lester. There's a woman called Laura Luma who is spending a lot of time with him now and traveled to the debate with him. She's a very troubling person, and even the most extreme MAGA people have disenfranchised her and said she's too extreme for them. She went with him to the nine to eleven memorial last week. She has publicly said on many occasions that she believes nine to eleven was an inside job and that it was
the American government. Like talk about a conspiracy. So she peddles these conspiracy theories, and Trump will just regard agitate what he's been told. And that's why he's so easy to play any leader that pisss in his pocket, whether it's Kim Jong U R. Putin, they know how to play him. It doesn't mean that he's colluding with them. They're just smarter than him.
I just worry that we're all being played by him, that the left leaning media is being played by him. I don't when I say we, I don't mean we the left leaning media, but like when we're laughing about the dogs and cats and going, this man's out of his mind and that we are being played by him like a violin. And I think that that's why it'll be interesting now to see if there's any legs to this idea of like maybe this assassination attempt was overblown,
maybe it wasn't real. Maybe he just wants a new cycle. But that Trump's enemies also stop buying it.
But that's the left conspiracy. Yeah, yeah, but you even saw in the debate he was trying to say, this is the Democrats organized to try and have me killed. I mean he's been saying that quite a lot. Jadie Vance came out straight after that first assassination attempt and said that, and many people say that's why he was chosen. Apart from being best mates with John Jr. Trump really liked that. He loves a conspiracy theory because he knows that it plays well with his base, who love a story.
And to go back to that first assassination attempt, because the news cycle moved so quickly that we never kind of properly get to prosecute what happened. I remember us having a conversation and talking about the contempt in political discourse and was this a reflection of where we're at at a culture and political divisiveness. Looking back, what actually happened there. The way that history will interpret what happened was that this gunman and two people died on that day,
and that was really sad. But what happened on that day was he wanted a spectacle. I don't think that that man was politically motivated to kill Trump. I think he would have killed.
Popide in the locations of both candidates exactly.
And so it wasn't anything against a Republican candidate. It wasn't anything against Trump. It was about spectacle. It was the same as we see in the US all the time of people going and school shooting, for example. It's got a lot to do with gun laws. This obviously we don't know so much about anymore, but the way
that it was put into this very neat narrative. And whether you think Trump's smart or an idiot or manipulated, he tells a story, and he tells a good story that does resonate with a lot of people and makes them feel things. So the cats and dogs, and we talked a little bit about this posted debate, but that is a story about savages it's about the external savage coming into a Western civilization and destroying the vulnerable things they love.
But Jesse, it's also in the same realm as the Democrats executing babies. They're executing the babies after they're born. It's this idea that these evil people, you're right, are threatening our way of life. When the moderators during the debate were fact checking him, I mean we were laughing because it's like it's satire. It's not something out of Saturday Night. I've mister Trump, We've checked, and no, it is not legal in anything.
You know why the facts a cutter baby didn't even work because what he was speaking to was something that some Americans.
Feel, and just yeah, it plays for him.
If you feel like someone's taken your job, or you feel like your suburb looks different to how it looked twenty years ago, then you actually don't give a shit whether a real cat or a real dog was killed or eaten. You're just like, yeah, that man knows how I feel, which is even more kind of sinister.
Scary. I heard someone walking around, You're right. I was just I was just thirsty, thirsty. Don't you have a graph by your bed? I I forgot. Are you sure there wasn't something else you were looking for? Because I hate you to be sneaking around. I mean, if you want something, just ask.
Like many of you. The weekend binge watching Nicole Kidman's latest series, The Perfect Couple on Netflix, and what everybody's talking about is how similar it is to so many other Nicole Kidman TV series from the past few years, because she seems to keep playing a rich, cold, murder adjacent, ambitious mother who looks like she's thirty two while wearing a series of quality wigs and living beside large bodies
of water. You may remember that vibe from Big Little Eyes, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Undoing, a Family Affair, and now The Perfect Couple, and I should say a Family Affair didn't have a murder in it, but her character was oddly spookily similar to the one she plays in The
Perfect Couple. They were both hugely successful authors grappling with issues around sex and love and what it means to parent your adult children and all the rest of those shows like The Perfect Couple do hinge around a murder that's revealed in the first episode. It's definitely giving white lotus and lots of people have remarked on the similarity
between White lotus The Perfect Couple. We'll be doing a full subscriber review of the whole series with all our thoughts in the next few days, but today we want to unpack this idea of Nicole's era and the idea that it's a pretty interesting career decision to choose so many roles that are the same whole What do you think is going on with that? Is it a deliberate strategy or she just likes playing those women? I don't know.
I mean, one of the things I think about the fact that all these sort of TV ones have come out at the same time, because she also has a movie coming out, which is supposed to be very Venice Film Festival, very arty, very award bab Baby Girl, Baby Girl. Is Is it some kind of hangover from the strike, because it's like, all of a sudden, just all these vehicles, no one's working harder than Nicole. Kidman, it feels like at the moment, doesn't it.
Well.
They did say that this series, The Perfect Couple was meant to be filmed over six weeks, which is still a pretty short shoot given it with six episodes. But they had to condense it because of the writer's strike to just three weeks. It was filmed in three weeks, three ways wow, six hours of TV.
One of the things that I was thinking when I was watching it is that, you know how people have always said, what are the roles for women over a certain age in Hollywood? There are now more roles for women over a certain age in Hollywood, but they are very specific ones.
How would you describe the thing that.
Kidman can't do anymore is she can't do ordinary person. So if you think about, say, Kate Winslett playing Mayor of Eastown, I can't remember what the character's actual name was, Mayor the detective. It was detective. It was a few years ago now, but it was an absolute and everybody was like, she's so brave because she looks so normal and so unlike a movie star and all that because she was playing a small town cop who was deep in grief and didn't have time to get her roots done.
Nicole Kidman can't play those roles anymore because of the esthetic choices she's made about her face, which are entirely her business, mean that she is now perfectly positioned to play a certain type of rich, older woman who would have also made those choices.
But you say that she didn't look that different back in the day when she was in the hours, and that's ironically, or maybe not ironically, what she married Mioska for you think, I mean she wore a prosthetic nose for that and as sort of a gray wig where she played Virginia Wolf. You're right, she does look different now.
But what's interesting is when we've been involved with Strive, you do think about, oh, this character and is it too similar to other characters that they've played, and should we cast this person because I mean, obviously not the main character, but some of the characters have they played something similar in something else that's coming out around that time.
When you are Nicole Kidman, you're the boss, I think you get to decide what projects you do.
And she's produced a lot of that.
And she's produced a lot. What we don't see a lot of is women or people who can work as much as Nicole Kidman wanting to work as much as Nicole Kidman, like she.
Must love work.
I was looking at her IMDb profile and she has ninety seven credits to her name, and I kept going back going. No, but there's been a recent explosion of Nicole Kidman. No, there hasn't. That woman has consistently worked for what twenty five thirty year is something like interesting.
Yeah, she clearly does.
Love that.
Because I'm fascinated by ambition. What happens to ambition as you get older, too, because you know, a more traditional trajectory is you go so hard to establish yourself and then you get really picky. I'm now at a point not me Nicole Kidman. I'm being Nicole Kidman in the enpoyment. I can entirely pick and choose. I don't have to do any job to pay the mortgage. I don't have to do any job to keep myself in the spotlight.
Because she's Nicole Kidman, the drive in her to love what she does is clearly not slowed down at all. She could be on her ranch in Nashville, or at her farm in the Southern Highlands here, or kicking back on a beach in Hawaii for nine months of the year and do one project. But she does not want to, And I find that really interesting.
In twenty nineteen, she was ranked as the fourth highest paid actress in the world, with an annual income of thirty four million dollars, so she is very, very rich. So in the last ten years she's done thirty projects, and you think like you've got your big little lies, you've got your nine perfect strangers. And that's actually on part with two other women of her era. You've got Kate Winslet, she's done about thirty, and you've got Kate Blanchett,
who's also done about thirty. The difference with Nicole Kidman is there's this brilliant article written on Slate with the headline Nicole Kidman's Beach reads Cinematic Universe, and they say it's like the Marvel Universe, where like all the characters could possibly be related slash the same characters.
They literally wear the same clothes. She wears the same wigs. She always is sort of like looking wistfully out to see.
There's a lot of huffing. There's a lot of sighing, which is a a state pawn exactly. They say, it's kind of like the depressed wine Mum, but like that artifice coming undone. So it's like the opening of this Slate article is so good. It's like watching the Perfect Couple. You kind of go. Wait, didn't we already watch this in a scenic coastal location. No, that was big lit lies. She's playing a wealthy New Yorker who's adulterous husband may
or may not have committed murder. Wait, No, that's the undoing and it just goes through and there's like six that you go, these are all the same thing. And one theory is that maybe she's not trying to prove herself anymore because she's always gone through eras in her career where she's played like complicated mothers or like her divorce film was More and Rouge, and they kind of
go through and see it. But if Nicole Kidman just wants to work and she gets a druckload of money to go and be a depressed wine mum in Nantucket for three weeks, fuck take it. Like there's this theory in Hollywood that it's like one for them, one for me, Like is she just doing that paying the bills and then going and doing some passion project like maybe the one she won the baby Girl?
Yeah, maybe she loves it, because one thing you could argue is that another thing that all those things have in common is that massive hits, big, little lies, the undoing this like everybody's talking about the perfect couple. I've started watching it against my will because me have told me I should. Yeah, and im in exactly nowhere there as good as Big Little Eyes. I'm sorry.
People should stop.
Comparing it to that. There's nowhere near that good. But it's really good. It's really fun. And so she obviously knows what women want to watch, right, yeah, because we're all watching it.
So I think that's a really interesting idea that it's not a flaw, it's a feature. So it's not oh whoops, the characters are all similar, it's she knows that this is what people want to see her be in the same way that you know, Tom Cruise just only does films where he's jumping out of planes, Like he only
plays one character. Remember when he did Born of the Fourth of July and he did Magnolia, and he was making some interesting choices sort of twenty years ago, and then it's almost like he decided, no, I'm going to give the people what they want, which is me being a stunt guy and jumping out of planes. And it's
almost like she's kind of done the same thing. Whereas you look at Kate Winslet and Kate Blanchette, for example, And I probably couldn't tell you those thirty projects that they've each done because they've been so varied and they haven't been as commercially successful as Nichole's.
Kitmun does do some risky things. I think Baby Girl is meant to be risky, and she went through a real art house phase. She really did, but it's almost like she's left it behind.
She's meant to be amazing in Baby Girl, but when you say risky, she's not putting on a prosthetic nose and not plucking her eyebrows, and.
More to being risky than what you look like.
Right?
Is it risky material? Controversial? Material? Difficult?
I would argue, is it risky for a woman of her age to look her age? Because of course, one of the things that's kind of disconcerting in this is that she's meant to be the matriarch with three adult children, which would put her in her fifties, which is and yet she looks younger, a lot younger than the young women. I disagree.
I think that it's perfect casting. The character she's playing would look like that. That's true, and so as to my point before, she doesn't look like a small town cop with no money, but she looks exactly like a very successful, you know, waspy author with a munchin on Nantucket. That is what she would look like. So I think that, as I say, the choices she's made allow her to play a very certain kind of older woman who does look like that.
So isn't the same as you know, how when an author has a bestseller, all of their book covers look a bit the same, like Lisa Jule for example, Oh you've got to look and vibe for your novels. And is that because it's like, oh, I like Nicole Kidman, and it's like more of the same. It's if you liked Big Little Lies, if you like Nine Perfect Strangers, if you like the undoing.
This just feels like also we're seeing the boom of female fiction, which is very new. And the thing about contemporary women's fiction is that it also isn't about twenty year olds anymore like Big Little Lies. Was a real kind of shift in that, and Leanne Moriarty is almost synonymous with Nicole Kidman at this point. They obviously did Nine Perfect Strangers, and now they're doing what Alice forgot,
I think is the next one. And I think she's attached herself to the those sorts of projects, and so she's done the damsel in distress or like the Witch. She's done romance. She's done a bunch of stuff. This is a current cliche, and this is what the slight article said that she's leaning into only to invert it. Sometimes I'm not fully seeing the inversion of the cliche.
To be honest, there's a few two dimensional I really struggled with that in A Family Affair where I went what's difficult is when you know what Nicole Kidman is capable of. She's one of the best actresses alive.
There were some real glimpses of it in this. Yeah, I found even.
In the first episode. I think she's great in it.
I'm not understanding the accent.
This is.
This is something that's happened with a British accent.
I don't English accent.
In the last two shows she's done, she has a completely different accent to the rest of her family, which isn't offul well.
No, she's Australian in the last one in a Family Affair, and she's a brit in this one.
Why isn't she just doing an American accent?
It's distracting.
I think great in the perfect contest nd a normal accent. Now that as we will be talking about this, stay tuned for an upcoming subscriber episode. You can watch this on Netflix Really good, easily bingeable, six hours, go hard.
One, unlimited out loud access. We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively from Mum and MEA subscribers follow the link in the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week, and a huge thank you to all our current subscribers. Period tracking, cycle sinking, femtech and meno washing. Has capitalism finally weaseled its way into my ovaries. There's a few things going on here, and I want to start with an experience I had last week.
My husband was out with a bunch of friends and I got a message from him saying, my friend has the flow app on his phone that tracks his girlfriend's cycle. Maybe we should do this, and I promptly replied, fuck off. To be clear, this isn't It's not about baby make It's about working out. When I am pre menstrul do I get perms?
Absolutely?
Is that information I would like to share with my partner. No, I like to keep them Onney's toast.
Why I would like everybody if I still had a cycle, I would like everybody to know what it was.
Now it's to mining. Oh my goodness, it's so onto mining. And this isn't just about period tracking. It has some incredible benefits. It can anticipate symptoms, it compiles health data, and it can potentially assist with the diagnosis of things like PCOS or endo. This about an industry because everywhere I look, I am being sold something like cycle sinking exercise regimes. Have you guys seen this? Yeah, no, okay,
big in my world. It's probably because you're perry, so they're just like, she's a right off, I'm met her now, Yeah, exactly. So your algorithms, No, you don't need it, but it's where your exercise regime is based on where you are in your cycle, so you know, when you're on new period, you shouldn't do this, but you should do more of this or whatever. Yeah, there's fertility courses, there are new gadgets to assist with period pain. There's moon caups and
period undies. There's a new industry that a lot of experts are now riding about and it's being referred to as the absolute gold rush of menopause. So in the UK, for example, Tesco has announced it's trialing menopause friendly aisles in stores and it's got skincare and vitamins and special pads for ladies.
They've worked out that the older ladies have the money.
Yeah exactly.
There also be no people in that aisle, so true, people are bloody annoying.
I want to know, are we all being taken for a ride or should we be excited that whole new industries are being funded to cater to our needs?
Both okay, both yes and yes. And there are a lot of people who are launching whole brands for menopause and women like Naomi Watts has got a brand called Stripes that does everything from lubricant for vaginal dryness to shampoo and yeah fake so I can run.
I mean, that's genuinely something that is a symptom of that period of your life. So that's solving a problem that exists, right.
But what I think so lovely about it? And I take your point, but like capitalism is always sold to women. Thanks for including us and not ignoring us, because I much prefer being sold to as a woman of my age then products being sold to me by twenty year olds who are advertising anti wrinkle creams, Like, thanks at least for acknowledging that I exist. And there are certain things that are specific about being this age.
How about a tea? Do you need a special tea?
Well, no, I don't need a special tea, but if someone finds that tea nice. What's the most important thing for women is information, not products, to be honest, and that's where we sit and that's why we had the Very Pery Summit and why we'll be doing more around that next year because women need information. Do they need to buy products? I would argue that they need to know whether or not they should use HIT and whether or not there are certain things that they might just
think are just them. They might just think that their vaginal dryness or their skin dryness, or their ezatia is just them, or their weight game or their forgetfulness. They might not understand what it is. And by telling them, hey, all these random seeming symptoms they're all connected. They're all because you're lacking estrogen and your body's going through reverth puberty. It's like, Oh, it's very normalizing now. Whether you choose to buy products to treat those things or not is
then up to you. But the most important thing is the information. I agree with me or on this.
But I want to go back to the variot tracking app and though whether or not your partners should.
Have oh to your worst nightmare whole that's terrible.
I can't believe that's terrible.
Can you guys explain to me why it's terrible?
This is what I would think. I don't know. I can't speak for Jess. She'll speak for herself. The problem with your partner and the people around you, and your colleagues and whoever. Knowing that, oh, she's pmassing as it means, Oh, I get to disregard everything you say a day.
But that's it's not.
True that your hormones are so in charge of your life that there's no truth to any of the things.
So's there's a lot of truth exactly.
It's like if I lose my ship because you keep putting your cup on the edge of the dishwasher instead of putting it in the dishwasher, and I'm more likely to lose my ship the day before my period about that.
So why wouldn't you want it doesn't mean somebody to know that, because he'll go, oh, she's just pay messing and not think, oh, I should put my cup in the dishwater. See, you've clearly got awful partners, because what I would like to believe is that my partner would go, Okay, that's not the time to bring this up or do that. I'm gonna treat her with some special t LC because.
Sensitive little flowers are so so we then we just tiptoe around the crazy home.
Before period. Frankly appreciated if everybody really took a little bit of better care of me before I have.
This is the problem with this is if there is a tension in this that we've discussed before about that idea. You know, it used to be where women can't be in powerful positions because they're too emotional X amount of days of the year. You couldn't trust the decisions that they'd make, You couldn't trust the calls they'd make. Shouldn't let them hire anyone, fire anyone, make any important calls
about things. Of course, there's a lot of truth and science to hormones, and it's great that we're all learning more about it. But this is what worries me about us leaning so heavily into the hormonal story of our life. It can so easily be weaponized against us. And you're right, Mia that lovely, well meaning people won't do that. But the world isn't full of lovely, well meaning people. And also even if they are, those tropes are so ingrained
in our culture. This idea of like, oh, she must be p messing if she's angry about something, rather than maybe she's got a really valid reason to be angry about something. We don't want to hand more of that to people.
Well, the sort of Handmaid's tale side of this is in America, since rovers Way was overturned, a lot of people have been saying, you should take those apps off your phones because they can be co opted potentially by legislation to track your periods. I mean, that's what Project twenty twenty five, which is this blueprint for what conservatives want to do if Trump wins the election. It includes
women's cycles being tracked. When this sounds like something out of a horror film, it's very dystopian, but this idea of we do want to track women so yes, it can be used for nefarious purposes, and we must remember that. But one of the things I always used to find hardest about my PMS, and also about Perry, which is very similar in mood swings of it, was that I would never realize that's what was going on. I would just think that everyone was awful. My relationship was awful,
I was awful, life was awful. And sometimes I like a third party to just give me a little reality check and just say, hey, could be because a bit.
I think though, Just firstly on the privacy thing, I think that's an important point because the idea too is that if it is illegal for you to have an abortion, then that could lead to criminal proceedings.
And use contraception.
And as part of criminal proceedings, you can get data off someone's phone and your abortion or your pregnancy would be logged in your phone. So that's a problem. The other problem is sharing that data with advertisers so that they know, oh, at this point of a cycle, she might be more likely to buy this kind of thing and being manipulated, which I hate all that shit.
Read the fine print before you download those apps.
Yeah, But the other thing is if I'm in my local supermarket, and there is menopause aisles right for like, you know, you need your special pad, and you need your specialty and your skin care and your vitamins. And then I walk into work and I'm working with women who are of menopausal age. Is it not reshaping how
we see women? Like we've wanted to divorce women a little bit from their hormones, and at a moment where women are becoming their reproductive capacities again in a very very dangerous way.
I just worry that these.
Two things could be I agree, I sympathize with this because I agree with me that I think it's great that we are much more aware now of menopause and all the things that come along with it. But we did an episode of mid about rage, and in it we were discussing myself and just interparsons how there is an element of midlife rage which is directly related to
a plunge in estrogen right there, That's true. But there is also an element of midlife rage that's about just having had enough of spending years and years putting yourself at the end of a list, putting up with a whole lot of crap, caretaking all the time living in a world where you're often told to shush and smile
and be nice. That when women get to that place sometimes where things boil over and they go the cliches about older women, no folks left to give all that stuff, there's an element of truth in that that is really important. And I think, while it's imp I want to understand the science, it shouldn't all be dismissed as science. It's the same I used to feel the same way when I was pregnant. There was a sort of strain of
being easily dismissed when you're pregnant. Baby brain. Now there is some scientific truth to that, right, But also pregnant women can do amazing things. They can run countries, as just Cindra ar Durn showed us. They can certainly run businesses, They can do all kinds of incredible things. They don't become lobotomized idiots because their hormones are doing things. So I agree it's a fine line to walk. It's like, we want to be understood, we want to be empowered.
And when I was really struggling with Perry symptoms in particular, I tried every tea, every cream, every supplement, to try and help me with some things, and some of them really did and some of them really didn't, and you know that was that, and I was glad they were there. And a lot of those are businesses started by women who can see a gap. But it's not everything. It's exactly where you started mere, which is like, yes, and yes,
it's great that the science is improved. It's great we've got more awareness, but also let's not dismiss women as just walking balls of hormones.
And it's also at the moment it's a bit the wild West because the science and the investment in the femtech. Like I look at the incredible explosion of devices to help with period pain and I'm like, that's amazing. I mean, I've been spending money on medication ever since i got my first period, and now that you would have people are using tens machines or they're using these heat packs
and they're trialing them. I'm like fantastic, Or like invest in endometriosis when they test for it and they're able to find it. But what I worry about is then all of this stuff popping up online that's unregulated, that a products that don't work or courses that don't work because you've got a I guess people who are desperate who have been ignored by medical science for most of his way, which.
Brings us back to l and why it's important to have responsible information from responsible sources. And that's why with the very Peri summit that we did and that we'll be doing it again next year, it wasn't us just saying and getting an influencer. We brought the leading experts from around the world to give information and what we decided to do with that information is then up to them. But you're presenting reputable information and no one's trying to sell you something out loud.
As I want to know if you would feel comfortable with partner, friends, even colleagues perhaps tracking your period. We asked the women in the Mummeya office how they feel about it. Most of them have tracking apps on their phone and here is what they said.
I used the period tracker app called Glow, and I absolutely think it'd be great if my partner had access to this so then he could prepare for how I'm feeling throughout the month. Apparently every month is like the four seasons, so like winter being PMS, so it'd be great if he knew about this and could be extra nice and buy me things.
Look, I use a period tracking app, but I just don't see the need for my partner to be up all in my business in that regard. If I need something, or I need support, or I need to communicate to him, I'll just tetle him myself.
I would actually love if my partner had access to my flow app, because I don't think you'd use it against me. I feel like he would just you know, make me food or be nicer to me when he needs to be.
I don't currently use a period tracker app. I don't think my partner needs to see it personally. If he needs to know, we can have a conversation about it.
But I can't really think of a reason why he would need to know.
I use both flow and Natural Cycles, and I let my partner or ex partner have access to it so you can track my period in my fertility because I feel like it shouldn't just be on me. It's like a partnership. So yeah, I let him track so he kne when I was my period was coming in, when I was gonna be fertile.
Look from a fertility perspective. I totally get it. You're both looking out for that window and you know you want to jump on it. But any other time, no, thank you. That's my business. I don't need you inside my uterus as a man for any reason, whether you are government trying to make legislation or my husband. That is literally just my business. And you can reach out and say I noticed you're feeling a little bit emotional this week.
You okay?
Can I help you? You don't need an app to track that and inform you when I have PMS. No, thank you, sir.
That's all we've got time for this Monday. A massive thank you to all of you out louders for listening to today's show, and of course to our wonderful team for putting this show together. We will be back in your ears tomorrow with a rundown of what happened at the Emmys today. Bye bye bye.
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