Episode 49: The Second Annual Cursties, Part I

The more likely a place is to like tell me to kill myself or like issue a rape threat, like the more authentic and vital it is as a reflection of American discourse.

Like as much as it hates me personally, that is directly correlated to how real and how American it is.

Yeah.

Have you ever considered, Moira, that maybe the pussy is in bio?

Maybe you need to open yourself up to new ideas.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrienne, today we have our second annual installment of everybody's favorite tradition, which is the Kirstie Awards.

Do you want to tell us about the Kirsties?

This is a long-running tradition in the sense that we made it up last year.

So we're trad wives in that way.

We're celebrating and upholding and vigorously defending tradition that we invented not 12 months ago.

We used to be a proper country.

Return.

That's right.

Return.

And this is our award for the most cursed discourses having to do with gender and sexuality in 2024.

We anticipate recording for about 45 hours

because there was a lot of them.

There was a lot of them.

Just no way around that.

But helping us sift through it is a man who is perhaps the Leonardo or the Galileo of cursed tics and also a person who's recorded three shows like this probably.

This is all I do now.

This is my my whole life.

Michael Hobbs, welcome back.

Hello.

I wanted you guys to do like, Adrian, Moira, what do you know about the most cursed discourse of the year?

And like, steal our intro.

Oh, my God.

We should.

I would love that.

All right.

Do you want to get into our nominees?

Because we've got a lot.

We've got a lot on the plate.

Yeah.

The way we usually do this is we each nominate three takes or three cursed discourses.

Last year, I feel like we all operated at a pretty great level of remove.

I have to say that for myself, that wasn't true.

This year.

I kind of ended up, I went down a couple of rabbit holes and then I was like, convinced myself that those rabbit holes actually said everything about our present moment.

That's what I did too.

And I do think that the election kind of brought a whole lot of stuff into focus for me.

I did that too, where it's like, this is not a bad take.

This is like a canonical bad take.

Yeah.

This is symbolic of a broader disease.

Yeah.

When we are selecting nominees for the Kirsties,

what I try to do is think about, okay, what is reflective of a bigger trend right like which conversation

which controversy which misconception or like new enthusiasm that people are showing really reflects uh something significant and bigger right what's part of a bigger trend in the culture or in politics that can tell us something about our time that's important which is why what i choose is always the stuff that pissed me off the most personally right it's always the stuff that annoyed me the most

because that is really what's an urgent emergency

telling us something important about our historical moment.

Dead voice teenagers on Instagram.

Boom, I'm there.

People who are a slightly different kind of feminist than me.

Really, like, really minds my gears.

Yeah.

Really burns my cannoli.

And I think you'll see in our selections of the Kirsties that our bugaboos, our irritations are really really what's most historically important.

Yes, pet peeves.

Whatever we got.

People listening to Bluetooth speakers on public transit is actually a national crisis.

It's a sign of a social breakdown.

Yeah, that's a bad example because I do actually believe that.

But I'm sure I can come up with a better example of pet peeves that aren't actually, that don't have social import.

Yeah, it's about our retreat from the public, the way we privatize everything now.

Bluetooth speaker is the parking space of

you're almost being given a New York Times op-ed columnist position right now.

So, who wants to go first?

Yeah, first nomination.

Adrian, I think you should do the honors.

Yeah, give it to us.

So, I'm going to start with my, it's cursed, but honestly, like, is it maybe closer to the Bluetooth speakers than to like incipient fascism?

Okay.

Um, possibly.

So, this is my most Andy Rooney take this year, which is a kind of cavil about the hand-wringing of a certain class of Twitterati over people leaving Twitter for blue sky.

Oh, God.

You know, this idea that people were retreating from the public sphere, you know, no, leftist snowflakes, don't leave the agora, the modern encyclopédie, the central repository of the world's knowledge, and also the place where there are my tits in the bio.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

The sudden attachment to Twitter as this like space where you encounter other people's ideas, where those ideas are 99% of the time, Holocaust denial and/or my tits are in popular, right?

As a guy who, you know, also wrote a book on tech discourses.

This has been Twitter's pitch for a long, long time.

And it was a sales pitch, right?

Like, it is just so noticeable to me that the kind of pundits that then roll out these kinds of, you know, people are withdrawing from the public sphere and going back into their little bubbles.

Basically, they were parroting back what Jack Dorsey had been like desperately claiming at shareholder meetings for years and years in order to excuse like how little money Twitter made.

It's just amazing if like you're using a company's frankly delusional sales pitch as like a basis for your politics and then think you're the kind of adult in the room.

It just, it had everything for me.

Was there like a canonical take or just like a general overall discourse?

I mean, there were a ton of these pieces.

I must say I stopped reading them at some point.

I have in my notes here one from Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins that I just thought was kind of funny.

It's a tweet.

We're witnessing in real time a social media version of liberal white flight.

And you're like,

okay, sure.

That's the good shit.

Starting to post on Blue Sky more is exactly like not wanting to live in an urban area with black people.

Yeah.

Completely.

Exactly.

I will say, like, what kind of blew my mind about this is, you know, framing blue sky as a bubble that is insulated, not the real world, reflective of a cowardly refusal to engage with opposing ideas, right?

This

proposition that Twitter is the public sphere, Adrian, you are right to point out that this was a marketing tactic of Twitter, right?

But it also is like really dependent on Twitter's perceived political affiliation as a platform, right?

Because back in the 2010s, I'm old enough that I've been on Twitter for like an embarrassingly long time.

And I remember when Twitter was a really important piece of media infrastructure, right?

It was how you shared your your work.

It was how you got jobs as a journalist or as a freelance writer, right?

It was how even like other kinds of public-facing intellectuals like academics could promote their work, right?

Back then, the line on Twitter was Twitter is not real life.

Twitter is an echo chamber for these lefty weirdos, right?

And now that Twitter is dominated by a conservative political tilt, suddenly it is real life.

Suddenly, it's actually a vital source of the, you know, the free exchange of ideas.

I think that's exactly right.

Twitter became an ohio diner yeah yeah right like the place where you try to get a reactionary take that is supposed to be more natural and less coastal than your own you know homo opinions that it's like you now go to twitter rather than to the waffle house the more likely a place is to like tell me to kill myself or like issue a rape threat like the more authentic and vital it is yeah as a reflection of American discourse.

Like as much as it hates me personally, that is directly correlated to how real and how american it is yeah have you ever considered moira that maybe the pussy is in bio maybe you need to open yourself up to new ideas yeah it's like you're cutting yourself off but it has this like funny kind of instant nostalgia i think fortune had a headline that i remember retweeting right people are fleeing x for threads and blue sky welcome to the era of social media fragmentation and it's like What are you talking about?

Like, as Moira is saying, like, you've been spending 10 years telling us Twitter is not real life.

Yeah.

Which is also true, right?

Like, in 2016, we all found out that like what we were seeing on Twitter was one thing, and then like all our uncles were getting radicalized on fucking Facebook, which we'd all left, right?

Like, social media has been fragmented.

Also, yeah, you follow people who have similar ideology to you.

Even if you're on there, it doesn't feel like it's that big of a change qualitatively.

Yeah.

Also, I feel like it's really frustrating zooming out that like throughout the course of our lifetimes, I would say the biggest political story is the radicalization of the GOP, right?

We didn't have people saying and doing derange shit in public constantly in the 1990s.

Whatever you thought about like the Reagan era, like the sort of H.W.

Bush conservatives, it's like it was a very different party back then.

And yet all of our kind of moral panics around this keep trying to repackage it as like a bipartisan issue, right?

So people have written all these books about like polarization.

We're in this era of polarization, even though the Democrats haven't radicalized anywhere near what the Republicans have.

The echo chamber discourse feels like a similar attempt to do that, where it's like, it's not really about the fact that platform after platform gets taken over by like open Nazis and these weird like trad bring us back site, like full-on psychos.

That's not really the problem.

The problem is that we're not hearing from each other enough.

And like, I just don't think empirically echo chambers are really like the problem that everybody thinks they are.

I think it's an attempt to talk about radicalization without naming it for what it is.

And we just keep getting these distractions.

And I think we just need to acknowledge that the main problem in American politics is the radicalization of the GOP and the fact that like 30% of the country is just completely unmoored from reality.

And I don't think that I have to hear from these people more.

Well, also you hear from them.

They control the White House, the Supreme Court, and Congress.

Like if there were a voter bloc that wasn't represented.

Right.

Which is, I think, where this entire sort of language game started from.

Oh, the GOP is actually not that extreme, but some of its voters are very extreme, right?

But by now, this is what the GOP sounds like.

I can just turn on fucking CNN or C-SPAN and I get to hear from them just plenty, right?

Yeah.

Not sure why I need to have Twitter user, you know, Adolph 18, whatever.

1488.

Adolph 1488.

Yeah.

I wish I didn't know that, but I do.

Give me his rationale for, you know, mass deportations and concentration camps.

Like, I can just listen to the speaker of the house do that for me.

Right.

For free.

Also, like,

something I have noticed, the comparison of dislike for racial ideology to like opposition to the black liberation struggle.

Like, why is that always the way these reactionary centrists want to like smuggle in their scolding to the left?

Yeah.

It's like, no, I'm sorry.

It's not like white flight, right?

Because actually, I'm trying to get away from the people who are opposed to like a racially pluralistic democracy.

What if this good thing was actually bad?

Have you considered that it might be bad?

What if it was bad?

What if it was different in a way that made it bad?

And I mean, like, it's not even getting away.

Twitter had a use.

You used it for certain things.

Yeah.

I left Twitter not because of anything Elon Musk did other than to make it unusable for me.

Right.

I don't see what I gain from people who are clearly engagement farming because they have blue checks and can monetize that shit.

Jesus Christ.

I don't know what I gain from reply guys who are clearly AI generated.

Right.

Like my dream as a social media user, as for many people who freelance in media is to someone to be like, that's a clever take.

What if he writes that for us as an article right and then i make 500 that is the use case yeah yeah yeah as more i was saying like if if the use case is someone's like you should go kill yourself like yeah i may be being a snowflake but like above all i'm also just like a participation in a in a you know marketplace of attention and ideas and i find this product just dog shit and i don't see why i would do it right like i don't get on 4chan with a take and hope that like the new republic comes calling right they're like we saw you on 8chan dang me man right?

Like, it's not going to happen.

So, like, I don't know.

Like, we're going about our business.

We're apportioning our time, our creativity as we see fit.

And then we're being kind of badgered and moralized into somehow surrendering our time of life to these idiotic exchanges, right?

I mean, I'm hearing myself say it now.

This is cancel culture, isn't it?

Like, the entire thing about cancel culture discourses was that, like, you owe these people this attention, like, withdrawing it, being like, fuck it, I'm done listening to this fucking person.

Like I, but the novels were okay.

I too was Hufflepuff, but I'm just done listening.

It's just, the books go on forever.

The tweets keep coming.

Like, I'm sorry.

I'm just, I'm off the train.

And people, oh,

how dare you not follow the collected works of J.K.

Rowley?

And this is the same fucking thing.

Like, I'm sorry.

I will not, you know, follow the collected works of Adolph Lover.

What is it, 1488?

Yeah.

You sweet summer child, you don't know 1488.

And this is because you're too sheltered and not spending enough time on Twitter.

I know.

The fact that me and you know it is a sign of like how fucking toxic all of these platforms have become.

I shouldn't know this shit.

I shouldn't know what it stands for.

Yeah.

I also think it's so funny over the course of the last two years, right, to watch a deranged billionaire buy this like relatively useful and okay, if problematic, social media platform and slowly turn it into a platform for like AI slop and right-wing propaganda and then cast the people leaving as like the problem.

Like, do you just know people are leaving this platform?

It's like, well, the guy who completely just ruined it and is a fairly open white supremacist at this point, that's not worthy of condemnation, but the people who are just like, I don't want to spend my day like this,

that's the problem.

Okay.

I actually find the fact that Blue Sky is so lefty just like a little annoying.

Yeah.

I think it is kind of like a hothouse atmosphere where like everybody ends up getting like pushed maybe 7% further to the left than they should be.

It's like, okay, I wish there was a broader range here.

But also, it's not like there's some non-echo chamber social media platform available that all of us are choosing not to use.

It's like, I'd rather have annoying lefties than like literal Nazis and a bunch of fucking robots from Macedonia.

And every single platform creates its own use cases, right?

Like we are shitposty on Twitter.

We are reflective on Tumblr.

We're horny on Instagram, right?

Like these things generate their own tones and their own rhythms.

And if the rhythm is no longer what you were using it for, right?

If like if you were getting information from a platform and now it's no longer giving you information, I don't know how you get to a point where like you owe that platform anything, right?

Yeah.

Friendster didn't get to like browbeat us.

Like, you know, you guys are leaving for Facebook.

You know what that means?

You're leaving the Agora, right?

It's so fucking dumb.

Yeah.

And this is why I think that all these Musk stands like love this fucking discourse.

Because they get to cast themselves as a hero and other people as villains or snowflakes.

Exactly.

And the idea that like consumers owe their consumption to the producers.

I feel like this is a discourse that has really taken over with Silicon Valley.

It sort of started, I feel like, with the recording industry, which was like, oh, the only reason people aren't buying our albums is because of piracy.

It's like, well, also, like, you could also interrogate.

your offerings and how you're getting them to people.

But like, sure, it's, it's the pirates.

But this has been the logic of Silicon Valley all this time, that like, there's something preventing us from breaking through.

And it's, it's pure pitch speak right it's not primarily how they communicate to you and me it's how they communicate to their investors to explain why you know the company is still not profitable after 10 years of runway right but it kind of moralizes our attention in a way that they otherwise like run away from screaming right we're like every time we're like well people should be confronted with true facts it's like oh but would you tell people what to think and then they're like but you're not watching my garbage fire watch my garbage fire everyone these people can't handle a woman with three breasts saying, How do you open, posting photos of herself constantly?

You guys just can't handle it.

What's your first one, Moira?

Yeah, I'm interested in like how our first cursy was about Twitter because Twitter also gave us, I think, many of our cursed discourses of the year.

Oh, yeah.

Including my first.

And this is kind of a big umbrella of discourses that I like to term fellas, is it gay to be heterosexual?

Oh, I love this shit.

You're gay for dating Taylor Swift?

Yeah.

That was one of my favorite things all year.

Yeah.

So this is like declarations from right-wing men, particularly like MRA manosphere influencers, but also sometimes just like Republican gadflies.

And these are like about casting heterosexual pleasure, like playfulness, affection, companionship, any kind of like liking the woman that you as a sister man are dating.

That does sound pretty gay.

Well, it's a sign of your insufficient masculinity, right?

Like you, if you're gonna fuck women, you should really hate them and like not spend any time with them or like enjoy their company at all.

Just listening to her talk, you like know things about her?

Feels a little like the loafers.

Yeah.

So like, remember Matt Walsh?

He's like a

bespectacled bearded guy who I think hates divorce because, you know, everybody he's ever looked at is like, I want a divorce right now.

I want to marry you just so I can divorce your ass.

He has like a YouTube show where he talked about back in January, he's like, I heard somebody was getting his wife a Valentine's Day gift already.

And he's like, getting a Valentine's Day gift for your wife a month in advance?

That's fag shit.

It's like you like your wife too much

and therefore

you are under suspicion of homosexuality or at least insufficient heterosexuality right that's what gay people say all the time once you like women too much you're one of us that's that's why people become gay because we just we liked women we flew too close to the sun i just love my wife

all of a sudden i'm having sex with a guy like man

like my wife

a little bit more withholding yeah i mean so given that this is uh once again an all gay panel yes listening to your heterosexual life partner is definitely gay.

We're leading in.

Absolutely correct.

It's definitely true.

Anything short of low-key poisoning each other's dinner while you glower at each other,

kind of fruity.

This like principle that like liking your wife or girlfriend too much is gay is getting really invested into the MAGA perception of sex itself, like the sex act itself, right?

Yeah, because what do they even want?

Whenever I watch like Andrew Tate or whatever, I'm like, you just want people to be miserable.

Speak of the devil, Michael, because the devil he doth appear.

I'm going to read you a November 30th tweet by Mr.

Tate

who says,

a two-minute intercourse is more than enough time for a husband to inseminate his wife.

Any more than that is vice, perversion, and socialism.

Yes.

Is it gay to have sex for three minutes?

I love it.

Also, like, can we just pause to say, like, again, as an all-socialist panel,

yes, having sex for more than two minutes does make you a committed socialist and you should vote accordingly.

Yeah, that's how it happened.

She's like, this feels good.

Marxist.

This has also been such a mask off year for the Manosphere.

You know, they claim to be like helping men, you know, date women or like things that sound kind of reasonable.

Like, here's how you should work out.

Here's how you should maybe try to get dates or whatever.

But really, like, they're selling this like Christo-fascist ideology.

And also like they just want you miserable.

They want you to think that you're doing it wrong constantly.

And this is why the sort of we need a left-wing Joe Rogan.

This is another discourse that has kind of bothered me is that you can't really have a left-wing Joe Rogan because the whole Manosphere thing is like making you unhappy and telling you there's like some weird trick.

to get women or whatever.

The actual key to getting women is like, try to be nice to them.

It'll work out with some people, won't work out with other people.

Like try to take care of yourself, dress well.

It's like really boring advice, but you can't sell that in the marketplace.

To sell something in the marketplace, you have to be constantly giving them these like life hacks and shit.

Like it used to be like, wear a fucking top hat and do like close-up magic and shit.

Black light attack.

Exactly.

It reminds me a little, Michael, of like the logic of diets that you guys talk about on the maintenance phase.

Like the diet is a like receding horizon of self-discipline and acceptable, like virtuous behavior, right?

And if you fail at it, if it doesn't doesn't work for you, it's because you didn't do it hard enough, right?

Totally.

And masculinity is kind of the same scam, right?

You're never masculine enough.

It's just a very insecure, like, gender position, right?

It needs to be proven all the time.

And therefore, its standards of achievement can continually recede beyond actual acceptability.

But like, I do want to dwell for a minute on how miserable these people are in trying to pursue them.

They seem so miserable.

Because what made me draw my attention to this is something I just sent it to you guys in the chat, which is a video of MAGA influencers Isabella and Josiah Moody, who appeared on the YouTube talk show, The Grudge.

The Grudge seems to be like a kind of like lefty to nonpartisan YouTube talk show that, to be honest, I don't really know much about it.

It seems like it's geared towards men under 25, of which I am not one.

Anytime I hear lefty to moderate, I think fascist.

Yeah, I know.

Crypto.

It's like

poke a little bit under the surface and it's just going to be like

a crypto scam and like weird eugenics.

Yeah.

But the show, they had these influencers on the show.

They apparently have their own following.

They're a married couple.

And they talked about how they only have sex for reproductive purposes and have excluded pleasure from their sex life.

Or at least Josiah, the husband, talks about this.

He says, as soon as we're together, it's like no birth control, nothing, because I'm not going to have gay sex.

And like, gay sex is more than just like another man and a man.

It's just like the idea of looking at sex as such a materialistic thing and just like, oh, well, we just have an orgasm and that's fun or whatever.

No, like, dude, sex is about having children.

It's about having babies.

And look at his wife's face.

Well,

I am now.

Because she looks like she just wants to die.

The tweet that you sent, the text is Trump supporter doesn't want to have gay sex with his wife.

Gay sex with his wife is just such a fascinating phrase to me.

Yeah, I can't tell whether her glance says, I really need an orgasm stat, or whether it says, like, oh, I've been getting busy with someone else.

Yeah.

She's actually more disdainful, it seems like to me.

It is not the stare of like enraptured affection.

You know, it is a look of appraising somebody and finding them wanting.

Yeah.

She's like, oh, you're the guy from the last time you were in me for two minutes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Any more than that is socialism, guys.

Yeah.

To me, it seems like a side to like a suspicion or like paranoia about the corrupting influence of closeness to women, right?

Yeah.

Like if you like a woman too much, you might start thinking of her and maybe even other women as human beings, right?

I don't know if this is actually a danger of heterosexuality based on what I see of it.

It doesn't seem to happen.

People manage.

It reminds me of this wild radical feminist, like lesbian separatist from the 70s, Marilyn Frye, who has this assessment of male heterosexuality.

So she goes, to say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage with sex, fucking, exclusively with the other sex, i.e.

women.

All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men.

The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, with whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence, and love they desire.

Those are, overwhelmingly, other men.

So wait, you're circling back around.

This is kind of gay.

Yeah.

These guys spend more time trying to look good to other men than I do.

Yeah.

This is this whole thing.

It is kind of gay.

Because your masculinity can only be affirmed by other men, and women's bodies are like an instrument for that performance, right?

Yeah.

Dude, I don't know if you had this experience, Adrian, but like after I came out, like all my buddies in high school were like straight dudes, and I was like the first gay person they'd ever known.

And this was like late 90s, early 2000s.

So we were all kind of working through it together.

I had this like late night drunken conversation with one of my straight friends where he's like dealing with my homosexuality.

And he's like, bro, I think I'm gay too.

And I'd known him for long enough to know, I'm like, why do you think that, man?

And he's like, I haven't had sex with a woman in six months.

I'm like,

bro, what are they telling you, man?

You don't.

I'm like, have you ever been attracted to a guy?

No, you don't lose your straight card at some point.

It's like, people are in this miasma where they think they're doing it wrong constantly.

Yeah, yeah.

And that this is like this threat, like you can lose your heterosexual status and become gay.

And these fucking grifters keep telling them.

like, oh, no, you're doing it wrong.

You're doing it wrong.

Like you brought up diets, Myra.

And I feel like it's so similar to the diet stuff where it's like the actual diet advice is like, try to eat fruits and vegetables, vegetables, try to move around.

It's like really boring stuff, but you can't capitalize on that.

You can't write a best-selling book on that.

So every year we need a new fucking superfood.

There's some new fad diet.

There's some new paradigm for this.

It's like there has to be something new that you can sell to an audience.

And it's the same with these guys.

It's like, how to be a man is all like pretty boring.

Pretty boring and basic advice.

How to pick up girls is like, just be, be friendly, nice, whatever.

But like, you can't sell that.

So you need to keep moving the goalposts.

You need to keep changing the definition so that you can make a fucking video about it.

Like the grift is so central to this that, again, this is why we can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because it's fundamentally a grift, all this Manosphere shit.

Yeah.

Heterosexuality is a pyramid scheme.

You heard it here first.

And it's also gay.

And that's why it's a game.

It's a gay pyramid scheme.

The funny thing is the myth about gay men for so long has been like, they're recruiting you.

It's like that.

It's the straight guys recruiting you, man.

The straight guys are telling you you're gay.

Gay people don't give a shit.

Yeah.

Like we don't want them.

like

stay over there yeah yeah and what are those pants right we're like ready with like bitchy remarks

um i mean like it what it does remind me of one of the funny kind of through lines of anti-gay discourse of the in the 90s and early 2000s was how easy it seemed for conservative men to imagine that they would be tempted into it.

And you're like, yeah, I know.

You're a straight man.

This is very similar to the trans discourse now, where it's like, if we tell kids that trans people exist, like they might be like, oh my God, I'm trans in a way that like if you grew up as a cisgender person just doesn't make any sense it's like if you're not transgender the idea of dressing up in other clothing will not appeal to you like i feel totally safe like dressing up in women's clothes because i don't feel anything when that happens to me that's most people it's fine it's like the the sort of the strength and weakness like that this is always cast in fascism as like the minorities are too strong and too weak at the same time yeah it's like this is this like totally horrible way to live and it's so immoral but also if a kid puts on like his sister's dress once he's gonna be like, I'm trans now forever.

Everything has to be like vulnerable all the time.

Like everything has to be under threat.

That kind of brings me to mine, actually.

Yay.

This year has really been the year of like the mainstreaming of anti-trans garbage, like stuff, stuff that used to be like beyond the pale is now just like completely mainstream and like appears in like USA Today and shit.

Like this is the year when all this stuff went completely mainstream.

And so you could have picked any article for this, but the radicalization cycle that people have gone through and that like people are quite sort of openly describing themselves like joining hate movements at this point in like, please have sympathy for me sort of way.

So I found this is relatively obscure, but it just feels kind of like canonical or symbolic to me.

This article on this lady's sub stack called, I pretended to be non-binary to expose a medical scandal at Kaiser Permanente,

which sounds a little bit like a dog took my face and gave me a better face to change the world.

The Celeste Cunningham story from 30 Rock.

But this is the story of like this woman who she gives some background later in the article, but her daughter came out as trans.

And she basically like rejects this.

She's like, no, you're not trans.

And then she starts going online and getting radicalized.

She eventually just completely like loses the relationship with her kid.

So her daughter goes and lives with their husband.

There appears to be like a divorce that goes on.

Like this really broke up the family, essentially her radicalization, but then she blames it on her kid being trans.

And then this, this whole article kind of claims to be like, I said that I was non-binary.

Like, look how easy it is to get hormones and surgery.

I mean, I should say that both Moira and I have Kaiser, I believe, and

easy to get surgery is not the first thing I do.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It is not easy to get anything from Kaiser Permanente.

They vaccinate pretty consistently, I have to say.

Like I've been able to walk in, but like anything more than that, they're like, yeah, come back in May.

So the opening paragraph of this piece is, she says, on September 6, 2022, I received a mail from Kaiser Permanente reminding me of a routine cervical screening.

The language of the reminder stood out to me, recommended for people with a cervix ages 21 to 65.

When I asked my OBGYN about this strange wording, she told me the wording was chosen to be inclusive of their transgender and gender-fluid patients.

Based on this response, several thoughts occurred to me.

Could I expose the medical scandal of gender-affirming care by saying and doing doing everything my daughter and other trans-identifying kids are taught to do?

And so she then goes through this whole thing of like, I emailed back and told them that I'm non-binary and I want new pronouns.

And like within an hour, they were like, okay, we've updated your chart with your new pronouns.

And

like this is like, she's casting this next scandal, like, they didn't even check.

They just changed my pronouns on my chart, which like completely.

She then says that like she's, she's 52 years old.

She has been experimenting with a non-binary identity for a while.

She is firm in this identity.

She then gets a series of like mental health assessments.

I believe there's two different mental health assessments.

There's then like a physical risk assessment before they prescribe her anything.

Like these are potentially the side effects.

She goes to an endocrinologist.

It takes four months for her to get a prescription for testosterone.

As a 52-year-old woman, she says that this is too fast.

She never takes the testosterone, but she says that she's taking it.

And then she eventually gets scheduled scheduled for gender-affirming surgery.

And the crescendo of the piece is, she says, in fewer than 300 days, Kaiser Permanente's esteemed multidisciplinary team of gender specialists was willing to prescribe life-altering medications and perform surgeries.

Okay, can we talk about how funny it would be if people spike transitioned?

There are all these cherfs here suddenly.

Like, it's like, yeah, okay, congratulations.

I guess you own someone.

I'm not sure it's the libs.

This will show them.

Is the premise supposed to be that they were supposed to detect that she was lying to them?

Well, that's the thing.

All of these articles are like, this is rushed.

This is too fast.

And then when you actually get to the timeline, it's like, oh, there were like numerous mental health assessments.

People asked her about like previous trauma.

They asked her about social transition.

They talked to her about all the side effects of whatever medication she's going to take.

There's really no process breakdown anywhere here.

Like, I don't know what really went wrong here other than you think trans people are fake.

Like all you're you're really saying is like, they said I was trans because I said I was trans.

Well, some people are trans.

I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah.

They only believed me because I made a month-long effort to deceive them.

Yeah.

It's like, uh.

And also, like, what exactly are doctors supposed to do, right?

If you go into the doctor and you say, like, oh, I'm having suicidal thoughts, are they supposed to be like, prove it?

It's like, these are mental health assessments.

Jump off a building now.

Yeah, people aren't auditing.

like your actual life or something.

If you say like, oh, I have insomnia and it's interfering with my work life, like we're going to have to talk to your boss about that.

No, I mean, everything is kind of based on trusting the patient.

So I don't know what another system would be.

And then as usual, she describes, quote, fewer than 300 days as some kind of scandal.

And she didn't get surgery.

She just got a referral to the surgeon in 300 days, which, if anything, is too slow.

It's a really, it's almost a year to get a referral to a surgeon for somebody who, according to her own testimony, has been firm in this identity for a long time.

So like, what exactly went wrong here?

It's like every single one of these articles, once you break them down, there's no actual scandal here.

I'll tell you what the scandal is.

Some weird Gen Xer like deprived a bunch of people of tea they could have used themselves.

Yeah, exactly.

And

wasted a whole lot of time, which probably makes my insurance premiums go up.

Oh, Kaiser emailed her, like, about this.

Yeah.

Can we get our $5,000 back?

Because what the fuck?

And also the pride with which she describes, I chose this ideology over my relationship with my child.

Yeah.

This is actually like a really sad story of somebody self-radicalizing and falling down this weird rabbit hole.

And like, imagine hating your kids so much that you do this year-long charade to like prove that they're lying about the thing that they told you.

It's like, like, I, I, I wanted to own my kid by transitioning.

It's like, wow, you really, you really won the argument with your own child who no longer speaks to you.

Wow, this is very healthy behavior.

So that will be the worst Thanksgiving of all time, I have to say.

If the parent shows up and has just like transitioned just to own their kid, like,

gotcha.

It only took me a year and a half to do it.

It's like, yep.

Yeah.

Should probably be faster.

But so here's a question.

Maybe this is because Warren and I just talked to Matt Bernstein about right-wing grifters.

Like, do we think this is just about ownage or is this someone, because there's also the bachelor who fake transitioned as well.

Awful God.

It's like people were nice to me.

Owned.

Somebody fake transitioned on the bachelor.

Or like a previous bachelor contestant said, I'm transitioning.

And then he would appear in public with like a wig and kind of like bad makeup.

And then he would say, like, oh, I'm early in my transition.

And like, he got lots of support.

People were really nice.

They were like, okay, great.

Like, it's good you're on this journey.

Like, people were super nice.

And then later he was like, I was lying.

And I fucking owned all of you.

And like, I don't know what that was supposed to prove.

Like, yeah, people were nice.

People were nice to you.

How terrible.

And like, actually, you were a secret dick the whole time.

It's like you did prove a point, but not the the one that you think you're proving, as in most of these pieces, right?

You're like, this is a real societal phenomenon, but like the actual kind of rapid onset, scary thing that is happening to people is these people going online and getting radicalized against their own fucking kids

based on this insane ideology that has no evidence behind it.

And even when they attempt to gin up evidence, like, look how fast the surgeries are.

It's not, they can't find evidence for it.

We just went through for our TransKids episode, we went through the 2018 Jesse Singal article about how, you know, kids are being rushed into transition.

And then his actual own reporting is him talking to a lot of clinicians who are like, I mean, this takes a lot of time.

People wind up with various different outcomes.

You know, we really try to think through it all.

And it's like, he cannot create a scandal.

He, so he just like casts it in this ominous language that is completely belied by the evidence that he himself is presenting.

You know, it's nuts.

You'd think that an article about kids transitioning too fast would include an example of a kid transitioning too fast.

10,000 words.

You'd think you could find one example of this actually happening, but I don't know.

These are just my weird standards for how journalism should happen.

Yeah.

So I think that brings us back to you, Adrian.

What is your second Kirstie nominee?

So things are getting a little lighter.

I think 2024 was a banner year for somehow people who are being very hot.

in a very cis way, portending the death of woke.

So this is the Sidney Sweeney boobs discourse, in other words.

I guess we should talk about like whether the death of woke discourse around Sweeney's boobs has now been counteracted by all of gay Twitter losing its shit over the

healthcare killer.

And like everyone's like thirst trapping this killer.

Maybe Woke's back.

The spike in I can fix him searches must have been profound.

But then I don't even understand this.

This was like maybe also a story of online radicalization because it's like you see a beautiful woman with big boobs and you're like, take that, gays and feminists.

Why?

Why can't you just be like, oh, nice boobs?

I don't know.

There was a tweet by noted public intellectual Richard Hinania.

Oh, God.

His first bad take.

Wow, interesting.

Of secret white supremacist pseudodem fame, right?

Yeah.

So what had happened is City Sweeney hosted SNL on March 2nd.

And basically a very specific part of the internet lost its goddamn mind.

Among them, Richard Hinania.

He tweeted out a picture of Sweeney at the kind of curtain call they do at the end of SNL, where she thanks everyone, et cetera, et cetera, in which her boobs...

Her tits are out.

They are pushed up like to her like chin yeah i tend to not notice women's breasts and even i was like whoa okay there there they are they are prominently featured me and adrian can take it from here moira we can describe women's breasts all right we can look you're sitting with two premier experts on the shape and feel of women's breasts so yeah but and then and then his commentary was wokeness is dead

Is that the whole tweet?

That's it?

Yeah.

Just like a woman with her boobs existing and he's like, wokeness is dead.

I think if he looks at them too long, he becomes gay.

Yeah, I wonder.

And then I found another one of these from the National Post in Canada.

Wokeness is no match for Sidney Sweeney's undeniable beauty.

You're like, okay.

We've been pressured into pretending everyone is beautiful except for those who actually are.

I'm sorry, have we?

Oh, that's like a whole anti-body positivity thing.

A lot of this shit is like disguised fat phobia.

Yeah.

That some people are like, yeah, if you're fat, you should be able to like go on Instagram.

And like, some people think fat people are hot as shit.

And then this is somehow like a refutation of that.

It's like, well, some people

think Sidney Sweeney's hot, some people don't.

Some people think Lizzo is hot.

Some people don't.

People have different tastes than other people.

Nothing challenges my wokeness about this.

I will, I will like be the annoying feminist and say that this is like Amiya Sreynivasen's point in her famous piece, The Right to Sex.

It's like, no, our desires are constructed by politics, right?

And they do have political content and ideological content.

And I think that there's something like avowed about the right-wing, like dog-barking response to Sidney Sweeney's appearance and her body that like does, okay, well, this is a

highly cisgender

person who has exaggerated secondary sex characteristics, let's say.

It is the breast and not the rear end, like the fetish object or the fetishized body part in the late like 2010s, I want to say, was like the Kardashian style, like big rear end, which was obviously like a

sort of appropriation or mimicry of like black women's bodies, right?

Like maybe nodding to like

a different sexual politics.

And that seems to have really gone the way of the dodo bird now.

The body trend is like hyper-thinness, you know, like Ozempic is a big thing.

Like eating disorders are back in vogue, to like put it in crude terms, right?

Like women are underfed again in a way that does seem

aligned with a right-wing politics in which like they're not supposed to be having undisciplined undisciplined bodies or fulfilling their own desires, right?

Yeah.

So like I do see what they're going for.

I just think it's really weird, right?

It feels in keeping with the like moving Nicole Post on heterosexuality thing, where it's like, is it gay to be attracted to people who aren't Sidney Sweeney?

It's like it's not only the way that you're supposed to have sex with and treat women, it's also like the kind of women you're supposed to be attracted to.

Yes.

Yeah.

It just seems like they're, they keep redefining like ways in which you're doing it wrong.

Maybe I'll quote briefly from that National Post article because I think it's kind of picking up on what you're talking about, Maura, but it is also way dumber.

So I think you're kind of steel manning it here a little bit.

Exactly how this led to a cultural cataclysm over beauty and wokeness can be summarized as follows.

We spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty, because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate.

Or so we've been scolded to accept by today's diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics.

We aren't supposed to admire Sweeney's beauty, but we've done it anyways.

The times, they are changing, aren't they?

It feels very similar to like the attack on feminists that it's like, feminists don't even want you to stay home and raise kids when the actual feminist ask is that people would have more options than just the one thing.

And it's the same thing too.

I don't think anyone is saying that you can't get a boner when you see Sidney Sweeney.

It's like we should just let people get boners to whoever they want to get boners to.

It's not narrowing the options.

And like, no one is telling you you're a piece of shit for like thinking of, I don't know, Victoria's Secret Catalog is hot or whatever.

Like you're allowed to think conventionally attractive hot people are hot.

No one gives a shit.

I think, Michael, you're on to something in that.

Like the actual complaint is not like the absence of desire or some sort of like imagined public prohibition on desire for women who looks like City Sweeney.

It's the like avowal or option to express desire for women who don't, right?

Like I think Jordan Peterson, I think this was this year over the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

And like, I think we as feminists should aspire for things beyond like a more broad-based project of objectification, right?

But there was a swimsuit model on one of the covers of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, which had like a bunch of covers.

And one of them was like, I think she was like of the Aoki clan.

I think she was like one of the descendants of the guy who founded Hibachi Grill.

Like, there's, he has a bunch of like hot children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and things like that.

I think she was one of those.

And she was like a plus size Asian model.

Yeah.

I think her name's Yumi New.

Yumi New?

Yeah.

And then Peterson had a meltdown.

Yeah.

He was like, there's a hot girl on the cover, but she's not my preferred kind of hot girl.

And I need this institution, this like commercial enterprise to be catering to my specific tastes sexually and nobody else's.

And when they don't, or when they have like a different vision of the erotic ideal, that is oppressing me.

It's like, it's very strange.

Yeah.

You've stolen my boner from me.

Yeah.

I think he called it authoritarian authoritarian tolerance.

He was like, no amount of authoritarian tolerance can convince me that this woman is hot.

And like, I don't know, you're allowed to find people hot or not hot for any reason.

I don't really give a shit.

I mean, that's the thing is like the tiniest bit of representation for kind of different forms of beauty.

These people fucking melt down, but it's not really like replacing anything.

Like there were still normal models on the other clubs.

I feel like Kate Upton's in the world.

I mean, I feel like

I never feel like more of a lesbian than when the internet has a boyfriend, right?

Like Barry Kyogin, the little Irish guy, I was like, that's a swamp creature.

And everybody around me was like, oh, he is so, but like, what if I was like, me having to come across pictures of Barry Kyogin on my timeline is actually oppression.

Yeah.

This is authoritarianism.

Yeah.

That you other people think somebody is cute.

And I'm like, I just, I don't really, I'm not that moved by it.

I don't know.

Yeah, imagine going through life that way if you're like a furry.

None of these swimsuit models are wearing fur at all.

Where are their whiskers?

I don't know.

I just don't feel owned by Sidney Sweetie's tits.

I just don't.

I'm just like, they're out there.

That's fine.

That's cool for her and cool for all of you.

Hollywood Starlight is conventionally attractive.

Hold the fucking presses.

I'm so owned by this.

I mean, one other way to read this is, of course, to think like, I think this was a lot of conservative men not knowing who she was until they saw her on snl yeah and like wanting to communicate the fact that they thought she was hot but they can no longer just say like i like this but they have to sort of cast it in culture war language right like i know i'm gonna offend some people by yeah by retreating to my bunk with this this picture i've just found it's like i feel like that's between you and your left hand man like it's just just tweet va va vum no one gives a shit just bring vava voom back

this is a sign that conservatives need to watch the White Lotus because she was great on it and it's a

show.

It's a perfect show.

Yeah.

I think it's coming back.

All right, with that, we're already at the end of the first half of an award show that at this point rivals the Oscars in sheer lack of discipline.

I like that at this award show, the Kirsties, nobody wins, but we all lose.

You know?

What's that tagline in Aliens versus predator.

Whoever wins, we lose.

But if you guys want even more, we've got part two coming to your podcast queue very soon.

So thanks for coming along with us on this dark, dark journey.

You've witnessed the predator of cursed discourses.

Wait for the facehugger of absolute crappitude that is coming at you in part two of the Cursed Dies.

In Bed with the Right, I'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.