November 13, 2024 • 51 mins
Martha Stewart is a whole vibe -- which is probably why Netflix made a doc about both her and it. Trouble is, the billionaire professional homemaker, jailbird and Snoop's best friend isn't too happy with the end result...
Plus, why did Kate Middleton’s face attract so much attention after a Remembrance Day service in London? Or have we just forgotten what women actually look like?
And, dating as a job. The new method for singles who no longer want to be quite so... single, that boasts a scorched earth policy and some very strict criteria.
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What to Read:
- Read: One day, Martha Stewart’s billionaire boyfriend turned to her in bed and said something unforgivable.
- Read: On Martha Stewart’s honeymoon, she kissed a man who wasn't her husband.
- Read: Martha Stewart's whole life crumbled in 2004. Her best friend played a part in her downfall.
- Read: Armie Hammer and the 'cancelled' celebrities who rage bait their way into headlines.
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Hosts: Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens & Amelia Lester
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Mayer acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Welcome to Mama Mea are out loud?
What women are actually talking about on Wednesday the thirty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
On What how About?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
We's done Again? Hello, and welcome to Mama Mea Out
loud What women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the
thirteenth of November. I'm Meya Friedman sitting in the big
chair while Holly wayIn Wright is away.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I'm Jesse Stevens and today we are joined by Mama
Maya's US correspondent and the deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine,
our friend, Amelia Lester.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Hello, Hello, welcome, And on the show today it's equal
parts chaotic and iconic. Yes, we're talking about the Martha
Stewart Netflix stocko and why the original influencer Jailbird and
Snoop's best friend hates it? And why did Kate Middleton's
face attract so much attention after Remembrance Day's service in London?
(01:11):
Have we just forgotten what women actually look like? Plus
dating as a job the new method for single people
looking to be unsingle that boasts a scorched earth policy
and some very strict criteria. But first, Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
In case he missed it, Armie Hammer's mum has spoken
about a very special birthday present she gifted her son,
who is definitely not a literal cannibal. In case you're wondering,
Hamma has a new podcast is called Army hammer Time Podcast,
and he dropped the second of a two part interview
with his mother Drew. Here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
What did you get?
Speaker 5 (01:51):
So I call Army and I go, Army, what would
you like for your birthday this year?
Speaker 6 (01:55):
And he goes, oh, I don't know, you know, maybe
maybe money whatever. And I was like, I believe I'm
going to give you a vas sect to me.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah, so yeah, my mom got me a sex to.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Me for that stupid and by the way, you know,
as the church lady, I would love to say, okay, Army,
I'm really praying that you don't have sex outside of
marriage because under God, sex you know, is in the
purity of a marriage and.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
All this, and I'm thinking that's not gonna work. So
now I'm out here blasting away, bro, just throwing it
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
She also went on to say how many young women
would love to have Armie Hammer's little babies.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I love this interview. It's made my whole week and
you can watch the video of it. It's quite extraordinary.
It's just the two of them. I think Army's wearing
like shorts and thongs and sitting in a chair and
his mum's just sitting on the couch and they just
set up I think a phone. But she goes on
to say it's a miracle after he talks about blasting
it everywhere. It's a miracle we don't have a bunch
of little hammers running around and he said, yeah, I
(03:02):
ate them.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Wow, that is fucked and a less blasting, Army, less blasting.
She also had some thoughts about those allegations that were
made in twenty twenty one. Here is how she directly
referenced them.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Well, you know, I even.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Called you one time and I was like, okay, let
me just get this straight. I go, are there any
women out there with ribs or limbs missing? That's what
I want to know as a mother, because end of conversation,
if there are limbs or ribs missing.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
She's not having any of these accusations. She's not buying
it her Army would not eat a person.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I do want to say, I'm all for normalizing vasectoms
for men. I think it's really important that men take
responsibility for family planning. And my husband, for the record,
did instagram his vasectomy live, not live, but before and
after shock.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Can you explain? Is it true? I heard that there's
a big thing on Super Bowl someday in the US
where men go and get their vasectoms and then recover
on the couch watching like the day before, and then
recover on the couch watching football.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yees, it's a movie. I have heard that. But it
is interesting to note that for sectomy rates in the
US are much lower than they are in Australia. Culturally,
it's much more taboo, So it's interesting that Army's breaking
the fourth wall, as it were.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I'm also interested when she said I gave him a
vasectomy for his birthday. Look, this story is strange. Army
is clearly not your usual bear, and I was like,
did she just get out the scissors?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I don't know. You love an overshare amongst family members.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So Jamia, would you pay for your son's v sectomy?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
For example, I'd pay for it to be reversed so
I could have my grandchildren.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The documentary about Martha Stewart, who is eighty three, dropped
on Netflix a couple of weeks ago, and we are
ready to talk about whether Martha is actually the original influencer.
A quick snapshot of who Martha is in case you've forgotten.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
She is the.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Queen of homemaking, cooking, and everything lifestyle. She's a TV personality,
a business mogul, and the original sort of DIY expert
who built an entire empire around making everyday life look fabulous.
She started as a model. She then became an investment
banker and a stockbroker, and she started her own company.
(05:24):
After she wrote a cookbook and then made a magazine,
started a media company called Omnimedia, and it listed on
the New York Stock Exchange. I think she was on
the board of the New York Stock Exchange. And she
became America's first female self made billionaire. So she's got
an extraordinary legacy, really, most of which I didn't know
what had forgotten about. So her brand is all about
(05:45):
like fancy recipes, home dcort tips, gardening ideas, entertainment advice,
and this documentary covered her whole life because she's got
a fascinating life. As if that wasn't interesting enough, She
then went to prison for insider trading, well not quite
insider trading, but for a scandal around insider trading, and
(06:09):
she was in prison for about five months. In two
thousand and four, there was a big, very public celebrity
court case. Her legacy is that she's basically a household name,
and if you've ever googled how to set a table,
I don't know do people google about you would have
found her. A few key moments from the documentary have
gone viral, including a chat that she had about infidelity
(06:32):
in her marriage. So she was married to this guy
called Andrew Stewart from when she was quite young, I
think she was nineteen. She kissed someone else on her honeymoon.
She was in Italy in the Duomo and a moment
overcame her and she had a quick past with a stranger,
and then she had another short lived affair. But her
husband had many affairs before they eventually divorced. Here's the
(06:54):
conversation she had with the interviewer in the documentary about infidelity.
Speaker 7 (06:59):
I don't know how many different girlfriends he had during
this time. But I think there were quite a few
young women. Listen to my advice. If you're married and
you think you're happily married and your husband started to
cheat on you, he's a piece of shit, and look
at him. It's a piece of shit, and get out
of it, get out of that marriage. But I couldn't
do that, couldn't walk away. Didn't you have an affair
(07:21):
early on in the relationship or when you were a Yeah,
but I don't think Andy ever knew about that.
Speaker 8 (07:27):
He did say anything about it.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
He did, Yes, you would confess to him.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Sess He didn't straight from the marriage until you told
him you had already straight.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
Oh that's not true. I don't think.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Amelia and I've watched this documentary. We adored it. Jesse
hasn't seen it yet. What was interesting to me was
realizing that all this talk about Ballerina farm and Nara Smith,
all these tradwives and influencers who make the work of
homemaking and parenting look effortless while running these big businesses
(08:02):
and making a huge amount of money from looking effortless.
She really was the original influencer. Didn't you think, Amelia
so What was your takeaways from the documentary.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, it got me thinking about what an influencer is
and what makes for an influencer. There was this recent
survey of the American Labor Force that said seven percent
of Americans describe themselves as influencers as their job. Now,
this climate can't be true, the figure cannot be that high.
But when you think about what makes for an influencer,
it comes down to a person who can get other
(08:33):
people to spend money. That's what it comes down to.
I read a great definition of it recently by Emily
Sunberg at the newsletter The Feed. She wrote, what the
followers of these women really want is to step into
their lives for a few minutes each day. And that
got me thinking about how you can draw a straight
line from Martha Stewart to Gwyneth Paltrow, and then I
(08:55):
would argue a dotted line from both those women to
Zoe Foster Blake.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's interesting. So all women who have built incredible business
empires and who other women are really obsessed with their lives.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, they get us to take out our wallets. They've
successfully monetized not just their taste, I would say, but
their lives. We think, for a few minutes each day,
if we buy a Martha Stuart Kmart piece of home wears,
or if we buy Gwyneth's new skincare line or Zoe
foster Blake skincare line, we're actually wanting to grab a
piece of their lives.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
But isn't that the same with every celebrity who's ever
endorsed a product, every celebrity who has a fragrance.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
I don't think so. And this is where I actually
think Martha Stewart is unlike a lot of influencers, and
that is that she is, as far as I can tell,
extremely talented. For example, it started with cooking and catering.
That is a real skill. It can be kind of
disparaged in the treadwife world, but being a great cook
(09:57):
is like it's a really good skill. And then there's
interior design and then even like how to set a table,
like there is real status in that. And it's the
same with Zoe Foster Blake. I think this pouchhow is
very good at marketing. But I wonder if that's a
bit of the tension that's emerged between them.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
I would call Zoe and Gwyneth and Martha influential, not
influenzas I would actually put Zoe quite separate. Although it's
interesting for all of those women, they are naturally talented
at a particular thing. For Zoe it's writing, she's a
brilliant writer. For Gwyneth, it's acting. For Martha, it was
(10:36):
actually cooking and homemaking. And I think what's interesting about
her and what the documentary, which she didn't like. By
the way, she's come out and said a whole lot
of things that she didn't like about it. You could
hear she probably didn't like that in exchange about the infidelity,
but she critiqued almost everything, from camera angles to music choices.
She told The New York Times she hated the scenes
(10:57):
at the end, where she said she looked like a
lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden. She
didn't like how she looked on camera. She thought there
should have been more rap music involved and that would
have been more interesting. And it made me see how
many documentaries that we watch about celebrities, and there's a
whole host of them at the moment, from Harry and
Meghan to the David Beckham documentary. They're now making one
(11:20):
about Victoria Beckham, Taylor Swift. Of course, they all have
creative control and approval. And even Oprah, who Apple was
making a documentary about and they finished and she paid
to buy it back so it would never be released
because she didn't like it. And I think that's why
I like this documentary. What did it make you feel
about Martha herself?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Amelia, Well, I think that's why I want to push
back on Jesse's idea that it's about skill. I think
all three of these women are so smart, so brilliant,
they deserve every dollar that they've made. But I think
that their greatest skill is marketing. And is marketing an
idea of perfect imperfection or imperfect perfection. This word perfect
(12:03):
comes up for Martha all the time. That's what she
was selling with the perfectly made tables and the perfect
Thanksgiving turkeys.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
But the idea is that she lets us.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
In to tiny parts of her life that are anything
but perfect, and she keeps us wanting more from it.
So a couple of things that come up in the dosh.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
You mean in the documentary, because not in her before
she went to prison, like her magazines and her public persona,
does she let us in she certainly didn't used to
because there was all that stuff about how she was
the Queen of mean before it came out about Ellen.
It reminded me so much of that thing about the
worst thing a woman can do in business or in
(12:41):
life is be assertive. And it showed some scenes of
Martha's Stewitt in the kitchen with people who were working
with her for her, and she was really rude to
them and really short.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
That's true, but she's now a huge influencer in her
own right coming out of prison letting it all hang
out in this documentary. The New York Times had recently
that she is a gen Z beauty influencer, and she specifically,
what do you mean? So she advertises clay to Postkincare,
which is a really expensive skincare brand. The creams are
all four hundred dollars and up on TikTok from her
(13:13):
Connecticut mansion. She's routinely getting seventy eighty million views for
these skincare advertisements, and so the relatability of it is
part of why she's taken off with a new generation.
So let's run through a few things that she talks
about quite frankly in this documentary the first marriage ending
in divorce, as we've discussed, and she shares with the
documentary makers letters that she sent her ex husband begging
(13:36):
him to take her back. That's an extraordinary amount of disclosure.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
That was quite j lo. I thought it was.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
She's admitted that she didn't feel naturally maternal towards her
daughter Alexis, and this is something that her daughter has
spoken about over the years, the fact that while she
and her mother are very close, her mother was never
a straightforwardly maternal figure for her. She didn't come.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Across as very warm. And I kept finding myself texting, you,
have you ever seen a more unlikable woman like her? Unlikability?
And I know this is a real weapon that we
use against women, this idea of needing to be likable.
What was interesting is that she wasn't trying to be likable.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
No, when Nora's Gwyneth, by the way, Gwyneth is also I.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Feel like Gwyneth tries to be likable. I think Martha
is really like, yeah, I didn't like being a mum
that much. My husband was a dickhead. People need to
be better.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
She was on Drew Barrymore's show this week and Drew's
famously touchy with her guests, and she just pushed her away.
I loved that.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I think it's the complexity that makes her a complicated
monet painting that we can't stop staring at, because in
a lot of ways she actually subverts the feminine. It's like,
in one way she's the antitrad wife. Even her voice
is a bit deeper, she's disagreeable. She doesn't come across
as pleasant. It doesn't seem to be like her aim
(14:56):
to come across as pleasant. Like compare that to a
ballerina farm Hannah Nielman, who from the high voice to
the slow talking to the there's something so tranquil about
it and subservient.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
They're both very much with Hannah Nielman's husband and Nara
Smith's husband, Lucky Blue. It's always in the service. They're
working in the service of their husband and children, and
they're always very much in the service. Whereas that's so interesting,
Martha's more about I'm doing this because I like, I
want a nice table, and I want to be gardening,
(15:29):
and I want to be making a nice Christmas dinner
because it gives me joy.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And she fucked the rest of you and she flirts
with the male gaze, but she also rejects it. So
she's on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She dates famous man.
She dated Anthony Hopkins, which I didn't know, but she
broke up with him because she said she couldn't stop
thinking about Hannibal Lecter. And she's spoken up very openly
about how difficult it has been for her to date
in midlife and beyond.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
She's quite beyond midlife. I would say she's eighty three.
Is she still dating?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
She is, And she.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Says that she's got no plans to retire, like she
doesn't see anything appealing about retirement. But I was thinking
about a quote I read recently about fame and how
people become famous to feel understood. That's the number one
reason is that they want people to understand them. And
after that documentary, there was a headline that said she
still doesn't feel understood, and she doesn't, and I wonder
(16:19):
if that's why she doesn't want to retire. She's not
done yet. She feels like people don't fully get her.
And that's my question, as someone who hasn't watched the documentary.
Are we laughing at Martha Stuart or are we laughing
with Martha Stuart because she's become this cultural icon in
the last few years. She kind of pops up with
Snoop Dogg. She's like, again, this complicated figure and I've
(16:44):
seen viral clips from this, like the one about her
affairs and her relationships and stuff, and I have a laugh.
But do you think she feels like we're laughing at her?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
What a great question. No, I think that she's more like,
you know, how Betty White became iconic, Yeah, and Ruth
Baty Ginsburg was iconic. I know that's different. She was
the Supreme Court judge and has her own complicated history.
But I don't I think people are laughing at her.
I'm not laughing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
About Miron's another one.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, yeah, the Queen. Like it's kind of like, I
hate to say it, but like they're so old they're cool.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, exactly, It's like they've come back again. It's like retro.
Was this documentary good for her brand or bad?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Well? I think the very fact that she's still selling
really expensive skincare to gen z on TikTok means that
it was great for her brand. I think we now
crave the deconstruction of perfection that she's revealing to us
in this, don't you think, Miah, Yeah, And I think
that what it did do Jesse, that's so interesting what
you say about they want to be understood.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I think that's incredibly astute. I think what it reminded
me a little bit like watching the Menendez Brothers documentary.
I think, I know what I think about these people.
And I thought I knew what I thought about Martha Stewart,
but I changed my mind after watching the documentary and
I was like, oh, that was bullshit that she got
(18:06):
sent to prison. Yeah, it is like, yeah, soso bad.
And similarly to the Menandez brothers, like I thought that
they'd made up all those allegations. That was my understanding
because the reason I think that where relooking at all
of these things. You know, we've got this segment all
or nothing where you either know everything about a topic
or nothing. The Internet allows you to know everything about
(18:30):
any topic if you want to. But back in the
nineties and the eighties and until the last ten years,
there was a limited amount of information you could get
about a certain topic. You know, if you wanted to
dive deep, there wasn't really a way you could particularly
for someone like Martha Stewart who wasn't iconic in Australia,
and same with the Menendez brothers. I was kind of
dimly aware of that story, but now it's like these
(18:53):
stories are international.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
You're also making me think about how I felt after
watching Harry and Meghan's documentary versus how I felt watching this.
Once I'd watched Harry and Megan's documentary, I didn't need
to know anything else. But having watched the Martha documentary,
it's like Jesse said, she's a monet painting. I want
to know everything, and I still don't know everything.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
When you say that about Harry and Meghan, do you
mean I'd like I'd eaten too much at the buffet,
Like all the mystery was gone, all the interest was gone.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
There wasn't the push pull of that collaboration between a
director and their subject. This was more of a push
pool dynamic, and so there were points where it was uncomfortable.
There are a lot of points where it was uncomfortable.
The filmmaker would leave the camera on Martha as she
finished a thought and then wanted the camera to be
turned off, and I felt like that push pool made
me want to know more.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
The other thing that Martha appears to have done, at
least in what I've read and clips I've seen, is
that she owns that she's really, really rich, and she
quite likes being really really rich, which we don't see
very often with women in Australia. You would never ever
get away with it. But watching that and watching a
woman who owns it is sort of refreshing, but also complicated.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
The fact that she's self made. And I keep coming
back to what you say about not feeling understood. She
doesn't get the credit she deserves, as so many female
business owners don't, and I would include Zoe among them,
where it's like they have built these multi million dollar
empires entirely on their own, and that's pretty bloody impressive.
(20:34):
Is she still as culturally relevant in America as she
used to be?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I think she's even more so. They talk about in
the documentary. This big turning point for her was when
she went on a roast of Justin Bieber in twenty fourteen.
That's when she actually met Snoop Dogg and they became
very good friends. She had been out of the public
eye for a long time after prison. She was a
punchline to your earlier question, Jesse, she was a South
Park punchline in fact, But then when she went back
(21:00):
on Comedy Central and this roast of Justin Bieber, people
thought that the jokes were really ribald and funny and
definitely pushed the envelope. Were you shocked by that? I didn't.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, I didn't get to that part of the documentary.
I got distracted.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Well, I was shocked by the jokes and how like,
what were they? They really pushed the envelope.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Rip bold is not a word you hear often on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
There were jokes that sort of pushed the envelope in
terms of how you talk about race. There were jokes
that also people made fun of her for being really,
really old, and she laughed about it, wearing her leather
leggings and her Dreasman note and embroidered jacket. I mean,
she just came across as tough as nails, and I
think we really at this point respond to that and
with no fucks to give.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
It's nice to see Snoop again.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
One of the highest rated episodes on my show, Martha
Stewart Living was when Snoop and I made brownies together.
And I've used this recipe ever since. As a matter
of fact, I ate three of them right before they
called and asked me to do this.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Rose in a moment. A UK TV presenter made a
comment about Kate Middleton on the weekend and let's just
say it got us all thinking out loud.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
An article ran in Grazia on Tuesday with the headline
She's aged so much. The vile commentary around Kate Middleton's
appearance needs to stop. At first, I rolled my eyes
because it felt like one of those classic Internet tropes
of using mock horror to incentivize people to click on
(22:36):
a less than flattering photo. I thought, this is just
engagement baiting. The publication says, they're saying this is a
terrible photo. They're saying she looks old, how offensive. Here's
the photo, please leave comments below. And from that I
just went I'm not going to engage. But then I
saw where the comments had come from and I thought
(22:57):
that this actually was a valid news story. First, I
should say Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, appeared at
a remembrance Sunday service in London and since completing her
chemotherapy treat in September, She's been slowly returning to royal duties,
and images of her in a black dress and a
black hat were published widely online. We can, of course
(23:20):
expect the internet to be cruel, there's nothing new about that.
But there was one particular comment on X from a
high profile British TV presenter who regularly appears on Good
Morning Britain and Loose Women. Her name is Narinda Corp.
She shared an image of Middleton with the comment genuine question,
why has Kate aged so much? Isn't she only forty two?
(23:43):
Is she a smoker? It's the only explanation.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Was she high? This woman?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
It's the most bizarre tweet.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
If you want to think it. I can't control what
you think, but like, firstly, did you miss the cancer part?
And secondly why share that with the world? Like what
did she think she was doing?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Yes? So she's since apologized. Unsurprisingly, she faced a lot
of backlash. She apologized with a video on social media,
and here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
I put out a stupid tweet that wasn't my intention.
My intent was not to be malicious or nasty or anything.
I'm not like that. Anybody who knows me it was
stupid to ask about the aging. I've admitted that, and
I put my hands up and I've apologized if it
caused offense. I didn't wish death on anyone. I didn't
do anything like that. I asked about aging. She smoked
(24:34):
nothing to do with cancer.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, so I think that the emission of the cancer
was actually kind of the problem. But Google trends, since
all this has happened, Google Trends shows a spike in
searchers for Kate Middleton looks Tired, Kate Middleton aging, and
Kate Middleton looks old. My question is what is wrong
with us?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
My question is how are those Google searchers. Kate Middleton
looks tired is a statement.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I would defend that, not defendant explain it in saying,
if you're looking for the original, you'd heard something about
it and you wanted you knew it would link you
with the photo or the original apsource material. I'm going
to now not defend nerindacal, but kind of defend her
after saying I think she was high, and of course
she should never have said it. What I think this
is an indication of, however, is actually nothing to do
(25:22):
with Kate Middleton it's about the fact that we don't
know what women look like anymore. We're just not sure
what women are meant to look like because everyone famous
kind of looks this same weird age, whether they're Nicole
Kidman who's almost sixty, or Kylie Jenner. Everyone is sort
of this nondescript, strange age. So if there's a time
(25:44):
that a woman is perhaps not having the tweakments that
she once had, or she is tired, or maybe she's
recovering from cancer, or who knows what is happening, we're
just like, oh, wait, what does a female face look
like anymore? I actually don't know. And it's something that
friends and I in my group chats often do when
(26:07):
we see someone's not in this way where it's like, oh,
doesn't she look tired. It's almost like a CSI forensic
analysis of trying to understand how women look a certain way,
not necessarily because we want to emulate them, but just
trying to understand this look that people have.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, it's like the old adage that cosmetic surgery doesn't
necessarily make you look younger, it just makes it look
like you had cosmetic surgery. And when now there's this
growing bucket of women for whom age is just a
number and they're sort of untethered from the timeline.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
I think that the chemo, the health context, and the
smoking comment is all really critical to this story. The
smoking comment was so revealing, and it was revealing because
we look at aging now as a personal failing, almost
like I can see that you haven't prioritized your health, But.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Isn't it I know you haven't prioritized your face.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yes, but I think that what we've done is we
have made your face a proxy for health in a
way that's not the truth, but that's what we It's
like the shorthand now is someone goes and gets the
tweakments and they look well, and so it's almost like
this moral failing if you don't get all of those,
because people go, oh, that is the number one reason
(27:32):
women I know say they've had the tweagments is that
they don't want to look tired. Not that they want
to look younger, but that they want to look well.
They want to look healthy.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Because we're a raising effort. Isn't that what it's all about?
Isn't that what beauty standards are about? Back to Martha Stewart,
and influencers. We're raising the effort and we're also raising
the biology of growing older because ironically, if Kate and
it's just seems so yucky to even be talking about this,
but if Kate is looking a certain way, you know,
she also got criticized and people commented when she looked
(28:04):
completely untouched by her cancer treatment when she was first
appeared at the Trooping of the Color in that white dress.
And I think that's so interesting, Jesse, because it made
me think about the controversy that happened in twenty thirteen
when Hillary Mantel, the late book Or Prize winner, gave
a lecture at the British Museum called Royal Bodies. And
(28:25):
it was around the time, ironically, Kate had withdrawn from
public life because she had severe morning sickness. And what
she said was she was talking about the role of
royal women and how essentially their role is purely to
be ornamental and it is purely about their esthetics and
also breed. And she said Kate seems to have been
(28:46):
selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable,
as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities,
without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears
precision made, machine made, so different from Diana, whose human
awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed her every gesture. I thought
this was so interesting because as much like that is
(29:07):
Kate's role. It's not to have a person or opinions,
or to do a physical job. It's to be ornamental
and shine the light of her attractiveness on whatever she's
standing next to, whether it's the king or the heir,
her son, or the charity that she's promoting.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Mantel got a lot of criticism for that at the time,
I remember, and then eventually she came out and said, look,
that wasn't intended as criticism. I was actually trying to
sympathize with Kate's plight. She is trapped. She has to
be perfect no matter what, and that's very much a prison.
And it made me think of the fact that she
got all this criticism Kate did when that video came
(29:46):
out recently of her and the family announcing that she
had completed her treatment. A Guardian article by Hillary Osborne,
which was published about that video, described it as soft focus.
She was very disparaging. She said that look. The author
had been through cancer treatment, and she said, I found
this video upsetting because it seemed to underplay the strain
of cancer treatment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I was joking with my friends if she's out scouting
for fields to run through. But I don't blame Kate
Middleton for doing that, because that's what the public needs.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
If she doesn't do it, she's told that she's a
secret smoker who's tired. Yeah, she really is trapped in
that way that Hillary Mantel highlighted. That same article had
a phrase in it that I've been thinking about a lot.
I have some loved ones going through cancer treatment. She
talked to in the article about how after you finish chemo,
you linger in a sort of grayness, and that idea
of grayness and the physical aftershocks of it go beyond
(30:40):
the hair that we all think of, for instance, to
this overall grayness of demeanor. And it must be really
hard if you are expected to be a perfect plastic princess,
as Hillary Mantel put it, when you're feeling that grayness.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yes, there is the particular role that a princess plays,
but even for women who have survived cancer, and that
is a whole you know, physical experience I can't begin
to imagine. But a lot of my friends who have
then me into the next stage have talked about struggling
with body image, have talked about like, as you say,
(31:15):
from the skin to weight fluctuations, to the hair to
even like sex drive, all that kind of stuff, which
feels like such a silly thing to even worry about
in the wake of a brush with your own mortality.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
But you're not free of beauty standards even when you're facing,
you know, a serious illness.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And this is just the classic. Yeah, it's a comment
about Kate, and it's very specific to that scenario, but
also to anyone who's had a really rough year and
is thinking I'm not looking my best. They just got
told you know exactly what everyone's thinking of you. Like,
let's remember Kate's year. In January, she underwent major abdominal surgery.
(31:57):
By March, it was that photoshopping controversy. Later that month,
she announces the cancer diagnosis. She then shares an update
in June, we know that she's undergoing preventative September, she
releases the video that we all saw, and she's only
just in the last few months returned to any royal duties.
(32:17):
That is a shit year, Like that is a really
shit year. And she turned up to this event over
the weekend for Remembrance Day, which obviously you know was
important to her and it's an important part of her role,
and people tell her she looks like shit. Like that
is just the cruelty of that and what it reveals
about our culture is so disturbing.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
But it's not as though she's not aware of her
role and of society's expectations. And it was so interesting
seeing her at the trooping of the color and everything
she did was so coded. She had a tight white
dress on. I read a lot of think pieces around
that afterwards, and some people were disappointed that she looked
untouched by cancer and felt that it didn't, as you say,
(33:01):
reflect their experience, and others were comforted because they thought, oh,
after my cancer experience, I too could be back to
my normal self. And it reminded me of those bodies
bouncing back after babies, and that whole disgusting thing that
used to be on magazine covers and is now on
(33:23):
Instagram in many places where it's like we must raise
all signs of pain, trouble, emotional frailty, physical change from
women's faces and bodies. That's what our culture demands.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
But I think it's interesting you bring up birth because
Kate's always been quietly courageous on this front. I don't
think Hillary Mantel ultimately gave her enough credit. Remember when
after her oldest son was born, George, they came out
of the hospital and she had still a visible bump,
but it was physically impossible for her not to have
had a physical change of shape, right, But she didn't
(34:01):
have to come out and do that right then and there.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, I think she did. That was before Meghan had
reset the standards. That was a you know, it was
the son of the heir to the throne. I don't
think she couldn't, but I know what you mean. She
did choose a dress that showed I remember thinking at
the time feeling so grateful and how pitiful it was
because she looked perfect in every other way. You're right,
(34:24):
there was this tiny trace that was of course gone
by the time we next saw her. And again, not
criticism of her, but it's this beauty standard that insists women,
no matter what we're going through, no matter how old
or young we are, you can even see it in
Martha Stewart. She's eighty three, and yet she still has
to be relevant. She has to pose for the cover
of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit is she.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And the irony of this is that when you look
at that photo, she has had her makeup professionally done,
she's had her hair professionally done, she's had all the
clothes are immaculate, and still it wasn't enough. It's not
like she wasn't trying. She was, and still it was
like there was still criticism.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Before we move on, I want to just do a
little quick bit of feedback as a gift.
Speaker 8 (35:09):
Oh, thanks for the feedback.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Great, I'd love your feedback.
Speaker 7 (35:12):
What a gift.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
I always worry that you've got feedback for me that
you're saying is a gift. Every time you bring this up,
I bristle because I am scared.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
No, it's a new segment that I want to introduce
where anyone can bring a little bit of feedback, because feedback,
as we say here at MMA mea feedback is a gift.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, you told me last week my shirt was terrible.
That was a gift.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
That was a gift. I said, burn your linen short
sleeved shirt. That was my feedback. It was indeed a gift.
My gift this week is to women writers on the
internet and also people interviewing women or men. It's a
mostly female thing. Please stop writing letters to your younger self.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Why has this riled you? What has come up in
your life? Because this is it. It's a thing. I'm
sure that we have dozens of them on a website
called Mamma Maya. Why today has this upset you?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
It's been growing on me. The feedback has been brewing
for some time. I find it lazy, I find it boring.
I find it self indulgent, which is ironic given how
much I write about myself on the internet. It's not
that I'm not interested in women's opinions or women's experiences
or women's stories. Hell that's my business quite literally. But
(36:25):
this whole idea of when you write a letter, it's
like a letter to my twenty five year old self, like,
just stop it. I don't know why it annoys me
a merely does it annoy you?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Well, you know who would never do this, Martha Stewart,
because she had it all figured out from the age
of twenty five.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
I just don't see the relevance I do. So I
feel like it's like saying I had this dream last
night and it was a bird, but it wasn't a bird,
it was actually my English teacher from fourth grade, and like,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Care, I'm going to defend it. We're obsessed with youth
and we're always pandering to the young people. And if
I'm hearing my wisdom from Maya Friedman, who is in
her fifties, then what I want to know is how
well your life and your experience is are directly relevant
to me. And if I'm twenty five, what I would
like is for you to write a letter to me
(37:17):
and tell me how to make better decisions. And I
think that that's what it's about. It's also a very
low touch form of journalism in that you don't have
to do any research, you don't have to interview anyone
except yourself, and it's a very stream of consciousness. It
might just be your journal.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
My letter would be very short. You're an idiot, but
you know everyone's an idiot when they're younger, and then
hopefully you become less of an idiot as you get older.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Finn me as feedback on feedback to your younger self,
stop doing.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It after the break. Dating is a job, not a hobby.
There is a new way to find love and it
is not for the fainthearted.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Loud design to be deleted. That's the tagline of one
of the most popular dating apps, which also promises to
be the dating app for people who want to get
off the dating apps. But a new investigation by the
UK publication The Observer has found that dating apps are
becoming more like gambling products. They're more like Poky's. They
(38:25):
encourage you to buy more and more extras, they get
you into game like features, and then they lock users
into what experts have called a perpetual pay to play loop.
So one woman has the answer to this loop, and
it starts with accepting that dating is not a game,
but rather a very serious business. So get out your
(38:46):
pen and paper take some notes. Her name is Jenny Young.
She is a fifty six year old professor of English
in the US, and last year she pioneered something called
the burned Haystack method. So she was back on the
dating market in midlife. She watched her daughter unsuccessfully swiping
through apps. She realized she did not have the energy
to do the same thing. She googled how to find
(39:07):
a needle in a haystack, and she realized you have
to burn the haystack to find the needle. You burn
the haystack and the needle is left on the ground
because metal doesn't burn. Okay, so it's a needle, a guy,
the girl. It's your romantic partner. The needle is your
love of your life. The basic principle as it applies
to dating, and by the way, this assumes you want
a long term monogamous relationship, which not everyone does. Caveat
(39:31):
there is to filter out time wasters and red flags
as soon as possible. You need to hard yes or
hard no anyone who comes into your own box on
the dating app as soon as possible. It's like Marie
Kondo for dating. And then you block anyone who's a no.
Rather than let them keep circulating around or do the
fade out or the slow burn. Forget it, you just
got to block them. So here's some examples. You might
(39:52):
match with someone who lives two hours away who might
be interested in a long term relationship. You block them.
The match doesn't want to meet in public, they just
want to meet it his or her apartment. You block them,
and the result is that the apps are suddenly working
for us instead of driving us mad. Is blocking different
(40:12):
to just not swipe? I haven't been on the apps?
How does it work? So part of what the apps
are doing by keeping you there is that no one
ever actually leaves your universe. You might stop sort of
dming with someone, but they might then show up again.
And it's very frustrating to have to keep interacting with
these people who you've decided you're not interested in.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
So you swipe left or right, whatever it is if
you're not interested in them, But unless you block them,
they might be served to you again, like changed your mind? Yes,
Larry's still got two dogs.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
And likes fishing. Yes. And the thing about Larry is
that you might be in a conversation with Larry and
then it might kind of die on the vine, and
then Larry might come back in two weeks time to
tell you about his new fishing escapades, and you just
got to block Larry because you're not interested in him.
So this was interesting to me, not because I'm on
the apps, but because.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Were you when you were single in New York?
Speaker 2 (41:06):
A little bit? A little bit. I'm about to get
to that. Actually, it's formalizing an approach to finding love
that is quite familiar to me. I lived in New
York for eleven years, and New York women have known
for a long time that if you want a relationship,
you have to approach looking for it with the same
single minded ruthlessness that you apply to your career. That
is a given. So at first this was quite hard
(41:27):
for me when I lived in New York because I'm
Australian and you're not meant to show any kind of
effort or expend any energy on anything. Things are just
meant to forn.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Your app We barely want to commit to an actual date.
It's like, do you want to kind of meet up?
I'm going to be at the pub this time.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
People's day maybe the word date in Australia until relatively recently.
And so I remember I used to roll my eyes
at this one friend of mine because she was a
real go getter, and she'd schedule drinks with one person,
dinner with another, post dinner drinks with someone else, and
she approached it like a job and I rolled my
eyes at it. And then she found the love of
her life on a drink s date, and I thought, well,
(42:02):
maybe she's onto something here. So here's what I did.
I am an older millennial, so dating apps were around,
but they were by no means as ubiquitous as they
are now. So instead, what I did was I asked
every single person I met to set me up with someone. Everyone.
This included, no joke, my boss. My boss set me
up with someone. Didn't go very well, but he did.
(42:23):
My dentist set me up with someone. Again, didn't go
very well, but he did. I met an entire table
of women at a work dinner, never met them before.
First question was, do any of you know anyone that
I can date? What do you know? What happened after
that dinner? One of the random women at that dinner,
who I'd never met before, told me that she thought
I'd get along with her brother. And he is the
(42:43):
person who got the visectomy I mentioned at the start
of this episode. Oh so my question to the romantic
that is actually no, it is actually my question to
the two of you is can the pursuit of love
be approached like a business deal? And if you are
uncomfortable right now, tell me why I am.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Not uncomfortable, because Amelia, I did exactly the same thing.
I got to the end of my tether and I
said to my friend. I knew he had handsome friends,
and I said to him, I see you hanging out
with all these and some of them must be single.
I don't know why you're not setting me up. And
then he ended up setting me up with someone and
I went to the wrong restaurant and I didn't like him,
(43:22):
and it all went quite pear shaped, and I was like, Ah,
this is why you're not setting me up, because I
have potentially really thrown a spanner in the works of
your friendship with this person.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
But which is why it's better to ask your dentists.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
By the way, yes, I think acquaintances there's way less
pressure on it, and then you don't really have to
debrief with them. It's just like, go on one date,
see how it happens. My cousin maybe she was early
thirties and she was single, had just come out of
a long term relationship, and I said, I work with
this guy at the golf club. He's quite nice, don't
know him that well. Go on a date. Three kids
engaged now, So I have done this before for my friends.
(43:58):
I think it's great wingman behavior.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
I have never set anyone up successfully hasn't occurred to me.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Really, my worry with this thing about going on dating
apps and being very quick in our filtering is that
I think how filtering methods are flawed. And this is
why Dolly Alderton said this the other night at her show,
and it is exactly what I think about dating, which
is that the biggest lesson you can learn is not
to have a type. And the issue with going on
(44:26):
your apps is that I found there was an inverse
relationship between the men who had a great opening line
or great chat on apps and being a good date,
like they were completely different. I was going for the
same man because as an Australian woman who thought I
was meant to sit back and just wait or whatever,
(44:47):
I just kept dating the same guy who was the
type of guy to make a move, whereas the guy
I should have ended up with was a guy who
doesn't make a move. Dating apps, to me, I just
feel incredibly nihilistic about all of them. I was reading
that there's a class action suit against some of the apps,
which you know. The claim is that they are working
(45:09):
to keep you on the app and not necessarily serving
you your best matches, because then you'll leave them when
you are on it. It feels like gambling more than anything,
Like you are playing a slot machine and you're actually
not being served. This is a theory. You're not being
served your best matches because then they might lose you.
I'm all for your strategy, Amelia, which is go on
(45:31):
a date and go with unlikely people rather than thinking
you're filtering method, because my filtering method was broken.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I want to come back to the part where you said,
does this make you uncomfortable? And it does only because
I've internalized this belief that, like everything else women do,
finding a partner should be effortless. It should just happen.
It's like I woke up looking beautiful. I just bumped
into him, like we cut, you know, met eyes across
(46:00):
a crowded room. So I think at the beginning, there
was so much stigma around dating apps, dating websites, as
it used to be with RSVP, because it was like, oh,
you're trying so hard, yes, and it's so strange, Like
we accept that people have to try to have nice
hair and they have to try, well, maybe not with
beauty standards, but they have to try at work.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
I'm trying to think if there's anywhere else that we
accept that people need to try. Everything else just has
to be effortless, which means that it's of course, it's
not effortless. Whether it is your hair or your skin,
or your relationship or meeting someone or your friendships. None
of it's effortless. And so not only do we have
to put in the work, but then we also have
(46:43):
to make it seem like we're not working.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah. Jenny Young has thoughts on this too. One of
the things that she says, and remember how every generation
has these kinds of dating orthodox is so they used
he has to have his cab light on. In the
nine Sex in the City, Sex and the City, this
idea that men will only get into a relationship once
they're ready to have their cab light on. The nineties
were very heteronormative. It was always men's cab lights, I think. Yeah.
(47:07):
Then in the two thousands there was he's just not
that into you also from Sex and City actually, and
the idea of that was don't read between the lines
too much. If he's not returning your calls or he
doesn't seem very eager to meet up, that's because he
doesn't really like you.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
I think that was very freeing. I think that was
actually a really helpful thing, even though it seems a
bit mean. I think that that gave us, you know,
a framework for not kidding ourselves.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
But it was the New yorkerfication of dating, which was
that you need to divorce yourself from the emotions of dating.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
But you do, Jesse, I think you do. And I
think this latest method the burned Haystack. She's coming from
a background of reading books through a living and figuring
out what words mean, and she's saying, if the words
someone is sending to you are unappealing or don't seem
particularly excited, it's actually a new version of just he's
(48:01):
just not that into you. Cut him loose. There's no
point continuing to read the subtext. I'm sure we've all
been there, reading a text from a love interest and
figuring out if talk to you later actually means I
want to have a phasectomy eventually with you. And so
I think that it is very freeing for women, in
particular to think my feelings. I'm always worried about being hurt,
(48:22):
but women also worry about hurting men. This is obviously
in street relationships, and this is saying don't worry about
hurting them, They're fine.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
I was speaking to a friend recently about how we'd
had experiences in our early to mid twenties. Say a
bad relationship, a bad date, say you were ghosted, that
throws you off kilter, and then what happens is you
have a series of either dates or situationships or relationships
that looking back, you sort of sabotaged. Like you can
(48:50):
be thrown off kilter by one experience and then you
can't get your groove back. So it's like, to me,
dating felt like I was on a sporting field and
I sprained my ankle and I tried to come off,
and it was like get back on, and then I
broke my arm, and then it was like go back on,
and then I had all these ines and I was
like do you love me? And they were like no,
(49:12):
You're a total mess. Like I felt. For me, I
probably needed to.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Just sit You need it to be benched.
Speaker 3 (49:18):
I needed to be benched for a prolonged period of
time and then just sit next to Luca at work
and go from there. But I was not match fit
and throwing myself out and out again with multiple injuries.
Was not good for anyone, I think.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Thank you to all of the out louders for listening
to today's show if you still are, and also to
our fabulous team for helping us put this show back
together after breaking it as I did at the start
of the show when I didn't know how to even
say hello. I'm ending it strongly as I started by
making a fool of myself. Let me tell you what
I should have told my twenty five year old self.
(49:56):
Pull up a chair. We will be back in your
ears tomorrow. Thank you Amelia for sitting next to me, and.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Bye, out Louders. If you ever wondered what Mayor Friedman
is like as a mother in law, and you might
want to listen to yesterday's subscriber episode. Actually, before we go, Amelia,
how would you feel if your mother in law came
to your house, went through your children's clothes, threw out
bags of their clothes and rearranged them just hypothetically. How
(50:25):
would that make you feel?
Speaker 2 (50:27):
Are you asking for a friend, Jesse, Yeah yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah right? Is the friend's mother in law the
same mother in law who again told me last week
that my shirt was terrible.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Yeah, yep, she's a nightmare to be that.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
So we've got time for on the show today.
Speaker 3 (50:43):
Here is a taste Mia.
Speaker 8 (50:45):
You have gone into Jesse's home, yeah, and rearranged him
when I was there, when Jesse was buried with you
not home, and you rearranged her daughter's wardrobe and decided
which clothes should go and which should stay.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
And that's what you did without being asked.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Am I correct?
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Twice?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
I would be really annoyed.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
As always, will pop a link in the show notes
shout out to any Mum and me A subscribers listening.
If you love the show and you want to support us,
subscribing to Mom and Mia is the very best way
to do so. There's a link in the episode description
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Mayer acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Welcome to Mama Mea are out loud?
What women are actually talking about on Wednesday the thirty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
On What how About?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
We's done Again? Hello, and welcome to Mama Mea Out
loud What women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the
thirteenth of November. I'm Meya Friedman sitting in the big
chair while Holly wayIn Wright is away.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I'm Jesse Stevens and today we are joined by Mama
Maya's US correspondent and the deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine,
our friend, Amelia Lester.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Hello, Hello, welcome, And on the show today it's equal
parts chaotic and iconic. Yes, we're talking about the Martha
Stewart Netflix stocko and why the original influencer Jailbird and
Snoop's best friend hates it? And why did Kate Middleton's
face attract so much attention after Remembrance Day's service in London?
(01:11):
Have we just forgotten what women actually look like? Plus
dating as a job the new method for single people
looking to be unsingle that boasts a scorched earth policy
and some very strict criteria. But first, Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
In case he missed it, Armie Hammer's mum has spoken
about a very special birthday present she gifted her son,
who is definitely not a literal cannibal. In case you're wondering,
Hamma has a new podcast is called Army hammer Time Podcast,
and he dropped the second of a two part interview
with his mother Drew. Here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
What did you get?
Speaker 5 (01:51):
So I call Army and I go, Army, what would
you like for your birthday this year?
Speaker 6 (01:55):
And he goes, oh, I don't know, you know, maybe
maybe money whatever. And I was like, I believe I'm
going to give you a vas sect to me.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah, so yeah, my mom got me a sex to.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Me for that stupid and by the way, you know,
as the church lady, I would love to say, okay, Army,
I'm really praying that you don't have sex outside of
marriage because under God, sex you know, is in the
purity of a marriage and.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
All this, and I'm thinking that's not gonna work. So
now I'm out here blasting away, bro, just throwing it
all over the place.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
She also went on to say how many young women
would love to have Armie Hammer's little babies.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
I love this interview. It's made my whole week and
you can watch the video of it. It's quite extraordinary.
It's just the two of them. I think Army's wearing
like shorts and thongs and sitting in a chair and
his mum's just sitting on the couch and they just
set up I think a phone. But she goes on
to say it's a miracle after he talks about blasting
it everywhere. It's a miracle we don't have a bunch
of little hammers running around and he said, yeah, I
(03:02):
ate them.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Wow, that is fucked and a less blasting, Army, less blasting.
She also had some thoughts about those allegations that were
made in twenty twenty one. Here is how she directly
referenced them.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Well, you know, I even.
Speaker 5 (03:18):
Called you one time and I was like, okay, let
me just get this straight. I go, are there any
women out there with ribs or limbs missing? That's what
I want to know as a mother, because end of conversation,
if there are limbs or ribs missing.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
She's not having any of these accusations. She's not buying
it her Army would not eat a person.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I do want to say, I'm all for normalizing vasectoms
for men. I think it's really important that men take
responsibility for family planning. And my husband, for the record,
did instagram his vasectomy live, not live, but before and
after shock.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Can you explain? Is it true? I heard that there's
a big thing on Super Bowl someday in the US
where men go and get their vasectoms and then recover
on the couch watching like the day before, and then
recover on the couch watching football.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yees, it's a movie. I have heard that. But it
is interesting to note that for sectomy rates in the
US are much lower than they are in Australia. Culturally,
it's much more taboo, So it's interesting that Army's breaking
the fourth wall, as it were.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I'm also interested when she said I gave him a
vasectomy for his birthday. Look, this story is strange. Army
is clearly not your usual bear, and I was like,
did she just get out the scissors?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I don't know. You love an overshare amongst family members.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So Jamia, would you pay for your son's v sectomy?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
For example, I'd pay for it to be reversed so
I could have my grandchildren.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
The documentary about Martha Stewart, who is eighty three, dropped
on Netflix a couple of weeks ago, and we are
ready to talk about whether Martha is actually the original influencer.
A quick snapshot of who Martha is in case you've forgotten.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
She is the.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Queen of homemaking, cooking, and everything lifestyle. She's a TV personality,
a business mogul, and the original sort of DIY expert
who built an entire empire around making everyday life look fabulous.
She started as a model. She then became an investment
banker and a stockbroker, and she started her own company.
(05:24):
After she wrote a cookbook and then made a magazine,
started a media company called Omnimedia, and it listed on
the New York Stock Exchange. I think she was on
the board of the New York Stock Exchange. And she
became America's first female self made billionaire. So she's got
an extraordinary legacy, really, most of which I didn't know
what had forgotten about. So her brand is all about
(05:45):
like fancy recipes, home dcort tips, gardening ideas, entertainment advice,
and this documentary covered her whole life because she's got
a fascinating life. As if that wasn't interesting enough, She
then went to prison for insider trading, well not quite
insider trading, but for a scandal around insider trading, and
(06:09):
she was in prison for about five months. In two
thousand and four, there was a big, very public celebrity
court case. Her legacy is that she's basically a household name,
and if you've ever googled how to set a table,
I don't know do people google about you would have
found her. A few key moments from the documentary have
gone viral, including a chat that she had about infidelity
(06:32):
in her marriage. So she was married to this guy
called Andrew Stewart from when she was quite young, I
think she was nineteen. She kissed someone else on her honeymoon.
She was in Italy in the Duomo and a moment
overcame her and she had a quick past with a stranger,
and then she had another short lived affair. But her
husband had many affairs before they eventually divorced. Here's the
(06:54):
conversation she had with the interviewer in the documentary about infidelity.
Speaker 7 (06:59):
I don't know how many different girlfriends he had during
this time. But I think there were quite a few
young women. Listen to my advice. If you're married and
you think you're happily married and your husband started to
cheat on you, he's a piece of shit, and look
at him. It's a piece of shit, and get out
of it, get out of that marriage. But I couldn't
do that, couldn't walk away. Didn't you have an affair
(07:21):
early on in the relationship or when you were a Yeah,
but I don't think Andy ever knew about that.
Speaker 8 (07:27):
He did say anything about it.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
He did, Yes, you would confess to him.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Sess He didn't straight from the marriage until you told
him you had already straight.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
Oh that's not true. I don't think.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Amelia and I've watched this documentary. We adored it. Jesse
hasn't seen it yet. What was interesting to me was
realizing that all this talk about Ballerina farm and Nara Smith,
all these tradwives and influencers who make the work of
homemaking and parenting look effortless while running these big businesses
(08:02):
and making a huge amount of money from looking effortless.
She really was the original influencer. Didn't you think, Amelia
so What was your takeaways from the documentary.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, it got me thinking about what an influencer is
and what makes for an influencer. There was this recent
survey of the American Labor Force that said seven percent
of Americans describe themselves as influencers as their job. Now,
this climate can't be true, the figure cannot be that high.
But when you think about what makes for an influencer,
it comes down to a person who can get other
(08:33):
people to spend money. That's what it comes down to.
I read a great definition of it recently by Emily
Sunberg at the newsletter The Feed. She wrote, what the
followers of these women really want is to step into
their lives for a few minutes each day. And that
got me thinking about how you can draw a straight
line from Martha Stewart to Gwyneth Paltrow, and then I
(08:55):
would argue a dotted line from both those women to
Zoe Foster Blake.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's interesting. So all women who have built incredible business
empires and who other women are really obsessed with their lives.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, they get us to take out our wallets. They've
successfully monetized not just their taste, I would say, but
their lives. We think, for a few minutes each day,
if we buy a Martha Stuart Kmart piece of home wears,
or if we buy Gwyneth's new skincare line or Zoe
foster Blake skincare line, we're actually wanting to grab a
piece of their lives.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
But isn't that the same with every celebrity who's ever
endorsed a product, every celebrity who has a fragrance.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
I don't think so. And this is where I actually
think Martha Stewart is unlike a lot of influencers, and
that is that she is, as far as I can tell,
extremely talented. For example, it started with cooking and catering.
That is a real skill. It can be kind of
disparaged in the treadwife world, but being a great cook
(09:57):
is like it's a really good skill. And then there's
interior design and then even like how to set a table,
like there is real status in that. And it's the
same with Zoe Foster Blake. I think this pouchhow is
very good at marketing. But I wonder if that's a
bit of the tension that's emerged between them.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
I would call Zoe and Gwyneth and Martha influential, not
influenzas I would actually put Zoe quite separate. Although it's
interesting for all of those women, they are naturally talented
at a particular thing. For Zoe it's writing, she's a
brilliant writer. For Gwyneth, it's acting. For Martha, it was
(10:36):
actually cooking and homemaking. And I think what's interesting about
her and what the documentary, which she didn't like. By
the way, she's come out and said a whole lot
of things that she didn't like about it. You could
hear she probably didn't like that in exchange about the infidelity,
but she critiqued almost everything, from camera angles to music choices.
She told The New York Times she hated the scenes
(10:57):
at the end, where she said she looked like a
lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden. She
didn't like how she looked on camera. She thought there
should have been more rap music involved and that would
have been more interesting. And it made me see how
many documentaries that we watch about celebrities, and there's a
whole host of them at the moment, from Harry and
Meghan to the David Beckham documentary. They're now making one
(11:20):
about Victoria Beckham, Taylor Swift. Of course, they all have
creative control and approval. And even Oprah, who Apple was
making a documentary about and they finished and she paid
to buy it back so it would never be released
because she didn't like it. And I think that's why
I like this documentary. What did it make you feel
about Martha herself?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Amelia, Well, I think that's why I want to push
back on Jesse's idea that it's about skill. I think
all three of these women are so smart, so brilliant,
they deserve every dollar that they've made. But I think
that their greatest skill is marketing. And is marketing an
idea of perfect imperfection or imperfect perfection. This word perfect
(12:03):
comes up for Martha all the time. That's what she
was selling with the perfectly made tables and the perfect
Thanksgiving turkeys.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
But the idea is that she lets us.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
In to tiny parts of her life that are anything
but perfect, and she keeps us wanting more from it.
So a couple of things that come up in the dosh.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
You mean in the documentary, because not in her before
she went to prison, like her magazines and her public persona,
does she let us in she certainly didn't used to
because there was all that stuff about how she was
the Queen of mean before it came out about Ellen.
It reminded me so much of that thing about the
worst thing a woman can do in business or in
(12:41):
life is be assertive. And it showed some scenes of
Martha's Stewitt in the kitchen with people who were working
with her for her, and she was really rude to
them and really short.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
That's true, but she's now a huge influencer in her
own right coming out of prison letting it all hang
out in this documentary. The New York Times had recently
that she is a gen Z beauty influencer, and she specifically,
what do you mean? So she advertises clay to Postkincare,
which is a really expensive skincare brand. The creams are
all four hundred dollars and up on TikTok from her
(13:13):
Connecticut mansion. She's routinely getting seventy eighty million views for
these skincare advertisements, and so the relatability of it is
part of why she's taken off with a new generation.
So let's run through a few things that she talks
about quite frankly in this documentary the first marriage ending
in divorce, as we've discussed, and she shares with the
documentary makers letters that she sent her ex husband begging
(13:36):
him to take her back. That's an extraordinary amount of disclosure.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
That was quite j lo. I thought it was.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
She's admitted that she didn't feel naturally maternal towards her
daughter Alexis, and this is something that her daughter has
spoken about over the years, the fact that while she
and her mother are very close, her mother was never
a straightforwardly maternal figure for her. She didn't come.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Across as very warm. And I kept finding myself texting, you,
have you ever seen a more unlikable woman like her? Unlikability?
And I know this is a real weapon that we
use against women, this idea of needing to be likable.
What was interesting is that she wasn't trying to be likable.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
No, when Nora's Gwyneth, by the way, Gwyneth is also I.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Feel like Gwyneth tries to be likable. I think Martha
is really like, yeah, I didn't like being a mum
that much. My husband was a dickhead. People need to
be better.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
She was on Drew Barrymore's show this week and Drew's
famously touchy with her guests, and she just pushed her away.
I loved that.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I think it's the complexity that makes her a complicated
monet painting that we can't stop staring at, because in
a lot of ways she actually subverts the feminine. It's like,
in one way she's the antitrad wife. Even her voice
is a bit deeper, she's disagreeable. She doesn't come across
as pleasant. It doesn't seem to be like her aim
(14:56):
to come across as pleasant. Like compare that to a
ballerina farm Hannah Nielman, who from the high voice to
the slow talking to the there's something so tranquil about
it and subservient.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
They're both very much with Hannah Nielman's husband and Nara
Smith's husband, Lucky Blue. It's always in the service. They're
working in the service of their husband and children, and
they're always very much in the service. Whereas that's so interesting,
Martha's more about I'm doing this because I like, I
want a nice table, and I want to be gardening,
(15:29):
and I want to be making a nice Christmas dinner
because it gives me joy.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And she fucked the rest of you and she flirts
with the male gaze, but she also rejects it. So
she's on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She dates famous man.
She dated Anthony Hopkins, which I didn't know, but she
broke up with him because she said she couldn't stop
thinking about Hannibal Lecter. And she's spoken up very openly
about how difficult it has been for her to date
in midlife and beyond.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
She's quite beyond midlife. I would say she's eighty three.
Is she still dating?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
She is, And she.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Says that she's got no plans to retire, like she
doesn't see anything appealing about retirement. But I was thinking
about a quote I read recently about fame and how
people become famous to feel understood. That's the number one
reason is that they want people to understand them. And
after that documentary, there was a headline that said she
still doesn't feel understood, and she doesn't, and I wonder
(16:19):
if that's why she doesn't want to retire. She's not
done yet. She feels like people don't fully get her.
And that's my question, as someone who hasn't watched the documentary.
Are we laughing at Martha Stuart or are we laughing
with Martha Stuart because she's become this cultural icon in
the last few years. She kind of pops up with
Snoop Dogg. She's like, again, this complicated figure and I've
(16:44):
seen viral clips from this, like the one about her
affairs and her relationships and stuff, and I have a laugh.
But do you think she feels like we're laughing at her?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
What a great question. No, I think that she's more like,
you know, how Betty White became iconic, Yeah, and Ruth
Baty Ginsburg was iconic. I know that's different. She was
the Supreme Court judge and has her own complicated history.
But I don't I think people are laughing at her.
I'm not laughing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
About Miron's another one.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, yeah, the Queen. Like it's kind of like, I
hate to say it, but like they're so old they're cool.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, exactly, It's like they've come back again. It's like retro.
Was this documentary good for her brand or bad?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Well? I think the very fact that she's still selling
really expensive skincare to gen z on TikTok means that
it was great for her brand. I think we now
crave the deconstruction of perfection that she's revealing to us
in this, don't you think, Miah, Yeah, And I think
that what it did do Jesse, that's so interesting what
you say about they want to be understood.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I think that's incredibly astute. I think what it reminded
me a little bit like watching the Menendez Brothers documentary.
I think, I know what I think about these people.
And I thought I knew what I thought about Martha Stewart,
but I changed my mind after watching the documentary and
I was like, oh, that was bullshit that she got
(18:06):
sent to prison. Yeah, it is like, yeah, soso bad.
And similarly to the Menandez brothers, like I thought that
they'd made up all those allegations. That was my understanding
because the reason I think that where relooking at all
of these things. You know, we've got this segment all
or nothing where you either know everything about a topic
or nothing. The Internet allows you to know everything about
(18:30):
any topic if you want to. But back in the
nineties and the eighties and until the last ten years,
there was a limited amount of information you could get
about a certain topic. You know, if you wanted to
dive deep, there wasn't really a way you could particularly
for someone like Martha Stewart who wasn't iconic in Australia,
and same with the Menendez brothers. I was kind of
dimly aware of that story, but now it's like these
(18:53):
stories are international.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
You're also making me think about how I felt after
watching Harry and Meghan's documentary versus how I felt watching this.
Once I'd watched Harry and Megan's documentary, I didn't need
to know anything else. But having watched the Martha documentary,
it's like Jesse said, she's a monet painting. I want
to know everything, and I still don't know everything.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
When you say that about Harry and Meghan, do you
mean I'd like I'd eaten too much at the buffet,
Like all the mystery was gone, all the interest was gone.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
There wasn't the push pull of that collaboration between a
director and their subject. This was more of a push
pool dynamic, and so there were points where it was uncomfortable.
There are a lot of points where it was uncomfortable.
The filmmaker would leave the camera on Martha as she
finished a thought and then wanted the camera to be
turned off, and I felt like that push pool made
me want to know more.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
The other thing that Martha appears to have done, at
least in what I've read and clips I've seen, is
that she owns that she's really, really rich, and she
quite likes being really really rich, which we don't see
very often with women in Australia. You would never ever
get away with it. But watching that and watching a
woman who owns it is sort of refreshing, but also complicated.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
The fact that she's self made. And I keep coming
back to what you say about not feeling understood. She
doesn't get the credit she deserves, as so many female
business owners don't, and I would include Zoe among them,
where it's like they have built these multi million dollar
empires entirely on their own, and that's pretty bloody impressive.
(20:34):
Is she still as culturally relevant in America as she
used to be?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I think she's even more so. They talk about in
the documentary. This big turning point for her was when
she went on a roast of Justin Bieber in twenty fourteen.
That's when she actually met Snoop Dogg and they became
very good friends. She had been out of the public
eye for a long time after prison. She was a
punchline to your earlier question, Jesse, she was a South
Park punchline in fact, But then when she went back
(21:00):
on Comedy Central and this roast of Justin Bieber, people
thought that the jokes were really ribald and funny and
definitely pushed the envelope. Were you shocked by that? I didn't.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, I didn't get to that part of the documentary.
I got distracted.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Well, I was shocked by the jokes and how like,
what were they? They really pushed the envelope.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Rip bold is not a word you hear often on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
There were jokes that sort of pushed the envelope in
terms of how you talk about race. There were jokes
that also people made fun of her for being really,
really old, and she laughed about it, wearing her leather
leggings and her Dreasman note and embroidered jacket. I mean,
she just came across as tough as nails, and I
think we really at this point respond to that and
with no fucks to give.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
It's nice to see Snoop again.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
One of the highest rated episodes on my show, Martha
Stewart Living was when Snoop and I made brownies together.
And I've used this recipe ever since. As a matter
of fact, I ate three of them right before they
called and asked me to do this.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Rose in a moment. A UK TV presenter made a
comment about Kate Middleton on the weekend and let's just
say it got us all thinking out loud.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
An article ran in Grazia on Tuesday with the headline
She's aged so much. The vile commentary around Kate Middleton's
appearance needs to stop. At first, I rolled my eyes
because it felt like one of those classic Internet tropes
of using mock horror to incentivize people to click on
(22:36):
a less than flattering photo. I thought, this is just
engagement baiting. The publication says, they're saying this is a
terrible photo. They're saying she looks old, how offensive. Here's
the photo, please leave comments below. And from that I
just went I'm not going to engage. But then I
saw where the comments had come from and I thought
(22:57):
that this actually was a valid news story. First, I
should say Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, appeared at
a remembrance Sunday service in London and since completing her
chemotherapy treat in September, She's been slowly returning to royal duties,
and images of her in a black dress and a
black hat were published widely online. We can, of course
(23:20):
expect the internet to be cruel, there's nothing new about that.
But there was one particular comment on X from a
high profile British TV presenter who regularly appears on Good
Morning Britain and Loose Women. Her name is Narinda Corp.
She shared an image of Middleton with the comment genuine question,
why has Kate aged so much? Isn't she only forty two?
(23:43):
Is she a smoker? It's the only explanation.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Was she high? This woman?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
It's the most bizarre tweet.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
If you want to think it. I can't control what
you think, but like, firstly, did you miss the cancer part?
And secondly why share that with the world? Like what
did she think she was doing?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Yes? So she's since apologized. Unsurprisingly, she faced a lot
of backlash. She apologized with a video on social media,
and here's what she said.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
I put out a stupid tweet that wasn't my intention.
My intent was not to be malicious or nasty or anything.
I'm not like that. Anybody who knows me it was
stupid to ask about the aging. I've admitted that, and
I put my hands up and I've apologized if it
caused offense. I didn't wish death on anyone. I didn't
do anything like that. I asked about aging. She smoked
(24:34):
nothing to do with cancer.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, so I think that the emission of the cancer
was actually kind of the problem. But Google trends, since
all this has happened, Google Trends shows a spike in
searchers for Kate Middleton looks Tired, Kate Middleton aging, and
Kate Middleton looks old. My question is what is wrong
with us?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
My question is how are those Google searchers. Kate Middleton
looks tired is a statement.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
I would defend that, not defendant explain it in saying,
if you're looking for the original, you'd heard something about
it and you wanted you knew it would link you
with the photo or the original apsource material. I'm going
to now not defend nerindacal, but kind of defend her
after saying I think she was high, and of course
she should never have said it. What I think this
is an indication of, however, is actually nothing to do
(25:22):
with Kate Middleton it's about the fact that we don't
know what women look like anymore. We're just not sure
what women are meant to look like because everyone famous
kind of looks this same weird age, whether they're Nicole
Kidman who's almost sixty, or Kylie Jenner. Everyone is sort
of this nondescript, strange age. So if there's a time
(25:44):
that a woman is perhaps not having the tweakments that
she once had, or she is tired, or maybe she's
recovering from cancer, or who knows what is happening, we're
just like, oh, wait, what does a female face look
like anymore? I actually don't know. And it's something that
friends and I in my group chats often do when
(26:07):
we see someone's not in this way where it's like, oh,
doesn't she look tired. It's almost like a CSI forensic
analysis of trying to understand how women look a certain way,
not necessarily because we want to emulate them, but just
trying to understand this look that people have.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, it's like the old adage that cosmetic surgery doesn't
necessarily make you look younger, it just makes it look
like you had cosmetic surgery. And when now there's this
growing bucket of women for whom age is just a
number and they're sort of untethered from the timeline.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
I think that the chemo, the health context, and the
smoking comment is all really critical to this story. The
smoking comment was so revealing, and it was revealing because
we look at aging now as a personal failing, almost
like I can see that you haven't prioritized your health, But.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Isn't it I know you haven't prioritized your face.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yes, but I think that what we've done is we
have made your face a proxy for health in a
way that's not the truth, but that's what we It's
like the shorthand now is someone goes and gets the
tweakments and they look well, and so it's almost like
this moral failing if you don't get all of those,
because people go, oh, that is the number one reason
(27:32):
women I know say they've had the tweagments is that
they don't want to look tired. Not that they want
to look younger, but that they want to look well.
They want to look healthy.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Because we're a raising effort. Isn't that what it's all about?
Isn't that what beauty standards are about? Back to Martha Stewart,
and influencers. We're raising the effort and we're also raising
the biology of growing older because ironically, if Kate and
it's just seems so yucky to even be talking about this,
but if Kate is looking a certain way, you know,
she also got criticized and people commented when she looked
(28:04):
completely untouched by her cancer treatment when she was first
appeared at the Trooping of the Color in that white dress.
And I think that's so interesting, Jesse, because it made
me think about the controversy that happened in twenty thirteen
when Hillary Mantel, the late book Or Prize winner, gave
a lecture at the British Museum called Royal Bodies. And
(28:25):
it was around the time, ironically, Kate had withdrawn from
public life because she had severe morning sickness. And what
she said was she was talking about the role of
royal women and how essentially their role is purely to
be ornamental and it is purely about their esthetics and
also breed. And she said Kate seems to have been
(28:46):
selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable,
as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities,
without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears
precision made, machine made, so different from Diana, whose human
awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed her every gesture. I thought
this was so interesting because as much like that is
(29:07):
Kate's role. It's not to have a person or opinions,
or to do a physical job. It's to be ornamental
and shine the light of her attractiveness on whatever she's
standing next to, whether it's the king or the heir,
her son, or the charity that she's promoting.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Mantel got a lot of criticism for that at the time,
I remember, and then eventually she came out and said, look,
that wasn't intended as criticism. I was actually trying to
sympathize with Kate's plight. She is trapped. She has to
be perfect no matter what, and that's very much a prison.
And it made me think of the fact that she
got all this criticism Kate did when that video came
(29:46):
out recently of her and the family announcing that she
had completed her treatment. A Guardian article by Hillary Osborne,
which was published about that video, described it as soft focus.
She was very disparaging. She said that look. The author
had been through cancer treatment, and she said, I found
this video upsetting because it seemed to underplay the strain
of cancer treatment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I was joking with my friends if she's out scouting
for fields to run through. But I don't blame Kate
Middleton for doing that, because that's what the public needs.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
If she doesn't do it, she's told that she's a
secret smoker who's tired. Yeah, she really is trapped in
that way that Hillary Mantel highlighted. That same article had
a phrase in it that I've been thinking about a lot.
I have some loved ones going through cancer treatment. She
talked to in the article about how after you finish chemo,
you linger in a sort of grayness, and that idea
of grayness and the physical aftershocks of it go beyond
(30:40):
the hair that we all think of, for instance, to
this overall grayness of demeanor. And it must be really
hard if you are expected to be a perfect plastic princess,
as Hillary Mantel put it, when you're feeling that grayness.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yes, there is the particular role that a princess plays,
but even for women who have survived cancer, and that
is a whole you know, physical experience I can't begin
to imagine. But a lot of my friends who have
then me into the next stage have talked about struggling
with body image, have talked about like, as you say,
(31:15):
from the skin to weight fluctuations, to the hair to
even like sex drive, all that kind of stuff, which
feels like such a silly thing to even worry about
in the wake of a brush with your own mortality.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
But you're not free of beauty standards even when you're facing,
you know, a serious illness.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And this is just the classic. Yeah, it's a comment
about Kate, and it's very specific to that scenario, but
also to anyone who's had a really rough year and
is thinking I'm not looking my best. They just got
told you know exactly what everyone's thinking of you. Like,
let's remember Kate's year. In January, she underwent major abdominal surgery.
(31:57):
By March, it was that photoshopping controversy. Later that month,
she announces the cancer diagnosis. She then shares an update
in June, we know that she's undergoing preventative September, she
releases the video that we all saw, and she's only
just in the last few months returned to any royal duties.
(32:17):
That is a shit year, Like that is a really
shit year. And she turned up to this event over
the weekend for Remembrance Day, which obviously you know was
important to her and it's an important part of her role,
and people tell her she looks like shit. Like that
is just the cruelty of that and what it reveals
about our culture is so disturbing.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
But it's not as though she's not aware of her
role and of society's expectations. And it was so interesting
seeing her at the trooping of the color and everything
she did was so coded. She had a tight white
dress on. I read a lot of think pieces around
that afterwards, and some people were disappointed that she looked
untouched by cancer and felt that it didn't, as you say,
(33:01):
reflect their experience, and others were comforted because they thought, oh,
after my cancer experience, I too could be back to
my normal self. And it reminded me of those bodies
bouncing back after babies, and that whole disgusting thing that
used to be on magazine covers and is now on
(33:23):
Instagram in many places where it's like we must raise
all signs of pain, trouble, emotional frailty, physical change from
women's faces and bodies. That's what our culture demands.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
But I think it's interesting you bring up birth because
Kate's always been quietly courageous on this front. I don't
think Hillary Mantel ultimately gave her enough credit. Remember when
after her oldest son was born, George, they came out
of the hospital and she had still a visible bump,
but it was physically impossible for her not to have
had a physical change of shape, right, But she didn't
(34:01):
have to come out and do that right then and there.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, I think she did. That was before Meghan had
reset the standards. That was a you know, it was
the son of the heir to the throne. I don't
think she couldn't, but I know what you mean. She
did choose a dress that showed I remember thinking at
the time feeling so grateful and how pitiful it was
because she looked perfect in every other way. You're right,
(34:24):
there was this tiny trace that was of course gone
by the time we next saw her. And again, not
criticism of her, but it's this beauty standard that insists women,
no matter what we're going through, no matter how old
or young we are, you can even see it in
Martha Stewart. She's eighty three, and yet she still has
to be relevant. She has to pose for the cover
of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit is she.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And the irony of this is that when you look
at that photo, she has had her makeup professionally done,
she's had her hair professionally done, she's had all the
clothes are immaculate, and still it wasn't enough. It's not
like she wasn't trying. She was, and still it was
like there was still criticism.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Before we move on, I want to just do a
little quick bit of feedback as a gift.
Speaker 8 (35:09):
Oh, thanks for the feedback.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Great, I'd love your feedback.
Speaker 7 (35:12):
What a gift.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
I always worry that you've got feedback for me that
you're saying is a gift. Every time you bring this up,
I bristle because I am scared.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
No, it's a new segment that I want to introduce
where anyone can bring a little bit of feedback, because feedback,
as we say here at MMA mea feedback is a gift.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, you told me last week my shirt was terrible.
That was a gift.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
That was a gift. I said, burn your linen short
sleeved shirt. That was my feedback. It was indeed a gift.
My gift this week is to women writers on the
internet and also people interviewing women or men. It's a
mostly female thing. Please stop writing letters to your younger self.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Why has this riled you? What has come up in
your life? Because this is it. It's a thing. I'm
sure that we have dozens of them on a website
called Mamma Maya. Why today has this upset you?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
It's been growing on me. The feedback has been brewing
for some time. I find it lazy, I find it boring.
I find it self indulgent, which is ironic given how
much I write about myself on the internet. It's not
that I'm not interested in women's opinions or women's experiences
or women's stories. Hell that's my business quite literally. But
(36:25):
this whole idea of when you write a letter, it's
like a letter to my twenty five year old self, like,
just stop it. I don't know why it annoys me
a merely does it annoy you?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Well, you know who would never do this, Martha Stewart,
because she had it all figured out from the age
of twenty five.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
I just don't see the relevance I do. So I
feel like it's like saying I had this dream last
night and it was a bird, but it wasn't a bird,
it was actually my English teacher from fourth grade, and like,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Care, I'm going to defend it. We're obsessed with youth
and we're always pandering to the young people. And if
I'm hearing my wisdom from Maya Friedman, who is in
her fifties, then what I want to know is how
well your life and your experience is are directly relevant
to me. And if I'm twenty five, what I would
like is for you to write a letter to me
(37:17):
and tell me how to make better decisions. And I
think that that's what it's about. It's also a very
low touch form of journalism in that you don't have
to do any research, you don't have to interview anyone
except yourself, and it's a very stream of consciousness. It
might just be your journal.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
My letter would be very short. You're an idiot, but
you know everyone's an idiot when they're younger, and then
hopefully you become less of an idiot as you get older.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Finn me as feedback on feedback to your younger self,
stop doing.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It after the break. Dating is a job, not a hobby.
There is a new way to find love and it
is not for the fainthearted.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Loud design to be deleted. That's the tagline of one
of the most popular dating apps, which also promises to
be the dating app for people who want to get
off the dating apps. But a new investigation by the
UK publication The Observer has found that dating apps are
becoming more like gambling products. They're more like Poky's. They
(38:25):
encourage you to buy more and more extras, they get
you into game like features, and then they lock users
into what experts have called a perpetual pay to play loop.
So one woman has the answer to this loop, and
it starts with accepting that dating is not a game,
but rather a very serious business. So get out your
(38:46):
pen and paper take some notes. Her name is Jenny Young.
She is a fifty six year old professor of English
in the US, and last year she pioneered something called
the burned Haystack method. So she was back on the
dating market in midlife. She watched her daughter unsuccessfully swiping
through apps. She realized she did not have the energy
to do the same thing. She googled how to find
(39:07):
a needle in a haystack, and she realized you have
to burn the haystack to find the needle. You burn
the haystack and the needle is left on the ground
because metal doesn't burn. Okay, so it's a needle, a guy,
the girl. It's your romantic partner. The needle is your
love of your life. The basic principle as it applies
to dating, and by the way, this assumes you want
a long term monogamous relationship, which not everyone does. Caveat
(39:31):
there is to filter out time wasters and red flags
as soon as possible. You need to hard yes or
hard no anyone who comes into your own box on
the dating app as soon as possible. It's like Marie
Kondo for dating. And then you block anyone who's a no.
Rather than let them keep circulating around or do the
fade out or the slow burn. Forget it, you just
got to block them. So here's some examples. You might
(39:52):
match with someone who lives two hours away who might
be interested in a long term relationship. You block them.
The match doesn't want to meet in public, they just
want to meet it his or her apartment. You block them,
and the result is that the apps are suddenly working
for us instead of driving us mad. Is blocking different
(40:12):
to just not swipe? I haven't been on the apps?
How does it work? So part of what the apps
are doing by keeping you there is that no one
ever actually leaves your universe. You might stop sort of
dming with someone, but they might then show up again.
And it's very frustrating to have to keep interacting with
these people who you've decided you're not interested in.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
So you swipe left or right, whatever it is if
you're not interested in them, But unless you block them,
they might be served to you again, like changed your mind? Yes,
Larry's still got two dogs.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
And likes fishing. Yes. And the thing about Larry is
that you might be in a conversation with Larry and
then it might kind of die on the vine, and
then Larry might come back in two weeks time to
tell you about his new fishing escapades, and you just
got to block Larry because you're not interested in him.
So this was interesting to me, not because I'm on
the apps, but because.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Were you when you were single in New York?
Speaker 2 (41:06):
A little bit? A little bit. I'm about to get
to that. Actually, it's formalizing an approach to finding love
that is quite familiar to me. I lived in New
York for eleven years, and New York women have known
for a long time that if you want a relationship,
you have to approach looking for it with the same
single minded ruthlessness that you apply to your career. That
is a given. So at first this was quite hard
(41:27):
for me when I lived in New York because I'm
Australian and you're not meant to show any kind of
effort or expend any energy on anything. Things are just
meant to forn.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Your app We barely want to commit to an actual date.
It's like, do you want to kind of meet up?
I'm going to be at the pub this time.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
People's day maybe the word date in Australia until relatively recently.
And so I remember I used to roll my eyes
at this one friend of mine because she was a
real go getter, and she'd schedule drinks with one person,
dinner with another, post dinner drinks with someone else, and
she approached it like a job and I rolled my
eyes at it. And then she found the love of
her life on a drink s date, and I thought, well,
(42:02):
maybe she's onto something here. So here's what I did.
I am an older millennial, so dating apps were around,
but they were by no means as ubiquitous as they
are now. So instead, what I did was I asked
every single person I met to set me up with someone. Everyone.
This included, no joke, my boss. My boss set me
up with someone. Didn't go very well, but he did.
(42:23):
My dentist set me up with someone. Again, didn't go
very well, but he did. I met an entire table
of women at a work dinner, never met them before.
First question was, do any of you know anyone that
I can date? What do you know? What happened after
that dinner? One of the random women at that dinner,
who I'd never met before, told me that she thought
I'd get along with her brother. And he is the
(42:43):
person who got the visectomy I mentioned at the start
of this episode. Oh so my question to the romantic
that is actually no, it is actually my question to
the two of you is can the pursuit of love
be approached like a business deal? And if you are
uncomfortable right now, tell me why I am.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Not uncomfortable, because Amelia, I did exactly the same thing.
I got to the end of my tether and I
said to my friend. I knew he had handsome friends,
and I said to him, I see you hanging out
with all these and some of them must be single.
I don't know why you're not setting me up. And
then he ended up setting me up with someone and
I went to the wrong restaurant and I didn't like him,
(43:22):
and it all went quite pear shaped, and I was like, Ah,
this is why you're not setting me up, because I
have potentially really thrown a spanner in the works of
your friendship with this person.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
But which is why it's better to ask your dentists.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
By the way, yes, I think acquaintances there's way less
pressure on it, and then you don't really have to
debrief with them. It's just like, go on one date,
see how it happens. My cousin maybe she was early
thirties and she was single, had just come out of
a long term relationship, and I said, I work with
this guy at the golf club. He's quite nice, don't
know him that well. Go on a date. Three kids
engaged now, So I have done this before for my friends.
(43:58):
I think it's great wingman behavior.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
I have never set anyone up successfully hasn't occurred to me.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Really, my worry with this thing about going on dating
apps and being very quick in our filtering is that
I think how filtering methods are flawed. And this is
why Dolly Alderton said this the other night at her show,
and it is exactly what I think about dating, which
is that the biggest lesson you can learn is not
to have a type. And the issue with going on
(44:26):
your apps is that I found there was an inverse
relationship between the men who had a great opening line
or great chat on apps and being a good date,
like they were completely different. I was going for the
same man because as an Australian woman who thought I
was meant to sit back and just wait or whatever,
(44:47):
I just kept dating the same guy who was the
type of guy to make a move, whereas the guy
I should have ended up with was a guy who
doesn't make a move. Dating apps, to me, I just
feel incredibly nihilistic about all of them. I was reading
that there's a class action suit against some of the apps,
which you know. The claim is that they are working
(45:09):
to keep you on the app and not necessarily serving
you your best matches, because then you'll leave them when
you are on it. It feels like gambling more than anything,
Like you are playing a slot machine and you're actually
not being served. This is a theory. You're not being
served your best matches because then they might lose you.
I'm all for your strategy, Amelia, which is go on
(45:31):
a date and go with unlikely people rather than thinking
you're filtering method, because my filtering method was broken.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I want to come back to the part where you said,
does this make you uncomfortable? And it does only because
I've internalized this belief that, like everything else women do,
finding a partner should be effortless. It should just happen.
It's like I woke up looking beautiful. I just bumped
into him, like we cut, you know, met eyes across
(46:00):
a crowded room. So I think at the beginning, there
was so much stigma around dating apps, dating websites, as
it used to be with RSVP, because it was like, oh,
you're trying so hard, yes, and it's so strange, Like
we accept that people have to try to have nice
hair and they have to try, well, maybe not with
beauty standards, but they have to try at work.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
I'm trying to think if there's anywhere else that we
accept that people need to try. Everything else just has
to be effortless, which means that it's of course, it's
not effortless. Whether it is your hair or your skin,
or your relationship or meeting someone or your friendships. None
of it's effortless. And so not only do we have
to put in the work, but then we also have
(46:43):
to make it seem like we're not working.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah. Jenny Young has thoughts on this too. One of
the things that she says, and remember how every generation
has these kinds of dating orthodox is so they used
he has to have his cab light on. In the
nine Sex in the City, Sex and the City, this
idea that men will only get into a relationship once
they're ready to have their cab light on. The nineties
were very heteronormative. It was always men's cab lights, I think. Yeah.
(47:07):
Then in the two thousands there was he's just not
that into you also from Sex and City actually, and
the idea of that was don't read between the lines
too much. If he's not returning your calls or he
doesn't seem very eager to meet up, that's because he
doesn't really like you.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
I think that was very freeing. I think that was
actually a really helpful thing, even though it seems a
bit mean. I think that that gave us, you know,
a framework for not kidding ourselves.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
But it was the New yorkerfication of dating, which was
that you need to divorce yourself from the emotions of dating.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
But you do, Jesse, I think you do. And I
think this latest method the burned Haystack. She's coming from
a background of reading books through a living and figuring
out what words mean, and she's saying, if the words
someone is sending to you are unappealing or don't seem
particularly excited, it's actually a new version of just he's
(48:01):
just not that into you. Cut him loose. There's no
point continuing to read the subtext. I'm sure we've all
been there, reading a text from a love interest and
figuring out if talk to you later actually means I
want to have a phasectomy eventually with you. And so
I think that it is very freeing for women, in
particular to think my feelings. I'm always worried about being hurt,
(48:22):
but women also worry about hurting men. This is obviously
in street relationships, and this is saying don't worry about
hurting them, They're fine.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
I was speaking to a friend recently about how we'd
had experiences in our early to mid twenties. Say a
bad relationship, a bad date, say you were ghosted, that
throws you off kilter, and then what happens is you
have a series of either dates or situationships or relationships
that looking back, you sort of sabotaged. Like you can
(48:50):
be thrown off kilter by one experience and then you
can't get your groove back. So it's like, to me,
dating felt like I was on a sporting field and
I sprained my ankle and I tried to come off,
and it was like get back on, and then I
broke my arm, and then it was like go back on,
and then I had all these ines and I was
like do you love me? And they were like no,
(49:12):
You're a total mess. Like I felt. For me, I
probably needed to.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Just sit You need it to be benched.
Speaker 3 (49:18):
I needed to be benched for a prolonged period of
time and then just sit next to Luca at work
and go from there. But I was not match fit
and throwing myself out and out again with multiple injuries.
Was not good for anyone, I think.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Thank you to all of the out louders for listening
to today's show if you still are, and also to
our fabulous team for helping us put this show back
together after breaking it as I did at the start
of the show when I didn't know how to even
say hello. I'm ending it strongly as I started by
making a fool of myself. Let me tell you what
I should have told my twenty five year old self.
(49:56):
Pull up a chair. We will be back in your
ears tomorrow. Thank you Amelia for sitting next to me, and.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Bye, out Louders. If you ever wondered what Mayor Friedman
is like as a mother in law, and you might
want to listen to yesterday's subscriber episode. Actually, before we go, Amelia,
how would you feel if your mother in law came
to your house, went through your children's clothes, threw out
bags of their clothes and rearranged them just hypothetically. How
(50:25):
would that make you feel?
Speaker 2 (50:27):
Are you asking for a friend, Jesse, Yeah yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah right? Is the friend's mother in law the
same mother in law who again told me last week
that my shirt was terrible.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Yeah, yep, she's a nightmare to be that.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
So we've got time for on the show today.
Speaker 3 (50:43):
Here is a taste Mia.
Speaker 8 (50:45):
You have gone into Jesse's home, yeah, and rearranged him
when I was there, when Jesse was buried with you
not home, and you rearranged her daughter's wardrobe and decided
which clothes should go and which should stay.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
And that's what you did without being asked.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Am I correct?
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Twice?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
I would be really annoyed.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
As always, will pop a link in the show notes
shout out to any Mum and me A subscribers listening.
If you love the show and you want to support us,
subscribing to Mom and Mia is the very best way
to do so. There's a link in the episode description
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