Women vs. The System (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry)
Added 2024-12-27 16:03:10 +0000 UTCBack in October, before the 2024 election, we had on our friend—and brilliant screenwriter and playwright—Dorothy Fortenberry to talk about gender and the presidential campaign. Amid all the postmortems and Democratic soul searching, we wanted to have Dorothy back on to revisit some of those questions, starting with the difficulties women face in running as "outsiders" or against "The System"—an especially relevant consideration given the prevailing anti-incumbent, burn-it-down sentiment among voters across Europe and the Americas. Along the way we discuss Sarah Palin, Trump's "bad sex" cabinet and administration, how "having fun" is coded in American culture, and more.
Sources:
Dorothy Fortenberry, "The J.D. Vance sperm cups were probably a troll. But they got me thinking," Slate, Aug 23, 2024
— "Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore," Commonweal, Nov 5, 2020
Martin Pengelly, "RFK Jr sexual assault accuser says she chose to speak out after Super Bowl ad," The Guardian, Nov 21, 2024.
Eric Lutz, "Matt Gaetz Accused of Sex With Minor in House Ethics Report," Vanity Fair, Dec 21, 2024.
Eric Tucker, "Trump’s Pentagon pick paid woman after sex assault allegation but denies wrongdoing, his lawyer says," AP, Nov 17, 2024.
Tony Tulathimutte, "Our Dope Future" in Rejection (Sept 2024)
Robert Hanley, "Donor Apologized to Sister for Seduction of Husband," NYTimes, Jan 13, 2005.
Damon Linker, "The Bestial Politics of Masculine Self-Assertion," Notes from the Middleground, Nov 22, 2024.
Sam Adler-Bell, "MAGA Misfits vs. Nationalists vs. Reaganites vs. Dorks: The battle of the Trump transition," NY Mag, Dec 14, 2024.
Listen again:
"Suburban Woman," Oct 29, 2019
"Living at the End of Our World" (w/ Daniel Sherrell), Sept 2, 2021
"'Succession,' 'Extrapolations,' & TV Writing Today" (w/ Will Arbery), May 4, 2023
"Boys and Girls in America," Oct 3, 2024
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Comments
Loved this episode. Never been to these comments before. 😬💜
Judson Dunn
2025-01-19 23:16:12 +0000 UTCI, the dad, am usually the one who takes the kids to the doctor. There’s more moms than dads in the waiting rooms to be sure but it’s no longer as one-sided as it has been. Ditto on washing hands. I think this has changed for the better, at least in my milieu.
Nimportequi
2025-01-17 11:41:16 +0000 UTCThere’s no possible way to have a left wing Rogan that the Democratic establishment would approve of. He would need to be someone along the line of the Chapó boys or Hassan Piker. Whoever they’re gonna try to roll out will be the cringiest person ever.
Tim Combes
2025-01-09 20:39:27 +0000 UTCTo each his own. For a show that can be exceedingly erudite I think rank punditry is a necessary release valve every now and again.
Tim Combes
2025-01-08 21:30:35 +0000 UTCIt is the rankest of punditry. Frankly a lot of sloppy thinking that needs to be revised and refined.
Brock
2025-01-08 02:01:04 +0000 UTCWhy
Sam
2025-01-07 13:15:33 +0000 UTCSorry to sound a sour note but I strongly disliked both Dorothy episodes and I hope you don't make this a more regular thing.
Brock
2025-01-03 00:22:02 +0000 UTCIt seems odd to have this discussion and not ask why none of the recent women candidates tried to run as an outsider against the system, all we have, here and elsewhere, is handwringing of how difficult it is. The fact that educated professional is now a more female gendered thing, due to more women getting degrees, matters here. The millue and staffers of the campaigns were all educated professionals who are of and for the system.
Nico Villarreal
2024-12-31 01:19:18 +0000 UTCThe gender stereotypes you've described have shifted from year to year (or even day to day.) An example is the 'nanny state' -- the indulgent government programs which prevent you from overcoming your weakness. Mom can't stop loaning her shiftless son a dollar. Dad knows he has to go out and earn it like a man. Sometimes, women are reprimanded for not nagging. A thing I saw that keeps popping in my memory -- a car with a 'Don't Tread on Me' sticker right next to a blue line flag; the main conservative symbol of the Obama era with the central declaration of the first Trump term; a defiant expression of independence mingling with a wish for a protective authority figure. Arguably, these two sentiments have long collided with each other in the USA. And, perhaps more than arguably, Trump has become how Americans reconcile them.
David B Hearne
2024-12-31 00:01:58 +0000 UTCWould you do an episode on Kash Patel? As the presumptive next FBI director he’s very likely to be the vector through which Trump punishes his enemies, but he also wrote multiple books - including, symptomatically, children’s books - laying out his exact worldview, including his belief that federal law enforcement is effectively a protection racket. Touches on many themes that have come up lately
J. Haskin
2024-12-30 01:14:32 +0000 UTCI think that the point Sam made about Republicans distrusting experts is sorta correct and sorta wrong. Hes right that it benifits the right and they can play the rebel role. But, it's not them manifesting a democratic impulse. It's them being dumb as shit.
Garett Smith
2024-12-29 20:17:42 +0000 UTCYou know who I kept thinking about in this conversation? Carrie A Nation. Surely there’s other examples of radical disruptor women who gathered a movement behind them, but she was who came to mind for me. Obviously she couldn’t run in her lifetime, but I wonder how that might have gone. It would have worked in her favor, maybe, that the causes she championed were about protecting the home and family, but her attacking the saloons also has a necessarily anti-capitalist bent as well. “Rich men are profiting off making our men drunk, while wives and children shoulder the consequences.”
Jenna Harmon
2024-12-29 16:36:42 +0000 UTCYou’re missing the fact that those other countries with female presidents have castrated militaries. We have a big erect military ready to fuck the world. You forget to mention in your momfluencer fantasy that she also loves killing people. Here’s my bathroom watch me do my makeup and yes I love murder. Huge fan.
Sam
2024-12-29 13:11:29 +0000 UTCMy libidinal fury against Stein is that she is not only utterly useless as a politician, leading an utterly useless political faction in the US that hasn’t built significant support in twenty years, it’s that she is also just useful enough to cause political damage precisely at a time when that is counterproductive to her claimed objectives. She and her idiotic political faction should be shot into the Sun.
Linda Carruthers
2024-12-29 04:35:20 +0000 UTCI want to breed a super race of humans but I don’t want to touch any boobies on my way there
Sam
2024-12-29 01:04:17 +0000 UTCThis was a really interesting conversation. The claim that our culture genders rebellion and disruption as male is important because it feels counterintuitive. Shouldn’t the less privileged gender be the one that gets to play the outsider? On some level this goes back to the separate-spheres ideology of the industrial revolution, which assigned women the role of holding down domesticity and religious values so that men could go off and compete in the amoral capitalist marketplace. Once women became seen as the maintainers of bourgeois norms, our culture started to imagine rebels against behavior and conformity as male. Huck Finn escaping from the prudish Widow Douglas to have adventures in the wilderness with an older Black man becomes the model for every white male Beat poet, rock star, and antihero of the twentieth century. (Speaking of antiheroes, it can’t be a coincidence that Taylor Swift is at the peak of her influence in liberal culture right now. To the kind of poptimist criticism that lionizes her, Swift’s big-tent, success-embracing, I-am-your-hero version of stardom is a moral corrective to the morally problematic white male misanthrope rock star.) Anyway, none of this precludes a successful female presidential candidate from emerging in the Trump environment. But for that candidate to be a Democrat, the Democrats may have to reconsider their current tactic of presenting themselves as the defenders of a normalcy very few swing voters seem to believe in.
Sebastian Lecourt
2024-12-28 23:55:42 +0000 UTCWHEN IN ROME DO AS MAT SITMAN WOULD DO
Sam
2024-12-28 23:52:29 +0000 UTCIt is a sad fact maybe even tragic that an entire people’s better history can be waylaid by the fact that women by a slight degree might wait at a don’t walk sign despite there being no traffic instead of walking against the don’t walk sign. And that an entire people’s history can be ruined because people would rather vote for a rapist who they imagine walking against the don’t walk sign
E.J. Pettinger
2024-12-28 22:18:36 +0000 UTCI’m just gonna say it. Dorothy Fortenberry could win.
E.J. Pettinger
2024-12-28 22:13:13 +0000 UTCI love every interview with Dorothy!
Chad Bailey
2024-12-28 20:24:46 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Maybe being picky but re: “Trump could wake up tomorrow, declare free IVF funded by taxing marijuana and the entire party would get onboard” - I always think it’s important to point out that Trump WON’T wake up and declare that tomorrow. It’s easy to overstate his hold on the audience - rather than the fact that he knows his audience, like a good standup, and doesn’t “do material” that will piss them off too much. Anytime he sees the slightest blowback, he quickly makes a rambling statement to walk it back
Aaron Lee
2024-12-28 17:23:46 +0000 UTCSeconding this!
Alex Marinides
2024-12-28 17:16:59 +0000 UTCHa - as the parent of a middle schooler, I love seeing Skibidi Toilet called out as the New Nihilism
Aaron Lee
2024-12-28 16:58:43 +0000 UTCI really enjoy listening to Dorothy. I have to admit to having a big reaction to the connection she made about "Rule Following" and the pandemic. "Mom makes you wash your hands", I yelled: "YES! OMG". As a mother, who is involved public health communication, and works to advocate for good air quality in public schools, the Cassandra moments are constant. When you are an activist calling out system failures AND still like to think of yourself as an agitator, it is really weird to be cast as the goody-goody. You do feel like the mother trying to get the teens to not kill themselves by doing something stupid. "Systems are sooooo boring, Mom... skibidi toilet". Environmentalism as a whole, is often cast feminine in this same way IMHO. Thanks Dorothy, I feel seen. lol
Sam Murphy
2024-12-28 16:18:15 +0000 UTCI predicted in about 2014 that overturning Roe would not do much to reduce abortion. I was right, but many of my co-religionists had already had a drink of the right wing Kool-Aid and abandoned the need to support women, the poor, the immigrant, etc. https://ground.news/article/abortions-are-up-in-the-us-its-a-complicated-picture-as-women-turn-to-pills-travel?utm_source=mobile-app&utm_medium=article-share
Chad Bailey
2024-12-28 16:00:43 +0000 UTCWe should've talked about Sheinbaum! Though I think being the designated successor of a very popular "anti-establishment" male politician doesn't entirely overturn the paradigms we were working with. There's more to say though. - Sam
Know Your Enemy
2024-12-28 14:49:47 +0000 UTCI’d say that Jill Stein fits the bill as a female politician outsider - though of course (as a third-party candidate) she didn’t garner tons of votes. But, of all the hoops that a female politician outsider would need to face, the hardest might be getting the support of Democratic Party insiders (not that Stein would be in the running - but I think many Dems’ libidinal fury toward her comes in part from her being a female outsider).
JimJim5122
2024-12-28 09:16:56 +0000 UTCI hate to say it… but isn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene the example of a woman who has risen through the ranks without being a “rule follower,” and has successfully positioned herself as an outsider taking on the party elites?
Aaron Lee
2024-12-28 06:48:33 +0000 UTCI sent the episode to some friends with the following, seemed fitting: It’s a good listen. I like these guys and Dorothy was a delight I laughed and said, “ooooo, good point” in equal measures. They are also not dour, realistic optimism I guess is the best way to describe it. Anyhoo, listen away and draw your own conclusions!
Frank Wofford
2024-12-28 01:13:29 +0000 UTCI don't know much about her, how would you characterize her style?
genrepunk
2024-12-27 22:43:58 +0000 UTCEpisode legit kept getting better and better, and I have a massive crush on Dorothy now. Wishing all of you a safe and joyful passage into the new year despite what looms before us all.
genrepunk
2024-12-27 22:42:46 +0000 UTCBeing a little further into the episode, I should add that I do think being into understanding those horrible things is a form of perversion :P And Dorothy, thank you for your insights. Often the simple explanations are true on a basic level but impute intent where in practice there's a more complicated network of factors. This selection effect of those who perform femininity in ways that bring them intra-party success leaving only establishment candidates at the top makes so much sense.
genrepunk
2024-12-27 21:51:15 +0000 UTCCome to Paris while you're in Europe!
sallie
2024-12-27 21:13:30 +0000 UTCI was just talking with a friend who posed the question of how one keeps up with all the horrible things happening without being constantly heartbroken and horrified, and my answer was that I listen to commentators whose opinions and insights I respect, and whose thoughts I enjoy hearing. Thank you for being that.
genrepunk
2024-12-27 21:11:46 +0000 UTCAnd you two, too!
Dan Anderson
2024-12-27 20:01:42 +0000 UTCShe's so good!! I hope to see her on Bluesky some day soon
Dan Anderson
2024-12-27 20:00:33 +0000 UTCGood episode but it feels like a big oversight when discussing “what archetype of woman can be a successful politician” to not talk about how Claudia Sheinbaum was just elected president of Mexico! I think contrasting her political style with Kamala/the dems could be very informative and should have at least merited a passing mention.
John Poorman
2024-12-27 19:43:51 +0000 UTCI feel like the comment on Elon being disgusted by women and wishing for a collection of wombs was right on. That came together for me when I realized that many of his children had been conceived via IVF. Not knocking anyone that goes that route, but I had always assumed the many children was at least in part the classic philandering executive, but if he’s not sleeping with these women, it’s not about physical attraction. He really is just about expanding his progeny and their mothers are a means to an end.
David Behrens
2024-12-27 18:55:35 +0000 UTCYa'all need to do an episode on Helen Chenoweth, please.
Hannah Vig
2024-12-27 17:49:54 +0000 UTCDOROTHY THA GAWDDESS
adam fleming petty
2024-12-27 17:01:14 +0000 UTCNice! I like Dorothy a lot. Important and timely episode!
Allen
2024-12-27 16:07:20 +0000 UTC
