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[music: “Lose It” by Austra]
Kelsey Wallace: You are listening to Popaganda, a Bitch Radio podcast from Bitch Media, a feminist response to pop culture. This episode was recorded on Thursday, May 5, at the Bitch headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Warning: the following podcast contains explicit language, including the word “bitch,” of course.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Bitch Popaganda. I’m Kelsey Wallace, the web editor here at Bitch, and with me today are –
Kjerstin Johnson: Kjerstin Johnson, the web content manager.
Andi Zeisler: And Andi Zeisler, the editorial-slash-creative director.
KW: And today we’re going to talk about Donald Trump’s sexism, aspirational television and a summer movie preview, so let’s get started. Anna Holmes wrote a column for the Washington Post this week called “Donald Trump’s Sexism” and it’s basically – well, Kjerstin, why don’t you tell us what it’s about.
KJ: Well, I think everyone’s been hearing a lot about Donald Trump recently because he’s been like, really just pushing – he pushed the whole birth certificate thing back into the spotlight, even though no one wanted to see it there except for the Tea Party, I think. Um, he’s gonna run for President, I guess. But Anna Holmes did everyone the favor of reminding them what a douchebag he’s been for like, decades now.
AZ: Yeah, it was basically like a reminder of, everything that’s odious about Donald Trump is nothing new. He’s really been perfecting his brand of douchebaggery for three decades at least, at this point, and much of it really revolves around his quite low and quite public low opinion of women and girls.
KW: So, do you think – I feel like this article assumes that a lot of people, just in kind of the public at large, have forgotten about some of this or just don’t care about it, or are at least sort of taking it for granted. Like, ‘yeah, Donald Trump is a sexist douche.’ Yet, I don’t think people are taking his presidential run too seriously, but his poll numbers aren’t bad. I mean, he’s looking better than some of the other Republican candidates. So do you think there’s something better about him, or is it something about our cultural climate that is just – you know, that we’re just accepting this. Like, “yeah, he makes the Miss USA pageant contestants parade in front of him in their underwear, but that’s just Trump bein’ Trump!” I don’t know – what do you think it is, that some people are just swallowing this from him?
AZ: I think culturally, we’ve gotten to a point – or we get to a point – with certain public figures where we have it in our heads that it’s not worth criticizing them because they are who they are and they are these outsize characters. You know, um –
KJ: Like you don’t want to take someone with that haircut seriously.
AZ: Exactly. Or like Jack Nicholson: we all know that Jack Nicholson is gonna show up at the Knicks game and be mugging for the camera and have, like, an eighteen-year-old next to him. Like, he’s just wacky Jack! And, you know, we do it with a lot of people. I think that was really on display with a lot of the Charlie Sheen stuff. It’s sort of like their boorishness or their douchebag-ness or their sexism or whatever is just kind of – in itself, it’s become entertainment.
KW: Yeah.
AZ: And we don’t take it seriously. So when someone like Donald Trump is actually in a position of possibly being – and I don’t believe that he is a contender, but he’s in a position of possibly being taken seriously, I do think these reminders are helpful. Although, frankly, the people who would take these reminders seriously aren’t the people who consider him a contender.
KW: Right, exactly. Somebody who’s thinking that he seems like a pretty good presidential candidate probably did not have his or her mind changed by reading this column.
KJ: I mean, yeah. And then it’s funny because, I mean, in the article she quotes Carrie Prejean, who has, like, come out totally in opposition to gay marriage, and Carrie Prejean has like, pointed out what a douchebag Donald Trump is. So like, hopefully, that’ll change someone’s mind.
KW: Maybe somebody will be like “oh, I’m with Prejean. She thinks he’s a douche – ”
AZ: It’s really a race to the bottom with those two.
KW: Yeah. The thing that really struck me – because I think I’m really guilty of writing off Donald Trump as just a complete joke and not thinking that seriously about his, just like, blatant sexism and creepiness – there’s a quote in here where he talks about his eldest daughter Ivanka, and once he said: “She does have a very nice figure. If she weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” And –
AZ: What I want to know is, what was the question that preceded that statement? Did someone say, like, “would you ever date your daughter?”
KW: “Do you think your daughter is a hot piece of – ?” It’s just, you know, I feel like that – to me, the fact that someone who said that about his own daughter in a public way is even being taken seriously by anyone to run for office just tells me that some people get a pass on stuff like this and some people don’t. I mean, I think – you know, I was Googling Sarah Palin to see how old her eldest son is, to draw a comparison. He’s pretty young. But still, if Sarah Palin said that she thought that Track was like really hot, and that maybe if he weren’t her son she would date him, I don’t think that she’d get very far in a political race. That’s – that’s really gross. That’s pretty out there. To me, that’s beyond objectifying Miss USA contestants, and into a completely new realm.
AZ: Well, sure, especially because people – again, it’s one of those things where people are like, “well, she’s in the Miss USA pageant, she’s gotta be used to being evaluated like a piece of meat.” But yeah, it’s sort of like, um – you know, I think Donald Trump has made a lot of these kind of, like, really kind of beyond-the-pale and beyond what most people would consider, um, just sort of, regular everyday tastelessness or sexism. He’s made a lot of comments like that and I do think it’s useful to keep bringing them up.
KW: So is the lesson here, for people who are thinking about, in three or four decades, running for political office, that if you kick it off now, with a really high level of misogyny and just sort of overall offensive behavior, that everyone’s tolerance – like, you’re just building up a public tolerance for it, to the point that if you want a presidential campaign, everyone will be like “oh, that’s just her bein’ her – you know, she’s an asshole.”
KJ: I think so, yeah.
KW: I think, because we basically condition –
KJ: It’s like that with so many people. Like Dov Charney, it’s like, “good ol’ Dov, keeping sleazy!”
AZ: I think that the danger – I mean, I really don’t know that this has anything to do with the presidential campaign, because I’m of the group that believes this whole presidential campaign of Donald Trump’s is a sham meant to promote his Celebrity Apprentice ratings.
KJ: Let’s hope so.
AZ: Yeah. But I think the more important lesson here is: why, just because something persists over time, do we need to give it a pass? Why do we need to believe that, like, just because Donald Trump or Dov Charney –
KW: Or, I think, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the governor and did win the governor’s race in California and has a long history of sexual harassment –
AZ: Exactly.
KW: – and, you know, we’re just kinda willing to swallow it because he’s been in the public eye for so long?
KJ: Or because, you know, it’s funny because he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, so he gets the pass because it’s entertainment.
KW: Right.
AZ: I mean, I think it’s something – I think there’s a larger issue here about, you know, politicians and the kind of ego that leads one to go into politics. Because, you know, Bill Clinton had a long history of sexual harassment, which didn’t, for me – and admittedly, I’m a Democrat – didn’t really mitigate or affect his politics. But I think when it’s someone who is a personality first, or like a, you know, a celebrity financier, or a bodybuilding movie star, it’s a little different. And it’s hard to sort of tease out what makes it different, and I know there are a lot of people on the right who are like, “well, nobody’s talking about how Bill Clinton had this long history of sexual harassment and mistreatment of women.” It’s very possible that we just have to take for granted that anyone who gets into politics has a sense of their own righteousness that impacts how they treat other people in general, not just women. But um, I don’t think that means we shouldn’t point out the most egregious examples, especially when – as in Donald Trump’s case – it really doesn’t seem to have much to do with actual political aspirations.
KW: Right, and then, you know, also in Donald Trump’s case, some of his misogyny does seem to be bleeding into the politics that he’s – at least, I do think that he’s kind of a fake and a sham, and so I think some of the stances that he’s taking are more for attention. I don’t buy that he even thinks that the birth certificate is a fake. I think it’s just like, he’s capitalizing on an opportunity to get attention. But he’s changed his position on women’s reproductive rights and then I believe it was his aide who said, “well, yeah, you change your mind just like you change wives. It’s just how it goes.” And it’s like, well, both of those attitudes are actually problematic.
AZ: Basically what he’s saying is, if you’re someone who changes wives like they change their socks, you’re probably a douchebag who’s gonna flip-flop.
KW: Right. And we shouldn’t believe what you said about being pro-choice five years ago because, well, you had a different wife then too. So I think we can safely say none of us are planning on voting for him.
KJ: Probably.
KW: Except for Kjerstin. But still, I really appreciated Anna Holmes’s article, just because I do think that, kind of like what Andi was saying, it’s important that we keep being reminded of this stuff.
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Well, on that note – speaking of things that are taken seriously, or not, there was an article in the New York Times this week by Dan Kois – I think I’m saying that right – called “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” which was about what Dan is calling “aspirational” television- and film-watching. To define that, a quote from the article: “Those are the kinds of films and television dearly loved by the writers, thinkers and friends I most respect, so I, too, seek them out; I usually doze lightly through them, and I often feel moved, if sleepy, afterward. But am I actually moved? Or am I responding to the rhythms of emotionally affecting cinema? Am I laughing because I get the jokes, or because I know what jokes sound like?” So, it’s basically an article about the stuff that we watch because we feel like we should, or because we want to be involved in a cultural conversation about it, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we actually don’t care that much. So Andi, what did you think of the article? Did you identify with Dan here?
AZ: Yeah, it really resonated with me, especially now that I feel like television has really gotten so much smarter and is very much – for me at least – kind of the center of my personal media diet, I think more so than films, and more than other visual art and maybe even music. Just because it is something that I do pretty much every day for at least an hour. And it just reminded me of all the things that…even as I’m saying them, kind of empty promises I make to myself about things that I’m going to put on my Netflix queue and going to get around to watching. All however-many seasons of Lost there were – see, I don’t even know – just so I can finally get the Smoke Monster references that are still, like, percolating –
KW: I gave up on Lost also.
AZ: I think, yeah, the piece definitely resonated with me in that way.
KW: Kjerstin, what about you?
KJ: Yeah, definitely. I feel like I went through my phase of trying to catch up on all, you know, the what’s-what of Film with a capital F, and just saw too many films where I was like “I’ve had it. I know that this is like really revolutionary in film history, but I can’t watch another avant-garde silent thing.” Which sort of like, quelled my thirst to keep up with the Joneses or whatever as far as media goes. Now, I think, I definitely take recommendations, but because television has become so – you know, there are these hour-long shows that have six seasons apiece that I just, I am worried about starting something. I would like to get the whole thing instead of just starting something, and I just don’t have the time to watch everything. I try and pick what I watch, specifically, and try not to watch everything that I think I should watch.
KW: Do you pick things based on the conversations that you can have with other people about them? Like do you choose to watch things because you want to be involved in the discourse, or is it really just about what you yourself are drawn to as a viewer?
KJ: I would say what I’m drawn to as a viewer, but also about accessibility. I don’t have a television and I also didn’t have internet at home for a while, so it was like, “how much do I want to spend at the video store?” But if my friends can like, give me a download file for this, then [I’ll watch that]. But now that I have Netflix Instant, it changes things. It was a lot about accessibility, about how much time and money I can bring to it.
KW: I have to say that I chalk it up to working here at Bitch, and, well, I work at a media organization so I have to keep up with this stuff. But I know a lot of it is just straight-up peer pressure. I feel a lot of pressure to keep up with shows. I got cable and HBO partially because of that, even though I justified it in other ways. Part of it is because I really like watching TV, too. But, you know, I was kind of combing through my roster of shows, thinking, “okay, what here am I just keeping up with because I want to be involved in the conversation?” Or, to me, the more telling one is, “what series did I watch a few episodes of and now I lie and say I’m keeping up with it when I’m really not?”
AZ: So you’re not going to tell us?
KW: No, I am. A few shows that I pretend to –
KJ: Kelsey just opened up a notebook.
AZ: There’s at least a page of writing.
KW: A few shows that I pretend to care about but I really don’t are: first of all, I’ll cop to Saturday Night Live. I don’t like it, I never really have.
KJ: That’s one for me where like, the time investment isn’t really worth the payback. I need to have a specific sketch to watch.
KW: I’ll watch a sketch like on YouTube, but I kind of cop to caring about Saturday Night Live more than I actually do because I know that it’s culturally significant. I read Bossypants and I see people from SNL all over, like Seth Myers at the correspondents’ dinner and it’s like, “oh, Saturday Night Live: it’s part of our cultural conversation.” But I don’t like it and I’ll actually go so far as to say that I have faked liking other sketch comedy shows that I really don’t. So, that. Um, Portlandia?
AZ: Yeah, Portlandia’s on my list.
KW: I only watched the first three episodes, but I have pretended to have seen more than that.
KJ: That’s very easy to do, though, with Portlandia.
AZ: Yeah, it’s true.
KW: We are in Portland right now.
AZ: You can be like, “remember that sketch where they just look goofy?” But I have to admit, I was really outraged when I heard that it had been renewed for a second season. I was like, “why?”
KW: Yeah.
AZ: And I realize admitting this is, like, a huge faux pas.
KW: Here we are in Portland –
AZ: Someone’s gonna throw, like, a thing of poutine at me from a moving car.
KJ: You just got that from Portlandia.
AZ: I did!
KW: We’re at a feminist magazine, which is something that’s kind of ripe for Portlandia fodder. But yeah, I watched a few episodes and now I think we’ve all experienced friends outside of Portland being like, “oh my gosh, did you see the thing – ”
KJ: My mom. Like, ultimately – that’s the ultimate “this has gone too far,” when she asked if I saw it.
KW: Right. I couldn’t take anymore. There were a few jokes that I liked, but not really. Also, The Walking Dead on AMC. I made it through an episode and a half of that guy’s fake Southern accent and couldn’t take it. But I was like, “yeah, The Walking Dead, this is an important show with zombies, we’re moving forward,” you know. Also, pretty much anything animated, it turns out, I don’t have the right brain for it.
AZ: I’ve been faking, like, knowledge of The Simpsons, probably as long as it’s been on the air.