July 14, 2025 • 49 mins
She was the voice of a generation, then she vanished. Now Lena Dunham is back with a Netflix romcom—but where has she been?
The creator of Girls disappeared from the spotlight for years, and the story behind her absence is almost more compelling than her comeback. So why did the woman who defined millennial womanhood step away? Mia, Jessie and Amelia Lester discuss on today's show.
And if you've been posting less and scrolling more, you're not alone. Women everywhere are retreating from social media, choosing to lurk rather than share. We're exploring why we're all heading towards posting zero—and what it means for how we connect.
Plus, scurrilous (royal) gossip: King Charles and Prince Harry's aides held a secret meeting, and everyone's speculating about what went down. Are the palace walls finally cracking?
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Muma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
On Welcome to mummya out loud where women come to debrief.
I am Jesse Stevens, I'm Mia Friedman, and I'm Amelia Lester.
And here is what's on our agenda for today, Monday,
the fourteenth of July. Everyone's talking about Lena Dunham's new
show Too Much, which dropped on Netflix last week. And
the girl's creator is suddenly everywhere. So where has she been?
(00:41):
And have we finally stopped being weird about Lena Dunham.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
We've also got some scurrilous gossip about a secret meeting
between Team Charles and Team Harry. I was eating this
story up over the weekend. We want to know what
it means and also who tipped off the paps?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And you are not imagining it. Women really are posting
less on social media and they're lurking more so are
we heading towards posting zero?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
But first, in case you missed it, if you find
yourself dreading, Monday's finding them harder than any other day
of the week, it could be because of this.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Phenomenon called identity lag.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Speaking to Mamma Mia, a psychologist named doctor Marni Lishman said,
the shift from weekend you to work you can be
very emotionally jarring. There is also a concept called role fragmentation, which,
according to Stylist, is what happens when we spend the
weekend exploring parts of ourselves that sort of go they're
not expressed during the work week right, and then we
(01:39):
turn up on Monday and we have to transform right
into our LinkedIn selves immediately. There's this experience of sort
of whiplash, Amelia, do you relate.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I'm about to confess something which probably makes me sound horrible,
but I actually look forward to Monday's.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Because you like that identity more.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I find it easier to inhabit. So I have two children,
and on the weekend there's a lot of chaos and
a lot of noise, and we don't have routines, whereas
during the week I have routines, and I love that routine.
And I'm often very tired on Sunday nights. And I
remember when I had very little kids, people at work
(02:20):
would say to me, have a good weekend, and I
would hate them because I knew that my weekend might
be fulfilling but was not going to be fun or easy,
and now I feel that less. But even so, Monday
brings routine and normalcy and talking to people who are
rational and professional.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But you work with maay, how about you.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
I really related to this because I think we all
wear a mask at work, and we should in many ways,
because you know, you shouldn't let it all hang out
at work. Also for me, sometimes I take my medication
during the work week, but then I didn't on this weekend,
and I did feel quite different. I do in here
habit two sort of slightly different personas. But this morning
(03:09):
I was sort of fighting off a cold over the weekend,
and I thought I didn't want to call in sick
because I knew Holly was away and all of that stuff,
and I wanted to do this show, but also I
wanted to inhabit this persona. I knew I could stay
home and continue with my weekend persona, which was unwashed hair. Yeah,
(03:30):
but I wanted to lift and be in this persona.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Don't you reckon when you turn up on Monday?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Though, I find it hard to get my head in
the game, Like my head somewhere else, at least for
the first half a day, and then when you look around,
there's a sense of everyone's sort of cose playing work.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I found this.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
I remember when everyone came back to the office after COVID,
and I think identity lag can be something that happens
with significant life changes that you're still People came back
to the office and they were still work from home identity,
and you could see everyone kind of cose playing sitting there,
working meetings, using lingo to try and get themselves kind
of get the moska.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Back after holidays or after matt leave or any yeah,
or starting a new job. I always find just sort
of cosplaying trying to work out what your new identity
is in that workplace.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
You could argue that the whole world's kind of going
through identity like post pandemic.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I think it's still happening.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I spent the weekend binging on all ten episodes of
Lena Dunham's new Netflix series Too Much. She's the writer,
of the creator, and the director. She also has a
supporting role in it, playing the sister of the main character,
but she's not the star of this show. The show
is semi autobiographical. It's about an American woman in her
(04:44):
thirties who leaves New York after a bad breakup to
move to London, where she meets this musician and they
fall in love. It's a rom com. It's got a
phenomenal supporting cast. The main character is played by an
actress called Megan Stalta, who she plays Kayla in Hacks.
She's kind of the assistant. She looks a lot like Lena,
(05:05):
and she sort of acts a little bit like Hannah
horvathin Girls. We're going to talk about too much on
Friday Show, but today we wanted to talk about Lena.
Girls was obviously her breakout hit. She was only twenty
five when she wrote and directed and was the showrunner
on that show, and she was everywhere for the six
(05:27):
seasons that Girls was around six or seven seasons. It
was the sort of the mid twenty tens, and we
just wanted to have a little bit of an explainer
about her place in the culture and why. You might
remember she seemed to be so controversial back then until
she basically was so controversial she imploded and disappeared. She's
(05:48):
done a lot of things since then, but she also
did move to London about five years ago and met
this musician and got married and he's the co creator
of this show with her, and I just wanted to
recap because there's two kinds of people, the ones who
know all the law and who watch Girls and who
are huge fans, and then there are those who didn't
and who are a little bit foggy. They've heard of
(06:08):
Lena Dunnam, they've heard of Girls, but they don't really
know the details.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
A lot of people have forgotten but know that Lena
Dunham was somewhat exiled, whether that was like a self
appointed exile or she was sort of a lot of
drama passed out from Hollywood, But I don't think people
can remember the point at which she was sort.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Of what did she do and who was she? Amelia
for those who were a bit vague.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, So I actually remember the very first time I
heard about Lena Dunham, and it was in twenty ten,
and I was working at the New Yorker magazine and
we had these ideas meetings every week, and people would
bring ideas about things that people were talking about, pitched
them essentially as stories, and this extremely switched on, very
very cool young man came to the meeting, and he
(06:53):
always had the best ideas, and he came to the
meeting and he said, there's this young director called Lena Dunham,
and she has written and directed a movie called Tiny Furniture.
And I thought, that is such a strange name for
a movie, And because I am evidently not an especially
good magazine, I passed on that story, which is sort
of like when all those people passed on signing the
(07:14):
Beatles when they started shopping their first album around. Because
very shortly after that she did become extremely famous, and
it's easy to forget quite how exciting it felt to
watch that ascent happen. So Tiny Furniture it became very famous,
very quickly because, in addition to being a very interesting
sort of movie about a woman coming of age in
New York, there was a sex scene which took place
(07:36):
in an abandoned tunnel in Brooklyn, Oh, And there was
this frank depiction of sex that we had never seen before.
I can't stress how revolutionary this was. It was a
sex scene in an abandoned tunnel. It was not glamorous.
The parts did not fit together like tetris, which is
often how we see sex scenes and certainly used to
(07:56):
see sex scenes on film. It felt very real and
gritty and quite literally dirty because it was in an
abandoned tunnel, and there was something incredibly exciting about seeing
a young woman's vision of sex, which is sometimes profoundly unfulfilling.
Sometimes it doesn't always in orgasms, and in fact sometimes
(08:16):
the man can be a real jerk afterwards. And you
hadn't really seen any of that from a woman's point
of view. So if I sound excited, it was because
it did feel like a new way of thinking about
young woman.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And so then unsurprisingly shortly after that, she teamed up
with Judd Apatow, who was everywhere at the time the
director of The Forty year Old Virgin and This Is
Forty and other movies like that sort of you could
argue taking that same no holds barred approach to men.
He teamed up with Lena Dunham, who was doing it
for women's lives, and then they made together Girls, which
(08:49):
premiered as you said, me, and when she was just
twenty five and twenty twelve, everyone called Girls the millennial
generations answer to Sex and the City. It was sort
of everything sex and the city was and it was
also about four women in New York. But these four
women were really going through messy struggles. It wasn't glamorous.
They were not drinking cosmos in bars, were kind of
(09:10):
like taking gin shots in their sort of like hoveled
apartments in Brooklyn. It felt very different. It had lots
of critical acclaim millions of viewers. The second season was
greenlit before the first was even over. But then even
as Girls was this huge touchstone moment. Over the course
of the six seasons that it was on, I remember
that you started to feel Lena Dunham slipped down the mountain,
(09:33):
as we so often do the women, we build them up,
and she became the voice of her generation. People often
quote this line from the pilot of Girls, where her
fictional character Hannah Horvar says, I may not be the
voice of my generation, but I feel that I am
a voice of a generation. But in fact, over time
she became the voice of millennials.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Can we talk about her body though? And I, you know,
I just think we'd be remiss not to, because part
of what was so transgressive about that show and about
her starring in it, is that she didn't have the
kind of body we were used to seeing. Even in
the sex scenes on Sex and the City or on
shows like Friends, the female lead was always a size
(10:12):
zero and looked a certain way, and she didn't. And
it's so funny looking back now because like a lot
of people, I'm rewatching Girls and it's almost like when
you rewatch Bridget Jones and all of the talk about
how fat Rene zell Wigga was, And there was all
this talk about Lena Dunnaman and how brave she was
or how shocking it was to see her having sex
(10:34):
and not talking about her body. Her body was incidental,
and when you look back now, she'd be what a
size ten to twelve maybe.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
There was even an episode of Girls where she has
this kind of sexy weekend with a stranger that she
meets and he's very, very handsome. Yes, And there was
this whole discourse because this is what we did back then,
where everyone was saying that it was an unrealistic plot
because he was too good looking for her.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, she was this lightning rod in that she was
being criticized by the far right for being what they
saw as not conventionally attractive or to woke or whatever.
But then I think she pissed the left off to
the same degree, and often because the show was criticized
for not being diverse. It was very white. It wasn't
(11:26):
maybe self aware about class that show. It wasn't possible
for it to be all things to all people.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah, shall we get into some of the controversies, some
of the things that tipped her down the mountain, because
there's a couple of interesting ones to revisit, I think. So.
She had a huge memoir deal with Random House in
twenty fourteen. Her memoir came out and they had paid
three point five million dollars for it, So there was
a lot of excitement about that when it came out.
And in it she talks about being curious about her
(11:53):
siblings Vagina when her sibling was a toddler. She talks
about opening it and putting some stones in there, some
pebbles in there, and also trying to kiss her sibling
on the lips when.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
She was changing her siblings nap or something, and she
was My memory is that she was only or seven, No,
she was seven and her sibling was like three.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
A toddler. Yes, And so the alt right, which was
rising at the time, because we didn't even really have
the phrase back then. I think we probably would have
described them as sort of conservative provocateurs. But this rising
alt right really seized on these anecdotes as evidence that
Lena Dunham was a sexual predator. And it might sound
a bit absurd now because her siblings spoke out and
(12:32):
said this was not a problem and she was a toddler,
but it made no difference. That was really the start
of her fall from grace.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
You know, you would never put that in a book now,
right because it was those early years of when things
were being weaponized offhanded comments, and Lena Dunham was very unfiltered.
Her character was as well, but she was then called
to sort of as the voice of her generation to
speak about all these different things and girls was it
was back when there was more of a monoculture. Everybody
(13:01):
would watch it and every week there would be these
big discussions, and it was also the rise of women's
websites and blogs like Jezebel, so everything would sort of
picked apart.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
There was this week there was this quote by Kevin
Fallon where he said it was the discourse apocalypse, which
I think is a really good description of that of
that time, and the book I think fits into this.
What's worth acknowledging is that it was absolute cultural saturation
because while there was girls, there was also the memoir,
the personal essay, which you know has disappeared people do not.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Well, and that was part of her breakthrough, was that
disclosure and women talking frankly about these most private things
was seen as a liberation rather than sort of a liability.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, and then there was Lenny Letter, there was Women
of the Hour, there was interviews, there was social media
early on everywhere.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
She's incredibly prolific, and it's interesting strife is set at
this time too, very deliberately, because it was the beginning.
It was the rise of women's media and a lot
of women's voices in the media, like Lena Dunham. But
it was also the beginning of cancel culture, when the
left started to be very censorious ofarticularly outspoken women.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And let's get to that also the idea of so
we've talked about why the right kind of seized on her.
She was a messy woman who was also in their viewer,
sexual predator. On the left, there was also this rising
sort of criticism of her. You mentioned Lenny Letter. That
was her newsletter, and that was also she has always
been ahead of her time, podcasting before a time, newsletter
right before a time. And in this newsletter Lenny Letter,
(14:33):
she wrote an essay once, a personal essay about going
to the met gala, and she wrote that she was
sitting next to this football player called Odell Beckham Junior,
and I'm just going to quote from it. It was
like we were forced to be together. And he literally
was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a
woman in a bow tie because Lena had worn a
bow tie to this met gala. I was like, this
(14:55):
should be called the Metropolitan Museum of getting rejected by athletes.
So the whole point was how fat and ugly she
felt sitting next to Adell Beckham Junior, who was not
interested in talking to her. This was at the time
when intersectionality not a new concept, but one which rising
and value and in prominence. At the time, people felt
like a white woman was saying that she was entitled
(15:17):
to attention and affection from a black man, and that
was a real lightning bolt moment.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
Do you think would you say, Amelia that it's when
because she's always done a lot of personal disclosure, and
so her authors and artists since the beginning of creativity,
but it was the time when the personal was being
very politicized. So everything she would say personally, whether it
was about playing doctors with her sibling or this personal
(15:45):
experience of how she felt next to this man, suddenly
everything was taken and overlaid with this political context that
was often used to cancel her.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, I'm quite literally political because the other thing I'm
going to throw into this heady cauldron of cancel culture
is Hillary Clinton. So twenty sixteen, she starts basically part
time to full time campaigning for Hellillary Clinton's presidential run.
And there was that whole idea around them that this
was going to be Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling
(16:18):
in her pants suit. Remember pants suit Nation. This idea
of women felt jubilant that finally they were going to
get a woman in the Oval office, and Lena really
spent the year campaigning for her. Along the way, while
she was on the campaign trail, she said that she
was she had an abortion, another reason why the left
did not love her, and of course the left didn't
really love Hillary Clinton. She was a centrist candidate who
(16:40):
happened to be running for the left, but I.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Know what she was trying to say, Like that is
just such an example of how the conversation changed. So
it was part of a podcast. She'd done an episode
about abortion, and someone asked her in an interview, have
you ever had an abortion? And she said no, I
wish I had. But taken out of context, what she
was trying to say is she was trying to be silly.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And you know, I think that what you're speaking to
as well is that we didn't know how to take
her because she was this character. It was this classic
to uncouple Hannah Horvath from Lena Dunham. I still think
we don't quite know how to do that, and.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
That's why she's cast someone else as in this new exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
And I think that activists now almost have to adopt
this earnest tone because if you are an activist, if
you have something very serious to say about the world,
you can never joke. So she would clumsily say things.
She would joke about something that was very seriously.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Because she's very funny.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
She's very funny, and girls was very funny, brilliant writer,
and so she'd say things tongue in cheek, even on
girls that were then weaponized because we were like, well,
what are you about? Are you a feminist or are
you And it's how feminism became this like stick to
beat women with, because sometimes she did and she did
make real mistakes. Like I think it was just after
the Me Too movement when someone.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Was accused of Yeah, we should just talk briefly about that,
because that was I think the final in the coffin
Fellina Dunham. The left and the right just couldn't handle
her anymore. So what happened was in November twenty seventeen.
So yeah, during the met movement, there was a girl's
writer named Maury Miller, a man, and an actress named
(18:23):
Aurora Perry No accused him of sexually assaulting her. This
was back in twenty twelve, but the allegation came out
in November twenty seventeen. Dunham responded to the accusations and
she said, Nope, I know him. He did not do this.
She said. While our first instinct is to listen to
every woman's story, our insider knowledge makes us confident that
this accusation is one of the three percent of assault
(18:46):
cases that are misreported every year now. I remember reading
that on Instagram. Do do you? I do? I think
I talked about at the time, and I was devastated
because it just felt like a real betrayal. And I
don't identify with either the far left or the far right.
But to me, she lost me in that moment. I
have to admit, right, she lost me and I was
(19:07):
a huge fan of hers. So then after that she
went very much to ground. She basically left the public eye.
There were some health reasons for that. She had a hysterectomy,
Judah endometriosis, and she wrote about that very beautiful lessing
for US Vogue. She also was diagnosed with Ella's dan
Lows syndrome, and so she does now identify and describe
herself as chronically ill. She moved to London in twenty
(19:29):
twenty one.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
She went to rehab.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
She went to rehab.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
She was addicted to prescription medication and she broke up
a long term relationship. Through almost the entirety of girls,
she was dating Jack Antonoff, who's Taylor Swift's co collaborator,
Lawd's collaborator Margaret Qually. He's married to Margaret Qually, and
that was a very defining relationship obviously in her life,
(19:53):
at a very defining time in her life. And there
are a lot of biographical similarities. There's a character very
similar to him in Too Much, which is which is
also very interesting. But she's also very good friends with
Taylor Swift, who she no doubt met through her relationship
with Jack Antonoff and who she remains friends with to
this day. Taylor Swift was actually at her wedding too.
(20:15):
She was a brise man, yeah to this musician Loue Felder,
who's her co creator on Too Much. And she was
part of remember that whole squad, Yeah, with the nineteen
eighty nine tour. It was all of these supermodels and
Lena Dunham And she spoke afterwards, even though she's still
friends with Taylor, how that wasn't very good for her
self esteem.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Oh, it wasn't very good for Taylor's self esteem either.
They both suffered from eating disorders around that time that
they've etinly spoken about. She moved to London, she did
make some films, none of them really hit. And now there's.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
This She has a I think it's a fifty five
million dollar deal with Netflix, so She's Made Too Much,
which is a ten episode series which I assume will
go to a second season because I think it's been
pretty well received. She's also currently directing I think it's
a rom com with Natalie Portman in New York called
Good Sex. She's got a ton of different projects on
(21:09):
the boil Well. I think she's so talented, like crazy talented.
She's like one of the most talented creators of our generation.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
She's a beautiful writer, and I suppose you can compare
her almost to a bo Burnham. He's a male comedian
of the same sort of age, and he does something
really interesting, which is he releases a special, whether it's
stand up, whether it's on Netflix, like Inside, and then
he disappears for years. Is that a privilege that's afforded
to men. I don't know, but I was thinking about, like,
(21:41):
you're Jerry Seinfeld, You're Larry David, You're Ricky Gervais. I
think that men are allowed to create, star in develop
these personas who are imperfect and funny and play with
that in a way that we don't allow women to.
I think there was a lot of misogyny, a lot
of fat phobia in our treatment of Lena Dunham. I
just think it's very interesting that she's been invited back
(22:03):
to the party.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And what I'm so glad she has. What I'm loving
about this is that jen Zed seems to be able
to rediscover her and girls without bringing the subsequent baggage
to it. They can appreciate it as the brilliant show
it was and celebrate her storytelling capacity without then having
to assume that she has to mean something politically to them.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So we'll be talking more about too much. If you
want to get it into your eyes, it's on Netflix
at the moment. You can watch all ten episodes.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
In a moment.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
An inconvenient truth about alcohol and what we're meant to
actually do about it. Should Australia mandate cancer warnings on alcohol?
And how much labels on anything really even matter?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
So.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
In January of this year, the United States Office of
the Surgeon General recommended that warnings about alcohol's cancer risks
be displayed on drink packaging. We are, as often cited,
much to Maya's disappointment, not doctors.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
We're not.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Mayn We're not. You're not.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
But according to a study in the Lancet, alcohol is
responsible for five eight hundred new cancer cases per year
in Australia.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That is more than I would have assumed.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
It has been found that any level of alcohol use
increases the risk for several types of cancers. Now we're
going to leave the medical studies to the side, because
the question is how best to communicate this information given
a lot of Australians actually aren't aware of the risk.
So in Australia and the US there are warnings on alcohol,
about its impacts on unborn children and about operating heavy machinery.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Did you know the pregnancy warning labels only became mandatory
in twenty twenty three in Australia.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Did not know that?
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I thought they'd always been there.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Is that the one with the picture of the pregnant woman? Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
So Ireland is the first country to have a mandatory
cancer label on alcohol. It hasn't come in yet, but
they've made the sort of policy and Australian health bodies
want us to follow suit. My question is do we
reckon that labels make that much of a difference, Amelia,
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I went on a real journey here because my instinct
was to say no, they're white noise, and we tune
them out and we want the drink. But then I
read about California. So when you go to California, you
see labels everywhere. They're on like everything from pleather jackets
to drink cans, like like soda cans. What kind of
(24:31):
labels subway seats? There are these huge labels that say, essentially,
this product may cause cancer. I cannot stress how widespread
these labels are.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
But what do you like on a subway set? Yes,
because of the plastic that's used.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Because of the plastics. So there was this law in
nineteen eighty six which basically identified nine hundred chemicals that
could be carcinogenic. So it was a pretty low bar,
and they decided to slap these giant labels on any
product that contain these chemicals. We're talking big labels too.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
See my response to that, I imagine that if I lived
in that context, I would stop seeing it. And I'm
feeling this already, that there's a new study every day
about a new castogen and I just have to go, Okay,
everything's carstinogenic.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I'm not taking That's.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Exactly what I assume too, Because as a consumer, what
can you do about it. So you get a car seat,
for instance, you rent a car and you get a
car seat, and on the car seat is a giant
label that says that the car seat that, by the way,
you're legally mandated to put in the car and news
may cause cancer. And you think to yourself, well, that's
unfortunate because I have to use it. Yeah, but it
turns out that they've had this unexpected consequence that no
(25:37):
one was really thinking about. So there was a recent
study done that said, let's look into what sort of
effects these labels have had, and they talked to both
consumers and to companies. And you're right about the consumers,
because again, using the car seat example, there's nothing I
can really do about it. I have to use the
car seat unless they fashioned one out of bamboo, which
I don't think would be legal.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Legal.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, So they asked the companies and it turns out
that eighty percent of the companies that this survey interviewed
said that the law had prompted them to reformulate their products.
So think about, for instance, nail polish remover, like, yes,
you can make it with the carcinogenic substance, or you
can try and use something else that maybe doesn't cause cancer.
And so what I thought is fascinating about this in
the context of this debate about Australia and the labels
(26:19):
and alcohol is that obviously you know something either has
alcohol or it doesn't. It's a little bit different. But
on the other hand, I think we are seeing a
trend towards people wanting lower alcohol beverages or maybe even
those fancy non alcoholic beverages that people are increasingly using
for mocktails and as a substitute in social events. So
(26:41):
I wonder if it is going to prompt companies to
innovate more to make lower alcohols or no alcohols, like
a phoney Negroni for instance, that could be a positive.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
This is also being discussed in the US around highly
processed food and wanting to have clear labels about what's
in the food, and it has been adopted in places
in South America and apparently has had an impact on
firstly the knowledge and secondly the choice whether or not
to buy it. I think Australia has so of mess
this up a bit with the Health Star rating, because
(27:12):
I've started to ignore that.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Do you actually take any notice of the Health Star rating?
Speaker 1 (27:15):
No, And in fact, my child looks at the snack
and it has one star, and yes, well it's got
a star.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
It's got a star.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
And what a lot of people don't know about your
health star rating is that it's been compared to other
foods in the same category. So you're not comparing yoga
and chips. You're comparing chips and chips. So your four
star actually isn't healthy, right.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So there are some labels that I've stopped seeing. But
the difference with alcohol, I was thinking, is most of
the context in which I consume alcohol, I have absolutely
no proximity to the label. So I am at a bar,
a restaurant, even if I'm at work and someone pours
me a drink, I'm at dinner and someone pours me
a drink. My behavior around alcohol is that I don't
generally have it in my house, But I wonder if
(27:58):
that's going to make any difference if it's being.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Poured at a venue.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Whereas with cigarettes, for example, where we know that the
label had made a big difference, there's no such thing
as getting a cigarette as distinct from its packaging. Do
you know what I mean like alcohol exists is a
very specific type of consumer good in that often it's
not linked to its packaging. So I would never see
that label, Like do you read labels on things?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:23):
I don't read the fine print, but if it's an
actual label, yeah, I mean I do. I guess I
do if it's warning me of something. I'm also a
little bit wary, you know. I like being educated. I
like knowing so that I've got choice. I think that
a lot of people don't know the connection between alcohol
and cancer. Everyone knows the connection between cigarettes and cancer.
(28:46):
But I don't think that's a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
I wonder too, if the cigarettes and the alcohol. So,
for example, the two messages on alcohol at the moment
are about pregnancy and umbond baby and operating heavy machinery.
Right there is enormous stigma about those two things, and
the stigma I think comes from it impacting another person.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Ah, that's iry.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So if I sit there at the pub and my
friend has had four drinks and picks up their car
keys horrified, you simply wouldn't let it happen. And that's
been a change in a generation. That's been a really
positive thing. Same with drinking, the idea that you would
if a heavily pregnant person was sitting there with a
bottle of wine in front of her, you'd get looks.
But cancer impacts you, and so I wonder if there
(29:31):
will ever be the same amount of stigma around that
even with cigarettes. My issue with people smoking in public
is the passive smoke of like it impacting people around them,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
I'd be interested to know whether the because obviously the
photos that are on cigarette packets are extreme and they're
not like your regular warning light weel, They're very, very graphic.
I know that some people have actually black humor, name
the people and name the photos, and there's a sort
of a oh, this is Jerry with the lungs, or
this is you know, Jane with the fingers, whatever it is.
(30:06):
But it would be probably hard to measure that because
over the same period of time, the price of cigarettes
has gone up a huge amount.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
And advertising was pulled.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Yeah, which is a different kind of detern.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I think that's a really interesting point. You make me out.
I'm a bit stuck on it. The idea that we
all now understand that cigarettes cause cancer. We read articles
just constantly telling us about the direct links between alcohol
and cancer. Why do you think it's been so hard
for us to internalize that as a society.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I think that alcohol is so much part of our
culture and so connected to celebrations, whereas we don't have
a celebratory cigarette. I mean, you know, there used to
be that cliche after really good sex, you know, people
would say, I feel like a cigarette. But it's not like, Oh,
it's you've got a promotion at work, let's all have
(30:55):
a cigarette. There's never been that.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Choice and it's your one cigarette a week. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
That smoking I think was that widespread in say, my parents' generation,
Like it was something that everyone did, and you see
it even in films. The easiest way for them to
situate themselves within the context of the seventies is that
everyone has a cigarette in I've seen.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
A lot more smoking in popular culture, like and just
like that, for example, the way sam As smokes, the
way Carry sometimes smokes.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
There's also been this wishful thinking about the idea that
young people are going to understand just how bad alcohol
is and not drink, And there's been this rising trend
of articles about how gen z have rejected alcohol as
a social lubricant in the way that past generations loved it.
It turns out that really was just wishful thinking. A
new report in the Financial Times says that seventy three
(31:45):
percent of Gen Z admitted to consuming alcohol in the
past six months. And so it turns out the reason
why they weren't drinking was because they weren't in the
workforce and they didn't have money to spend on alcohol.
But now that they're aging into the workforce and earning
real money, it turns out that they like a drink
just as much as any other generation. I think it's
time for a bit of scullous gossip, just to lighten
(32:06):
the mood here a little bit. Prince Harry and King
Charles may be working towards making amends, and I am
so relieved. I've been very worried about this.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
What do we know about this?
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Because I saw the headlines over the weekend, what steps
have been taken?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It's actually not even that scurrilous. There's photos. So the
Mail on Sunday had the scoop. They said that the
Monarch and the Duke of Sussex's aides met for a
secret peace summit in London last week. And there were
photos in fact of these high level officials leaving the meeting.
So it took place at a place called the Royal
Overseas League. That is a private members club that was
(32:43):
set up to promote wait for it, international friendship. Oh
across the pond overseass two words for some reason. And
I can just smell the other bound books in their car.
It feels very the Crown. I want to go to
their people with shaman might say, who are there? So
I'm glad you asked that, mere, because we've got their names.
(33:04):
Meredith Mains who was Prince Harry's new CEO, Liam McGuire,
who was the Sussex's pr le That's a busy job,
isn't it. And Tobin Andre who was King Charles's communications secretary.
Now what I really want to know is who leaked this?
Which side do you think has more interest in leaking
that these talks are happening?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Maya, the're the pr expert.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
I think it was a joint decision to leak it,
because it's almost a leak off, right. I imagine that
the terms and conditions by which this meeting in any
future meetings would happen because part of The reason they
haven't happened until now is because no one trusts the
Sussexes anymore. Because every text message, every phone call, every conversation,
a lot of these really private exchanges have become fodder
(33:49):
for interviews, for books, for Netflix documentaries. So I think
for anyone to feel safe having these conversations, the leaking
policy would have had to be very much laid out,
So I think it was probably mutual decision.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
I also think Harry has a real incentive here to
patch things up fast. Now I'm going to get a
little bit pragmatic and maybe a little bit more bit
about this. Charles is in his mid seventies. By all accounts,
William is determined not to let Harry get away with
any of this royal ish funny business anymore. So for instance,
(34:23):
calling yourself the Duke of Sussex. Jamie Kern Lee mcpho
was the first person to have Meghan on a podcast
as an interview guest showed on her Instagram that Meghan
had sent her a gift using the HRH nomenclature, which
William is simply not going to allow. So when William
becomes king, all these royal sort of trappings are going
(34:47):
to go away. So I think what Harry wants to
do is shore up what he can use and what
he can't use now, because soon enough it's going to
be very hard for him to get away with it.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
So completely excommunicated.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
As soon as I saw this headline, my first reaction
was concerned for Charles because I went, oh, he's sicker
than we thought because he was diagnosed with cancer in
February last year. We do not know what type of
cancer that is still there was Also, when Harry recently
did that interview following the court case, he said.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
I don't know how long my father Yeah, but they
were very upset about that. They were utset about that. Firstly,
he doesn't know, and secondly that's a pretty awful thing
to say.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
But for Charles to come to the table here, I
just thought, there is nothing like mortality to kind of
bring potential or an attempt at reconciliation.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
You know who wasn't represented at that meeting, William No,
and nor will he After the break has posting on
Instagram and Facebook become cringe? And are we heading towards
posting zero.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
One unlimited out loud access.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively from Mum
and Maya. Subscribers follow the link in the show notes
to get us in your ears five days a week,
and a huge thank you to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
I just came back from Greece, so I definitely would
say I insufferably overposted on that holiday, both grid posts
and stories. Most of the time, though I probably consistently
post Instagram stories grid posts probably more, maybe once every
two weeks.
Speaker 5 (36:26):
I do not post a lot to my main kind
of like Instagram or TikTok feeds. But what I do
use social media for a lot more is stories. I
kind of like that it's temporary and there's less pressure
I feel to get it right. You don't have to
curate anything, you don't have to get a caption.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It can just be a lot simpler. So I do
not post regularly on social media. Maybe once a year
if that. If we've been on holidays and I want
to post a photo, I feel this weird pressure about
getting the caption right and do I need to ask
a friend to edit the lighting?
Speaker 4 (36:53):
And like, who am I doing this for? Because I
don't care and in my real life I don't care
if you know, anybody who's on holidays at the moment,
particularly in Europe, you might be struck by how surprising
it is to see this almost retro use of social
media where they're posting, here's what I ate for lunch,
(37:13):
here's me in front of a landmark, here's what I
bought in a shop. I've got a few friends who
are overseas at the moment, and it's such a stark
contrast because it feels like what social media isn't anymore.
And I only realized that when I started seeing those
photos again. As social media has evolved, the baseline expectation
(37:34):
for posting keeps rising. We've been posting, well some of
us for fifteen years now, and it started off with
sort of dashed off tweets. Then it became carefully composed
Instagram photos, which were replaced in turn by TikTok clips,
which are increasingly showing the production value of television. Have
(37:57):
you noticed that it's now when you flick through, everything's
moving towards short form video content. So there's very few
pictures of people's breakfasts, very few pictures of sunsets, very
few pictures of people's dogs or selfies or their families
and women. We know that women are posting less and
lurking more. And there are three There are actually four
(38:19):
reasons for this, which I'm just quickly going to go
through and tell me if any of these resonate with you.
The first one is with everything going on in the world,
a lot of which we see via social thanks to
the algorithm, people are feeling self conscious about posting just
sort of mundane, benign updates about their life because you know,
(38:40):
there's a lot of shouting and a lot of assumptions
are being made by what you don't post or what
you do post.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I think specifically in a context where there is discussions
around Gaza and what is happening in the US with
Ice at the moment, that anything you post does look
tone deaf, beside the worst thing happening in the world
right now, and therefore people are sort of opting out
whether you post or you don't post, that will be weaponized.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Because those things didn't used to be on Instagram so much,
but now there's so many brands posting and creators and
influencers they've sort of taken over, and news brands as well.
The second reason, which I alluded to, earlier reels. It's now,
whether it's on TikTok or whether it's on Instagram, even
on Facebook, people are posting these kind of movie trailer
(39:30):
production quality values, and social is a place of work
for a lot of people, influencers, creators, and brands. So
these are big budgets. It takes a lot of time
to edit and produce and film these reels, and.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Not everybody's up to it, right, And that's not an accident.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
I think, as you say, the average person, women are
posting less and less, and that is because of a
very intentional algorithm change that happened, which was we are
going to present your content to strangers. This is no
longer about friends engaging. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about that
on Instagram. Initially it was like I was sharing with
(40:09):
my community, and now it's been like.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
People who chose to follow you now they were interested
in what Jesse had for breakfast, or maybe that you've
got a haircut.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Now you're performing to strangers. And therefore it is the
erasure of context which brings it back to your I
suppose either you post about everything all of the time
or you post about nothing.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
That context is really important and That's the next point
is that millennials who grew up on social media, like
you two, you're moving into middle age and seeking more
privacy in your lives. You don't want to be perceived
all the time, that sense of I don't want to
show the world what I'm doing. It's almost like everybody's
woken up from this collective fever dream of why were
(40:53):
we just sharing all the private moments from our lives.
Firstly with a bunch of people who we might you know,
the person who went to school with, or an ex
boyfriend or an ex boyfriend's mother that still follows you.
And now it's literally why would I want to share
those things with strangers? And that idea of being person
by people either who you don't know very well or
you don't at all. And then the fourth reason is
(41:16):
group chats. This is relatively new over the last few years.
If you wanted to share an observation about something, a
picture about something, some news that you've got a promotion,
or that you'd had to put your dog down, you
would do that on social media. Now you're much more
likely to do it in a group chat.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I think there's a fifth reason. Ai as Ai scrapes
the internet for fodder. People are understanding, you don't want
to put your baby photo up there because your baby's
going to end up being used by AI to make
a completely unrelated video.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
So Jesse, I was reading this amazing piece about posting
on Wei, which is kind of like everyone's feeling a
bit weird about posting. It was in The New Yorker
this week. I certainly feel that way. I used to
do instababbles on Instagram all the time, where I just
sort of chat, you know, spontaneously while I put my
makeup on a couple of months ago, I felt uncomfortable
about doing that, and I stopped doing that. And I
(42:06):
used to post lots of sort of getting ready videos
and stuf. I don't do that anymore. And I loved
this idea of understanding why. And it's said in this
article social now is just used for punditory provocation and promotion.
Does that ring truth for you?
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (42:22):
And it is my greatest concern, like reading this about
who we're leaving social media too, because I think it's
a very skewed vision of who people are, what they
care about, morality, ethics, tone, discourse, all of those things
being left to the content creators. Now, when someone uploads
(42:43):
something onto social media, it's sort of like, oh, are
you trying to be a content creator?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
You kind of don't know why.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Else it feels vulnerable because people talk about feeling cringe
when they post something.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
But why is that bad? Why don't we just leave
it to the professionals.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I suppose the reason why I worry about leaving it
to the inadverted commas professionals is because of the tone
of that conversation. You get the extremes on both sides.
You get the people like exactly what it said here,
you get people who are provocative on.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
Purpose professionals, and we don't want to do it anymore.
You haven't posted on social for a long time.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Have you, No?
Speaker 3 (43:20):
But like normal people, sometimes I have to go on
to TikTok and I scroll and I scroll, or I
scroll on Instagram and I go The normal people aren't here.
The normal people have left this party. The normal people
are all watching. It's like, you know what it's like.
It's a party and it's four am, and all the
normal people with normal lives went home, and you look
(43:41):
around and you think all parties are like this.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
All of the time, and.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
People are throwing things, and there's vomit in the corner,
and there's like people on the hard drugs and you're
just looking around, going this is this is terrible.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
People telling me about Amazon Prime sales.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
People being way too intense.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Yeah, and it's descended into chaos, and you go, what
has happened to parties? And it's like, no, no, no,
it's not the party, it's the people who are left.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
But on the flip side, Jesse, I'm going to attempt
a more optimistic take on this trend, which is maybe
the normal people quote unquote I have just realized that
real life is much better than social media, and now
they're prioritizing IROL experiences. This is my theory as to
why we've all suddenly become obsessed with tennis. Have you
noticed that, yes, I know you always liked. Yes, Yes,
(44:25):
everyone's watching the Wimbledon front row this year so much
more than they ever have in past years. And I
feel like the hype around sporting events, around the eras tour,
around live music generally is because people are turning to
real life more. They're valuing it more. And I've noticed
that even in my group chats particularly with American friends,
because the enormity of what's going on is difficult to
(44:47):
summarize and get at. People are even retreating from group chats,
or maybe they're just not talking to me.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Either way, Yes, I can't.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
Believe you haven't said the word capitalism.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
That's the thing, right, is that these social media companies
couldn't charge any of us to be on it, right,
And in fact, there.
Speaker 4 (45:03):
Are those pictures of our breakfast.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Yes, that incredible documentary called The Social Dilemma made the
point that it is one of the the widest used
products that everyone would refuse to pay for. In fact,
most people not only wouldn't pay a dollar to use it,
they would pay a dollar not And the only people
who have upheld these companies is advertisers. And I think
that that's eroded trust. But the reason why Amelia, I
(45:28):
think your optimism is totally misguided is because people have
not left the party and gone home.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
They are standing by the.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Windows, addicted to watching what's going on. If you looked
at the time people are spending on social media that
hasn't gone down, that has not gone down.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
That's the thing. We're not posting, we're lurking Now, men
have always been lurkers, right, Women have always been posters, commenters, likers, sharers.
But now women aren't doing that anymore, not as much.
And as Jesse said, we're looking through the window. And
the problem with that. If we've just left the party,
that's different. Let them, you know, eat, But because we're
(46:07):
watching it, it's skewing our idea of reality.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
The other element to why millennials in particular stopped posting
is because we watched as the dumb stuff that the
famous people posted got dug up. So the dig which
we've talked about on this show, it was weaponized. It
was all weaponized.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
So I think what happened was Trevor Noah, Yes, when
was that he was named to the Daily Show chair
after John Stewart left, So that was when the Daily
Show was absolutely at its peak. Trevor Noah was named
the new chair and people dug up all these sort
of fat phobic, fat shaming tweets.
Speaker 3 (46:47):
How many careers like have been I mean destroyed might
be too big a word, but have been impacted.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Well, it's that idea of social excavation, which is why
you know, in Lauren Sanchez Bezos got married, she wiped
her Instagram. It's this idea, and if you look at
a gen Zeta or Jen Alfa's social they'll only have
on Maine, which is in their feed. They'll only have
like three or four posts for millennials and gen X's
(47:13):
it was like a record of everything.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Every time we didn't avocado toast in a sun dappled room.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
You go back and it was a record of our relationships.
It was almost like a public diary. But this idea
of being perceived and not wanting to be perceived, that's
something that gen Z's and Jen alf Is a much
more savvy about because they don't want people drawing conclusions
about them because of something they posted two weeks ago,
let alone two years ago.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Think that's why Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift have never
followed each other on Instagram, because they know that the
unfollow would be such a big story.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Which I find it interesting that jen Alphas and Z's
have pulled back because when I look at my own
social media usage, and if I'm being entirely honest with myself,
I think it was indexed a lot on whether or
not I was courting, like in my single life, so
I wonder if too, if you're on sort of Him
(48:10):
or you're on Bumble and you're but it's more curately dating.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
It's more curated and with less shot.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Because you won't to be saved when you're seeing you.
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Don't want someone going back and seeing pictures of you
with your exes, or you don't necessarily want to be
known in that public way, whereas our generation it felt
like we really wanted to be known. It's like remember
my Space, which it was like what are your favorite books?
What are your favorite movie?
Speaker 1 (48:33):
It happened quickly, like I remember I had my first
child in twenty eighteen, and the practically the first thing
I did was post a picture of him on Instagram.
By the time I had my second child in twenty twenty,
I was not putting a photo of her on the
internet ever.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Wow, A big thank you to all of you the
out louders BeO, we are done. That was great for
listening to today's show and our fabulous team for putting
this show together. We'll be back in your ears tomorrow.
Speaker 6 (49:02):
Bye.
Speaker 4 (49:03):
Shout out to any Mum and Maya subscribers listening if
you love the show and want to support us as well.
Subscribing to Mom and Maya is the very best way
to do so. There is a link in the episode
description
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Muma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
On Welcome to mummya out loud where women come to debrief.
I am Jesse Stevens, I'm Mia Friedman, and I'm Amelia Lester.
And here is what's on our agenda for today, Monday,
the fourteenth of July. Everyone's talking about Lena Dunham's new
show Too Much, which dropped on Netflix last week. And
the girl's creator is suddenly everywhere. So where has she been?
(00:41):
And have we finally stopped being weird about Lena Dunham.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
We've also got some scurrilous gossip about a secret meeting
between Team Charles and Team Harry. I was eating this
story up over the weekend. We want to know what
it means and also who tipped off the paps?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And you are not imagining it. Women really are posting
less on social media and they're lurking more so are
we heading towards posting zero?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
But first, in case you missed it, if you find
yourself dreading, Monday's finding them harder than any other day
of the week, it could be because of this.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Phenomenon called identity lag.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Speaking to Mamma Mia, a psychologist named doctor Marni Lishman said,
the shift from weekend you to work you can be
very emotionally jarring. There is also a concept called role fragmentation, which,
according to Stylist, is what happens when we spend the
weekend exploring parts of ourselves that sort of go they're
not expressed during the work week right, and then we
(01:39):
turn up on Monday and we have to transform right
into our LinkedIn selves immediately. There's this experience of sort
of whiplash, Amelia, do you relate.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I'm about to confess something which probably makes me sound horrible,
but I actually look forward to Monday's.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Because you like that identity more.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I find it easier to inhabit. So I have two children,
and on the weekend there's a lot of chaos and
a lot of noise, and we don't have routines, whereas
during the week I have routines, and I love that routine.
And I'm often very tired on Sunday nights. And I
remember when I had very little kids, people at work
(02:20):
would say to me, have a good weekend, and I
would hate them because I knew that my weekend might
be fulfilling but was not going to be fun or easy,
and now I feel that less. But even so, Monday
brings routine and normalcy and talking to people who are
rational and professional.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But you work with maay, how about you.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
I really related to this because I think we all
wear a mask at work, and we should in many ways,
because you know, you shouldn't let it all hang out
at work. Also for me, sometimes I take my medication
during the work week, but then I didn't on this weekend,
and I did feel quite different. I do in here
habit two sort of slightly different personas. But this morning
(03:09):
I was sort of fighting off a cold over the weekend,
and I thought I didn't want to call in sick
because I knew Holly was away and all of that stuff,
and I wanted to do this show, but also I
wanted to inhabit this persona. I knew I could stay
home and continue with my weekend persona, which was unwashed hair. Yeah,
(03:30):
but I wanted to lift and be in this persona.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Don't you reckon when you turn up on Monday?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Though, I find it hard to get my head in
the game, Like my head somewhere else, at least for
the first half a day, and then when you look around,
there's a sense of everyone's sort of cose playing work.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I found this.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
I remember when everyone came back to the office after COVID,
and I think identity lag can be something that happens
with significant life changes that you're still People came back
to the office and they were still work from home identity,
and you could see everyone kind of cose playing sitting there,
working meetings, using lingo to try and get themselves kind
of get the moska.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Back after holidays or after matt leave or any yeah,
or starting a new job. I always find just sort
of cosplaying trying to work out what your new identity
is in that workplace.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
You could argue that the whole world's kind of going
through identity like post pandemic.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I think it's still happening.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I spent the weekend binging on all ten episodes of
Lena Dunham's new Netflix series Too Much. She's the writer,
of the creator, and the director. She also has a
supporting role in it, playing the sister of the main character,
but she's not the star of this show. The show
is semi autobiographical. It's about an American woman in her
(04:44):
thirties who leaves New York after a bad breakup to
move to London, where she meets this musician and they
fall in love. It's a rom com. It's got a
phenomenal supporting cast. The main character is played by an
actress called Megan Stalta, who she plays Kayla in Hacks.
She's kind of the assistant. She looks a lot like Lena,
(05:05):
and she sort of acts a little bit like Hannah
horvathin Girls. We're going to talk about too much on
Friday Show, but today we wanted to talk about Lena.
Girls was obviously her breakout hit. She was only twenty
five when she wrote and directed and was the showrunner
on that show, and she was everywhere for the six
(05:27):
seasons that Girls was around six or seven seasons. It
was the sort of the mid twenty tens, and we
just wanted to have a little bit of an explainer
about her place in the culture and why. You might
remember she seemed to be so controversial back then until
she basically was so controversial she imploded and disappeared. She's
(05:48):
done a lot of things since then, but she also
did move to London about five years ago and met
this musician and got married and he's the co creator
of this show with her, and I just wanted to
recap because there's two kinds of people, the ones who
know all the law and who watch Girls and who
are huge fans, and then there are those who didn't
and who are a little bit foggy. They've heard of
(06:08):
Lena Dunnam, they've heard of Girls, but they don't really
know the details.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
A lot of people have forgotten but know that Lena
Dunham was somewhat exiled, whether that was like a self
appointed exile or she was sort of a lot of
drama passed out from Hollywood, But I don't think people
can remember the point at which she was sort.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Of what did she do and who was she? Amelia
for those who were a bit vague.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, So I actually remember the very first time I
heard about Lena Dunham, and it was in twenty ten,
and I was working at the New Yorker magazine and
we had these ideas meetings every week, and people would
bring ideas about things that people were talking about, pitched
them essentially as stories, and this extremely switched on, very
very cool young man came to the meeting, and he
(06:53):
always had the best ideas, and he came to the
meeting and he said, there's this young director called Lena Dunham,
and she has written and directed a movie called Tiny Furniture.
And I thought, that is such a strange name for
a movie, And because I am evidently not an especially
good magazine, I passed on that story, which is sort
of like when all those people passed on signing the
(07:14):
Beatles when they started shopping their first album around. Because
very shortly after that she did become extremely famous, and
it's easy to forget quite how exciting it felt to
watch that ascent happen. So Tiny Furniture it became very famous,
very quickly because, in addition to being a very interesting
sort of movie about a woman coming of age in
New York, there was a sex scene which took place
(07:36):
in an abandoned tunnel in Brooklyn, Oh, And there was
this frank depiction of sex that we had never seen before.
I can't stress how revolutionary this was. It was a
sex scene in an abandoned tunnel. It was not glamorous.
The parts did not fit together like tetris, which is
often how we see sex scenes and certainly used to
(07:56):
see sex scenes on film. It felt very real and
gritty and quite literally dirty because it was in an
abandoned tunnel, and there was something incredibly exciting about seeing
a young woman's vision of sex, which is sometimes profoundly unfulfilling.
Sometimes it doesn't always in orgasms, and in fact sometimes
(08:16):
the man can be a real jerk afterwards. And you
hadn't really seen any of that from a woman's point
of view. So if I sound excited, it was because
it did feel like a new way of thinking about
young woman.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And so then unsurprisingly shortly after that, she teamed up
with Judd Apatow, who was everywhere at the time the
director of The Forty year Old Virgin and This Is
Forty and other movies like that sort of you could
argue taking that same no holds barred approach to men.
He teamed up with Lena Dunham, who was doing it
for women's lives, and then they made together Girls, which
(08:49):
premiered as you said, me, and when she was just
twenty five and twenty twelve, everyone called Girls the millennial
generations answer to Sex and the City. It was sort
of everything sex and the city was and it was
also about four women in New York. But these four
women were really going through messy struggles. It wasn't glamorous.
They were not drinking cosmos in bars, were kind of
(09:10):
like taking gin shots in their sort of like hoveled
apartments in Brooklyn. It felt very different. It had lots
of critical acclaim millions of viewers. The second season was
greenlit before the first was even over. But then even
as Girls was this huge touchstone moment. Over the course
of the six seasons that it was on, I remember
that you started to feel Lena Dunham slipped down the mountain,
(09:33):
as we so often do the women, we build them up,
and she became the voice of her generation. People often
quote this line from the pilot of Girls, where her
fictional character Hannah Horvar says, I may not be the
voice of my generation, but I feel that I am
a voice of a generation. But in fact, over time
she became the voice of millennials.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Can we talk about her body though? And I, you know,
I just think we'd be remiss not to, because part
of what was so transgressive about that show and about
her starring in it, is that she didn't have the
kind of body we were used to seeing. Even in
the sex scenes on Sex and the City or on
shows like Friends, the female lead was always a size
(10:12):
zero and looked a certain way, and she didn't. And
it's so funny looking back now because like a lot
of people, I'm rewatching Girls and it's almost like when
you rewatch Bridget Jones and all of the talk about
how fat Rene zell Wigga was, And there was all
this talk about Lena Dunnaman and how brave she was
or how shocking it was to see her having sex
(10:34):
and not talking about her body. Her body was incidental,
and when you look back now, she'd be what a
size ten to twelve maybe.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
There was even an episode of Girls where she has
this kind of sexy weekend with a stranger that she
meets and he's very, very handsome. Yes, And there was
this whole discourse because this is what we did back then,
where everyone was saying that it was an unrealistic plot
because he was too good looking for her.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, she was this lightning rod in that she was
being criticized by the far right for being what they
saw as not conventionally attractive or to woke or whatever.
But then I think she pissed the left off to
the same degree, and often because the show was criticized
for not being diverse. It was very white. It wasn't
(11:26):
maybe self aware about class that show. It wasn't possible
for it to be all things to all people.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah, shall we get into some of the controversies, some
of the things that tipped her down the mountain, because
there's a couple of interesting ones to revisit, I think. So.
She had a huge memoir deal with Random House in
twenty fourteen. Her memoir came out and they had paid
three point five million dollars for it, So there was
a lot of excitement about that when it came out.
And in it she talks about being curious about her
(11:53):
siblings Vagina when her sibling was a toddler. She talks
about opening it and putting some stones in there, some
pebbles in there, and also trying to kiss her sibling
on the lips when.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
She was changing her siblings nap or something, and she
was My memory is that she was only or seven, No,
she was seven and her sibling was like three.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
A toddler. Yes, And so the alt right, which was
rising at the time, because we didn't even really have
the phrase back then. I think we probably would have
described them as sort of conservative provocateurs. But this rising
alt right really seized on these anecdotes as evidence that
Lena Dunham was a sexual predator. And it might sound
a bit absurd now because her siblings spoke out and
(12:32):
said this was not a problem and she was a toddler,
but it made no difference. That was really the start
of her fall from grace.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
You know, you would never put that in a book now,
right because it was those early years of when things
were being weaponized offhanded comments, and Lena Dunham was very unfiltered.
Her character was as well, but she was then called
to sort of as the voice of her generation to
speak about all these different things and girls was it
was back when there was more of a monoculture. Everybody
(13:01):
would watch it and every week there would be these
big discussions, and it was also the rise of women's
websites and blogs like Jezebel, so everything would sort of
picked apart.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
There was this week there was this quote by Kevin
Fallon where he said it was the discourse apocalypse, which
I think is a really good description of that of
that time, and the book I think fits into this.
What's worth acknowledging is that it was absolute cultural saturation
because while there was girls, there was also the memoir,
the personal essay, which you know has disappeared people do not.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Well, and that was part of her breakthrough, was that
disclosure and women talking frankly about these most private things
was seen as a liberation rather than sort of a liability.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, and then there was Lenny Letter, there was Women
of the Hour, there was interviews, there was social media
early on everywhere.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
She's incredibly prolific, and it's interesting strife is set at
this time too, very deliberately, because it was the beginning.
It was the rise of women's media and a lot
of women's voices in the media, like Lena Dunham. But
it was also the beginning of cancel culture, when the
left started to be very censorious ofarticularly outspoken women.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And let's get to that also the idea of so
we've talked about why the right kind of seized on her.
She was a messy woman who was also in their viewer,
sexual predator. On the left, there was also this rising
sort of criticism of her. You mentioned Lenny Letter. That
was her newsletter, and that was also she has always
been ahead of her time, podcasting before a time, newsletter
right before a time. And in this newsletter Lenny Letter,
(14:33):
she wrote an essay once, a personal essay about going
to the met gala, and she wrote that she was
sitting next to this football player called Odell Beckham Junior,
and I'm just going to quote from it. It was
like we were forced to be together. And he literally
was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a
woman in a bow tie because Lena had worn a
bow tie to this met gala. I was like, this
(14:55):
should be called the Metropolitan Museum of getting rejected by athletes.
So the whole point was how fat and ugly she
felt sitting next to Adell Beckham Junior, who was not
interested in talking to her. This was at the time
when intersectionality not a new concept, but one which rising
and value and in prominence. At the time, people felt
like a white woman was saying that she was entitled
(15:17):
to attention and affection from a black man, and that
was a real lightning bolt moment.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
Do you think would you say, Amelia that it's when
because she's always done a lot of personal disclosure, and
so her authors and artists since the beginning of creativity,
but it was the time when the personal was being
very politicized. So everything she would say personally, whether it
was about playing doctors with her sibling or this personal
(15:45):
experience of how she felt next to this man, suddenly
everything was taken and overlaid with this political context that
was often used to cancel her.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, I'm quite literally political because the other thing I'm
going to throw into this heady cauldron of cancel culture
is Hillary Clinton. So twenty sixteen, she starts basically part
time to full time campaigning for Hellillary Clinton's presidential run.
And there was that whole idea around them that this
was going to be Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling
(16:18):
in her pants suit. Remember pants suit Nation. This idea
of women felt jubilant that finally they were going to
get a woman in the Oval office, and Lena really
spent the year campaigning for her. Along the way, while
she was on the campaign trail, she said that she
was she had an abortion, another reason why the left
did not love her, and of course the left didn't
really love Hillary Clinton. She was a centrist candidate who
(16:40):
happened to be running for the left, but I.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Know what she was trying to say, Like that is
just such an example of how the conversation changed. So
it was part of a podcast. She'd done an episode
about abortion, and someone asked her in an interview, have
you ever had an abortion? And she said no, I
wish I had. But taken out of context, what she
was trying to say is she was trying to be silly.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And you know, I think that what you're speaking to
as well is that we didn't know how to take
her because she was this character. It was this classic
to uncouple Hannah Horvath from Lena Dunham. I still think
we don't quite know how to do that, and.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
That's why she's cast someone else as in this new exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
And I think that activists now almost have to adopt
this earnest tone because if you are an activist, if
you have something very serious to say about the world,
you can never joke. So she would clumsily say things.
She would joke about something that was very seriously.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Because she's very funny.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
She's very funny, and girls was very funny, brilliant writer,
and so she'd say things tongue in cheek, even on
girls that were then weaponized because we were like, well,
what are you about? Are you a feminist or are
you And it's how feminism became this like stick to
beat women with, because sometimes she did and she did
make real mistakes. Like I think it was just after
the Me Too movement when someone.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Was accused of Yeah, we should just talk briefly about that,
because that was I think the final in the coffin
Fellina Dunham. The left and the right just couldn't handle
her anymore. So what happened was in November twenty seventeen.
So yeah, during the met movement, there was a girl's
writer named Maury Miller, a man, and an actress named
(18:23):
Aurora Perry No accused him of sexually assaulting her. This
was back in twenty twelve, but the allegation came out
in November twenty seventeen. Dunham responded to the accusations and
she said, Nope, I know him. He did not do this.
She said. While our first instinct is to listen to
every woman's story, our insider knowledge makes us confident that
this accusation is one of the three percent of assault
(18:46):
cases that are misreported every year now. I remember reading
that on Instagram. Do do you? I do? I think
I talked about at the time, and I was devastated
because it just felt like a real betrayal. And I
don't identify with either the far left or the far right.
But to me, she lost me in that moment. I
have to admit, right, she lost me and I was
(19:07):
a huge fan of hers. So then after that she
went very much to ground. She basically left the public eye.
There were some health reasons for that. She had a hysterectomy,
Judah endometriosis, and she wrote about that very beautiful lessing
for US Vogue. She also was diagnosed with Ella's dan
Lows syndrome, and so she does now identify and describe
herself as chronically ill. She moved to London in twenty
(19:29):
twenty one.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
She went to rehab.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
She went to rehab.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
She was addicted to prescription medication and she broke up
a long term relationship. Through almost the entirety of girls,
she was dating Jack Antonoff, who's Taylor Swift's co collaborator,
Lawd's collaborator Margaret Qually. He's married to Margaret Qually, and
that was a very defining relationship obviously in her life,
(19:53):
at a very defining time in her life. And there
are a lot of biographical similarities. There's a character very
similar to him in Too Much, which is which is
also very interesting. But she's also very good friends with
Taylor Swift, who she no doubt met through her relationship
with Jack Antonoff and who she remains friends with to
this day. Taylor Swift was actually at her wedding too.
(20:15):
She was a brise man, yeah to this musician Loue Felder,
who's her co creator on Too Much. And she was
part of remember that whole squad, Yeah, with the nineteen
eighty nine tour. It was all of these supermodels and
Lena Dunham And she spoke afterwards, even though she's still
friends with Taylor, how that wasn't very good for her
self esteem.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Oh, it wasn't very good for Taylor's self esteem either.
They both suffered from eating disorders around that time that
they've etinly spoken about. She moved to London, she did
make some films, none of them really hit. And now there's.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
This She has a I think it's a fifty five
million dollar deal with Netflix, so She's Made Too Much,
which is a ten episode series which I assume will
go to a second season because I think it's been
pretty well received. She's also currently directing I think it's
a rom com with Natalie Portman in New York called
Good Sex. She's got a ton of different projects on
(21:09):
the boil Well. I think she's so talented, like crazy talented.
She's like one of the most talented creators of our generation.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
She's a beautiful writer, and I suppose you can compare
her almost to a bo Burnham. He's a male comedian
of the same sort of age, and he does something
really interesting, which is he releases a special, whether it's
stand up, whether it's on Netflix, like Inside, and then
he disappears for years. Is that a privilege that's afforded
to men. I don't know, but I was thinking about, like,
(21:41):
you're Jerry Seinfeld, You're Larry David, You're Ricky Gervais. I
think that men are allowed to create, star in develop
these personas who are imperfect and funny and play with
that in a way that we don't allow women to.
I think there was a lot of misogyny, a lot
of fat phobia in our treatment of Lena Dunham. I
just think it's very interesting that she's been invited back
(22:03):
to the party.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And what I'm so glad she has. What I'm loving
about this is that jen Zed seems to be able
to rediscover her and girls without bringing the subsequent baggage
to it. They can appreciate it as the brilliant show
it was and celebrate her storytelling capacity without then having
to assume that she has to mean something politically to them.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So we'll be talking more about too much. If you
want to get it into your eyes, it's on Netflix
at the moment. You can watch all ten episodes.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
In a moment.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
An inconvenient truth about alcohol and what we're meant to
actually do about it. Should Australia mandate cancer warnings on alcohol?
And how much labels on anything really even matter?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
So.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
In January of this year, the United States Office of
the Surgeon General recommended that warnings about alcohol's cancer risks
be displayed on drink packaging. We are, as often cited,
much to Maya's disappointment, not doctors.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
We're not.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Mayn We're not. You're not.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
But according to a study in the Lancet, alcohol is
responsible for five eight hundred new cancer cases per year
in Australia.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That is more than I would have assumed.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
It has been found that any level of alcohol use
increases the risk for several types of cancers. Now we're
going to leave the medical studies to the side, because
the question is how best to communicate this information given
a lot of Australians actually aren't aware of the risk.
So in Australia and the US there are warnings on alcohol,
about its impacts on unborn children and about operating heavy machinery.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Did you know the pregnancy warning labels only became mandatory
in twenty twenty three in Australia.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Did not know that?
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I thought they'd always been there.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Is that the one with the picture of the pregnant woman? Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
So Ireland is the first country to have a mandatory
cancer label on alcohol. It hasn't come in yet, but
they've made the sort of policy and Australian health bodies
want us to follow suit. My question is do we
reckon that labels make that much of a difference, Amelia,
What do you think?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I went on a real journey here because my instinct
was to say no, they're white noise, and we tune
them out and we want the drink. But then I
read about California. So when you go to California, you
see labels everywhere. They're on like everything from pleather jackets
to drink cans, like like soda cans. What kind of
(24:31):
labels subway seats? There are these huge labels that say, essentially,
this product may cause cancer. I cannot stress how widespread
these labels are.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
But what do you like on a subway set? Yes,
because of the plastic that's used.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Because of the plastics. So there was this law in
nineteen eighty six which basically identified nine hundred chemicals that
could be carcinogenic. So it was a pretty low bar,
and they decided to slap these giant labels on any
product that contain these chemicals. We're talking big labels too.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
See my response to that, I imagine that if I lived
in that context, I would stop seeing it. And I'm
feeling this already, that there's a new study every day
about a new castogen and I just have to go, Okay,
everything's carstinogenic.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I'm not taking That's.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Exactly what I assume too, Because as a consumer, what
can you do about it. So you get a car seat,
for instance, you rent a car and you get a
car seat, and on the car seat is a giant
label that says that the car seat that, by the way,
you're legally mandated to put in the car and news
may cause cancer. And you think to yourself, well, that's
unfortunate because I have to use it. Yeah, but it
turns out that they've had this unexpected consequence that no
(25:37):
one was really thinking about. So there was a recent
study done that said, let's look into what sort of
effects these labels have had, and they talked to both
consumers and to companies. And you're right about the consumers,
because again, using the car seat example, there's nothing I
can really do about it. I have to use the
car seat unless they fashioned one out of bamboo, which
I don't think would be legal.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Legal.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, So they asked the companies and it turns out
that eighty percent of the companies that this survey interviewed
said that the law had prompted them to reformulate their products.
So think about, for instance, nail polish remover, like, yes,
you can make it with the carcinogenic substance, or you
can try and use something else that maybe doesn't cause cancer.
And so what I thought is fascinating about this in
the context of this debate about Australia and the labels
(26:19):
and alcohol is that obviously you know something either has
alcohol or it doesn't. It's a little bit different. But
on the other hand, I think we are seeing a
trend towards people wanting lower alcohol beverages or maybe even
those fancy non alcoholic beverages that people are increasingly using
for mocktails and as a substitute in social events. So
(26:41):
I wonder if it is going to prompt companies to
innovate more to make lower alcohols or no alcohols, like
a phoney Negroni for instance, that could be a positive.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
This is also being discussed in the US around highly
processed food and wanting to have clear labels about what's
in the food, and it has been adopted in places
in South America and apparently has had an impact on
firstly the knowledge and secondly the choice whether or not
to buy it. I think Australia has so of mess
this up a bit with the Health Star rating, because
(27:12):
I've started to ignore that.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Do you actually take any notice of the Health Star rating?
Speaker 1 (27:15):
No, And in fact, my child looks at the snack
and it has one star, and yes, well it's got
a star.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
It's got a star.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
And what a lot of people don't know about your
health star rating is that it's been compared to other
foods in the same category. So you're not comparing yoga
and chips. You're comparing chips and chips. So your four
star actually isn't healthy, right.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So there are some labels that I've stopped seeing. But
the difference with alcohol, I was thinking, is most of
the context in which I consume alcohol, I have absolutely
no proximity to the label. So I am at a bar,
a restaurant, even if I'm at work and someone pours
me a drink, I'm at dinner and someone pours me
a drink. My behavior around alcohol is that I don't
generally have it in my house, But I wonder if
(27:58):
that's going to make any difference if it's being.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Poured at a venue.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Whereas with cigarettes, for example, where we know that the
label had made a big difference, there's no such thing
as getting a cigarette as distinct from its packaging. Do
you know what I mean like alcohol exists is a
very specific type of consumer good in that often it's
not linked to its packaging. So I would never see
that label, Like do you read labels on things?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:23):
I don't read the fine print, but if it's an
actual label, yeah, I mean I do. I guess I
do if it's warning me of something. I'm also a
little bit wary, you know. I like being educated. I
like knowing so that I've got choice. I think that
a lot of people don't know the connection between alcohol
and cancer. Everyone knows the connection between cigarettes and cancer.
(28:46):
But I don't think that's a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
I wonder too, if the cigarettes and the alcohol. So,
for example, the two messages on alcohol at the moment
are about pregnancy and umbond baby and operating heavy machinery.
Right there is enormous stigma about those two things, and
the stigma I think comes from it impacting another person.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Ah, that's iry.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So if I sit there at the pub and my
friend has had four drinks and picks up their car
keys horrified, you simply wouldn't let it happen. And that's
been a change in a generation. That's been a really
positive thing. Same with drinking, the idea that you would
if a heavily pregnant person was sitting there with a
bottle of wine in front of her, you'd get looks.
But cancer impacts you, and so I wonder if there
(29:31):
will ever be the same amount of stigma around that
even with cigarettes. My issue with people smoking in public
is the passive smoke of like it impacting people around them,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
I'd be interested to know whether the because obviously the
photos that are on cigarette packets are extreme and they're
not like your regular warning light weel, They're very, very graphic.
I know that some people have actually black humor, name
the people and name the photos, and there's a sort
of a oh, this is Jerry with the lungs, or
this is you know, Jane with the fingers, whatever it is.
(30:06):
But it would be probably hard to measure that because
over the same period of time, the price of cigarettes
has gone up a huge amount.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
And advertising was pulled.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Yeah, which is a different kind of detern.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I think that's a really interesting point. You make me out.
I'm a bit stuck on it. The idea that we
all now understand that cigarettes cause cancer. We read articles
just constantly telling us about the direct links between alcohol
and cancer. Why do you think it's been so hard
for us to internalize that as a society.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I think that alcohol is so much part of our
culture and so connected to celebrations, whereas we don't have
a celebratory cigarette. I mean, you know, there used to
be that cliche after really good sex, you know, people
would say, I feel like a cigarette. But it's not like, Oh,
it's you've got a promotion at work, let's all have
(30:55):
a cigarette. There's never been that.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Choice and it's your one cigarette a week. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
That smoking I think was that widespread in say, my parents' generation,
Like it was something that everyone did, and you see
it even in films. The easiest way for them to
situate themselves within the context of the seventies is that
everyone has a cigarette in I've seen.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
A lot more smoking in popular culture, like and just
like that, for example, the way sam As smokes, the
way Carry sometimes smokes.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
There's also been this wishful thinking about the idea that
young people are going to understand just how bad alcohol
is and not drink, And there's been this rising trend
of articles about how gen z have rejected alcohol as
a social lubricant in the way that past generations loved it.
It turns out that really was just wishful thinking. A
new report in the Financial Times says that seventy three
(31:45):
percent of Gen Z admitted to consuming alcohol in the
past six months. And so it turns out the reason
why they weren't drinking was because they weren't in the
workforce and they didn't have money to spend on alcohol.
But now that they're aging into the workforce and earning
real money, it turns out that they like a drink
just as much as any other generation. I think it's
time for a bit of scullous gossip, just to lighten
(32:06):
the mood here a little bit. Prince Harry and King
Charles may be working towards making amends, and I am
so relieved. I've been very worried about this.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
What do we know about this?
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Because I saw the headlines over the weekend, what steps
have been taken?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It's actually not even that scurrilous. There's photos. So the
Mail on Sunday had the scoop. They said that the
Monarch and the Duke of Sussex's aides met for a
secret peace summit in London last week. And there were
photos in fact of these high level officials leaving the meeting.
So it took place at a place called the Royal
Overseas League. That is a private members club that was
(32:43):
set up to promote wait for it, international friendship. Oh
across the pond overseass two words for some reason. And
I can just smell the other bound books in their car.
It feels very the Crown. I want to go to
their people with shaman might say, who are there? So
I'm glad you asked that, mere, because we've got their names.
(33:04):
Meredith Mains who was Prince Harry's new CEO, Liam McGuire,
who was the Sussex's pr le That's a busy job,
isn't it. And Tobin Andre who was King Charles's communications secretary.
Now what I really want to know is who leaked this?
Which side do you think has more interest in leaking
that these talks are happening?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Maya, the're the pr expert.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
I think it was a joint decision to leak it,
because it's almost a leak off, right. I imagine that
the terms and conditions by which this meeting in any
future meetings would happen because part of The reason they
haven't happened until now is because no one trusts the
Sussexes anymore. Because every text message, every phone call, every conversation,
a lot of these really private exchanges have become fodder
(33:49):
for interviews, for books, for Netflix documentaries. So I think
for anyone to feel safe having these conversations, the leaking
policy would have had to be very much laid out,
So I think it was probably mutual decision.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
I also think Harry has a real incentive here to
patch things up fast. Now I'm going to get a
little bit pragmatic and maybe a little bit more bit
about this. Charles is in his mid seventies. By all accounts,
William is determined not to let Harry get away with
any of this royal ish funny business anymore. So for instance,
(34:23):
calling yourself the Duke of Sussex. Jamie Kern Lee mcpho
was the first person to have Meghan on a podcast
as an interview guest showed on her Instagram that Meghan
had sent her a gift using the HRH nomenclature, which
William is simply not going to allow. So when William
becomes king, all these royal sort of trappings are going
(34:47):
to go away. So I think what Harry wants to
do is shore up what he can use and what
he can't use now, because soon enough it's going to
be very hard for him to get away with it.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
So completely excommunicated.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
As soon as I saw this headline, my first reaction
was concerned for Charles because I went, oh, he's sicker
than we thought because he was diagnosed with cancer in
February last year. We do not know what type of
cancer that is still there was Also, when Harry recently
did that interview following the court case, he said.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
I don't know how long my father Yeah, but they
were very upset about that. They were utset about that. Firstly,
he doesn't know, and secondly that's a pretty awful thing
to say.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
But for Charles to come to the table here, I
just thought, there is nothing like mortality to kind of
bring potential or an attempt at reconciliation.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
You know who wasn't represented at that meeting, William No,
and nor will he After the break has posting on
Instagram and Facebook become cringe? And are we heading towards
posting zero.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
One unlimited out loud access.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively from Mum
and Maya. Subscribers follow the link in the show notes
to get us in your ears five days a week,
and a huge thank you to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
I just came back from Greece, so I definitely would
say I insufferably overposted on that holiday, both grid posts
and stories. Most of the time, though I probably consistently
post Instagram stories grid posts probably more, maybe once every
two weeks.
Speaker 5 (36:26):
I do not post a lot to my main kind
of like Instagram or TikTok feeds. But what I do
use social media for a lot more is stories. I
kind of like that it's temporary and there's less pressure
I feel to get it right. You don't have to
curate anything, you don't have to get a caption.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It can just be a lot simpler. So I do
not post regularly on social media. Maybe once a year
if that. If we've been on holidays and I want
to post a photo, I feel this weird pressure about
getting the caption right and do I need to ask
a friend to edit the lighting?
Speaker 4 (36:53):
And like, who am I doing this for? Because I
don't care and in my real life I don't care
if you know, anybody who's on holidays at the moment,
particularly in Europe, you might be struck by how surprising
it is to see this almost retro use of social
media where they're posting, here's what I ate for lunch,
(37:13):
here's me in front of a landmark, here's what I
bought in a shop. I've got a few friends who
are overseas at the moment, and it's such a stark
contrast because it feels like what social media isn't anymore.
And I only realized that when I started seeing those
photos again. As social media has evolved, the baseline expectation
(37:34):
for posting keeps rising. We've been posting, well some of
us for fifteen years now, and it started off with
sort of dashed off tweets. Then it became carefully composed
Instagram photos, which were replaced in turn by TikTok clips,
which are increasingly showing the production value of television. Have
(37:57):
you noticed that it's now when you flick through, everything's
moving towards short form video content. So there's very few
pictures of people's breakfasts, very few pictures of sunsets, very
few pictures of people's dogs or selfies or their families
and women. We know that women are posting less and
lurking more. And there are three There are actually four
(38:19):
reasons for this, which I'm just quickly going to go
through and tell me if any of these resonate with you.
The first one is with everything going on in the world,
a lot of which we see via social thanks to
the algorithm, people are feeling self conscious about posting just
sort of mundane, benign updates about their life because you know,
(38:40):
there's a lot of shouting and a lot of assumptions
are being made by what you don't post or what
you do post.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I think specifically in a context where there is discussions
around Gaza and what is happening in the US with
Ice at the moment, that anything you post does look
tone deaf, beside the worst thing happening in the world
right now, and therefore people are sort of opting out
whether you post or you don't post, that will be weaponized.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Because those things didn't used to be on Instagram so much,
but now there's so many brands posting and creators and
influencers they've sort of taken over, and news brands as well.
The second reason, which I alluded to, earlier reels. It's now,
whether it's on TikTok or whether it's on Instagram, even
on Facebook, people are posting these kind of movie trailer
(39:30):
production quality values, and social is a place of work
for a lot of people, influencers, creators, and brands. So
these are big budgets. It takes a lot of time
to edit and produce and film these reels, and.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Not everybody's up to it, right, And that's not an accident.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
I think, as you say, the average person, women are
posting less and less, and that is because of a
very intentional algorithm change that happened, which was we are
going to present your content to strangers. This is no
longer about friends engaging. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about that
on Instagram. Initially it was like I was sharing with
(40:09):
my community, and now it's been like.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
People who chose to follow you now they were interested
in what Jesse had for breakfast, or maybe that you've
got a haircut.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Now you're performing to strangers. And therefore it is the
erasure of context which brings it back to your I
suppose either you post about everything all of the time
or you post about nothing.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
That context is really important and That's the next point
is that millennials who grew up on social media, like
you two, you're moving into middle age and seeking more
privacy in your lives. You don't want to be perceived
all the time, that sense of I don't want to
show the world what I'm doing. It's almost like everybody's
woken up from this collective fever dream of why were
(40:53):
we just sharing all the private moments from our lives.
Firstly with a bunch of people who we might you know,
the person who went to school with, or an ex
boyfriend or an ex boyfriend's mother that still follows you.
And now it's literally why would I want to share
those things with strangers? And that idea of being person
by people either who you don't know very well or
you don't at all. And then the fourth reason is
(41:16):
group chats. This is relatively new over the last few years.
If you wanted to share an observation about something, a
picture about something, some news that you've got a promotion,
or that you'd had to put your dog down, you
would do that on social media. Now you're much more
likely to do it in a group chat.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I think there's a fifth reason. Ai as Ai scrapes
the internet for fodder. People are understanding, you don't want
to put your baby photo up there because your baby's
going to end up being used by AI to make
a completely unrelated video.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
So Jesse, I was reading this amazing piece about posting
on Wei, which is kind of like everyone's feeling a
bit weird about posting. It was in The New Yorker
this week. I certainly feel that way. I used to
do instababbles on Instagram all the time, where I just
sort of chat, you know, spontaneously while I put my
makeup on a couple of months ago, I felt uncomfortable
about doing that, and I stopped doing that. And I
(42:06):
used to post lots of sort of getting ready videos
and stuf. I don't do that anymore. And I loved
this idea of understanding why. And it's said in this
article social now is just used for punditory provocation and promotion.
Does that ring truth for you?
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (42:22):
And it is my greatest concern, like reading this about
who we're leaving social media too, because I think it's
a very skewed vision of who people are, what they
care about, morality, ethics, tone, discourse, all of those things
being left to the content creators. Now, when someone uploads
(42:43):
something onto social media, it's sort of like, oh, are
you trying to be a content creator?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
You kind of don't know why.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Else it feels vulnerable because people talk about feeling cringe
when they post something.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
But why is that bad? Why don't we just leave
it to the professionals.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I suppose the reason why I worry about leaving it
to the inadverted commas professionals is because of the tone
of that conversation. You get the extremes on both sides.
You get the people like exactly what it said here,
you get people who are provocative on.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
Purpose professionals, and we don't want to do it anymore.
You haven't posted on social for a long time.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Have you, No?
Speaker 3 (43:20):
But like normal people, sometimes I have to go on
to TikTok and I scroll and I scroll, or I
scroll on Instagram and I go The normal people aren't here.
The normal people have left this party. The normal people
are all watching. It's like, you know what it's like.
It's a party and it's four am, and all the
normal people with normal lives went home, and you look
(43:41):
around and you think all parties are like this.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
All of the time, and.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
People are throwing things, and there's vomit in the corner,
and there's like people on the hard drugs and you're
just looking around, going this is this is terrible.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
People telling me about Amazon Prime sales.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
People being way too intense.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Yeah, and it's descended into chaos, and you go, what
has happened to parties? And it's like, no, no, no,
it's not the party, it's the people who are left.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
But on the flip side, Jesse, I'm going to attempt
a more optimistic take on this trend, which is maybe
the normal people quote unquote I have just realized that
real life is much better than social media, and now
they're prioritizing IROL experiences. This is my theory as to
why we've all suddenly become obsessed with tennis. Have you
noticed that, yes, I know you always liked. Yes, Yes,
(44:25):
everyone's watching the Wimbledon front row this year so much
more than they ever have in past years. And I
feel like the hype around sporting events, around the eras tour,
around live music generally is because people are turning to
real life more. They're valuing it more. And I've noticed
that even in my group chats particularly with American friends,
because the enormity of what's going on is difficult to
(44:47):
summarize and get at. People are even retreating from group chats,
or maybe they're just not talking to me.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Either way, Yes, I can't.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
Believe you haven't said the word capitalism.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
That's the thing, right, is that these social media companies
couldn't charge any of us to be on it, right,
And in fact, there.
Speaker 4 (45:03):
Are those pictures of our breakfast.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Yes, that incredible documentary called The Social Dilemma made the
point that it is one of the the widest used
products that everyone would refuse to pay for. In fact,
most people not only wouldn't pay a dollar to use it,
they would pay a dollar not And the only people
who have upheld these companies is advertisers. And I think
that that's eroded trust. But the reason why Amelia, I
(45:28):
think your optimism is totally misguided is because people have
not left the party and gone home.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
They are standing by the.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Windows, addicted to watching what's going on. If you looked
at the time people are spending on social media that
hasn't gone down, that has not gone down.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
That's the thing. We're not posting, we're lurking Now, men
have always been lurkers, right, Women have always been posters, commenters, likers, sharers.
But now women aren't doing that anymore, not as much.
And as Jesse said, we're looking through the window. And
the problem with that. If we've just left the party,
that's different. Let them, you know, eat, But because we're
(46:07):
watching it, it's skewing our idea of reality.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
The other element to why millennials in particular stopped posting
is because we watched as the dumb stuff that the
famous people posted got dug up. So the dig which
we've talked about on this show, it was weaponized. It
was all weaponized.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
So I think what happened was Trevor Noah, Yes, when
was that he was named to the Daily Show chair
after John Stewart left, So that was when the Daily
Show was absolutely at its peak. Trevor Noah was named
the new chair and people dug up all these sort
of fat phobic, fat shaming tweets.
Speaker 3 (46:47):
How many careers like have been I mean destroyed might
be too big a word, but have been impacted.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Well, it's that idea of social excavation, which is why
you know, in Lauren Sanchez Bezos got married, she wiped
her Instagram. It's this idea, and if you look at
a gen Zeta or Jen Alfa's social they'll only have
on Maine, which is in their feed. They'll only have
like three or four posts for millennials and gen X's
(47:13):
it was like a record of everything.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Every time we didn't avocado toast in a sun dappled room.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
You go back and it was a record of our relationships.
It was almost like a public diary. But this idea
of being perceived and not wanting to be perceived, that's
something that gen Z's and Jen alf Is a much
more savvy about because they don't want people drawing conclusions
about them because of something they posted two weeks ago,
let alone two years ago.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Think that's why Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift have never
followed each other on Instagram, because they know that the
unfollow would be such a big story.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Which I find it interesting that jen Alphas and Z's
have pulled back because when I look at my own
social media usage, and if I'm being entirely honest with myself,
I think it was indexed a lot on whether or
not I was courting, like in my single life, so
I wonder if too, if you're on sort of Him
(48:10):
or you're on Bumble and you're but it's more curately dating.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
It's more curated and with less shot.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Because you won't to be saved when you're seeing you.
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Don't want someone going back and seeing pictures of you
with your exes, or you don't necessarily want to be
known in that public way, whereas our generation it felt
like we really wanted to be known. It's like remember
my Space, which it was like what are your favorite books?
What are your favorite movie?
Speaker 1 (48:33):
It happened quickly, like I remember I had my first
child in twenty eighteen, and the practically the first thing
I did was post a picture of him on Instagram.
By the time I had my second child in twenty twenty,
I was not putting a photo of her on the
internet ever.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Wow, A big thank you to all of you the
out louders BeO, we are done. That was great for
listening to today's show and our fabulous team for putting
this show together. We'll be back in your ears tomorrow.
Speaker 6 (49:02):
Bye.
Speaker 4 (49:03):
Shout out to any Mum and Maya subscribers listening if
you love the show and want to support us as well.
Subscribing to Mom and Maya is the very best way
to do so. There is a link in the episode
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