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It's a Woman's Will. Lucky to be.
Ah, Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia. Out loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Monday, the fifteenth of July.
I'm Holly Wayne, right, I'm mea Friedman, and.
I'm Jesse Stevens. And I went to actually message our producer and say, silly, silly, you've got the date wrong because I couldn't believe it was the fifteenth of July. I wanted to say to her, Oh, no, that's wrong.
When did you think it was?
I don't know, the second of June or something.
Yeah, that's fair.
We're racing through, yeah, through this year, and thank god because i'd like it to be over already. On the show today, the bullet that missed former President Trump but changed everything about the American election. Also, It's a Woman's Will, and we're waving drills while wearing teeny tiny bikinis and putting petrol in our butts. It's Katy Perry's come back
and you're living in it. And Vail Shannondoherty, who was very clear that haters were not going to be welcome at her funeral, a rule that likely means her husband is not invited. But first at least eight shots in just a few seconds.
That may change America forever.
Take a look at what happened.
Former US President Donald Trump has survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally. The FBI says it is treating the shooting as an assassination attempt.
Law enforcement officials say the person who opened fired was twenty year old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
We are not enemies. We're neighbors. We're friends, co workers, citizens, and most importantly, we are fellow Americans. We must stand together. There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever, period, no exceptions. We can allow this violence to be normalized. You know, the political regular this country has gotten very heated. It's time to call it down.
Yesterday, Donald Trump survived an attempt on his life and it's changed everything about the American election. We very much doubt that you haven't heard about this, but we're here to fill in some gaps and unpack some smart people's opinions about what comes next. Former President Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at about six o'clock on Saturday evening US time.
Now.
Butler is a smallish regional community on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, and he was talking in a kind of like show ground space usually used for the town's very popular farm show, and experts say that that kind of space in a rural area with very few surrounding buildings is actually should be much easier to secure than if you were in a city or any kind of place that had lots of overlooking buildings. So in theory, it's a relatively easy
to see cure spot. All the same alone, gunman on the roof of a car park aimed his ar style rifle at the former president and took several shots. One whiz passed his ear, nicking it and causing the former president to duck and for his Secret Service agents to do what they're paid to do and pile on top of him to take any further bullets.
I found those images incredibly moving. Isn't necessarily the right word, but it really made me think about what they do every day. Like that instinct, It's like Keny first responders, right. Your instinct is to move away from danger, but they literally put their body between the person they're protecting and danger.
There were no further bullets because a sniper had shot and killed the gunman, twenty year old Thomas Crooks, but not before his bullets took the life of a man attending the rally, fifty year old Corey Compartori. Then, and this is the part that you've seen over and over on your phone's TV screens and on the front of every newspaper in the world today. As Trump is ushered off, he shakes off his service agents to rise head and shoulders above them, which is, by the way, very much
against protocol. The whole point is that they're supposed to cover you, so that if there are more bullets coming, more gunmen there, they will get the shots, not you. He riises head and shoulders above them, raises a fist, and with his face splattered with his own blood, he shouts fight, Fight, Fight. Jesse, what did you think when you first saw this story.
It's weird, isn't it. It just pops up in your Instagram feet alongside someone's picture from Europe, and it popped up and I went, oh, and I'm horrified by this story, and I, you know, echo everyone who just says this is not what democracy is. I think it's really scary. I think it's a really traumatic incident. I think the biggest tragedy is the person who lost their lives and people who are in a critical condition that's been really
lost in this. I think that someone died for demonstrating their political beliefs, which should never happen in a democracy. But I actually don't think I was surprised. There was a moment of almost having expected this, which I have found in a lot of the commentary as well. And the commentary allowed me to understand why I felt that way, which was that the temperature had been rising so high in the US, and the way that these two candidates
speak to and about each other is so intense. You know, a lot of commentators have said, how did it take this long for there to be an act of violence like this? But then, of course we remember that Nancy Pelosi, that was only a few years ago that her husband was bludgeoned in his own home. And then there was Brett Kavanagh. Someone tried to assassinate him after abortion laws were turned back there's been someone setting themselves a light
outside Donald Trump's trial. Something like thirty seven people have died in like politically motivated attacks in the last few years, because in the US there doesn't seem to be a peaceful center. It's like the other side is your enemy. And to watch this, I realized that both sides had deteriorated, that there's been this representation from Democrats and from the left that you know, the deplorables and fake news and
all that kind of stuff. The riot, of course, the insurrection the January sixth Capital event, and that was Republicans. But this, I went, oh, this was an attack on Trump, and now he's seen as a martyr, and this will be if he wasn't already going to win this election, that man will win the election.
Mia, What did you think of the image, the image that I just described of him with the blood and his fist up, it's visceral, will definitely and to the history books as one of the most important news images of our time. What does it make you feel.
I felt oddly detached when I heard this news, and I've been trying to work out why. I mean, part of it is just going into adrenaline mode with breaking news.
But I also knew.
That it, like seemingly everything, it would play into his hands. Because that image was so interesting to me because for those out louders who were old enough to remember the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in the eighties by a lone crazy gunman who was trying to impress Jodie Foster, who was a young actress at the time. So it wasn't even politically motivated by a guy called John Hinckley. What you saw in that footage was grainy, like people panicked, ducking.
But what was interesting about Donald Trump's instincts is that your instincts, you would think would be to hide from danger, self protection. But he knew in that moment that the cameras were on him, and he was defiant without knowing what the attack was, what had happened, how safe he was, how safe he was that it was in fact an assassination attempt.
He straightway said fight fight it.
That meant fight who.
Donald Trump has always fashioned himself as the underdog and as a victim, and even when he was president, he was always trying to make it that everybody was against him, and he wasn't getting the credit he deserved and the respect that he deserved, and that he was a victim of the fake news media who were lying about him. And he actually won the election and people said that
he didn't. So his posture has always been very I'm the underdog, which is ironic for a guy who is as privileged as him and was literally the president of the United States. So I knew instantly that that image will probably win him the election, if he wasn't already going.
To win it. And the thing about it because it makes him a martyr. Yeah, and of course all the discourse, what's so maddening about it? And I knew in that moment.
He has a way of it's a little bit like I know you are, but what am I. He takes anything that anyone says about him, like fake news, for example's people were trying to say when he was just making out lies about Hillary Clinton and about Quanon, kind of conspiracy theories when he was running in twenty sixteen. He twisted that and used it to anything that he didn't want people to believe about him. He just called it fake news. He was the one that weaponized it.
And so now he's weaponizing the idea that the rhetoric, because even you said, Jesse, both sides have been inflating it. It actually hasn't been both sides. He's been called what he actually is, which is a convicted rapist and felon and an existential threat to democracy. Those are sort of facts, really, but his language has always been incredibly incendiary, incredibly violent.
The thing is, too, though about the fight Fight, Fight, is that there's Trump, but then there's also Trump's like literal army. What we saw on January the sixth when he incited a riot of people, armed people to invade a government building, and we do not know what would have happened to the high profile mostly democratic but not only not only Democrats, enemies of Trump who were in there if the mob had got their hands on them.
There is a literal sense of building a resistance under Trump, and a lot of Americans who would not identify as Republicans necessarily. No one knows why Thomas Crooks had twenty years old, so young, my god, but did what he did. But he is a registered Republican. But I don't know that a lot of Trump supporters consider themselves Republicans. They're Trump supporters, you know.
Just on the both sides thing. The reason that I'm cautious here because I know that in terms of violence entering political debate and Nancy Pelosi and you know, a lot of the cases were Republicans, some.
Were Democrats, like a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked a congressman a few years ago.
But with this, I did have a sense that in the moments afterwards, when it was being twisted to be about how this was Trump's fault, I just went, this is a human being who is running for president in a Democratic who just nearly by a centimeter, if his head had moved to a centimeter, would have been killed on a stage. Like I think we've got to be
careful not to blame him for the assassination attempt. And I think that there are points throughout the campaigns and points across the last eight to ten years where we can go we've stooped to a certain level. But also we have characterized Trump supporters and Trump himself as something less than Jamie.
Politics in America used to be really boring, like really boring, even with Ronald Dragan that was that wasn't a politically motivated attack in the good old days politics was boring. It's only since twenty fifteen that we've had things that were previously unimaginable, like riots in the Capitol building and people talking about hanging members of Yes.
But I've listened to both sides, left and right, and this actually isn't just about Trump. This is just broadly how we speak about people and the level of contempt that's in our voice. And remember Hillary Clinton and the deplorables. When you start representing people as less than human, when you demonize the other side to such an extent, violence seems like.
A started those chants of lock her up about Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, the Democrats, But you can't I see what Jesse is saying because the presidential debate that happened two weeks ago, and everybody obviously the story out of that was all about Biden's fitness for office, which we'll get to in a second. But the thing that actually really struck me about that is all the reports said, these men will not say hello to each other, they will not shake hands,
they won't refer to each other. That is not how politics used to be, right, It used to be like a sporting game.
But you know, let me finish myself.
It's like a sporting game where on the field you would take somebody's legs out whatever, and afterwards you shake their hands and you change shits.
And when did that change? Whole agree, And.
There is no question for me about what side in inverted commas I feel has heightened the debate. But I also think it's to do with the fact that we live in a very different time in terms of social media, and we all know that, we talk about it all the time, what the algorithm rewards, etc. It was striking to me that in the British election that we just saw, they are talking about each other with civility when they lose,
they are They're losing gracefully. And this is also Trump's fault, to be honest, because.
The Australian election the.
Reason that people talk about Trump being a threat to democracy, and some people in the aftermath of the shooting have said that such hyperbole. It isn't. Because he lost an election and he refused to get out of office. That is the definition of threatening democracy. So that's all true anyway. I want to ask Mia quickly to Jesse's point that
there's certainly not only one side here. Who's spinning. Almost immediately after this happened, senior Democrats came out straight away all what I would like to call the grown ups, and condemned the actions of the gunman, no question, called for calm, called for unity everybody from Obama to Biden to world leaders around the country. But there was a small portion of the left who went straight to work accusing the right of a conspiracy MAA, what's blueing on?
Well, if QAnon is a collection of sort of conspiracy theories held by right wingers, So overall, the beliefs of QAnon that became really big during the Trump years that the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, and the elites are all working together to bring Trump down and to abuse children, and that there's a cabal of selling children. So that's sort of what QAnon is, and that Trump
has come to overthrow all of these evil people. And what I hadn't heard about, but which has been around in the last couple of years and really showed its head after this assassination attempt is blueing on and that's the conspiracy theories held by the left. So what you might have seen over the weekend was the idea that the Trump shooting was staged to make him seem sympathetic
and powerful, which is how it's gone down. But the idea that it was just tomato sauce, and the way that the Secret Service allowed him to put his head up and pump his fist and say fight, fight, fight, Yeah, exactly, and people saying that the image was just too perfect of the upside down American flag and him with blood but still looking defiant with his strong scale and not looking scared or all the ways that you would have
thought he would look so. And this is where it is, both sides being crazy QAnon and Blue and on fighting it out and basically not believing anything that they see.
The thing.
It is not new or surprising at the moment that there are no agreed on facts about anything ever.
And I saw that everywhere. It wasn't just in tiny little niches on the internet, like it was all over my TikTok feed, all over Instagram, people whose opinion I respect saying almost immediately that they don't believe that this happened, And I just went, this is how you know, the divide just gets wider and wider and wide.
Yeah.
Because of course it also reaffirms what the QAnon people think, and a lot of Trump.
Supporters, which is that the Secret Service?
How did they miss it? People said they saw the sniper, they tried to alert police and nothing was done. How did it happen?
And they're blaming the Biden campaigns directly, So again, it just shows how far we've gone in denying the humanity of just a man.
Denying reality.
Okay, in the wake of the shooting, the US Democrats pulled their multi multi million dollar ad campaign that they're running at the minute, which attacks Trump and calls him all the things that we have established that is.
Can I ask about that it Has Trump pulled anything?
No, immediately, I'm sure it's out already. There'll be images of him bloody like that iconic even.
When the Republican Convention is about to start, and he will be hailed a hero. The religious right are saying this is proof that his presidency is ordained by God, et cetera. Anyway, let's move over to the other side, which, if we were recording this show on Friday, would have been one we would have thought was the most unusual development we'd had in a while in American politics, which
involves George Clooney. So while we're talking obviously about what the assassination attempt has done for Trump's chances, in the before the rally, many smart voices were saying that over on the other side, President Biden would likely step down on Sunday or Monday, not that he wants to. He has been very publicly digging in and saying that only
the Lord Almighty can get him to step down. But Democrats have been saying that in this case, the Lord Almighty might take the form of George Clooney, who wrote a column in The New York Times last Thursday headlined I love Joe Biden, but we need a new nominee, and in it he spoke about how he was one of the main players at a big fundraiser for Biden in June, and he said, I love Joe Biden as
a senator, as a vice president. I believe in his character, I believe in his morals, etc. But the one battle he cannot fight is the fight against time. None of us can. It's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe big fucking deal Biden of twenty ten. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of twenty twenty. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Clooney then name checked his choices. He interestingly put the name Wes More first to obviously who he thinks should get it. Let's say, from We's Moore, he says, and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitner and governors and Andy Bscher and so on and so on. Mia, Why does it matter even a little bit what George Clooney thinks about the president of the United.
States, Because there are two things that are required to win the presidency. The first is people voting for you, but the second is money to help make that happen. And the donors on both sides have incredible power, not necessarily in saying we want the candidate to be this person, but there are certain candidates that will get more money being donated to the party and other candidates who won't.
So for e then in a tap off, they're saying we're going to turn the tap off, which is understandable because if you believe that the wrong person is, you know, driving the car, you're not going to keep paying for petrol, you're going to say, well, why you're just going.
To drive the car off a cliff.
So with Joe Biden and why it could be George Clooney, there've been a lot of talks in the same way that people say, oh, Oprah should run for president, Michelle Obama should run for president, George Clooney should run for president. I don't think that's ever going to happen. But he has been a power player behind the scenes. He's good mates with Obama, and he's been a big supporter of Joe Biden and that influence because it's not just the
money that George personally donates. It's when you've got big Hollywood stars, people then pay money to go and be at those fundraisers.
That's how it works.
So they're rain makers as well as being providers of rain themselves. The position that the Democratic Party are in that's difficult is that it's all relying on what Joe Biden decides to do. And of course this weekend's changed everything. But if everyone in the Democratic Party, if the members of Congress say he needs to step down, and he doesn't, then they're screwed. They've screwed their Party. So it's like everybody's in this circle of being paralyzed because they have
to wait for it to be his decision. Now, George Clooney doesn't care, like it doesn't matter. He can say what he wants because he's a donor.
But Clooney is not just Clooney. Clooney is representative of He is so embedded in the higher up Democratic Party that he would not have written that without their endorsement, their blessing, without So basically he's being a mouthpiece for a large number of very senior Democrats.
Ye.
Now Biden has lost them. Yes, and it will be very, very hard for Biden to keep holding on. What do we think that Trump's assassination attempt does?
Though?
Imagining that Biden's getting under more pressure every minute and plans are afoot and Pelosi isn't even really backing him anymore, and Obama hasn't distanced himself from the Clooney column, then do you go, well, now, it would be disrespectful for us to do anything about anything for what a day, a week, a month, And is a change of candidate actually the best way to get the story back on you?
Yeah, they need a narrative because there's no story right now. And even we were watching this morning, Joe Biden addressed the nation the nation about what happened with Trump, and he is just so unint bying. It is more of what we've been seeing, which is this, it's just sad.
Every time he talks, it's sad.
Last week, I don't think we even talked about the fact that he mixed up the names of warring presidents, which is like we're talking about like steaks foreign policy that you just go what's going on? And over the weekend I kept thinking with Biden. What the Democrats are saying at the moment is that we would rather put a white, eighty one year old man who can't string a sentence together and mixes up names and is very uninspiring and every press conference before we would risk a
woman of color. And I know that a lot of people have a lot of analysis of Kamala, but I don't think that you can unpick but those two things.
No one's saying that except Joe Biden. He's literally he's holding his fire party and could be argued the country hostage because no one thinks that like nobody, there is nobody who is saying that he's a better chance than her, nobody within the Democratic Party.
That's why it's so fastical.
Now in terms of how it's changed what happened on Sunday in the attempt at assassination. It's good news and bad news for Biden. The good news for him personally is that it's changed the focus from him needing to step aside, and all he's trying to do is slow walk this and delay, delay, delay, until it becomes sort of too late to change candidates. So this has been very effective
for that because it would seem to be unseemly. For example, imagine if George Clooney's op ed came out tomorrow or the next day, or even at the end of this week. So all of that has been put on hold. And also it's given him the chance to present as a stately, reassuring, calming figure like whenever there's any kind of unrest. It is very good for incumbent prime ministers and presidents because everyone freaked out and they just want to be calmed.
But then he said, like he said in the first press conference, this is unheard of, and I thought this has happened in your lifetime. Joe Biden. You have seen one president JFK be assassinated. You've seen Ronald Reagan with an attempted assassination like not the right language, but on Trump, I just kept thinking that there are a few things.
If you've been to the US, something that will strike you as very different to Australia is the incredible outward display of respect for war veterans everywhere at a sporting match. If you have put your body on the line for your country. There is little that Americans respect more than that.
And that is how Trump will now be seen as a man who nearly lost his life, as a hero who nearly lost his life while fighting for America, and that is going to have an enormous impact on the rest of this campaign.
Katy Perry has released the first single from her new and it's an anthem about feminism that's made a lot of people mad. Here is the song, and we're lucky to believe it, Goddy wamb It's pretty catchy.
You'll be singing that in your head, I guarantee for the next few days. But it is the video, not the song so much that everyone's talking about.
I also have some thoughts about the song. Back continue yeah, look it was.
The video was roundly slammed across the internet after it dropped on the weekend for being a really cynical use of empty feminism to get attention and sell music at the expense of women. And there are two main reasons for this, which I'm going to unpack to describe the video itself. It starts with, you know, the very famous
image in feminism of Rosy the Riveter. It's the illustration of the woman with the red bandana in her hair and a work shirt and she's got her bicep, and it shows Katie dressed like a sexy version of her on a building site with a whole lot of other sexy construction workers in teeny tiny hot pants and bikini tops.
Really see every day on the street, yeah, work boots.
Yes, So they sort of dance for a while and she's got this bikini top on that's in stars and stripes, and then an anvil comes from the sky like kind of in a road run a cartoon. It sort of squashes Katie Perry, and it's like, this is the reset, and so it's going to be.
Like, well, what's the world like after it?
Oh?
Okay, So it was tongue in cheek sati hah.
But then the world afterwards is kind of just the same. But like you know, sexy women including Katy Perry, like in bikini and dressed like a biomechanical.
Horse that sex toys, that was driving.
They were sex toys. They were agues.
So the two main criticisms that she's using this empty feminism in this cynical weight attempt to get attention.
The first is that the sthetic of the video is.
Very much focused literally on the tits and ass of Katie Perry and the other women in the video, and she says that that's ironic because they are making fun of the male gaze while weirdly playing up to the
male gaze though. And the second thing is that the song was co produced and co written by doctor Luke, and he is a hit maker for a music producer who was accused of sexual assault by his former protege Kesha, which he denied, and Kesh's lawsuit claimed that doctor Luke drugged and raped her on two occasions, made threats against her and her family, and called her derogatory names. She also said this the way he spoke about her trigger and eating disorder.
The case was.
Eventually settled with no conviction or admission of guilt on his part. But Katie Perry's decision to work with him on this song about female empowerment, which he co wrote and produced, is an interesting one, and she obviously predicted the blowback about this because yesterday she released a defense of the video as being satire that was actually taken on set while the video itself was being filmed.
Here's what she had to say, girl Boss, shit, you can do it. You go girl, you were born to shine, and.
We're kind of just having fun being a bit sarcastic with it. It's very slapstick, very on the nose, and with this set, it's like, oh, we're not about the malegates, but we really are about the male gaze, and we're really overplaying it and on the nose because I'm about to get smashed, which is like a reset, a reset for me and a reset from my idea of feminine divine. And it's a whole different world we go to after.
This, except it's not really just a few sort of comments that are indicative from out louders and others. So you're dressed like every male fantasy. How is this empowering for women. You're saying, as a woman, you need to have a good body and show all your skin to be strong. This is so nineties. What about image for young girls everyone where? Don't you have a daughter? Is this what you aspire her to be? Someone else said a woman's empowerment song produced by doctor Luke call Alanis Morissette.
Because this shit is ironic, and then someone else saying is supposed to make us feel empowered. Nothing says female empowerment like holding a bedazzle drill. This is the most surface level fake feminist shit I've seen in a long time.
One of my favorite comments on that post was, for God's sake, you haven't even put the drill bits in correctly.
Jesse, How did you feel when I sent the video to you over the weekend.
I don't get it. I keep watching it over and over again. Then I was like, I need to know who wrote this, because I believe chat GPT wrote this. It's like you put in the video Feminist add them twenty twenty four.
Well, doctor Luke, who was accused of sexual assault, wrote this, but.
It was so incoherent and bizarre that I was like it it looks like a I has done this, But then I looked at the six riders, four of which a men, which is and the fact it took six riders is kind of saying a lot. But even the lyrics right are like it's a woman's world, which is
a meaningless statement. And in a US context when abortion laws are being wound back, I think we probably require something point here if we're going to be doing a feminist anthem, it's being an activist without wanting to upset anyone and say anything remotely controversial. And then she says we ain't going away, and it's like where would women go? Like women are here, therefore feminism they'refore tits Like I
don't understand. Also, yeah, what point we're making? So I've rewatched it like one hundred times, and what I am understanding is that feminism is an aesthetic I think, which is rosy the riveter, but also in a way it's perfect because it is an accurate reflection of the mess
that is the current state of feminism. It is a woman with boobs and a male gaze, holding a vibrator and a tool belt and trying to say, Jesse, is there something wrong with because I think she kind of loves that this is where feminism is at.
Because I think when she said that bit about it's not about the malgaze, but it is about the malgaze is what we often talk about when you're on Instagram or whatever and there's a picture of somebody saying blah blah empowerment, but they're in their bikini with their bum. That's what she's talking.
About, right, Is she critiquing that or I.
Think she's critiquing that. I think that's what she thinks she's doing.
But it's not critique if you're part of it, like law is it? To me?
It's like, you know when people they do it less now because they get called out, But you know when people post us a thirsty photo of like themselves in a bikini from behind with their bum and it's like just appreciating the beautiful sunset and tranquility and.
Feel so grateful for this holiday I've been able to.
It's like, you just want us to look at your bum, which is fine, but you don't have to dress it up in some message of empowerment or inspiration.
But you're just being thirsty.
Because we all live in a world where being validated for looking hot is power.
Here's my question about Katie Perry. Right, she was one. It's enormous, right If you think about it, you think about kiss the Girl, obviously, but then you think about raw, you think about firework, you think about Last Friday Night, and all those that are so ingrained in our culture that we could all sing them at any time. She was a massive, massive deal. She was multi platinum selling. She sold all the rights to her music last year
for two hundred and twenty five million dollars or something. Right, So, Katy Perry was a big deal. Now she hasn't really been a big deal for pretty much a decade. She's been releasing music, but it's not really cutting through in the same way. She is now thirty nine, she has had a kid. She is very much coming back with this album as the same Katy Perry as before. Because one of the things to note about this is it's not like Katie Perry wasn't playing with this kind of
imagery before. She definitely was, Like who could forget the shooting whipped cream out of your boobs and all that kind of stuff and all the suggestive lollipop licking and things. What do you do if you're her, right, what do you do if you are a female pop star and we know how age is that industry is? We know that every five minutes there's a Sabrina Carpenter, or there's
a Camilla Cabello, or there's a Charlie XCX. Pop music is obsessed with young, more dominated by women than it's ever been at any other time in history, which is great, but still mostly young, with a few like elder outliers, and I guess we could probably call Taylor Swift an elder these station a mid thirties. What are you supposed to do? Like, how does Katie Perry play that game? Because I saw a lot of comments on this going so sad. Is she having a midlife crisis? Isn't she too old for this?
Now?
Da da da da da? What does a Katie Perry do?
I don't think it's the getting a gear off that is particularly surprising, because I mean, Beyonce was naked on a horse, and apart from me, everyone seemed to be cool with that. Right, It's not the getting the gear off, it's getting the gear off and saying you're doing it in the service of feminism and empowerment. When actually, you've just had quite the body transformation, and you want to stay relevant, and the way to stay relevant in our culture is to be considered hot.
But the beauty that oppress all of us.
And she's gone back to doctor Luke, and as well as obviously what you said about kesher, he is sort of who was with her when her career launched, right, and then she separated herself from him. So that signals to me, I want to go back to ten years ago Katie Perry, when I made Bangers, when I made absolute bangers. What Katie Perry probably isn't nailing is evolution.
And this looked like a single that could have been on the same album maybe as Firework and Raw and all of those, and the music industry and the culture has evolved enormously, and even her look is almost exactly the same. And she said, I think it's it used to be. In her Twitter bio it said artist activist conscious, and she's decided that she's going to do purposeful pop. And to me, since she decided that.
But that's just also not true, like you can call it purposeful pop. The only song and I agree she's had bangers like Firework and all of those things, the only one that was even mildly purposeful or transgressive was I kissed a Girl and I liked it. And we've sort of seen not really any evidence that she actually ever was queer. Maybe she was, Maybe she was, and that's not really any of our business. But that's the only thing that she's done back then, I kiss a
Girl and I liked it. That's in any way transgressive or purposeful or kind of empowering.
What that song did was ingratiate her with the LGBT community who have really like followed her entire career, and there's a theory that this was a real and you can see that there's a lot of kind of LGBT.
That's what Again, it feels really tokenistic, like there's just inexplicably a cutaway shot of two guys kissing. That doesn't I mean, Madonna did that many many decades ago in a way that felt authentic. People know when they're being manipulated, they get it.
And we always been manipulated by pops. We are it is.
That's just not a sophisticated enough for tim. I quite like the video. It's an overach do.
I watched it several times because I'm like my candy, it's fun, like I like, it's fun right, pretty colors. I cannot forgive the doctor luke bit. I just think that that is the biggest mistake, is that she's talking a lot about the feminine, divine and all that. Then work with an all female team, do something like that that would be more interesting, but.
Have four men, right, you know what?
It feels like a little bit because in that clip that you played before me or where she's talking about how it's satire in her mind, I think she's trying to be like that ironic gen Z thing of like girl bossing, you know how it's like been a bit reclaimed, you know how, like Emily Verner, my our friend and co host on the pod, will like post pictures of herself on a big workday going girl bossing, and it's kind of like slightly ironic because we all know that
girls feminism is on the nose and it's gone, but they're like claiming it back. And I think she's trying to do all those things, but it just somehow feels cheesy off because the proof of this will be in is it going to be a hit?
This song?
And I feel like it might be even more derivative the girl Boss thing. But this feels like Barbie. It's looked at the success of Barbie and gone, we can use a Barbie doll as a signal of empowerment. And the song almost feels like a chat GPT rendition of.
The Barbie message We're all the President's girl, Yeah yeah, and the thing about how hard our lives are and blah blah blah.
It feels like she's taken that and gone, Okay, this is a cultural moment. I'm going to try and go with that, But it doesn't have the same depth or grit to it. It hasn't landed.
I agree, and I think, look, I'm just going to say the quiet part out loud. Her body looks very different to the way that it used to, and I think she's really feeling a lot of validation based on how her body looks like. We saw some photos of her appearing at fashion Week last week or the week before, and she was wearing some panty hose or some tights that were all ladded nothing and an open, full length
like fur coat. Now, Katie Perry, I would challenge you a little bit on the fact that she's always done like the whipped cream out of the bra and stuff, but in a very kind of fun way, Like remember she would go to the met gala dress like a Hamburger, or like she was very much in dress, very ott, but not as body con and not as body revealing as she has been in this new iteration of herself
where her body does look very, very different. And again she's part of the game that we all are forced to play in terms of beauty standards and what is rewarded in our culture. But I think where people are getting their hackles up is that she is exploiting that and pretending that it's for every woman when it's actually.
Just for her.
One thing that it's important to note is the like the glee with which people leap on this in some places, and how it descends into it like really disparaging, misogynistic, nasty commentary about her personally instead of recognizing that, as you said whole, it's really hard to reinvent yourself and be a woman in the entertainment industry at any age, but particularly as you hit forty and beyond.
Yeah, and I agree with the criticism, and obviously this is an album it'd warrants review, the culture is going to be talking about it. But I read one that was kind of mocking her for being an American Idol judge, which I thought was kind of a low blow. And she's a new mum, and she's Orlando Bloom's wife, and the tone which was applied to it, I just sort of went, do we talk about men in the same way or is this a little bit of fun that we have with a thirty nine year old woman who
is clearly trying exactly there are men? Yeah, Like I reckon that there's been more written about Katy Perry's attempt to, you know, I don't know, make feminism sexy than there has been about doctor Luke. Like doctor Luke is he gets the odd article?
Oh no, there was a lot written about him at the time. There honestly was. That's why people are so surprised. It's not like that was a small story that flew. No.
But I think that men who do much worse. This is a career misstep. This isn't a crime.
Oh yeah, of course. I don't think anyone's prosecuted. You just need to go to prison, let's be clear.
But I think it's really just reflective of that disconnect between how people are smarter than that, Like, you can't just feed people one thing and call it another and expect them to buy it. So I hate the term calling out, but I think people are just drawing attention to the contradiction here, and even though she's trying to own it and say it's satire.
Oh, it's a little bit tricky.
Clara and I actually did an episode on Canceled recently about Katy Perry about her She's got like a weird feud with Taylor Swift that happened for a few years, this awkward transition to purposeful pop that we've touched on, the regrets about her early music. She has said that she would phrase I kissed a girl very.
Different now it hasn't aged, It hasn't.
Actually aged that well, and a highly publicized court case. To listen to that, there is a link in our show notes.
I think it's hard being a female pop star, Oh so hard. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we drop new segments of Momma Mia out Loud just for Momma Mia subscribers. Follow the link in the show notes to get your daily dose of out Loud and a big Thank you to all our current subscribers.
We woke up to the news this morning that Shannondohity, aged fifty three, died after a decade long battle with breast cancer, and despite her illness, her husband made her suffer until the very end. Shannondohity is best known for her roles in nine O two one zero and Charmed, and in twenty fifteen, in her early forties, she was
diagnosed with breast cancer. Over the years, she documented a lot of her experience with treatment, from surgery to radiation, very publicly, and we knew that her cancer had spread. Just last year, she launched a podcast where she revealed that when she went into surgery to remove her brain tumor, it was just after she'd discovered that her husband was cheating on her.
I had brain surgery in twenty twenty three as well, and I went in to that surgery early in the morning, and I went in after I found out that, you know, my marriage was essentially over, that my husband had been carrying on an affair for two years.
She had been with kurt Iswarienko for fourteen years. When she discovered he'd been having a two year affair. She was heartbroken and filed for divorce in April twenty twenty three, but more than a year on it still hadn't been finalized. She wanted spousal support and claimed in court documents that she was trying to pay for all this treatment while he was on what sounds like their plane with another woman, going around the world at Gucci, spending money on jewelry.
I had no idea about this story. I knew she was unwell, but I had no idea.
In the court documents, she said, it is abundantly clear to me that Kurt is intentionally delaying settlement in hopes that I will not survive the divorce proceedings. It is simply not right that Kurt be permitted to prolong our divorce in hopes that I die before he is required to pay me. Oh my God, while he continues to live his life and shirk his responsibilities to his dying
wife of more than eleven years. Doherty was candid in her podcast Let's Be Clear with Shannon Doherty, and even had a rule for her funeral, Holly, What were her wishes?
She spoke on one of her podcasts about exactly how she wanted to be remembered and what she wanted to do with her money, and what she wanted to do with her funeral, And she says she wanted her guest list to be on the shorter side.
And there's a lot of people that I think would show up that I don't want there, Like I don't want them there because the reasons for showing up aren't necessarily the best reasons, Like they don't really like me, And you know, if they have their reasons, and good for them, but they don't actually really like me enough to show it to my funeral. But they will because it's the politically correct thing to do, and they don't want to look bad. I kind of want to take
that pressure off of them. And I want my funeral to be like a love fest. I don't want people to be crying or people to want people to privately being like thank god that bitch is dead now, you know, bye bye bitch, right, Like those are the things I don't want.
Oh, it sounds like this podcast was like the full Burn book.
Well, because the thing is about Shannon Doherty is that if you were obsessed with that era of TV, so Beverly Hills nine o two or no Charmed. She was a constant in the tabloids in those days for being and I'm just going to say it because I'm not saying that this is what she was. This is her reputation and what the tabloids decided she was, because you know how much we.
Like to cast a role.
She was a bitch. She was the one who the story went, was difficult with all the co stars, difficult with Jason Priestley left that show on Charmed, difficult with Alissa Milano left that show. So she's always been kind of portrayed, rightly or wrongly, absolutely as being like a woman who speaks her mind, wasn't afraid to make enemies, said what she said, they go. And then what has happened, obviously is that she has been very public about how
sick she's been for a long time. When it was announced that she passed over the weekend, a lot of those people, including Alisa Milano, have released statements saying how sorry they are, as they should and as they would right. What's interesting to me about the idea of saying so clearly, don't pretend you're sad when I'm gone, is a really interesting one, because if you've always lived your life as
being very straightforward about like, don't bullshit me. You know, I'm not afraid to call out bad behavior if I see it, or even behave badly if I am feeling it. Don't pretend that I'm a saint when I'm gone. Don't pretend that we loved each other when we didn't. Don't
pretend if you're my husband. And I mean, their divorce was one of the most acrimonious I can remember in Hollywood in that when they split, Doherty's agent released a statement saying, if you want more details, ask his agent because they're intimately involved, basically saying that he was having an affair with his agent. And so it's kind of interesting and I think worthy of respect that she's kind of saying she's a woman who knew that her mortality was finite. She was a woman who knew that the
end was close. The kind of people she wanted to be around her, despite all the rumors that she was difficult to work with. Her co host on her podcast was Holly Marie Coombs, who was the other person on Charmed. It was a show about three, which is if you weren't familiar with it, and it was massive, massive, massive in the naughties for a while they main friends, stayed friends.
Talk sometimes about the Milano stuffed but obviously she didn't suffer fools, and she's saying, don't pretend just now I'm gone.
A celebrity death is so loaded because there's an expectation that everyone who ever knew you or crossed paths with you will make a statement, and if they don't, what's wrong Exactly, So even the funeral would be about showing face, Like she's saying, you know, something that would absolutely be true,
which is it? A Lissa Milano would probably be expected and probably be advised by her agent that she show up as a sign of respect, even though they'd had this massive falling out, whereas in ordinary people's lives we kind of just let that stuff lie. But because it was also public for her, I don't.
No, don't people go to like the family funerals of relatives they can't stand?
Yes, they do. And it's really interesting in that the episode of mid I did with Jackie Bailey, who is a funeral celebrant. She said that one of the most complicated things often about funerals, obviously is dealing with the
family politics. And what people can and can't put aside, and also the idea of your loved one after they've gone being like a different person than the one that you were with, so you suddenly can kind of imagine that your relationship was different to how it was, or she was saying how the cause of a lot of tension in those final when a death is expected, in those final months, week's days, is We're going to set everything right in this very short period of time and
finally have that conversation that I've always been having in my head with you, or set this relationship on a path that I always truly believe it should be on when actually a person who is dying is the same person as they were when they're alive, and that your relationship with them is going to be as complicated as it always was. Like a lot of things we like to see an absolute binary of, like is her ex
husband sad or is he happy? Like I'm sure that his feelings about what's happened over the past, however long, are very complicated too.
Well, he could have handled things differently. I mean, that's still going through the courts. But what she said was chilling to me about his slow walking this so that he doesn't have to pay me because he knows that I've got a very limited life expectancy, and his refusal to do that means that the time I have left will be awful. I can't have the comforts and any sort of security.
This reminded me of an article I read in The Guardian years ago which was all about men who leave the terminally ill wives, and it said that the amount of marriages that end you to terminal illness a relatively small unlikely that your partner will leave you, I think at six percent, But when you interrogate that six percent,
it is almost always the man who leaves. The reason, they think, is a lot to do with gender division within a household and the expectation that you clean, that you provide, that you cook, and that you caretake the care taking position. Not that it comes more naturally, but
maybe it's more expected for women. So there were all these really heartbreaking stories of people remember ring, you know, their mum and dad, and how their dad was often very good, and it was saying that there's this thing about men wanting to fix a problem, but when the terminal diagnosis came in, they totally emotionally checked out, which I just thought was so so tragic. And also she'd had cancer for a long time before this affair had started, and I wondered the impact of that.
I interviewed a woman called Rebecca Wolf, who's a writer. She had four.
Children and had been with her husband for a really long time and they were about to get divorced. It had been a pretty unhappy marriage the last few years, and it had been emotionally abusive from her point of view, and it was just awful and she was getting out.
And then he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a limited amount of time to live, and she talked about how incredibly complicated that was, and she didn't, you know, obviously all their plans to split up were put on hold and people hadn't really known about it, and she nursed him until he died. But she then had very complicated feelings.
After his death.
She absolutely grieved, but it was different to the way everyone thought she was grieving, which is it of someone who was still with him and planning to be with him into the future, and who'd lost a future. She hadn't she'd lost her past, but she hadn't lost her future and we'll put a link in the show notes. It was an amazing interview to listen to. But what do you do if you're a Lissa Milano on this day? I mean, has she released?
Yes, she hasn't, And I actually think her statement's great, she said. And some people were rolling their rise of me like she shouldn't have released a statement, But I think that's tough. She said. It's no secret that Shannon and I had a complicated relationship, but at its core with someone I deeply respected and was in awe of. She was a talented actress, beloved by many, and the world is less without her. My condolence is to all
who loved her. I think that's a great statement. I mean, I think, yeah, it's not about you when somebody else passes. And I think that if she hadn't a released statement, everybody would have looked because there is nothing we love more than a female feud in averted commas. So the Milano Doherty feud is in the pop culture canon of you know, co stars at war that we so buy into.
I don't know, I think they we'll probably look back at Shannon Doherty, not in that way where we suddenly have to erase anything that's complicated about a person when they're gone. But in a way, what a gift to make a podcast kind of and document this final battle a cliched language, but this experience that is relatively common. And also to be so upfront about who you are.
I mean, maybe she's not, you know, the easiest person to work with, get along with whatever, but that doesn't mean that, as Milano's said here, that a lot of people will be devastated by her passing. I say veil, and I also say go and watch Beverly Hills nine o two one. It's one of the greatest shows ever made.
Out louders, If you feel like lifting spirits, well, may I suggest that you listen to our subscriber episode on a Family Affair, which stars Zac Efron and Nicole Goodman. People have listened to it have a lot of thoughts. I don't agree, so many thoughts, a lot of things we said. They think that we should have focused on other things more. They do being very cryptic, But please go and listen and jump in the outlauders and let
us know what you thought about it, what your takeaways were. Overwhelmingly, just say the Outlouder's not given it five stars, not five, and we also were not giving it three or four or five stars. So h you can listen to that via the link in our show notes.
A very big thank you our friends for being here with us on this enormous news Monday.
We were so loud, news cycles drunk and it needs to go home.
I know there are like five other things we could have talked about today too, but it's like we can't crumb it all into our show. This episode was produced by Emiline Gazillas. The assistant producer is Chylie Blackman. The audio production from Lea Porgees. And we'll be back in your ears tomorrow and then with more news and news on Wednesday Byye.
Shout out to any Mum of me is subscribers listening. If you love the show and want to support us as well, subscribing to Mama Maya is the very best way to do so. There is a link in the episode description