Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - coffee in the garden with my husband

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

If a tree falls in the garden where a woman enjoys drinking coffee with her husband and no one’s there to hear it, should the Internet harass her anyway? In 2022, Daisey sent one innocuous tweet that launched a thousand takes. Follow Taylor Lorenz: @TaylorLorenz on all platforms Follow Julia Claire: @ohJuliatweets / @juliaclairegramsFollow Bridget Todd: @BridgetMarie on twt / @bridgetmarieinc on insta See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but being a woman on the internet sucks. It is bad. It is so bad that maybe you just rolled your eyes at hearing me say it. Like, well, a white millennial just said being a woman online is actually really hard. and not to be that brave white millennial, but yes, it really sucks being a woman on the internet, and it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl, non-binary, really just not a cis man online, and other random online users know that, particularly anonymous people,

you'll get a crash course in gender discrimination, the likes of which you could not imagine. And of course, this happens across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogy noir to describe the elevated prejudice that black women experience, or why a study from the National Library of Medicine found that gendered racism against Asian American women has gotten worse in recent years, causing a community-wide decrease in mental health. Transwomen face threats of violence and violent actions at four times the rate of ciswomen, compounded by the world's most powerful countries passing laws that,

validate their existence at best and enable transgenocide at worst. And that's just studies that address people who identify as women. Non-binary people face a whole separate type of discrimination. There's billions of ways to be a woman online, and most of them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere still tends to fucking suck. That's one of the first things you learn on the internet. Don't be marginalized in any way or someone's going to threaten to kill you. You could also fall in love or meet your best friend.

In my case, all of the above. That's the monkey paw of logging in. It's why when I was 12 and posting on message boards lying out of my ass, pretending to be a 19-year-old boy named Aaron who wanted to start a band, I got legitimate replies and asked what my favorite bands were. And when I panicked and admitted I was a 12-year-old girl, the same people started asking me for pictures of myself. Really cool stuff.

And while there are many main characters of the internet who became notorious or were pilloried for doing something, a father refuses to open a can of beans for his daughter to teach her a lesson. A husband loves his curvy wife a little too weird. And then there are others who become the character of the day for simply existing online. Come with me, if you will, to October 2022. Shouldn't be a super heavy lift. You know, it's not not reset. The day was October 21st. Kim Kardashian tried to go to a fancy restaurant and an Usher concert for her 42nd birthday, but ends up at an in-and-out instead.

Liz Truss becomes the shortest-lived UK Prime Minister of all time and resigns after only six weeks. Midnights by Taylor Swift comes out, introducing the extremely unpleasant lyric, Someday I feel like everybody is a sexy baby into the world. Swifties, please don't contact me. I'm having a hard time right now and I can't deal with you. Yes, October 2022, in two short weeks, I would give a speech at my friend's wedding and meet the man who would ruin my life for the next nine months next to a porta potty. So here's some obvious advice I can give you.

Never talk to a man you meet next to a porta potty. The point is, being a woman online or in the world or me specifically is a pain in the ass. And our main character is terrific proof of that, with a healthy dose of class dynamic discussion to boot. The wife who drank coffee in the garden, your 16th minute, begins now. Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of face One more minute at me

I'm not so bad when you say on my mind On the morning of October 21st, 2022, a 24-year-old woman named Daisy tweeted the following from her Twitter account, at Lil Plant Mommy. My husband and I wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours. Every morning, it never gets old and we never run out of things to talk to. Love him so much. I know. Really fucked up stuff. The story here is, young woman enjoys coffee and talking with her husband for long periods of time. The reaction to this story, well... I wake up every day with chronic pain, Parcel Tunnel Syndrome, and wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk latte, but whatever, potato, potato, potato,

Tato, am I right? For hours? But what if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work in stuff, L.O.L. This is cute and all, but did you think of all the people who wake up to work grueling hours, wake up on the streets alone, or with chronic pain before posting this? You should be mindful next time before bragging about your picture-perfect life. You might upset someone. What is the purpose of this communication?

I'm happy for you, but it's just smug self-satisfying. bragging, if it's true. Your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or at least they should be. That is, unless you're flogging something. Very nice story. But haven't you been married for less than four months?

This phase will end. It always does. Please don't be disheartened when it does. Remember, love is a choice, not a feeling. No, no. They're a small business owner, so they are actively participating in taking advantage of other people's labors

so they can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism. They are capitalism? They don't even control the railways or the flow of commerce. I know it's not the same thing, but it feels like the same thing. I mean, Twitter is undefeated for finding the only people on Earth who can be crueler to you than your own negative self-talk, and that's just a fact. But to be honest, I was in a bad.

enough place when I saw this story that while I recognized that the backlash to this poor woman was ridiculous, I kind of resented her too. Every day. I'm doing well financially, but I don't have talking to my partner for hours in the garden every day money. I don't even think I have garden money. And at the time, I hadn't met anyone to either drink coffee with or ruin my life with. But to my credit, I had the wisdom to not participate in this discourse. I did what I think is the much safer move, thought about it privately, and kept my fucking mouth shut. At the time I'm writing this, this tweet from At Little Plant Mommy has 314,000 likes. This is about as close as it gets to a full-on public shaming for saying something that isn't only innocuous on its face,

but also doesn't appear to be courting attention outside of Daisy's Twitter circle. At this time, I think she technically qualifies as a micro-influencer. So less than 20,000 followers, not just a rando talking to people she only knows in real life, but by no means someone who is courting a massive audience. You probably follow 100 people like this. I'm basically this. And at the time this tweet was posted, Daisy had a discernible aesthetic and things that she talked to her audience about frequently. So for her, this tweet wouldn't have been outside of the realm

of a very normal post that she would make. About a year before this, the only other time the Wayback Machine Internet Archive saved her page, Daisy's bio read as follows. Naturalopathic Medicine Student, White Woman Student Emoji, licensed holistic beauty specialist, branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji. A few months before the tweet that shook the earth, she got married to a man named Matt, who it seems like she loved a whole lot. That's it. And her tweets were maybe what you'd expect based on that. Pretty niche, with a lot of slightly woo-woo wellness talk that isn't for everyone, but wasn't trying to be. As I read through some of her old stuff, I didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't think dairy is as bad as all

that. But honestly, I probably never would have found her account if it weren't for this story. People with as many 7-Eleven loyalty points as I do are simply not buying what our girl Daisy is selling. And by the way, the reaction that some of these response tweets implies suggests that Daisy owned a business that personified the grueling puppy mill that is capitalism with the same energy as if she were Jeff Bezos himself. Again, not true. Daisy ran a small-time esthetician business called the holistic aesthetician. And there's nothing wrong with that outside of being a little hard for me to say. It doesn't even seem like she has employees, and that might also explain her flexible hours.

And I can't emphasize enough that for this fairly small account, less than 20,000 followers, this was not an unusual post. The tweets posted around the same time were pretty similar. The perfect balance of love and light, but also real, raw, and imperfect is what I'm always striving for. balance baby did some highlights and a couple haircuts yesterday after months of not doing hair and they both turned out so pretty makes me miss doing hair so why did this tweet about drinking coffee in the garden blow up the twitter algorithm in a recent episode i spoke with taylor lorenz about the phenomenon of the dress and while coffee wife isn't a story she reported on at the time she has a lot of experience in tracking stories like this.

And what she found instructive about the drinking coffee in the garden story wasn't that it was more upsetting than your average woman doing something and getting yelled at online story. It was that the stories boost in the algorithm required both backlash to what Daisy said and backlash to the backlash. Here's some of our talk about that. Yeah, what was unique about that one too, or what I think, is happening more and more with these newer main characters. And I can think honestly Sidney's a good example of this more recently, too,

is like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto that person. And they become this vehicle for making some point about society. And I think we used to not do that as much with our main characters. I think they were just like we could appreciate that they were funny or they were in a viral video or whatever. And now it's like, everything has to say something about the world. And that's what I noticed when that went viral initially, people. And I think, I mean, just strictly based on how the engagement algorithm was working at that time, because a lot of people were like, let's yell at her.

Well, but it was not, it was an equal part, let's yell at her. And then people getting outraged that people were yelling at her. And that is, it's really important to have like both of those, I think, to reach. the level of virality that this did. But, you know, this is right, like, since Twitter has been leaning harder and harder into algorithmic recommendations for years. But I think we've really seen it, especially since the Elon era, like, really take hold. And I think this is an example of Twitter leaning hard into algorithmic recommendations

where suddenly this person is in your feed because everybody has an opinion on the commentary about it. And everybody wants to, again, project. they want to use this innocuous, benign, sort of generic tweet as a way to posture about whatever they want to talk about. Totally. And I think, I mean, that's a really great point that, like, you know, the wave of anger towards this user is one thing, but the story doesn't really thrive unless she also has thousands of people coming to her defense, even though she's tweeting, you know, into presumably to her the void. Do you remember when?

that sort of phenomenon took... Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was going to write about this recently because there was this sort of similar thing about DoorDash. Some person talked about DoorDash and suddenly it was like five days of discourse of people outraged about DoorDash

and then people outraged about the outrage. But the outrage at people that are expressing, they're very, you know, first of all, they shouldn't be expressing it at that woman. But I can understand things are triggering on the internet, whatever they get triggered. But then it's like the other people getting very triggered that anybody is triggered and it's just it just goes bananas but yeah i mean i think also

just we're dealing with a lot of really big problems in society and people can't reach the people that actually can affect change and the people that can affect change and have institutional power don't give a shit what average people have to say if they don't have money or access themselves to power so these main characters kind of become the only outlet for voicing this angeles and people are used as props to make these arguments or statements or whatever because they're at least accessible, you know? Yeah. How have you seen as, you know, as our feeds become algorithmically driven, how the treatment

has changed with regards to gender? Yeah. Well, I think actually the hatred of women is sort of fueled virality on the internet for years and especially since the beginning. I mean, I talk about it in the book, but the people that really pioneered the content creator industry and some of the people that put themselves online first were women. And there's a specific type of woman that gets a lot of hatred, which is sort of a semi-attractive or seemingly privileged women, usually an upper middle class white woman.

In one sense, they do very well on the internet because they ascribe, you know, they ascribe to traditional beauty standards. They're, you know, they're usually somewhat attractive, somewhat privileged. to do well online or enough to get attention online, but they're also subject to some of the most vicious hate because it's just a favorite pastime of the internet to tear women down, specifically wives, because there's this notion of like moms and wives, like always doing something wrong or like, it's misogyny. I mean, it's just hardcore misogyny. And then there's, of course, a separate type of really vicious hatred towards women of color or also just

ripped apart constantly. The thing is they don't really have the level of privilege. And so they often, some of these wives, curvy wife is a good example, right? You know, she's sprung that into brand deals and has a plus size clothing partnerships and all of this. Women of color are not able to take advantage of that virality and monetize it the same way. I mean, this coffee wife woman doesn't sound like she's leaned into it, but she could have released her own line of coffee cups or whatever, you know, like, and I don't know what she looks like, but I think, like, that people are more accepting of privileged women almost pivoting, even though they receive an outside hatred. If you're a conventionally attractive wife, mother, or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're going to get torn apart

because that is what, like, misogyns on the internet love to come for. Yeah. Thanks again to Taylor, her book extremely online is available now. So talking with Taylor, reset, how I was thinking about this story a little. So to say that the legacy of coffee wife is that people hate women online is technically true, but a little undercooked. After talking to Taylor, I became convinced that this story is also a pretty damning example of modern online algorithms gaming us to engage with each other. Because as I was going back through the quote tweets reacting to Daisy's bold statement, the mean tweets versus the defenses of Daisy are uneaseless. There's more nice comments coming to her defense.

For every tweet that says they are capitalism, there's also this. That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband, and folks said, not on my watch. I can't afford coffee. The only thing I have to drink in the garden is bird bathwater because I'm a robin. I'm an actual bird. This tweet is not relatable to my experience as a literal bird. I can't get a house because I'm a bird and can't apply for a mortgage. privilege, bitch.

Eat the rich has gone from no one should be a billionaire to no one living above the poverty level treating themselves in their husband to morning coffee in their garden should be happy. I feel like this is causing so much uproar because so many people are experiencing loveless and indifference from people

they're even romantically connected with. And seeing someone experience friendship and love that seems calm, balanced, and easy is infuriating. And when it comes to the algorithm, Once you've got a class war about the class war, you are cooking. In one of the last interviews Daisy gave on the subject in December 22, with YouTuber and Jelly Luz, she described what it was like experiencing these waves of discourse in what felt like a void.

It just kind of like blew up within like 10 hours of it posting. I posted it. I noticed that like a lot of people were like commenting and liking it. it was kind of going a little viral and like by the next day that I had posted it it was just like totally blown up with lots of like lots of negativity and lots of like hate comments and people saying all kinds of like crazy stuff about me and my husband and and that kind of continued the negativity kind of continued for a little bit but it got to the point by like day like two or three where like everybody was just coming in on the post

and being like, this is actually so cute and so nice and like forget about all the haters and like all of that stuff. And I feel like, I mean, when I try to go into the tweet and like look for the negativity, I literally can't find negative comments anymore because there's been so many thousands of people that have just like drowned all of the like meanness in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I kind of think that it like went in this wave of like negativity. And then there was like another way where it was like, where it got more popular, but then it was like turned into something really sweet and positive. She goes on to describe the few days of constant attention and requests for comment by embracing the coffee lady persona, even briefly adding it to her

Twitter bio, and not everyone would be able to do this, but she takes it in stride, leaning into jokes that suggest that this was all some big evil plan. She tweets things like this. This was all actually a big plot to draw everybody in and then teach them about how to grow their own food and heal the earth, plant emoji. And general reflections on the weird, still developing media cycle of those last few days in October. She directly confronts the criticism in a gentle series of tweets. It's really sad to look at the thousands of hateful comments on this post. Most saying spending time with your spouse is only for the rich, jobless trust fund kids. Saying our marriage won't last. It really shows why a lot of

marriages probably don't last. It's one thing to get to spend hours a day with your partner. We are very blessed. But most of the replies are implying that couples shouldn't have to spend time together. And if they do, you must be rich. Y'all are truly silly. But thank you to all the sweet comments. I love you so much, double heart emoji.

And to directly address her haters who claimed that she was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this. To answer your questions, we are not rich by any means. we've worked extremely hard to get to where we're at. We live very minimally and consciously and work jobs that match our lifestyle and allow us to live the life that we do. Thank you for all the love and uplifting comments.

You know who you are, red heart emoji. Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here. And I think this is a good example of how women have to conduct themselves very carefully online to not get anger from people. She's not ignoring it, but if it does upset her in any way, which it could be justified to do, she doesn't indicate that publicly. She and her husband post a number of other pictures in their garden, which it turns out is where they live in a community in Northern California where he teaches yoga and she runs her small aesthetician business. They tweeted pictures of them

eating breakfast, drinking the famous coffee. And while they never dropped their tax returns or the degree of privilege that they grew up with, the question is, why should they have to? Because the algorithm said so? There's no way around it. This story was tailor-made for the internet rage machine. Box writer Rebecca Jennings referenced as much in a December 22 essay called Every chronically online conversation is the same, saying, if you felt a creeping sense of dread while reading about Daisy and her husband, enjoying coffee in their garden, it's possible you spend too much time online. That's because, despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's post has all the markers of Twitter rage bait. And by rage bait, I mean a person sharing an experience that may not be

entirely universal. I mostly agree with this and do feel that the anger towards Daisy is wildly misplaced. This is the kind of anger we reserve for Kardashians throwing parties during a pandemic. And this doesn't invalidate any of the anger or frustration that online users that were truly, sorry, triggered by Daisy's inoffensive post felt. I mean, hell, Daisy herself articulated this feeling better than anyone else. Here she is on that same Angelilu's YouTube podcast. You know, as far as what I could say to the people that were doing all of that is I just think when you're exuding that much hate to other people that comes from a place in your heart that's hurt, because I truly believe that, you know, everything that, like, we're all just mirrors,

of each other and something about me made them feel something about themselves that was probably trauma from who knows when in their life and that caused something and caused them to feel that way. So I think that that just comes, that kind of behavior just comes from someone being hurt. And I understand that and I have compassion for those people because truly maybe they know better, but they probably don't know anybody or they're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing with it like that instead of in other. healthy ways, you know? So thankfully, coffee wife had a mellow enough lifestyle to forgive and was offline enough to understand the anger without becoming enraged back. When it comes to women behaving

in a very particular way to not get a particular reaction, Daisy did everything right. All she did wrong was exist in a way that the algorithm was liable to boost. When I started this show, the person who was most insistent, along with hundreds of others that I talk about coffee wife, was my best friend Julia. And I wanted to know why. Because no matter where you fell at the time, what happened over the coffee in the garden tweet was a pretty classic public shaming. And Julia is a great comic and writer who wrote a controversial essay for Gawker in 2022 called In Defense of Shame. She's literally an authority on shame. And not just because she grew up Catholic in New England, but that certainly didn't hurt.

And Julia feels strongly that Daisy was not deserving of the backlash she got. So, when is shame a necessary tool and when is it whatever the fuck this is? I wanted to ask her about it first. I'm Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at Crooked Media.

You are the person that I associate most with, like, intensely feeling about this story. I am the person you most associate with the concept of shame. Yes. Yes. And so it really, you've saved me an interview here by also, because, yeah, like, you felt really strongly that this woman had been shamed improperly, but you do feel, tell me your feelings

about a proper shaming. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Gawker RIP called In Defense of Shame was kind of immediately criticized by people who didn't read the piece as a defense, it being a defense of shaming. People were basically saying that I was co-signing dog pile culture, co-signing shaming, which is not at all what I was talking about in the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would. It's a very kind of like internal experience. more of a reflective experience, not an external experience. Shame is for, shame is for me.

It's not for you. You know, it's like, so to me, I mean, basically, like, my, my defense of shame was that more people need to be kind of in touch with their own shame. And I honestly think that, like, a lot of, I think the fact that a lot of people aren't is the reason why they end up projecting on on other people. But, yeah, this was one of those things, like, that was a clear case of shaming in a way that was completely needless and silly, honestly. You're yelling at this 20-something woman because she's having a lovely mourning.

Right. Kill yourself. Is there a. productive way to shame someone on the internet? That's a really good question. I think you have to, I think if it, if there is, you really have to be punching up. Like the whole thing with coffee wife is that she was just some kind of like random lady. Right.

It's very different if we're all piling on to like, I mean, there are some people who are really impervious to it. So, like, you know, Elon Musk seems to just revel in the fact that everyone hates him. But as far as a productive way to shame the average person, I mean, no, I don't think so. And I really, again, I don't advocate for shame as an external force. I think all of our shame should be internal and it should be between us and the Lord. Wow. Your parents are going to be so pleased. I know. Father Leroy at St. Edward's Parish. Your impact is felt on this podcast. Absolutely. Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire, but you can catch every day over at Crooked Media. And we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's 16th Minute.

Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more. Found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer.

Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.

Tune in on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs

that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you.

And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories.

stories, I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season. of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th minute. Today I've had six cups of coffee and still no husband in sight. We're talking coffee wife. So not to 2016 Ghostbusters this situation, but take a second to imagine how this

story would be different if it were a husband tweeting about enjoying time with his wife in said garden. I really don't think the reaction would be the same. In the context of heterocouples, husbands who adore their wives tend to be lifted up as wife guys in the same way that they're more easily rewarded socially for being an active part of their children's lives. And while there's intersecting issues that caused people to project onto coffee wife, I still think this boiled down to an Internet classic. Women are fair game for just about anything. There's no social incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband.

Because when a woman adores spending time with her husband, so what? It would be selfish of her to not love spending time with him. When a woman takes good care of and loves her children, so what? That's the natural expectation. And coming up short in either department is still met with easier, more reflexive criticism, even with gains made in general gender perception. But while I do firmly believe that Daisy was dragged online for simply being happy, I want to state the obvious and say, of course, women can fucking suck online.

There's plenty of precedent for that because women are people. And there are clear patterns en masse and as individuals for cis white women specifically, like Daisy and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best, bigoted and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarchy and capitalism rewards and being generally a condescending piece of shit to people who are more marginalized than themselves. That's a lot of words to say a no longer trendy term that is still somewhat useful and it is girl boss. There's a bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as simple as, quote, a woman, especially a young woman, who is ambitious and successful

in her career, unquote. And others, as I think of the girl boss, are connected more closely to women using the language of feminism to accrue power while actively upholding the status quo. Probably the most famous example of this is Cheryl Sandberg, who wrote the bestseller Lean in in 2013 to encourage women to advocate for themselves in the workplace. She is the ultimate girl boss to me for a few reasons. First of all, she is a huge beneficiary of capitalism that is actively harmful. She was the C.O.O. of Facebook during years and years of infinite growth. And second of all, she's using her position as a powerful woman to sell you something. And not something is that the only thing holding you back as a woman in the workplace is not the system you find

yourself in, but something you are neglecting to do. It's self-help snake oil that bullies the women who are reading it. Here's a quote. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but this is where we are. If you want the outcome to be different, you will have to do something about it. Oh, it's your fault. She also says this. We need to stop telling women, get a mentor, and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, excel, and you will get a mentor. Oh, it's my fault. $20 well spent. Thanks, Cheryl. That's the kind of girl boss shit we're talking about. so a very instructive term that is often misused after being sucked into this linguistic misogynist vortex. The difficulty with the girl boss tag gets to why I think coffee wife was done so dirty.

There are people who aren't big fans of women who glommed on to this word to use it interchangeably with all women, or women who had any power over them at work. If your manager is a woman, that doesn't mean she is cynically using touch. tools of the patriarchy to oppress you while assuring other women they're doing something wrong in order to personally profit. It's a very specific set of behaviors. And being a girl boss doesn't mean the women in question haven't experienced gender discrimination themselves. In fact, I'd wager that all of them have. This simply does not describe a woo-woo 24-year-old drinking coffee in the garden. The anger is valid, but it is misplaced. Daisy wasn't trying to make

money by saying this. She wasn't aiming to change minds or hurt anyone or, according to her, even reach outside of her normal audience. She was just sharing something. You know, like we're told is the whole point of social media. And given the state of Twitter in the fall of 2022, and on this specific week, the algorithm pushing this high engagement story makes a lot of sense. There were a number of algorithmic shifts on Twitter and in social media writ large in this year. If you're a Twitter user yourself, or I'm not going to say X, please don't contact me about this. If you're a Twitter user yourself or a proud Twitter retiree, you might remember when their timeline became completely algorithmically driven instead of what it had been for years and years, which was a real-time feed of people you had chosen to follow.

Now, people you didn't follow would be sorted to the top of your feed if the algorithm thought you were likely to interact with the post based on what you'd interacted with in the past. And the people you actually chose to follow might see their content get pushed further and further down. Users got really pissed off about this, and Twitter tried to mitigate the issue by splitting everything into two feeds. So if you opened the website on your laptop, it would default to the new, shitty algorithm feed. and you could shift over to the timeline you'd had for 15 years, but it would take some effort. And it's posts like daisies that would get sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed, the one you didn't ask for, and the one that no one is prepared to be sorted into.

And within a week of the coffeewife flare-up, a looming Twitter acquisition was finally completed. After months of legal wrangling and negotiation, Elon Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter. Earlier in 2022, Elon Musk, who I think we can all agree only had the best intentions and deserves the benefit of the doubt, offered to buy Twitter on a whim for $54.20 a share, just months after he'd become the company's largest shareholder at nearly 10%. This put the prospective deal at $44 billion, and Twitter accepted the offer very quickly.

They genuinely didn't seem to think he'd go through with it and accepted to all but resist a hostile takeover from Musk. But Musk, determined to pivot the platform to white supremacy, doubled down, declaring that his ownership would mean less bots and more free speech. He certainly made good on the former in the fascist content is king sense, but the crackdown on bots is pretty hilarious for a site that I can't even pay to stop auto posting my pussy in bio. underneath pictures of me and my infant nephew. So yeah, this change of ownership was famously a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out of the objectively bad deal that was his idea in July but wasn't able to, and was all but forced to go through with the deal less than a week after Daisy was declared the coffee wife. And what happened after that was, well, it's why Twitter has been in sharp decline ever since.

Just a small sampler platter of incidents since this time. welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye, and Alex Jones back to Twitter and generally promoting fascists, challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, and tanking the company's net worth by over 50%. There's a very depressing lens that we can see the coffee wife incident through as this dying gasp of old-school misogyny on Twitter, moments before it was about to get much, much, much worse. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories

that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal.

He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. on America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum,

the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's, illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy.

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And how bad has it gotten on the internet since 2022?

I went to an expert. My pal Bridget Todd, host of the incredible podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd. I am the host and creator of IHeartRadio's Tech and Culture Podcast. There are no girls on the Internet. And I guess you could say I'm a tech internet enthusiast,

aficionado, whatever you want to say. I'm excited to talk Coffee Wife with you. Why do you think that people had such a strong emotional reaction to coffee wife? Well, one, I think it's absolutely algorithmic, right? I think that we know a lot about how algorithms work. I think that they absolutely are feeding us and pushing us content that is going to elicit strong reactions, emotional reactions from us. So even if you don't know this woman, don't follow this woman, she wasn't like somebody

who had a ton of followers, she had a relatively small account. Platforms know this is content that is eliciting strong. reaction, strong engagement. Let's make sure that more people see it. You know, that's the name of the game for platforms. However, I do think that the time frame kind of matters. Like, I think that this was a time where do you remember how in the very beginning of the pandemic, we were also, there was a sort of novelty to it where it was like, who knows what's happening? But then that kind of wore off and then it was like, well, I guess this is just all of our lives now. And I think that this happened at a time when a lot of people were just sort of

grappling with that. I think for me personally, it was a time where I was spending way more time than I should have been on screens, on the internet, really paying a lot of attention to what strangers on the internet were doing because I didn't have a lot going on outside of that, right? I wasn't going out the way I used to, all of that. And I also think we were all feeling the sort of like existential dread of how reality feels right now, right? Everything is expensive. Rents are rising. Inflation is terrible. It just feels like we are being squeezed from so many different ankles. And so when somebody comes along with just pure joy, the pure joy of a, you know, having coffee in their garden with their husband every morning and, you know, isn't this nice,

it's like a trigger that it's not surprising to me that it was this big, this big tension point for so many people. That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've been having, I'd be curious what you think about that of like how the pandemic sort of warped our relationship to the internet and what it looks like trying to sort of return to straddling real life and internet life. Yeah. Boy, do I identify with that and feel you on that. I mean, I can speak for myself. I am not proud of what the pandemic, how I responded to the pandemic socially, right? I also am a pretty socially anxious person. I'm somebody who's in my head a lot. And I'm not proud to say this, but I would bet that I'm not the only person who feels this way.

I think during the pandemic, you know, we were watching people die. We were watching people lose loved ones. We were watching people lose their livelihoods. It was a really tough time. And so it was hard for me as somebody who, luckily, was very privileged and that that wasn't the case for me, right? Like, I got COVID, people I know got COVID, but thankfully, I didn't lose my loved ones. It wasn't impacting me the way that it was. I'm not an essential worker, right?

And so I think that for me personally, it was strange to grapple with that, this feeling of like, I am going through a tough time and so is everyone. I think it for me created this dynamic where I hate to say it, but I was very much like, what about my pain? You know, like, why is no, like, when is it going to be my turn for somebody to see me? Like, I wasn't an essential worker. Nobody around me died, but I still had a tough time. I was finding myself in this like almost very narcissistic place of wanting somebody to acknowledge what I had been through.

And so I think with coffee lady, I think it was a lot of people who perhaps were wanting someone to see their pain, wanting others to acknowledge their pain and their anxiety and their loneliness and their frustration, which is something that I can relate to really deeply. And so I think that's part of why, because some of the replies that she got would be like, I can't afford a garden. I don't have a husband. You know, I'm alone here. I don't have any friends. Like people really making it about themselves and what they lack. And like something about that tweet, I think, highlighted the lack that a lot of people were feeling. And I just, I really, it's easy to dunk on these people and be like, wow, you're so dysregulated that that's that this woman, this random woman's tweet is making you feel that way. But I also kind of get it. You're totally right. And I know I've been guilty of this in the past. and probably during the pandemic era internet where you're taking like your personal pain and I've had moments from like,

I don't want to see someone happy right now because I'm not. And like I think that there's a lot of that, but some of it is sort of manifesting as a political statement. I can't quite get my head around that phenomenon because I don't want to discount the fact that like class rage and class anxiety online. I mean, it makes total sense. I've experienced it all.

lot, especially the sort of the further back you go. But she's so clearly not the person that can, I think it's interesting online when people dog pile on someone who cannot help them. Right. I do think there's a gendered aspect to it. I haven't really kind of grappled with this too much just yet. But like, I know for me, when I'm scrolling TikTok or Instagram, there is something about the visualization of a woman who seems like she's got her shit together. She's got it all figured out. She wears the perfect two-piece, you know, workouts that she eats right. She starts her day with like lemon water or matcha instead of coffee, whatever it is.

Three gorgeous children who are well-behaved. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that coffee ladies tweet, at least for me, triggered a kind of very gendered, almost like politicized anxiety, that there are women out there who are doing it right. and Bridget, you are doing it wrong. Like something about, like, there has never been a day where I'm able to start my day, serenely drinking coffee in my garden. I actually do have a small garden and I never start my day out there because I start my day like most people, like frazzled, late for a call, just trying to chug some coffee while I'm

getting dressed, like doing a million other things. Sure, I should be taking a moment, smelling the flowers, journaling, yada, yada, yada. Yes, gratitude journal. Exactly. But who does that, right? And so I think there is something where women are told that you have, that in order to sort of signal that you have it together, your mornings have to look like XYZ. And I think that something about coffee lady, something about that tweet, signal to women, like, I've got it all together. Do you feel like crap that you don't?

I don't think she was, I certainly don't think she was trying to do that. But that's, I think that's probably how it hit some of us. The internet, I think, like a lot of things, is sort of built to make women angry at each other and resent each other. And, yeah, I mean, could you speak to that a little bit? I know that that's your beat. Yes. I mean, it's just a document, a well-documented fact. Algorithms want women to feel like shit. They want women to be comparing themselves to other women. They want women to be feeling bad. They want women to be feeling like crap all the time. And algorithms and platforms and tech leaders, make money off of women feeling like shit about themselves.

That's just a fact, right? And so if you've ever been scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever and you keep being surfaced content that makes you feel like crap, that's not you. You're not crazy or sensitive. Algorithms and platforms do that with intention because it keeps you on the platform longer. It keeps you coming back and it makes them money. It is a very twisted dynamic that we are a cog in this cycle

that is making other people, mostly men, rich, off of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us being in competition with each other. And rather than like celebrating the ways that we are different, celebrating the ways in which like, oh, well, like, my brand is this. I'm a hot mess. I own it. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Algorithms trick us into thinking that all of these great things that make us who we are are actually foibles are actually bad. And yeah, I mean, there's been study after study that shows that more time you spend on particularly Instagram, the more young women feel bad about themselves, the more body anxiety they have, the more likely they are to

engage in things like food issues or disordered eating. And none of that is by mistake. It is all by design. It is a feature, not a bug. And that would also apply to coffee wife, but people were attacking her as if she was like the root cause of it. It was very strange. I forget who I was talking to the other day about how they felt like they had fucked up their algorithm because they said that they weren't interested in something. And the algorithm kept serving that to them because they cared enough to say, I'm not interested. And the only way to truly demonstrate you're not interested is to keep scrolling and don't stop. But like if you are, if you theoretically, you know, see like a coffee wife TikTok come up and you care enough

to say, I don't like this, the algorithm will serve it to you again. And so I ran an experiment and it's completely true, like that the kind of content I went out of my way to say, I don't like this, the algorithm responds by being like, well, maybe you'll interact with it negatively because it makes you feel bad. Yes. And so I've experienced the exact same thing. I completely agree with you. And imagine how harmful that is when it's content that you find triggering, right?

When it's content that you have identified, like that might not be safe or healthy for me to see and engage with, right? But if the algorithm has gleaned like, oh, she has a little bit of an issue with X, Y, Z, let's keep showing it to her and see what happens. That's not really that cool. The part that's hard is even when I'm looking for it, it's hard to escape the, like, emotional experience of, I don't want to see that. And, like, feeling that your anger, for whatever reason, it does seem to, it routes at the person

because you can't, you know, the real kind of, God, this sounds. conspiratorial. But like the real enemy has no face. Right. And so I feel like there is this sort of very human instinct to try to place a face and a name to what is bothering you when in reality it is something much larger, like, you know, social media algorithms that are trying to make you upset, like the concept of class and like these huge things. And it's finding a sort of villain of the day to take it out on, even when that person sucks. In this case, they didn't, but sometimes they do, but it still doesn't. It's so unproductive. Yeah, we are making a bunch of random people proxies for a lot of our very valid anger and pain and fear. That's why I always say,

like, it's a game and we're all being played. The only winner here are tech platforms and people who run them and people who make money from them. And so even if you are running a successful little grift for a while, engagement baiting and all of that, all it takes is one algorithmic tweak and then no one's, you don't have the eyeballs or the attention of the world any longer. And so, yeah, it's a game and we're all being played. What can we, what can the collective learn from Coffee Wife? Something that I found really interesting about the Coffee Wife saga was how everybody assumed she was wealthy because she has a garden.

and I found that to be really interesting because she was like, oh, it's not like a fancy garden, it's just a small garden in my regular home. I think that it is very easy, and I say this because I've done it, to trick yourself into thinking, like, the things that I want, I can't have. I am, I could never have a garden.

And I think that that really, the coffee wife thing really showed me that a lot of us, feel like we can't have things that we actually can have. I don't know if that makes sense, but the fact that so many people were like, well, you have to be rich to have a garden. And it's like, well, actually, I don't think that's the case. And people who are not rich have gardens all the time. And like, why are you assuming that the past time of gardening is something that only the

wealthy can do? Even if you live in a small apartment, you can still have, like, a window garden or something. I think that we, I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the things that we want we cannot have. So that's one. Two, I would say, yeah, we really have to be better at understanding where we put our pain and who we make the proxies for our pain. I would say if the person you are tweeting at cannot change the circumstances that you're upset about, maybe you're putting your rage and your anger and your emotionality in the wrong place, and that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality to the right places, right? I know those places tend to be structural and institutional and faceless, but we got to really have a sense of what forces are actually making us unhappy.

And it's probably not this lady drinking coffee in her garden. Thank you so much to Bridget Todd. Listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet every single week. I sure do. So, what became of our coffee wife legend? Daisy didn't respond to my request for an interview, and I respect that. She just wants to be a person who does pleasant things with people she likes. Some people just don't want a dumb bitch podcaster interfering with their life,

and I have to accept that. As far as her online persona, Daisy is no longer coffee wife. She is Daisy and appears to be spending her time generally not on Twitter. Nowadays, she lives in Bali, India, and is returning to her lashes business later in the year. I have no idea if she's a wife, if she drinks, coffee, but she's certainly Daisy. And I like Daisy. And with that, the V Coffee Wife. Your 16th minute ends now. Okay, I'm on the couch with my boyfriend drinking coffee. Close enough. Oh, I should, I guess I should hold it. I should hold it. You're right. Get your coffee, yeah.

But hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife. And we don't have a garden We do have a little deck But I just We have a bug in the house, though Casper Casper and Flea, two bugs We do have two bugs

The deck kind of stresses me out because there's so much pollution And we're across the street from a We shouldn't say where are we? No, we should But you can visualize the pollution Because we can see all of the gathered dust You can see so much dust The accumulated dust

Flea just walked up to Casper and started kissing him. They are kissing. They're kissing right now. I know. Flea's licking Casper's forehead. You love saying, you're so dirty. You're so dirty. They're the same size now. It's great. We could try this in a garden at some point, though, don't you think? 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, James. me lost us. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Special thanks to Grant Crater and Sophie Lichten for doing voiceover and pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network.

Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. if you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma the saying it this is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant loud soft and whole the unwanted sorority is where black women fims and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing support and what happens after and i'm your host and co-president of this organization dr leia trotate listen to the unwanted sorority new episodes every thursday on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.