Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia out loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the third of June.
I'm Hollyween, I'm Clere Stephens, and I'm Amelia Lost.
And here's what has made our agenda for today.
The boy mum controversy that has me terrified for the next phase of my life.
The one thing you should never say when you meet someone, or is it?
And women shouldn't be allowed to write books discuss but first just putting it out there controversial opinions Wednesday anyway, First, in case you missed it, suns shining in Europe and so the tennis is happening. I'm sports correspondent for today. Oh we've been passing that mic around last week.
It was wow. I don't know how much I trust this, especially not with tennis better with football tennis not so much.
But anyway, I'm going to give it a go. Because there is this thing, this tournament called Roland Garros, which is also Therench Open. I had to make sure they were the same thing. They are the same thing, just like Wimbledon.
Land, Like who's rolling exactly?
Who is Roland? An answer to that, weren't they and this week there was a bit of a ding dong at the French Open over some umpires being women.
Oh oh my god, I know, I'm shocked.
Now.
To be clear, the umpires who get to adjudicate over the big Grand Slam titles, so French Open, US Open, Wimbledon, not the Open, et cetera, are called the gold badge ones. So they are the top of their field, just like in any other sport. You don't just pull the volunteer referee from Saturday football and put them on the ground final. So these are the these are the big guns. But in a game that was played by Paraguayan Adolfo Daniel Valeo, he criticized his female umpire and said that this level
of game should only be umpired by a man. His game was five hours long, which he's like, that's really really long, Oh my gosh. And it was hot and the crowd got rowdy. And we have talked a little bit lately, if we've talked about tennis at all, about how the polite like just sitting around and doing little finger claps, that tennis is over. Everybody yells now, and his words were a game like this, he got asked
whether or not. He thought it should have been umpired by a woman, by a magazine called Clay Magazine, And he said it has to be refereed by a man because it's a very demanding crowd and you need a lot of strength to go against the crowd. It's not normal for the crowd to be shouting for a full minute without any play in a match where the physical aspect matters so much. If you give a player a lot of time, he's going to take a marriage of it.
So basically, he's making the point that an umpire, A big part of what a tennis umpire does is they tell the crowd to shut up. And what he's insinuating here is the crowd wouldn't listen because the umpire was a woman, thoughts, and he lost. To be clear, he lost this patch.
He lost, and he lost to a seventeen year old, and I think his ego was probably just a little bit bruised. My favorite thing about this story is that he got fined so much money he.
Did, even though he went to notesap and apologized on Instagram.
Yeah, got fined like half his earnings from the tournament. But I saw a really good clip of Andy Roddick talking about this, and I just I love when it's men who come to the defense of a female umpire, And he just said, he was like, mate, focus less on the gender of the umpire and focus more on the fact that you couldn't beat a kid.
Do you want it? Scot Form on this? Doesn't he in a good way? Hasn't he also spoken out in the past about making sure that women get the same prize money as men.
Yeah, and I think it is part of a I like that they've taken it seriously because it is a bigger conversation in tennis that there is not necessarily parody between men and women or there I think there is parody, but there's some controversy about that. There people who say that there shouldn't be and there are such a small number of female umpires at this level, and then to have them kind of stigmatized in this way. I'm really really glad they took it seriously.
Okay, but here's a tiny devil's advocate here, right What if what his point that he's making, which is that the crowd isn't listening to her, isn't that on the like, doesn't that tell you a truth? About the crowd because maybe it's true.
I went through the comment section on one of the articles about this, and everyone was like, you just have to think about that teacher you had in like year six, who could command the whole frickin' room. I'm sorry, but people listen to women, and people listen to women with authority. I just don't believe that that was the case. In a few weeks, I am going to enter a brand new clas and a recent online controversy is making me
feel very, very weird about it. Once this baby is born, I believe a lovely midwife will fill out some paperwork, give me a badge, and officially christen me a boy mom. Boy mom, boy mom. I don't I do not consent.
That's what they say when you have a boy mom.
Somehow, the Internet has told me this is fundamentally different to being a girl mom, even though I believe that gender is mostly a social construct, and I don't really understand why I would feel any differently towards this little boy than I do towards my little girl. Apparently, the simple fact that during conception, it was a y chromosome that fertilized one of my eggs I am now going to be a boy mom. I'm a fundamentally different kind
of person. Holly, you're a boy mom. Familia, you're a boy mom.
I am.
And so is a woman named Jenny Molin. She is an actress. She was in the TV show Angel And she was also brief flee in Girls And she's a writer and the ex wife of actor Jason Biggs. She's also a mum to two boys. That is obviously the overarching identity.
Yes, boy mo. I reckon too that there would be some boy moms who would be policing the identity of boy mom and say, maybe you have to have only.
Boys, yeah, to be a boy mum.
That's true, but you know whatever, I actually know that's very true. But I think we all are like half boy moms. This week, she has made headlines for sharing a photo of herself lying on top of her twelve year old son in bed, and the original caption was your eldest son will be the most toxic guy you ever date. She yes, so she ended up removing that caption.
I don't mind the picture, but the caption is troubling me.
Yeah.
So comments called the post creepy, wildly inappropriate, disturbing. The photo itself again was not that controversial.
I do have although there are issues with this, which we'll get to. I do have an issue with people policing parental affection on the internet. It's like, if you see David Beckham kissing his daughter.
It's eh.
And if you see a boy posing with his mum in a bikini, it's ooh. It's like, you're making it weird.
Guys, you're making it weird.
All families are different in terms of their physical affection.
She did put it on the grid. It's an odd moment. I should put it on the grid.
Made also made odder by the camps.
But it seems that the photo then reminded people of a substack post she had published a few weeks ago in early May, and it was called please Stay, I want you, I need you, Oh God. And apparently that is a Benson bit.
Yeah, I want you, I need you, Oh God.
Yeah.
They so.
I don't understand Holly and her pop music being up to date with everything anyway, that's another conversation. But it was about her twelve year old son. And here are some quotes from that post. It opens with call me old fashioned, but I only want my sons to marry women with dead mothers, so it's my only shot at staying relevant, of seeming useful, and of winning by comparison.
Please tell me she's joke, she says.
Several months ago, my eldest was texting with a girl. She was twelve, but I could already tell my brand of toxic. She was bossing him around and using big words, and he was utterly spun. I complained to Jason, her husband at the time, that I wanted to intervene before he got hurt, and that she wasn't even hotter than me. Please start joking, but Jason insisted I let him make his own mistakes. Then she writes about how the abandonment we eventually endure as boy Morm's is uniquely cruel because
it begins as worship. They arrive obsessed, dependent, adoring. They think we're magic. We think we're magic. We spend years being the center of their emotional world, only to slowly watch them build one without us.
That's true of all children.
Yes, it's actually kind of like a human race, evolutionary thing that we have helpless babies, yeah, who then become less helpless as time goes on.
Yes, not so much about needing them to then be with somebody with a dead mother. But the final couple of lines of her substract were I'm still in it, but also somehow outside of it, fully aware I'm living through the longest goodbye of my life. I pray that at least one of them is gay.
That's referring to it.
I worry that there's some part of her here that is not joking. And the line that sort of gave it away for me is when she writes, I've never been broken up with yeah, which, first of all, lady, you have never lived. Being broken up with is the greatest experience. I recommend it to everyone. She goes on to it, I've never been into someone who wasn't just slightly more into me, which is a really annoying sing. But now karma going to make me pay in spades,
more likely in the form of some crazy bit. She was going to weaponize my flaws in therapy and melt or my jewelry. I have a little bit of a theory as to why she's sort of.
That's a rich text me working through some.
Boy mom feelings on the internet at this particular time, and I think a lot of this has to do with her divorce from Jason Biggs. Now that name might be familiar. He was in American Pie. He was the kid in American Pie who put his penis in a pie or something. Yeah, what happened.
I feel like he did a lot of things.
But that divorce was confirmed to People magazine only two weeks ago, so clearly, I think this is a situation where a couple is working through some complicated relationship dynamics, triangulating those If you'll allow me to esk to parrel this situation through the suns, they have a weird dynamic. I looked back in twenty nineteen. Yeah, I went into Jason Biggs Instagram from twenty nineteen. There is an Instagram post where Jenny is embracing their son in happier times.
They're on a holiday. They've go to Germany every year on holiday. The caption on this was there used to be a time when my wife wanted to ca noodle with me on a mountaintop. And at that point, I think the two of you are feeding off each other with this, because I get that that's a joke. I
get that it's all said tongue in cheek. But when you are making jokes that are premised on the idea that your son has replaced you romantically in some way, that's just there's a kernel there if that's how he views their son.
Yes, and but I think that's true. There's clearly a lot of stuff going on here, and I you know, we're getting to it later in the conversation with today, we're going to be talking about women getting attacked for telling their stories and like she's allowed to write what she wants and think what she wants. But you're right that there's a specific dynamic going on. But this is much broader than that, the boy mom thing and the whole like I don't want them to get married, I
don't want them to leave me. I don't like and the you know you can get a bumper stickers like daughters are for life and you know sons will break, like all that stuff. It's not specific to these two people. This is a much bigger thing, and I find it really interesting now. Mia wrote about this a few years ago. She one of the most viral things she's ever written, and we've talked about it on the show several times since. Was about how watching your son growing up will be
like the longest breakup of your life. And that hit a lot of nerves with people in a good way, resonated with them, and got shared enormously well. It also got a little bit of criticism from corners, which was
a misunderstanding of what Mia meant. But also I think it's a trap for girls because we talk about boys and girls so differently in this way where we say he's gonna grow up and leave me one day, he's going to live his own life and he's not going to be around to satisfy all my nurturing needs all the time. She on the other hand, he's going to stay close, never leave, never leave, fulfill all my needs, look after me. When I it's like, guys, haven't we moved past this?
This?
That might be what happens, but it also might not be what happens. Like this very stereotypical sort of jail we put girls in, which is that they are emotionally responsible for everyone around them all the time, and men are expected to go off and be emotionally responsible for other people. Can't we kind of move on.
From that this?
I remember seeing the criticism to MEA's article at the time and it was a very small proportion of people who read the article. There were so many who it resonated with and they shared it and there were lots of tears, But basically part of me was there. She wrote, there are so many batshit crazy things about being a parent, and one that definitely wasn't in the brochure is the way you don't actually parent one person, You parent many,
many different people who are all your child. And that idea is something that now having experience parenthood, I am so aware of and thought that she stated so so so eloquently, and the fact that I mean, I've got a toddler and I'm seeing the distance that she's having experiences without me, and she's becoming a person where I'm not the only influence in her life.
That's a very complicated thing that only continues to be complicated.
Yes, but what I struggle with is there is a kernel of truth in this in that if I look at my life, and if you look at all the research, it is daughters who end up caring for parents as they age. It is daughters who do a lot of that, the mental load of maintaining the family not always, and men do less of it. So I think women's anxiety about it or mother's anxiety about it is somewhat valid.
But the line between a sexual romantic relationship and a maternal relationship, I just don't see why that's being blursh. It's very confused.
I find a bit very I know these things are true, but then I will always question how much of it is true, because it's just what we keep telling everybody all the time. Because women's lives have changed enormously. Their social mobility is different, their professional arcs are different, A whole lot of things are changing very quickly for women. And so if we just keep insisting though that these are truths, these are unquestionable truths, that your son will
be swallowed up by some other woman. And it's this idea that I find strange, that men can be taken and stolen and they belong to you like none of our children actually belong to us, And that is one of the most enormous realizations you go through as they grow up. And so I just I wonder is that if we keep saying these things over and over again, we just continue to reinforce them. Right, girls can all so move off and move into the other worlds. Some
men stay close. Some men run away from their overbearing mothers because they daughters do the same.
They keep writing weird shit on the internet. As moms who have a boy and a girl each, is there something different about having a boy?
No? I find okay, so mystifying okay, and I'm I want to ask you why you think the boy moms who have the bumper stickers, why do they want to tell us that they're a boy mom?
Okay. I actually have a theory about this, and I've experienced it a little bit with this pregnancy. There are people where when you say, oh, I'm having a boy, they say, are you disappointed? And I think that I find that up setting, like.
Like, are there really people who say that, yeah, because boys are hard at work.
I've thought about it a lot and I find it really really distressing.
And in fact, there was a study done at the start of this year that said, for the first time, this is an Australian study, for the first time, parents expressed a preference more for having a girl than having a boy. So there really is a bit of a sort of sense now that boys are hard work, trouble. They're all going to grow up to be like adolescents the TV show and that you just rather have a nice, well behaved go. Yeah.
But there's a flip side to that, which is, as soon as you have a girl who enters puberty, everyone will go, oh, you've got trouble.
So you don't get that for boys entering puberty. It's a girl.
It's different. So the stereotypes tend to be that little boys are a handful, So you'll hear a lot of boy moms and this is entirely valid. Again from my experience, it's not necessarily that blanket true because I have a son, for example, who doesn't like sport and a daughter who's crazy about it. So you know, the world moves in
mysterious ways. But to generalize broadly, the stereotypes are as a boy mum when the kid is little, they'll never sit still, they'll be running around, You'll have a lot of balls in your house. It'll be you know, you'll constantly be apologizing to people because they've smashed a window or whatever. And there's definitely truth in that. Whereas girls sit nicely in color at the playdates, and you'll hear a lot of moms talk about that in a very
real way, and it's true. Then when they get towards like teenage years, you'll get they're like, oh, but girls, there's so much trouble. I hope you've got a shotgun. I hope she's not going to wear that. I hope she's not going to go there. Like, so, you can't win in these gender stereotypes. My experience, my personal experience, has been that those stereotypes have not played out to
be true. My personal experience in my family and my in law's family as not that it's turned out to be true that it's the women who do all the caring. My mother in law lived with her son right up to her death, and her daughter has never lived anywhere.
Like you know, I think that all of these things that you know, and I've moved to the other side of the world and my brother lives around the corner from my parents, Like, I just think we get lazy with these stereotypes, even though of course there is truth to them.
Yeah, there's a general there's a generalization. But I do think that the boy moms are trying to reclaim a little pat of their own and say that there's basically something sacred and special about being a boy mum, and I completely understand that response.
Yeah, particularly since the tide has turned in terms of stereotypes and what people want.
Do you think that I know, I keep asking the same question, but I just have to ask you because you might know more about her than me. Is sheer comedy writer? Is this satire?
Okay?
I have a thing I need to say about satire. You can't just write something and then say it satire. This happens so often where people are like, it's satirical, and it's like, I want you to define satire and then tell me how the thing that you wrote actually fit that, because I don't think that people saying it satire actually understand what satire is. Is she Is she seeing a little instinct that she has and exaggerating it. Maybe, but it's not.
It's not making a clever comment, no point, And in the context of the divorce. It has to be seen in that context. Yeah, that this is the way people communicate when communication between them has broken down. This is all about what's going on between her and Jason out ladders in a moment. Is a whole generation using the phrase pov wrong, spend any time on TikTok or as I do, watch tiktoks on Instagram and you will see a video. Sorry, I'm sorry, Claire.
No, see what happens is you're getting the tiktoks like six months.
I'm sorry. I'm not getting the pure I'm enriched ship talks. I'm getting the distilled TikTok on Instagram. My bad. I'm reading books, Claire, that's the I digress. Spend any time on TikTok slash Instagram and you will see a video with a caption which begins POV. This has become a very common format, and that, of course downs for point of view. There's an article in the New York Times this week that says that everyone under forty is using
this term wrong as Outlad's official most annoying host. And I say that because I'm always on time and I used to have the job title of fact checker. That is a true thing. This is the second in a series of mine, which began on Monday when I lam based it jen Z for not using enough capital letters. So now in the second of my series, it falls to me it seems to explain what POV actually means. Claire. I see you have a pen and paper please pick up the pen. If you caption a video POV you're
too short to reach the top shelf. That should feature a camera tilted up at something just out of reach. It should not picked a short person hopping up and down in the middle of the screen trying to reach a shlf. You got that POV is being used as synonymous with fly on the wall, and that is just not right.
Have you told everybody what it actually stands for?
Yeah? Yeah, point of view? Holy keep up. Incidentally, the same thing, now I have your attention, The same thing has happened with aesthetic. That doesn't mean pretty or good looking or nice. It means what something looks like. It's like the look of something. So that's very aesthetic. Is not a correct use of the word as thing.
God, my daughter says that all the time.
You can see I am fun at parties. Any questions, Okay?
Firstly, I went to pitch a branded content video recently and went to do the POV trend, and that was the moment that I went, no, it's not POV. It's not it's fly on the wall, and.
Which is FOT. Let's bring, let's bring into the mix.
It's not as catchy as it. No, it's not as catchy, and I had a full existential crisis, thinking, well, I want to be on trend, I want to be cool, but I shan't be doing something that's incorrect. But the annoying thing is that whenever you're pointing this out, because my mum's an English teacher and so she'll often have issues with all sorts of things that I said, and then she often has to pull herself up and say. Linguists will say.
You know that. The linguist say, it's fine, I should say that. In this New York Times article, they interviewed a linguist, a cunning one at that, and they said, it's fine, just relax. It is basically relax.
Language is what language becomes like if the young.
People English languages. Apparently other languages which I don't speak, apparently they're more formal and rigid. But in English we're all meant to be lucy goosey. Whatever, man, Matthew McConaughey about it all, Holly, how do you feel? Look?
It irritates me too, But I am done criticizing this generation because I just heard about a movie sensation called Backrooms Right that came out last week and it made eighty million dollars in its first two days. And that was made by a YouTuber who is twenty years old.
And it's such a cool premise.
And this is the whole thing, and we don't need to go. But like the thing is, is this generation who've grown up entirely just on TikTok and YouTube, who don't know how to use the terms, have started making their own work and it's freaking amazing and all of us old people need to sit down and shut up.
Claire. This is why she's the popular one. Moving on. Oh Hannah, i'mbinder is a very funny comedian. She's the star of Hacks, which just came to a conclusion on HBO. But in the lead up to the finale, Hannah gave an interview on the show Subway Takes, and she dropped a take so controversial I cannot stop thinking about it. Here is what she said, So what's your taking? I say nice to meet you, and you say we've met. That is a violent act against me, Are you serious?
Honesty is the best policy?
No, no, no, no, no no no.
If you tell me that we've met and you remind me in this way, with such a loathsome disdain.
You are embarrassing us. Both you are embarrassing me for not remembering you, and frankly you're embarrassing yourself for not being memorable. Pollie, you're nodding a full agreement on this.
As I've gotten older, my memory is not great, and when you meet people out of context, in situations out of context, I often don't remember that I've met them. And it's not offensive. It's not that I'm rude. Maybe it is. You'd probably tell me that I am. And so I sometimes say these days just to hedge it, have we met, or like I think we've met before,
in order to kind of like open that door. But if I say nice to meet you and you come straight back with, oh, we've met, I am more, you have narrow to the heart.
Don't you want to be reminded? You could have had a real important conversation last time you spoke.
No way, I want everyone to pretend that it's fine.
I totally disagree. For me, the violent act is not that we've met, it's the nice to meet you Like that's.
I'm sorry, that's that's a very common pleasantry. What is your problem with that?
Like nice to meet you when you've when you've already met?
That is?
That is violent?
Answer me this. If we have this encounter and I say nice to meet you, and you say we've met? What am I supposed to say?
Let's just cooseplay it. I can not cosplay.
If we were in cocktail dresses.
That would be so I'm going to hold up my mug and I'm at a cocktail party and.
I say, nice to meet you, merely Lester.
Oh, actually, Holly, we met once before. Remember we met at a party. And no, see it's a conversation. What about it? What does Holly say in response?
Oh?
Yeah, I remember that.
Open y you say we met at the party.
If you take this, it's actually harder than it seems to do it.
Okay, Hi, I'm like, I forget how social.
Interaction has gone.
Nice to meet you.
Nice? Have you ever said nice to meet you, Claire? I think that's where we need to start.
You.
Actually we met before, Claire at a party. It was at that person's house and it was really and we talked. We talked about being brow moms.
Remember, yeah, I love the person whose party that is? Yeah, they great. Now we're in conversation if you don't remember, Holly, I'm going to be honest, why don't you remember?
Sometimes you just don't remember.
You have, like, particularly a professional setting, you have a lot of small talk conversations. By the time you get to my age.
To a lot of.
Things, and you have had a lot of small talk.
Oh mother, what's something, bloody Blair? How'd you get here? Was it all right? I can't remember all of that? Okay, I have a question for the group. Since you're divided on this, can I suggest that you can say nice to see you instead of nice to meet I started doing it now. The problem with that is everyone knows what you're up to. When you're say nice to see you. You're not fooling anyone anyway. You're merely accepting that you can't possibly remember whether or not you've met this person.
But does it kind of work to say nice to see you?
Because it's like did you trip and fall? I'd remember that? Were you wearing like a bright red black feathers.
You said something when we first talked about this, which I think was so true. You said it's about ego expand.
Yes, like when they say nice to meet you and you're thinking or saying we've met. The reason you're upset is because you're like, why don't I always remember? So we actually separate conversation, had to chat about this a few weeks ago. I think I have this skill. I'm a super recognizer. I really recognize spaces, so I don't
forget meeting people. But it is a big act of confidence. Sometimes, if you had a very fleeting interaction with somebody, it takes a lot of audacity to be like, so good to see you again, because it is really scary when they're like what, who the fuck are you and you're like, oh, it had quite a profound impact on me in our social interaction. But I do think it is far warmer to kind of lead with that. I think it's so cold you've.
Just so if you're on the other side. So, if you're the person who's been forgotten, what do you say? Would you say to someone you've met me before and we talked about this, and you're a bad person because you don't remember. No, I mean obviously wouldn't say that last bit unless you're really grumpy. No.
See, it goes the reverse for me. So I am not assertive enough to say do your role along with it. Yes. However, I love when somebody says that to me, when somebody corrects me, because I'm in the unique position where I need clarity, because if somebody says, oh, good to see you and give me a familiar hug, and I need to establish have you met my sister?
Yes?
Have you there are two of you.
Yes, you may have met my sister, and therefore you've had a conversation with her. And if we do not acknowledge whether we know each other in this moment, we will have an entire social interaction where you think I'm someone else and it becomes embarrassing for me, and then you start calling me Jesse, and then I play along. And it's just I need all the clarity in a world because it's happened a lot where people.
I think you are both direct and have excellent social skills. So what do you say.
I've been on both sides of this equation, incredible as it is. Some people have forgotten they've met me and impact in Australian celebrity who we interacted with recently, she and I had interacted many years ago and had in fact even a meal together. Oh and I saw her at a sort of like quasi professional gathering, and she she didn't say nice to meet you. But you know when you know someone has no idea who you are, and I could just tell that she just thought I
was some kind of rabid fan. And she's looking at me like, why are you talking to me as though we've had dinner together? And so I did sort of say to her, well, we did have dinner together on a couple of occasions, like a decade ago. And you know what the worst is when you clarify that you've met them and they still don't I'm that happy.
Had she recently been through perimenopause, Get out of Jeffrey. I'm going to I'm going to go with that brain fog, brain fog cast over pasts. I'm just going to say it.
You know who wouldn't say that. You know who wouldn't say that to me? Simon Baker, who I meant once I may have told you about that.
God remember, because he'd be like, I listened to this podcast, but like, surely then you can have a conversation that's got some context about where you were together or who you knew in common, or like it opens new windows for the conversation to go. I think that transparency is lovely. Otherwise you're living a lie. And Holy, I don't know how you have entire conversations where you're living a lie.
I do like that you wrote in your notes on this. It's not an authentic social interaction if you're both living a lie.
We have to have.
Yes, we can't just be collute.
Peace breaker after the break why women shouldn't write books? Guess what women shouldn't write books? And No, this is not a new edict from Trump's Department of Tradwives. This is a vibe emanating from a whole lot of discourse around some of the biggest books of the year so far. You've heard us talk about some of them. The novel Yesteryear by Kara Claire Burke, that's the tradwife book, and the memoirs Famesick by Lena Dunham and Strangers by Belle Burden.
All of these books have been hugely successful in a very difficult market for books right books are struggling. These books have been unqualified successes, all written by women, all hugely successful. But they have Yesteryear and Strangers in particular attracted an enormous amount of criticism too. The author of Yesteryear, who has made a lovely amount of money from selling the rights to this book, and it's sold the film rights to ANH and all those things, has just wrapped
up her promotional tour. So the more successful your book is, the longer that tour will go. If it keeps selling a different markets and territories, you're going to be like, oh, can you now go to blah blah keep talking about it to such and such. So she's had a long promotional tour for this book, but it's over, and she wrote a notes app, oh its AP's very popular this week about it. I'm just going to read a couple of the things she has to say about the reaction
that she's had. I find it genuinely interesting. Writes Kara Claire Burke that men can and do create art and analyze culture in such a fashion that drives fervent conversation and debate and disagreement without the art or analysis in question being so frequently relegated to a term, and she means rage bait by that term that literally means designed
to piss someone off. The term rage bait has been used to describe three wildly different books the ones we just discussed, and the only real connection between them is that one they feature imperfect women, two they don't offer a clean moral and and three they've been commercially successful. When male artists pull this hat trick off, it's considered an intellectual achievement. When women do it, it's more often characterized as an accident, a mass orchestration, or a cheap
parlor trick. She says that all these things have been qualified as a rage bait designed piece of people off when they're just women's stories. Now, as she says, these books all really different. Hers is a novel that was always going to be viewed as political because of its topic.
Lena Dnom's, I would argue, has been massively well received. Actually, but it is the pov I think I'm using that correctly of a once very polarizing figure and Burdens So Strangers is about the breakdown of a marriage, and the Internet's decided that it's not as exciting as it sounded because the deserted wife in question is very rich, richie
rich rich, and therefore the stakes fellow. All this leads me to a piece I read by UK writer Polyvernon called Women shouldn't write books, and in that she talks about her experiences of publishing a controversial book and getting lots and lots of backlash for it. My question is
we can get to that in a minute. My question is, Amelia, are you not allowed to hate Strangers, for example, or Yesteryear, think it's not a good book, or that the premise is questionable because you are then not supporting the women's.
Of course, you're allowed to not like these books. I couldn't understand where she was coming from on this. I have read Strangers. I have not read Yesteryear. Strangers to me fell flat as a book for various reasons. We're not sort of debating its merits here, but in essence, I didn't like that it was the story of a marriage breakdown where I got no emotional complexity or sort of details of how the husband and wife interacted with each other prior to the divorce. That's why I didn't
like it. Does that make me a bad feminist because I felt that the men why I didn't have payoff?
No? But no, it definitely doesn't. But I think one of the things that the people who are supporting this view of it would say is that rather than people just saying I didn't like this book. It wasn't for me shrug. They're like, she should never have been allowed to write this book, that the advance was ridiculous, she's making all this money, Stada, da da, and it becomes like a personal attack about her.
The criticism I've come across of yesterday, which for the most part, I've just been seeing people say, read this book, it's amazing. One criticism I did see said that she displayed a certain lack of curiosity for the historical period which she is writing about. In the book, there was not a lot of detail about what life actually was like at that time, and it felt a bit flat
in its depiction. I wonder if she's including negative reviews in this idea of women shouldn't be able allowed to write books.
I think there's a big difference between criticism and criticism of a piece of art, if that's if that's a novel or a memoir, and public shaming. And I did a book event the other week with an author and we were both laughing about the fact that when you get the reason you can't look at good raids or anything like that is because when you get a two
or a three star review. Very often you're like, ah, I agree, like like you know you you very much are aware of your own shortcoming, your own shortcoming, your own blind spots.
That also applies to podcast reviews.
Exactly exactly the ones that hurt the most, and when you're just that was a bad point.
Yeah, But those are the ones that hurt the most, the ones where they get it right and they press
on a bruise. But there are a lot of two star reviews and stuff that'll just be like I don't like her, yes, like about authors and about podcasters and about whatever, or I hate that female character because blah, Like there are I think that there is a there is a difference between the criticism that hurts you and like for context here, obviously we're all writers of different kinds, and Claire and I have published books.
There is different don't publish bos because it's unseemly for women, you're not allowed.
Which is good, is that there's a difference between criticism that hurts because they're right and you're like, I knew it, I knew it, yep, and criticism that hurts because it's personal.
And criticism that hurts because it seriously is going into the category of public shaming it like it feels like it is trying to elicit a feeling of shame that you even tried and you had no authority or no right to even attempt to do what you did.
And do you feel like you got that when you published your book at all? Like that bucket of criticism that's personal as opposed to literary in nature.
No, But I think that if you have a book that explodes to the point of yesteryear, then that is the question that starts being asked. And Glennon Doyle puts it so well.
She has a quote.
That says, when a man puts out his work, the world asks is his work worthy? When a woman puts out her work, the world asks is she worthy of putting out work? So rarely will the criticism be about her work at all? It will be about her.
Yes, now, But if you're if the piece in question is a memoir, isn't that valid? I know, like that's tricky there, because I think that she's absolutely right about that, like that, whether it's fiction or not. But if you're if, isn't criticism of a memoir being about you? Of course, inherently it's going to be about you and whether or not you should have got the memoir deal and D D D.
I think there is a line like with Bell Burden, it's like, well, she doesn't not have a right to tell her story at all, but you're allowed to look at her memoir and think there were there were blind spots.
Well, and the whole act of criticism is meant to be about taking the work on its own terms and then assessing its success on those terms. So Bell Burden wrote a divorce memoir. And what worries me is I don't want women's writing to be relegated to this category of is not worthy of criticism and is not worthy of real, informed and intelligent debate, because that is an act of respect to say, Okay, you wrote a divorce memoir. Let's assess it as a divorce memoir. Is it successful
at what it's set out to do? That's we want women's work to be assessed in that serious minded way.
And there is some language though around some of these books, and I think Yesteryear in particular. It's interesting. I have followed Carol Claire Burke, and I feel like I've seen the arc of her emotional response to this, which at first was very I've written this book. It no longer belongs to me. It is to go out there. You can say whatever belongs about it. It does, but it belongs to the reader, who decides how it lands for them.
But then I understand that some of the commentary and criticism around it has been so personal and does seem so gendered that it would be impossible. She Okay, it keeps getting described as like, basically, of course it's successful. It's ripped from the headlines, it's ripped from the zion, and it's like every book ever is somewhat dependent on what the zeitgeist was. She hasn't done something malicious or like self serving by taking an idea.
That was in the heat.
Cuddy, Yeah, basically that she cheated.
Here's the thing about your point, Amelia, about which is a very good point about women's work being worthy of serious criticism. The problem with that is that serious criticism has changed. So that used to be like did you get a review in the New York Times or the Australian lower the literary supplement. Now it's like, are there
twenty million substack opinion pieces about this? And everybody is writing algorithms, and everybody knows that Yester Year or Strangers or whatever is the hot thing, and that you'll get more clicked, more views if you say something negative than if you say something positive. So that kind of removes the pure intention of whether anyone really is assessing the work. Polly Vernon, in her article about with the very rage baby headline of women shouln't write books, which obviously I've
stolen because it's great. She's talking about a specific experience that she had years ago where she wrote a non fiction book with the rage baby title Hot Feminist that landed at exactly the wrong cultural moment, and she got a viscerated, and she said it's taken her a long time to understand why, and she now just puts it down to woman and woman jealousy, which I'd love to get your take on. This is what she writes. I
have much more clarity on it now. I really couldn't fathom would have gone so horribly wrong initially, But ten years on, I think women can just be awful to each other, and never more so than if one of us looks like she might be getting a smidge more attention than all the others think is fair. Now, that is very much true of these books that have been massive smashes, right, and I got a lot of attention with that book. She says, why her? Why not them?
When will it be their turn? What if it's never their turn? Simple? Boring and depressing as that thoughts.
I have to say, my life changed when I realized this, when I realized that a lot of my anger to or like wanting to and not in any public just internally wanting to criticize other women actually examining that and thinking, hold on, is this because I'm actually jealous of what they're achieving, and then seeing that as a bit of a sign of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to pursue, and therefore changing my perspective on it. Like I do feel like my life change when I realized that go on to.
Women are better than this Gale. Men are not sitting around saying I didn't like the new James Patterson Airport thriller, But maybe that's because I'm just really jealous of James Patterson, said no man ever. Look on the other hand, it did make me pause for a second because I was about to sort of throw at you wholly the idea that fame sick, as you mentioned before, Lena Dunn's and
got a near universal positive response. But then I thought, maybe that's because as a culture, we've already cut Lena Dunna down to what we perceive to be the right size, and so at this point she doesn't have that sort of cultural cachet. She's certainly not at the height of her influence right now, and maybe that makes everyone feel a little bit better about the fact that she also happened to write a superb book.
Yeah, I think that's one hundred per cent true of me.
Lean.
I also think there's a bit of revisionist well I think not even revisionist history, the fact that we have perspective now and what we did to her, you know, and that's part of her book. The thing that this where this gets tricky, this thing about we all need to support each other all the time. I know from my perspective that I do not like to criticize, and
I'm just going to say it. I know, like other women's work in this way, I don't like it because I do feel like I'm more of the mindset of celebrate what you like don't disparage what you don't and in that in terms of well, I might not have loved that latest book by so and so, but I'm not gonna don't. I feel really uncomfortable about that. It's like, well, then I'm just not going to tell people to read that,
do you know what I mean? I don't feel I need to go online and write four hundred words about why I think she shouldn't have got the book.
Deal.
To me, I just feel like that is not my place. I think that there's serious criticism to your point, Amelia, that is actually addressing the work and not the person. And then there's just a whole lot of algorithmic nonsense that I don't want to be part of. Like but not I always remember, and I know this is a really weird comparison, but you know, I was briefly obsessed with that TV show Somebody Feed Feel right, where he goes around the world needs food and he always loves
the food. His whole show is just him like eating food and going yeah whatever, in Japan, in Korea, in wherever, and people always say to him, where are the ship meals? And he says, I don't put the ship meals like antib Yeah, he's like, I know. I'm aware of my power, I'm aware of my platform. I'm not going to go to somebody's restaurant cafe and tell the world I think it's terrible and make their life hard like that isn't
that isn't pure criticism. It's not worthy of respect, but it's responsible.
No, I get that. I just want to be sure. There's a danger in that, which is that if every woman says, well, I don't want to ever actually sort of engage critically with a work by a woman, what that means and what that results in is the sidelining of women's voices, because if you can't take them seriously, and if you can't grapple with their shortcomings as well as their good qualities, you are going to end up with everything that women right being called chick.
Lit, not worthy of interrogation. But I do think that there's an element here, and your James Patterson example speaks to this, and I do think it depends what kind of whether it's memoir where it does blur the line between who you are and the actual sent hand, whether you're touching on a cultural issue. I mean with Yesteryear that author was on she's a podcaster and she for a long time had been on social media talking about this, so there's also the personal connection.
To the work.
But I do think that as evidence that we are still prosecuting some big questions about feminism in real time, and whether women owe it to us to always reflect our experiences, and whether we have this instinct that we can't resist of fighting against other women's privilege, and like the Bell Burden example is fascinating because the idea that she is somehow protected from the distress of heartbreak and divorce because she happened to have money is something that
I think women are doing. Women do to each other.
She doesn't have to worry about not having a roof over it.
I think that's not criticism of the book, but criticism of the situation. It's like, how high are the stakes? A lot of women go through divorce and they are on the streets.
Right, But is it her job, woman's experience at all?
It's not.
So what I meant is like I need to say that in that I think it is a different experience. But then you need to take away from the idea that this is a divorce memoir that speaks to everyone about everything. This is rich person's divorce memoir, which is pervy and interesting in itself right how the other half live? I love that shit. We could clearly keep talking for a week. Today on.
We will do.
This conversation will continue off my friends. Please tell us what you think in out louders or wherever you like to engage with us. Massive thank you to all of you for being here with us and to our team helping us put the show together. We'll see you tomorrow.
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