You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Monday, the sixteenth of February.
I'm Olly Wayne, right, I'm Jesse Stevens.
And I'm Amelia Lester.
And here's what's on our agenda for today. Wuthering Heights and the return of the Bad.
Man looks Maxing Are we really doing this now?
And Harper Beckham, Celeste Barber and the question of how to handle very tricky relationship moments on social media.
But first, in case you missed it, did we just see another shit skirt flying off a glass.
Cliff in Australian politics?
Or is what just happened in the Liberal Party a little more complicated than that?
Quick catch up?
And don't worry, we are going to keep it brief. I know that everybody's tolerance of a discussion about politics like, oh god, we are going to keep it brief. But last Friday, the worst kept secret and Australian politics played out exactly as predicted. The first female leader of the Liberal Party, Susan Lee, lost her job.
She was rolled, as.
We so charmingly put it in Australia by Angus Taylor, a man who's been stalking that job for about a decade. She served nine months in the role, and no one who's been watching political headlines lately could really argue that she did a very good job. Although my shit skirt analogy is just a refresher for anyone who doesn't remember. This is that when something political is in a terrible mess.
So let's imagine, for example, that your party just lost the election in a landslide and your primary vote is in collapse and you've been chased out of every city in the country, as the Liberal Party has. Sometimes people go, oh, this is a good idea, a good time to put a woman in charge.
Yes.
So the president for that, of course is Theresa May inheriting Brexit right, and so you were just like she was given this pile of little all shit and told to deal with it, and there was no solution.
The idea is that you're dealing with You're trying to clean up this mess, and whichever way you do it, everyone in the gallery is just going, no, you need a stay and remover on that.
No, a bit assault model, get it out, vinegars. What you need you're doing it wrong.
And you're just rubbing it in and needs to be set on fire.
Are you going to explain why it was not in fact a shitskirt? She didn't do a good child.
So she didn't do a good job. Poles are in the toilet. Toilet not another analogy, poles are and toy.
But the argument about the shitskirt and the glass cliff is whether or not anybody could have really done a good job in this particular position.
She didn't get out the sad.
She really didn't get out the sad, and everyone else is like, I've got the side anyway. So after that landslide election loss, the Libs had a big argument about what they had to do. Either try and win back the cities that they lost to the Teals or go after the votes that they're losing to one nation in the regions. And Lee managed to do neither of those things.
And the polling on the Liberal Party and now in the toilet, as I discussed there sometimes party the Nationals are on this on off love affair and they are now behind one nation in the polls. And this is quite the feat because the Liberals historically in Australia have been in power more than any other party. There used to be the default government pretty much and now they are third in the polls.
In the last election, the Liberal Party which lost abysmally, they had thirty two percent of preference votes and then a recent poll this was cited in Jaquelin Malee's column over the weekend, said that they're down to about eighteen percent of the primary vote. So whether it was a man or a woman, with those polling numbers, the party had no choice but to replace that leader.
Has that ever happened before that one nation has overtaken the Libs?
No?
No, no, they are on the ascent at the moment. Step in Angus Taylor, who is a Liberal leader from Central Casting.
Yeah. First, starting with his name, Angus Taylor.
Yeah, he could not be more of an Anglo liberal white guy if he tried. I did hear some people talking on Friday about like he looks like a leader, which is code for.
Would be the penis.
Yeah, the penis and the fact like he's from a farming family, but he went to a very posh private boys school.
He was a Rhodes scholar.
He's that guy business da da da, He's the liberal guy and he has stepped in, and of course he knows how to get the shit out of the skirt.
What do we think, friends, So is he going to take it further to the right and try and get the one nation vote or do you think he's going to like double down on sort of more old school. Ye.
I think he's going to go a little bit more right, and he's definitely from the conservative faction of the party. But in saying that, he's also like, I want to bring us back to John Howard era politics. And it's an interesting strategy given that the Liberal Party have lost women and they've lost young people. So to put in a conservative guy who doesn't particularly appeal to either of those demographics, as far as I can tell, is an
interesting play. He's the guy, and I felt like this was important context.
I know what you're gonna tell us, and this is maybe the best political story everybody pay attention again.
Twenty nineteen Facebook status by Angus Taylor about something great that he was doing in politics, and then there was a comment. It was his official Liberal Party account, and then there was a comment underneath that said fantastic, great move, well done, Angus, And that was from Angus Taylor MP, and he had commented on his own Facebook page but like forgotten to change the name. So he's all of us trying to.
Like drum up a bit of hype latest program exactly.
It's incredibly relatable. But he's that guy, and he has had like a very long list of faux pas. I suppose he was behind a lot of the very unpopular policies that came forward in the last election, Like he was the guy behind the stopping work from home policy, right, But.
That's not a faux part.
Faux part makes it sound like he used the wrong fork. This is like what he did that.
With policy, just unpopular policies. He was very against the Stage three tax cards. He's very much like when you look back, it's not like he's been a particularly popular politician by any means.
But his name is Angus Taylor, and he's a man, and he comes from a farm. Yes, stop asking questions.
He's very ambitious.
The thing is is that Susan Lee, who has been gracious in stepping away, has left them with the shit skirt, which I respect because she's going to quit. She's not just stepping away from being the leader. She's actually quitting and what that means is they have to have a by election in her seat, and what that means is that they are going to be tested against one nation because she's a regional southern New South Wales seat. They're going to be tested against one nation for the first
time since the polls shifted. And so in a way that is Susan Lee's very past agg way of going well, fuck you, because I'm sure they would rather not be fine an election that quickly in that seat.
But Susan Lee is gone nut. I'm We're handing you the sad and I am walking away.
Could we say she flounced?
She floxd.
Wuthering Heights, the brand new film directed by Emerald Fanell, starring our very own Margot Robbie and Jacob Lordie, smashed the box office in its opening weekend. But despite the hole that the film has on our culture right now, from the press tour to the fashion to the very thorny discussions about sex and power and the enduring appeal
of a very bad man, reviews are mixed. I'm not sure if I have ever seen audience as this divided in terms of like even critics going from one star to five stars, right.
You almost don't know how the reviewer is going to go.
It's a Veggiem movie.
It is.
It movie?
Yes, So we read Nicki Gemmel's Color in the Australian. She gave it a five star rating, saying she inhaled it with her groin was how she put it, her first five star rating ever for a film, whereas the Independent gave it one star. They said Emerald Fanell's astonishingly bad adaptation is like a limp Mills and Boon. Some say the chemistry is outstanding, others say none exists between
Robbie and a Lordie. Another says Emily Bronte rolling in her grave, while another says it's Fanelle's best film to date. Now most people listening probably haven't seen it, right, It only just came out. But what we did want to talk about is the cultural phenomenon of this nineteenth century classic and the re emergence of the bad man Holly. Should you and I feel ashamed of how much we loved it with our groin?
We should?
Definitely.
We are very bad feminists today, Jesse and I both on the record, I believe of saying that we loved it, I did love it. And I'm also on the record of saying that I also love the book.
The thing that's really.
Less controversially, well except if you've read the book.
It's actually not less controversial because the book. People that are doing a lot of huffing about bad men after watching that and they're like, but he's mean and that relationship looks unhealthy, and I'm like, maybe you should read the book, like it gets a whole lot worse than that.
Not that that's a defense, but.
I think it's really interesting because there's no question the way that this movie has been marketed. One of the ways that Fanelle chose to market it was with the words the greatest love story of our time. Right now, I don't think that's ever what the book was. It's never what it was pretending to be. It's a really dark, twisted exploration.
Of all kinds of seedy things, but it.
Has this obsessive relationship at the heart of it. And what's really interesting is seeing people grappling with that in our culture now, where we have to absolutely unrightly in many ways disclose that we are against relationships that don't look healthy. There is nothing healthy about this relationship other than their sex. Life, which looks very healthy in the back of a carriage or up against a rock.
But apart from.
That, there's no question that Heathcliff is the archetype, possibly one of the original archetypes, along with other Bronte heroes like mister Rochester. For the brooding, tortured bad man.
Yes that women, there was almost a tongue in cheek lusting after him that I felt like the whole theater was almost laughing at because he was yeah, yeah, Amelia, are you a five star review?
No, I hated it, And I want to be clear that I'm not coming from a puritanical place, because I did enjoy Saltburn, which is for Nell's second feature and which was extremely sexual in many ways. What I object to in this is that this movie is not sexy, and yet I'm being constant told about how sexy it is.
Okay, but it's just a personal choice, Like I thought it was really sexy.
Do you think?
And I wonder if this is what it comes down to, is whether or not you thought, because I think it's very female gaze, and it's whether or not you find Jacob Alordie to be a sex god or not, or whether.
I find like raw eggs in sheets to be sexy. I think that's hard to clean up, and.
About that so much about clean.
And that's an issue because I've got enough laundry already. The problem is that she called it the greatest loster of our time. You know, I don't think that this book was ever meant to be a great cluster. It's an exploration of how love can yes be toxic, to use a very modern term. And it's also about race and sex and class and all these topics that basically got pushed aside on trauma just so that we could have a lot of shots of there's so much food
in this movie that I'm meant to find sexy. The egg, the jelly, Margot, Robbie puts her finger in some jelly. There's a lot of jelly happening. It just made me long for baby girl. Remember Nicole Kidman's the movie where she had the affair with the younger man and he drank a glass of milk. That's sexy. Don't ask me why, but that was sexy.
Yeah, I do think that was I do think that was sexy.
But I have a theory about why this has been such a cultural phenomenon, right, because I mean because we've been forced to consume it like at all times for the last three months. Margot Robbie seems capable of something that just about no other actor can do, which is that she inspires a movement like Barber was a movement. This is true from fashion to conversations to everything. You just go this is what every movie whish is they could be.
She's incredibly smart about so clever projects, directors, scripts like because the thing is about this is it's the Emerald finale of it all right. Yeah, Saltburn was controversial, Saltburn was over the top, Saltburn was silly. This takes all
those themes and turns up to eleven. Then you add in ready made culture war argument really about whether or not this is a love story, whether or not it's good role modeling, whether or not we should have adapted a classic in the first place, And you have got an instant vibe.
Well you've got another layer too, which is she just also had to look at the fact that women are reading smart in huge numbers, and that's just a ready made audience for it too.
But I wonder too.
My theory is that in a world that is being taken over by AI. So design to video, to ads, to fonts, to films to whatever, there's a almost like a banality to a lot of it that is all starting to look the same. They say that AI generated means that all writing starts to sound the same. That sort of thing in order to cut through the genre that seems to be as sending right now is absurdist.
So the best comedy show I saw last year was the most absurd, ridiculous, unexplainable thing and had nudity in it, and it was whatever happened in that room could never be replicated again. And I was like, oh, this is the anti AI revoultion Gary Starr and he does this Penguin classic show. It's coming back to Australia. You have to see it, and it's gone around the world and it's won every award right, And I just think that watching this I went there is something so ridiculous, over the top.
Edgy, weird.
Even kinks like AI can't predict the weirdness of human kinks, right, And so I think that that's part of what we're just loving. And it's Marty Supreme falls into the same category, which is just this weirdness that a robot could never.
I think it's like, if I'm going to leave my house and I'm going to go sit in a theater.
For too long, let's be on the record with that.
Like my main complaint if I have a complaint about this movie is it could have easily shaved past for an hour and nobody it would have been fine. But if I'm going to go and do that, what I want is an experience. And now I want a good time. And I got that with Marty Supreme. I was in that movie theater like kind of it wasn't a perfect film, but I was gasping.
I was like, no way, it was unpredictability and this was the same.
I got a really good time in that room. I just want to go back to Bad Men for a moment because I'm seeing a lot of hot takes. I think we might be putting on on Mamma Mia today about how we all need to remember that in real life Heathcliffs are bad and they are right, there is no question right. The archetype of that man who loves you so much he will do anything for you, you know, including hurt everyone in the world, including you, and himself
and everything in fantasy is great. In reality, as those of us who've had the misfortune to experience it is toxic, controlling, awful, veers into violence, not to be encouraged. But let's give women the respect of knowing that they're smart and they know the difference between fantasy and reality. I think we've been talking heats lately about obsessive fandoms, like around heated rivalry,
around pop music, around all kinds of things. There's something about female desire that can be very powerful and obsessive, and we're always looking for like safe places to put that. And I think it's okay for us to lose ourselves in a heathcliff for a couple of hours and for it not to mean that we really wish that we are in a terrible, controlling, abusive relationship.
I think we've got that.
And when women are making their own art, which this is written by a woman, produced by a woman, directed by a woman, and it's playing with these dangerous tropes, I think that's fine.
Do you think it's also a bit of a backlash to a trend we've had over films, certainly since Me Too, but longer than that, which are didactic in a lot of ways about how our relationships ought to look feminist overtones, which is great, but the pendulum seems to have swung a little bit and gone, what if we were to just lean into the naughtiness which we saw with fifty Shades?
That absolutely worked, how provocative it is, and I think that's why there were moments where everyone was laughing because they were just like, we know that this isn't good for us, but can't we just look at it and think that Jacob a Lordie looks hot with his shirt?
Laughter was more we were embarrassed because there's so much repression in that movie. The movie is about like subliminating sexual desire into things like egg yolks or aspect, you know. And I think that we're embarrassed on behalf of the people in it because we know how hard they were pressing their true emotions.
Was part of why you didn't like it that you felt as though it was like dangerous for women, Like did you think that it was.
A bit yeah, a bit, yeah, Yeah, I think that's true. I thought it was a little bit like you will find this sexy, and you know what's not sexy? People telling you incessantly that something is sexy like that problem.
Also women on a homogeneous blop like some of us will find that very sexy and some of us will not. Some of us will be thinking about a lordie lifting her up by a corset strings, and some of us will not.
I also couldn't understand what he was saying a lot of the time. It was to being and I was like, I'm sorry, Jacob, what what did you just say?
Maybe this part of why this is my movie is that Yorkshire accent.
Oh my god, it was really good. I just think it's like these heroes pop up.
We know they're bad for us, Edward and Twilight, Noah in the notebook, they'll be think pieces about like girls.
Remember I'm working.
You don't want a heath click, and.
That's fine, you actually do not want to hear I will be on the record, but it's okay. Lose yourself in it for a couple of hours.
I completely agree.
Loved it.
If you have seen Weathering heights, or if you were wondering whether or not to see Weathering heights, we are going to go I'm not going to say deep I was.
We're going to say deep in amiliates like don't. I'm like, you're fair.
We are going to go in depth into Wathering Heights with Mia tomorrow, Amelia and myself. Amelia didn't like it, me who loved it. But also a bit of behind the scenes gossip, a bit of industry stuff, a bit of.
Margo, a bit of all that stuff.
All on tomorrow's subscriber episode stilled by our very own ma of Friedman.
After the break, the substack about beauty routines, which has me thinking that none of this is fun anymore. I like reading fashion substacks by people with better taste than me so I can figure out what to wear. It's kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. And one of them is called Magazine, and it's written by a woman named Laura Riley. Now I looked up her age before this, but she doesn't disclose her age, which gosh, I wish
I didn't disclose my age. But it's very much out there if you'd like to find out what it is anyway, If I had to guess, she's probably in her late thirties, and she wrote something recently which kind of depressed me and made me never want to read about people's skincare
routines again. She wrote the following in January alone. I've done botox, m face IPL scheduled moxy broadband, seeing my orthodontist, cardiologist, gp obg wyn, ophthalmologist, dermatologists, plastic surgeon, trainer, and Polate's instructor. I've renewed my health insurance and MEDSPA membership. I don't know what a medspy ownership is. I've drawn blood three times, that's too many times to draw blood and given two urine samples. My current skincare routine is six to eight steps.
My daily supplement stack is seventeen pills, twenty on mondays and a peptide. And I've engaged at least five high tech tools from my home device library. I've tracked every meal macro and relevant micro nutrient. I still do all of this macro macro. It's not the question I had for breakfast this morning. All of this, and I consider myself pretty healthy and not hypochondriac.
So, my god, I just does she have a job. I just thought, is this.
What we're doing now?
Holly?
How are you going? Are you doing this? Well?
It is what we're doing now.
It's not what I'm doing now, but I've I'm doing well if I've got like a serum and a moisturizer, and I might look at me go, but this is everywhere I'm looking. At the moment, I was on my Instagram. On my Instagram Emma Greed, Who's somebody I like to follow. She is, you know, the Skim's Boss lady, who's like the archetype of the girl boss of the moment. She's just got had a book out about it and stuff.
She posted her regimen, like just her supplements regiment. She takes sixteen different pills every day, some of the morning, some for night, which is something I'm suddenly seeing everywhere. Yeah, the discussion about it and then all these different pills and potions.
Some of it is.
Under the guise of longevity, which is something I'm seeing
a lot, particularly with women at the minute. We all know that the longevity craze kind of really started taking hold in the bro culture of Silicon Valley, but now it's very much kind of merging with beauty standards to become something women a I ungenerously think it's the new You can't say anti aging anymore, because we've all got to be age positive, but longevity sounds in a positive and healthy but really it's the same and I'm seeing this everywhere, as well as the Miranda Curz, the Trinny
Goodles of it all who are wearing their what's Triny doing? She took a picture of herself in the morning the other day wearing her infra red mask, some kind of helmet that had red light underneath it. She was like, just all of these ye like Mia has, and she's just getting about her day.
Looking It's like a board that you stand on that apparently is good for bone density, and it just it's like a vibrating.
Boarde the emint to stand on.
I mean, I don't even know where to start, because the first thing when you read out all of those appointments and all the people I've seen, is the conflation of beauty and health. Like seeing your GP is not the same as seeing a facialist. They are just completely
different things. The other thing I noticed was the use of my GP my ophthalmologist begyn, which indicates you can't talk about this stuff without going There is such enormous privilege, particularly in the States, of having your own specialist doctors, like most people who genuinely have a heart issue, would struggle to pay for cardiologists, Like the healthcare system is totally broken, and I like cringe at the idea of her having a cardiologist to go and check that her
thirty something year old heart is great.
I think it's status, right, A status.
Emma Read's massive collection of pills and potions is status.
She has so many of them that, according to that Instagram caption, she pays her child to organize her supplements for her.
And I think it's like, what what is all this about?
Is it about an ultimate fear of death, which is like the longevity science stuff. I find the rhetoric of like scientific language around this to be a little bit disingenuous because it's like you're just putting goo on your face.
What all of this is about is about looking hot. Yes, it's just vanity. Because there's a term for what this is called, and it looks maxing. And the definition of looks maxing is trying to raise your social, your sexual market value by optimizing your attractiveness. This is absolutely something Heathcliff would have loved.
But I was going to say, that's not a new idea. We've just got all these new ways to do it right, so hot people have always enjoyed a lot of status.
There was a line in that in that substack that was like, my group chats are planning out cos medical tourism, and I bet yours are too, And.
I was like, is this satire?
This is a funny.
I'm not in your group chat, but is that what you're talking about?
Generally, it's trying to find a tie place for dinner. It's not looking at where we're going to go in the world to get some ridiculous new face.
But the key thing is that men are getting involved in this now too. And there's a guy called Clovicula. I kept seeing this word and just it was a news story that I wanted to opt out of. But in the end I just had to read about him because I kept seeing him everywhere. He is a young man who gets his name because apparently the length of his clavicle is ideal. If you'd like to know what it is, it's nineteen point five inches. I don't know
what that is in metric. And the other reason why apparently he's really handsome is because his chin to filterrim ratio is two point six. The filterrim is those two lines underneath your nose.
So this is like that golden ratio.
Yeah yeah, And so he is apparently like the perfect man. I'm putting this all in quote marks, just like Emerald Vanell with Wuthering Heights. He's meant to be the most handsome man. He earns more than one hundred thousand dollars a month teaching men how to be handsome, and he promises them that if they follow everything, they're going to get a lot of sleave maxing. Yes, slave maxing that means a lot of sex like slag axing. No, I'm sorry, we live in twenty twenty six. What do you want
from me? This is why Wuthering Heights is such a blessed a scale.
It really is.
It is a full time job. Like the intensive labor involved in this is out of control.
Okay, but Devil's Advocate. Isn't it a good thing now that men are also being hemmed in and oppressed by beauty standards?
Welcome to our hell, right. I know it's not like I'm joking, because I do sometimes get a little bit I'm gonna say it wrong, shash and freud. It's one of the out loud words we can't say shut when I see this because I'm like, yeah, men, we have
been dealing with this forever. And there is also an argument that we've kind of danced around before, which is isn't it good that now the effort that people are putting in the effort the cost the energy cost that they're putting in, Because there's the literal cost, But then there is the time, the list that you read out earlier, Amelia of what that writer is doing, the amount of time and thought and priority that other things that have
to be pushed aside for that. In a way, there's something almost healthy about that, because we used to all have to pretend that beauty was effortless, and the most high status beauty was always effortless beauty, and like being born blessed to look like Giselle was kind of the pinnacle of status. Whereas now it can be bought. It
can be bought in lots of ways. It can be brought with the surgeon, it can be bought with medications, it can be bought with tweakments and serums and injectables, and so that's kind of democratizing, and it also pulls the curtain back a bit. It makes me think all the time. I have this boyfriend.
Once he probably was a bit toxic, little bit Heathcliff, not all the way Heathcliff, little bit.
Who I remember him describing this woman once and saying how hot she was, And he said, I love the way her hair's like falling out of her bun. And then he said, unless she's done that on purpose. If she's done that on purpose, not hot anymore, Like you know what I mean. So the effortlessness and that oh I just happened to be gorgeous used to be the beauty standard, and now it feels like the beauty standard is I have created this version of myself. Look how hard I've worked at it.
I reckon it's more sinister because I think implicit within it is that looking after yourself is a virtue. And I find that and maybe it's my Catholic roots showing and that it's visible. Yes, if you are spending eight hours a day trying to be let's all be honest hotter, I think that's a I don't want to say, a moral failing, although maybe that is what I mean. I don't think that's good. I don't think it's good for you I don't think it's good for humanity. I don't think it's good for.
The world, point taken. But I still want to know why it isn't a good thing that men are now having to do the same stuff that we've had to do for millennia. Why isn't that good that now men are also engaged?
I like saying, well, now everybody's miserable, so that's better?
And is it better?
Wouldn't it be better if we were working more in the other direction to make everybody a little less veserable.
So a little less attractive and happy?
I was thinking about I'm very deep in Married at First Sight this season, and we've talked about this before, but the code word for everyone who's dating, the code that they speak in is they say, I just want someone who looks after themselves. Oh yeah, men and women say it completely catally.
So what does that mean.
It means that they're slim, and it means that they're hot, and it means that they hopefully have got their teeth done, they've got some veneers, they exercise, they eat, blah blah blah.
I say, we think we can see healthy on people's faces, but we really want to Yeah, Yeah, they look like they've spent a lot of time fiddling with.
And so what does that mean for people who up down? What does that mean for people who go that's not happen.
That's what it means.
If I have to call it sleive maxing, I'm happy to leave it up the shelf and just watch.
There is something a little bit sinister about it too. I need to mention that bit killer he's been hanging out with some Nazis.
I feel like there's a line there, like there's a bit is it a bit veering into eugenics?
Like is there something that's a bit are we optimizing?
Yes?
So much.
You're right, because you know, there was a Looks Maxer Influenza who was a man who was black, and he was basically hounded off platforms last year because people who are into looks Maxing are only into white looks maxes.
Yeah. Right, So there's this particular aesthetic. Emmigreed is of course a woman of color, but other than that, the looks Maxing thing seems to be very skinny, rich white lady.
You know what's funny about it? And this is very problematic to say, but I'm just going to say it is that when the perfect man who's created his perfect dimensions with.
His you know, his chin measures.
I want to him so bad, but you know, maybe it's all created by surgery. Maybe it's all self improvement, self care. And he and the perfect looks Maxing woman, you know, they fall in love and they love each other very much.
They make a baby. That baby's gonna look fucking ordinary because.
And then if you start with the looks maxing too, that they have to look back to their children because they can't be gone around with a that attractive child.
I think it's realing, But you've hit on something really interesting about what the end goal of the looks Maxes is. Because I'm talking primarily here about the male looks maxes. I think women understand that if in fact you are attractive, you get more out of life in terms of like you're paid more, and you get more attention from the opposite sex and so on. I think for men in particular who are into looks Maxing, they talk a lot about the attention of women and the fact that how
do you get the attention of women? How do you slay max Again, I'm so sorry that I keep using that word, but it's not about finding like a woman who they can perhaps be happy with, build a life with, like really connect with on a spiritual level. I think that's what they're going for. I think it is more about just getting the attention of as many women as possible, almost to sort of then boast about it to other looks Maxes.
Yeah, it's not about a deep, enduring relationship.
I also worry, I think so.
That if a looks maxa looks at me, I worry about what they'll say, because I'll say points that could be optimized.
I remember when I was last single.
I remember a friend of mine fixed me up with a guy who this was way before the term was coined, but he was definitely a looks max like always in the gym, very sweetly fragrance.
Wish I'd got the rule around the time.
And one of my friends fixed me up with him on like a day and it was clearly never gonna whatever. And her partner said to me one time after he had a drink, he was like, well, it was never gonna work, Like he.
Really cares about what he looks like.
And the thing is that was true, Like it was kind of like out at the time, but it was also true he cared about what he looked like a great deal, and obviously I care about what I look like.
But there's a line I'm not prepared.
To spend that much time, that that's much energy, that much risk, Like I'm just.
So that's another interesting dynamic with the looks Maxis and the fact that they desperately want the attention of women, because I do think that heterosexual women struggle, well, I'm sure actually non heterosexual women also struggle with the concept of male vanity. It's a bit of a taboo in fact, men are not meant to care about what they look like, particularly when it comes to women, And maybe that's what they're sort of breaking down here.
After the break, I have got some scorellous celebrity gossip that all teams with a particular.
Theme out loud as it's mea you've heard Jesse, Holly and Amelia's Wathering Heights bad man theory. But there's more to unpack, including gossip about the premiere and who was who on the red carpet and why we've got a little bit of beef within the pod. Anyway, for tomorrow's subscriber episode, I'm going to tell you all about it. I'm sitting down with Whole and Amelia to unpack everything
they thought about Margo and Jacob. So if you're not already a subscriber, you're going to forget, So follow the link in the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week.
Right now, I'm bringing.
The show home today with a scorelous gossip roundup that has a theme. We are teaming with a theme. How the hell are we handling tricky relationship moments on social media these days? In twenty twenty six, I start with the excellent Australian content creator, comedian actress Celeste Barber right on Friday, her hot husband and that's what he's always been known as. I'm not OBJECTI find the man. Appy Robin posted that after twenty years together and two kids,
they have agreed to separate. He wrote, the past few months have been incredibly challenging and deeply heartbreaking for us both. After much reflection, the decision has been made to separate. There are still love and respect between us, but sadly we are at capacity and have come to recognize we may want for different things. Our priority remains our children and they're well being. We kindly for privacy and understanding
as we navigate this. Obviously, the comments section gave a lot of privacy and understanding.
Colley, can I just check did Celeste post as well?
So this is what's quite interesting about this. Appy has two hundred and eighty eight thousand followers, a lot of followers, and he has in his bio now formerly known as hot Husband, and their relationship was quite part of her stick if you like. I think Celeste Barber's hilarious and I think probably Hot Husband started out because she was positioning herself as not hot up against all the models that she was impersonating and pointing out the beauty standards.
She has been completely silent. She's been posting, but she's been posting to her very large following, just professional stuff like she's been, you know, touring, doing shows, launching products, but she hasn't official.
She has not mentioned this at all.
But his timing is interesting because we always say, knowing how the internet and traffic works, if you want to announce something that you want to fall under the radar, you either do it around Christmas holidays or you do it on a Friday night.
Because newsrooms have gone on.
I learned this from the West Wing that even in the olden days is called taking out the trash. You do it on a Friday night when no one's paying attention.
So he posted.
Then people did pay attention, and look, I think it's icky when people claim to have feelings about parasocial relationship.
But I was quite sad shock. I always loved.
Their dynamic, and it made me realize everyone who's got any kind of public profile has to make a decision about how public or not they're going to be with their relationship, their family, their real life right. And the problem is is that whatever you decide to do with that, particularly if you do decide to share, if and when things go pay shape, that leaves you with a bigger problem.
I've often thought that's why Taylor Swift doesn't follow anyone, because she has been around in the public eye for long enough to know that things that you think are permanent, things that you think are going to be there forever, are not going to be there forever, and people are going to be picking over your social media as a result.
Let's just say that if me and the elderly boyfriend and ever split, I know where all the public sympaty will go with him anyway. Moving on to happy news, Aida Nicodemu, friend of the Pod, Big Book Club Girlie been through a lot of shit. Aida Nicodemus of the Pod, Oh yeah, oh loud ad Ada's are out louder. She's obviously home on home and away and has been for a long time. She on Valentine's Day talking of how
you handle it. She and James Stewart, her partner, announced it exactly the same time, with exactly the same video and exactly the same caption. I said yes, she said yes, And it's a little, very low five, very real video of him getting down on his knees and proposing to her in a cougie park. I may have got quite excited
about that. These people are forty eight and fifty for decades, they've been friends since that for twenty five years, they've been dating for at least two they've both got teenagers. As I say, they've both been through a lot of stuff quite publicly, and I was like, yes, I hope they're gone in for a big wedding pay day. I don't know if that still exists in this era. No celebrity magazine's been in the toilet.
But Holly, I keep waiting for my twin pregnancy pay day. I'm like, I swear just hello magazine not exist, because that I feel like they would like lap this up.
And I've been waiting for a call where they just offer me a lump sum of money.
Is it how I used to work?
That's exactly how it used to work. We would call your agent. We'd say, what do you think Jesse would be thinking about? But don't wish for that because you know what the next sentence would be. We'd be like, what do you think Jesse would be thinking about for her twin announcement? In the agent would go, oh, you know, blah blah through out a figure, and then you go, what about a body after baby? We were thinking like eight weeks after birth, and the.
Agent would wrap the price.
Up's expensive, Holly, I everyone has their price, and then you'd go bikini question mark and then go that'll cost you another ten.
That's what used to it, Jesse. Other celebrities being public with their private business. Tell me give me a Beckham update.
Yeap.
So the first thing I thought when I saw this story was, oh my god, the emotional weight of being a daughter, right, and this is Harper Beckham, the youngest Beckham, but notably the eldest daughter because she's the only daughter.
She is fourteen years old. And she posted to Instagram over the weekend in what appears to be her first sort of acknowledgment of the rift estrangement Beckham situation, which was she posted a picture of her three brothers, Brooklyn, Cruz and Romeo just had the words I love you all so much. Words can't describe it, and Romeo and Victoria Beckham reposted it.
She got reshared published. She has a private account by Victoria and by Romeo, and that in itself is kind of makes me feel uncomfortable because she chose I mean, I'm sure they sought her permission for it, but she did post it to a much more limited group of people, and.
It becomes and then when you do that, it becomes performance, which just feels like such a less intimate Do you just look at some of this stuff and you're like, oh, we having conversations behind the scenes.
It feels like Victoria's trying to prove a point by sharing it publicly, which Harper wasn't making by not sharing it.
Now, this is in stark contrast to Cruz, who a few months ago reposted a Daily Mail article that alleged that Victoria and David had unfollowed Brooklyn, and he basically went, no, they didn't, Brooklyn unfollowed them, and blah blah blah, like he's been waiting into it a little bit. And I remember thinking when I saw that a daughter could never because the role of a daughter in the family dynamic is often to consider and weigh up everyone's emotional needs
and try and keep the equilibrium of the family. And that's why I felt when I saw Harper do that at fourteen, I just went that show's probably emotional intelligence, but also like her own grief about the whole.
Thing that's been of emotional intelligence. And this isn't directed at Hart because she's literally fourteen, but Amelia.
Isn't it weird?
The Beckham because actually Cruz Beckham also posted last week and he posted some random pictures from his life. He's got a record to promote, he's in a band now, and there were pictures of Brooklyn in that like throwback old.
Pictures of that isn't the lesson was supposed to get from this.
All this a merely that if they all love each other so much, maybe keeping off the social.
For me feel like those children have grown up learning that the most important way to express love, or certainly an important way to express love is on Instagram. Because David and Victoria are constantly telling us how much they love their children on Instagram, and I don't understand why I need to know, Like that's great for them, but why why do they tell us this? And isn't that kind of Unbritish to be constantly emotioning in that way?
I don't think it is anymore, because I think social media's changed it, because I'm always kind of surprised, Like not surprised for Victorian and David, it's their brand, but the kids being so open all the time on social seems a little bit strange.
But then I was my niece who's not.
Obviously famous or whatever, but she just turned twenty one and on the day that she did, her feet is just full of all her friends posting pictures of them together, how much they love her, go queen. All that stuff that is just very very normal now for a generation. Is that at any major moment that you do post about it, and you're expected to post about it for about the people you love, and you're expected to tag them and they're expected to reshare it.
And I just wonder.
If actually celebrities are just reflecting what the young people makes me sound a hundred but what is very ordinary? I always remember and Vernham said to us that if people didn't post about her on her birthday, should be a bit upset, for example.
The problem with that, though, is the more you post, like Claire and I are constantly linking to each other going or there's been a breakup, like a this is like people in our lives or like you know, minor celebrities or whatever where you can tell because the declarations of love have stopped, or because the cadence of posting has changed or whatever. Like when you let people in for a little glimpse, you then give them a license to kind of speculate on the ins and outs of your life.
That's exactly it, and that's where we started this conversation. And I think that if you're telling people about the good times, they are going to expect that you can communicate with them through the bad times too. And I think that we really see that tension around celebrity divorce announcements, and I was thinking about, how do you remember when Sasha Baron Cohen and isle of Fisher announced their divorce
or their separation. It was them wearing tennis clothes about a match, and it was the match being over, and it was this extended tennis metaphor, and look, I know you love tennis, but that was too much. It just felt too contrived.
All like inauthentic. And then on the other hand, there was a story recently. It was a local, kind of Australian celebrity story. Couple had broken up, lots of followers between them, questions about what had happened that a lot of people had But then it got into child support and what time this person showed up for a visit, and it became this back and forth between two people that are clearly really hurt and have a complicated personal relationship.
I was thinking it would take such restraint not to say anything, especially if your partner has an enormous public platform that they're maybe profiting off or whatever, and you know you could do real damage.
Or presenting a version of themselves that you deeply feel is untrue. Like that, Again, this is not just celebrity business, but if you're sort of seeing an ex partner or whatever professing to be the world's most wonderful dad, or social media when you're kind of like, well, you haven't seen the kids, for like, the temptation is huge. We literally have this microphone where we can put people on blast, we can put our feelings on blast, and it takes a lot of restraint and maturity. I guess to not
did you catch Nicole Kidman's Valentine's Day post? Just on this What did she posted?
Because normally she would post about Keith, Well.
They are because this is what's to your point, Amelia, about can you redraw the boundaries once you've kind of gone, oh, actually, I don't want to tell everybody about this messiness. She and Keith were always very public with their declarations of love, weren't they. And on Saturday she just posted a rather sexy picture of herself in a man's shirt, which is a look Nick rocks, and it just said Happy Gallantines with a love.
Heart and I was also perfectly shot and lit. We need to pay.
Very lovely day.
She was like, I cannot let this go on. Marked that's all we've got time for.
On Today's show, out loud is Thank you for being here with us, and thank you to our amazing team for helping us put this show together.
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