You're Wrong About - Bonus Episode! Sarah and Mike on "The Feminist Present" Podcast

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Sarah and Mike tell Laura and Adrian about how we met, how we research and what we would say to Jessica Simpson if we ever met her.Follow the The Feminist Present here: gender.stanford.edu/podcastSupport us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Hey debunkmates, Mike here. Just letting you know it's a bit of a different episode today. A couple of weeks ago, the co-hosts of the Feminist Present podcast, Laura Good and Adrienne Dobb got in touch with us to ask us if we wanted to be on their show. And their show was really good and really interesting and has interviewed some of our favorite writers. And so we said yes. And since they asked us a lot of the stuff that listeners often ask us, things about like how we met and how we researched the show and stuff like that, we thought we would just put it into our feed so that if you're interested in that, you can take a listen. So this is us chatting with Laura and Adrienne about

true crime and the 90s and feminism and Jessica Simpson. So enjoy and we'll see you soon. How did you guys meet and why are you friends? Mike, you, well, okay, I'll tell the first part. The beginning of how Mike and I met is that in 2010, I started looking at the legacy of Tanya Harding, who I had grown up with the idea of as someone who grew up in Oregon, and became obsessed with her and how she had been done wrong by the media and just lectured people in bars about it. And over the course of like four years of just like thinking and obsessing over it and really like growing into the subject and growing into the kind of writer I had to be to in any real way, hopefully do her right through a piece of

writing, published a piece on Tanya Harding. And then Mike, this is where your pretty story begins. Yeah, and then enter Mike. And then I read the article, which is called Remote Control and is still among probably the five best things I've ever read. And it was a completely new way of looking at history to me. And there were two sort of things about it that really stuck out to me was that one, it was extremely well written and extremely empathic. And then secondly, it was sort of like this retelling of the Tanya Harding story. But without using like secret sources or like declassified accounts, like I spent days and days with Tanya Harding, he's like, no, it was all there all along. Like all we had to do was pay attention in the first place.

And the extremely tragic and human story of this woman was there. We just ignored it all. And that to me, like a light bulb went off in my head. And that was just a completely fascinating and really exciting way of looking at the world. And so I emailed Sarah on her Tumblr, like whatever her, you know, you have those little like contact forms you have on Tumblr. And I was like, and at the time I wasn't a journalist, I was like, Hi, I'm a random guy. I live in Berlin and I work at a human rights organization. I think you're cool. And that was it. And then when we both joined Twitter, I followed her and then we chatted on DMs a little bit. And then eventually, it says like years later, I ended up working at HuffPost and we

talked about like doing some stories together. We basically just like stayed in touch with each other on the internet as millennials do. It was kind of this journalistic when Harry met Sally, like the time kept not quite being right. Yeah. Getting closer. Yeah. And then eventually two years ago, I had this idea of like, let's do a podcast about this. And I asked Sarah if she wanted to record some test episodes. And then we just kept recording. And it's been, it's been more than two years. And like almost 100 episodes, I think we're like 90 something. 92 something like that. It's an impressive catalog. I mean, I've been binging quite a bit in preparation for this. I may be functioning on no sleep and mostly you're wrong about yet.

Okay, I hope it hasn't been too stressful. I feel like all of our episodes are unbelievably dark, except for like this one little series on Jessica Simpson. It was frankly a lifeline. I have to say, I loved how you're describing it in terms of the kind of digging that you do that it's not really about finding new and hidden information. The kind of wrongness you seem to trace preferably is kind of one that's all about kind of laziness. You know, people sort of build these fictions into their lives and never sort of bother to ask like, is that really what happened with the prom mom? Is this what really happened with Nancy Grace's fiance? Right? It's like easier to get along if you just believe it. Would you say that that's the overall theme or have you

created a taxonomy of wrongness over the years? Other episodes, they'd say, oh no, actually, that's about something different. There actually, there was something to be revealed there or there was something where the average person in the street really couldn't know what's really going on. We're definitely at the point where we're doing episodes now that are like beyond the template of like people were wrong, they entirely missed the point. We've done episodes lately that are like, you know, we weren't completely wrong about this, but it's like weirder and more complicated than we really have had time to dwell on culturally and like, let's have fun with that. Like I feel like maybe the OJ Simpson trial episodes are the best example of that because

we came back and had a big cultural reckoning with that trial in the last few years and have kind of accepted how complex it was, what that trial did more than anything was show us how limited our position in society was and therefore viewpoint. But there's no big, it was hiding in plain sight all along type thing with that story. It's more just like, let's just slow down and like talk about Faye Resnick and talk about all these elements that maybe we didn't miss apprehend or maybe we did, but it's just worth exploring more deeply. So I think that the intent of the show has grown more. Yes. I mean, a lot of it is just sort of recontextualizing and especially just telling stories chronologically because oftentimes when you're in the middle of a news event,

you learn it in order of importance. You don't learn it in the order that it happened. Right. I mean, there's also episodes where like people got it fucking wrong. Yes. There's always going to be plenty of those. Yeah. I mean, the one that I keep coming back to and that like really radicalized me and like made me want to do an episode of the show about everything that's ever happened in my life was Terry Shiveau. You know, it was this thing that was presented to the public as like, the medicine is so complicated and the ethics and the law, it's so complicated. And who can say and her husband's intentions seem dark. It's so murky. And then you look into it and there's 20 different legal trials and all 20 of them ruled in favor of Michael Shiveau and every single doctor

who looked at Terry Shiveau said, there isn't a lot of complexity here. There isn't an ethical gray area. This is someone who is not meaningfully alive. And yet it was presented to the public very consistently as like, oh, like we couldn't possibly say that like one side of this debate might not be acting in good faith. It was like, let's hear out everybody. And again, these are legal documents. These are like PDFs that you can find and they're like four pages long. I mean, you can read all this stuff in like an hour and just like nobody did, I guess. I also think of the show as just kind of a time saving device. People live lives and like, yeah, you could go back and learn what was going on with Terry Shiveau. But like people have children and grout

that needs to be disinfected periodically, you know, and just this, to me, it's really meaningful to kind of take the energy and the time necessary to care enough or to be invested enough about these old topics to really go back and find what is there and accessible, but which needs this time and energy to be added to the mix in order to be turned into something that can be useful to someone to listen to in kind of an hour span of hearing versus a 10 hour span of reading and contemplating. I mean, it's kind of like saying like, God, I mean, there's so much wool out there, but a lot of it isn't sweaters yet. And it's like, yeah, it's because you have to have people to make the sweaters. I love both like the textile and the archaeology analog. I love both of those

as useful metaphors here. Mike's chuckling because I've been using a lot of wool metaphors lately. I like the wool thing. I've heard the wool thing a number of times and I like it. I think it's, I'm stealing it. I love that. And Michael, I also loved what you were saying about how in its first iteration, news is delivered to us in order of importance because that begs the necessary second question, which is importance to whom, right? And like who decides that ranking and that triage of order of importance. There's so much reordering of history that you guys do, as you say, according to publicly available and accessible documents. And I'm reminded of my single all time favorite episode of yours is the one on Nicole Brown Simpson. And I think that's

such a good example of that kind of subtle paradigm shift because certainly most people in the world know her name, right? You know, like that's not an unfamiliar person or topic to most Americans, but I cannot think of a single other piece of OJ universe media, including the historic and iconic OJ Made in America by Ezra Edelman that focused so deeply on Nicole's point of view and what it meant for her to be someone who met her future abusive husband when she was 17, she was 16 or 17. 18, yeah. And that was her whole life from the time she was a teenager forward was him being in control of her image. It was just a really, that was an especially powerful act of feminist reclamation to me for you guys to endeavor to tell that story from her point of view. Thank you.

And again, what was Sarah's like extremely, like, innovative research method for that was like reading publicly available books, like, right, anyone, right? It just takes the interest in this person. And so much of it is just like, people have not shown interest in these stories. I guess the easy question here would be to say what's your research process. But as you're saying part of the point is that anyone can do this. But so what's your non research process? Because one of you always sort of goes in right having just what they retain from back when it was happening. And I think that's really, really powerful. Because in many cases, my recollection is 100% determinist with what you remember. I say, Oh, yeah, that was that case in Florida

with the thing and the alligator or whatever. That level. How do you make sure you stay that pure when the other person is doing their deep dives? How do you maintain your purity? I was just I was just the other day, like my boyfriend randomly brought up John Bonnet Ramsey and he's like, Yeah, when they found it. And I was like, no, no, no, no. It's like, I know we're going to do an episode. I don't want to know. I have only the vaguest memories of what actually took place. And so I do that very often in conversations when people will bring up like, I don't know, Casey Anthony or Lacey Peterson in one of these crimes. I really did not follow at the time at all, because I want to stay super fresh for those. So part of it is just us being

weird in our personal lives and telling people about historical events around us. And also that we're explaining to each other things that tend to be kind of in our wheelhouses. Like you'll notice that I don't do a lot of episodes that focus on systemic infrastructural failings, because those are hard for me to grasp and then to explain to people. And Mike doesn't do a lot of episodes on like feeling tabloid court TV type trials from the 80s and 90s, because he's not obsessed with those. I'm not like a feelings person, not a crime person. I'm not a feelings person. And Sarah's not like a exploding Ford Pinto go read a bunch of extremely tedious business memos person. I think we have really different ways of researching too. I think that I get really excited

if I get to order a bunch of pulpy out of print true crime books on eBay and read them. And you get really excited if you get to watch a bunch of Senate testimony. Yes. Yes. If I get to go on Lexus Nexus and like read a bunch of news sources from like 1976, like original documents and like, yeah, just reading Senate testimony this morning. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess it's true. There's two kinds of people in this world. Those who pick up a paperback copy of Michelle remembers from the mail are like, Oh, and those that do not. Yes. That's that's one of the ways to divide people. Speaking of the like wrongometer, we've included a different kind of episode that we've been doing since coronavirus began, which is to do these deep dive book club episodes, which the Michelle

remembers episodes are the first ones of where the point is to kind of go on this safari through, in my case, like terrible books. And in my case, like fun books that are fun to explore. That by the way, just as a literature professor, it makes me so happy because it's in some way, it's centering these books that we are not used to thinking of as literature as a literary text and really ask, yeah, what's the rhetoric here? What does the structure communicate? Et cetera, et cetera. I think that's so few people, of course, consume them in that way. That's what makes it fun that you don't consume them that way. But if any of these sort of get people to think more critically about these kinds of media that we consume, a close read of Nancy

Grace is not something I would want to undertake. But you want to hear someone who's just crawled out of it. There was a long period in my life, what feels like a long period now where I believe academia was where I was going to be for my entire life. And one of the things that I love and miss about it was just this feeling that like, it reminds me actually of the Ghostbusters slogan, like no job is too big, no fee is too big, like no text is too small, no book is too silly to be taken seriously, because like there's nothing that shouldn't be taken seriously, because everything is produced by humans with some sort of context and some sort of intent. At the top of every episode, I mentioned that I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And so

one of the things that I've loved getting to do on the show is to work with the literature that they satanic panic produced, because it's many kind of odd social movements and moments create bodies of literature. And then these books kind of go out of print, they experience a brief popularity or a brief period of being influential, and then society kind of moves on. But there remains this literature that I think is very fun to explore. And again, like people living normal lives where they have to do all kinds of difficult tasks and jobs all day, like don't want to sit around waiting around looking for the meaning in a book that is like repetitive descriptions of satanic torture. But that's what I get to do. With the Virgin Mary showing up at the end. With the Virgin

Mary showing up and speaking French, obviously. Yeah. She would, wouldn't she? Yeah. But that's another one where like one of the great revelations of that was that when we get these big moral panics, we always lose the primary documents or the cases that began them, right? Where we have at the beginning of the satanic panic, one of the books that inspires it, is a woman describing how there's all these satanists in Victoria, BC, and they cut off their own, what was it, ring fingers or middle fingers? Middle fingers, and they're sacrificing white kittens, and it's only white kittens, and they need like hundreds of white kittens per satanic, right? And you're like, yeah, and you're like, tell me about the boom and white kitten breeding on

Vancouver Island in the 70s then. And it's like, if people read this with any skepticism or any like critical view of any kind at the time, they would have said like, Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't smell right. I'm going to look into this more. But like that process doesn't happen. It's like we take the most convincing parts of these texts and these cases and we just throw out the stuff that just makes no sense. Well, it also inevitably a lot of people when these books came out read them and were like, I don't buy this. But then they were like, if only there was some kind of square of light, I kept in my pocket and I could write I don't buy this and then send it onto some kind of internet where strangers could see it and understand the sense in my argument.

But I can't because Star Wars just came out. That's something so interesting about using it as a window into this whole period of American history, right? Like, it is about like a lack of technology, unawareness, lack of media savvy in terms of how media often gets sort of woven into the panic, checking sort of didn't happen. And the way I guess the Christian right was sort of starting to take over sort of school boards and everything, right? There's also something. Okay, can you guys tell me if this is like a shower thought and like not worth expressing? Yeah, I love shower thoughts. Come on. Okay, there was like a tweet that went around a couple months ago about how when the Wonder Years was made, because you know the Wonder Years is about

the 60s and it was made in the 80s. And there's really only like a 20 year gap. And somehow like this 20 year gap, that was enough for like nostalgia to form. And yet it feels and again, tell me if I'm totally off base on this, but it feels like we don't have a similar relationship to the 90s. Like we don't see it as a historical period, even though it's quite a long time ago now. I think that what we're experiencing right now is a historical period. Like I think Zoomer are going through the experience that the baby boomers had in the 60s. And I think the 90s were like this sleeper moment, because what I remember about growing up in the 90s was growing up with this weird kind of bubble protected middle class white child sense of like, don't listen to Bill

Nye, global warming isn't going to be that bad. Everyone's terrified for you all the time. But yes, you're going to rise up and be the best of anyone at anything. And everything's just going to be up and up. There's a great big beautiful tomorrow. And the boomers gave everything they had to the millennials to get them to rule a great and just world and make things great by continuing to hoard all the resources and be important and not listening to anyone else, the like middle class white kids. And then we get sort of crashed and burned because everything was impossible and there were no jobs and the sort of like privileged echelon poi that was supposed to succeed just sort of like ended up living on futons for years. No one knew what to

make of this time of prosperity collapsing like a souffle. It's hard to feel nostalgia for that. I feel like I grew up expected to do something that like I'm glad I didn't get to do because society needed to sort of collapse in a way that meant that like there was no system left to buy into or very little left to buy into. I feel like what teenagers are experiencing now is like the kind of thing that you would then look back on from a more tranquil time if you've sold out maybe in that tranquil time and be like, yeah, that time was about something. I don't know what this one's about. I mean, I think it was about a lot of very distinct things that I don't think we really noticed at the time, right? I mean, you never noticed the historical context and like,

you know, you always to know what an era is, you have to know what comes before and what comes after and we didn't know what was going to come after at the time. But looking back now, I mean, we see, we do see the satanic panic. We see these weird moral panics about stranger danger. We see the rise of the American right completely transforming in these ways that wouldn't become clear to us until now. But all of that stuff was starting to form in the 80s and 90s. We see the mergers and consolidations that we're seeing now. A lot of that stuff started in the 90s, the private equity stuff started in the 90s, financialization started in the 90s. There were all these things happening then that are culminating now. But I don't think we sort of knew that that's what's happening. We're

like, huh, that's weird. Like we had like a little tech boom. No one wants to make a show today that's like, that was the day I got my first kiss from Winnie Cooper and Enron went down. It was the day they published the star report. First of all, Michael, I don't think that's a shower thought at all. I think that's definitely worth further investigation. And Sarah, I agree very much with your characterization of like white middle class childhood in America. And I would add to it, in addition to sort of the gifted child unlimited upward mobility sensibility you were describing, I would add to that the like stranger danger ever present ominous cloud, which made the message something like you can be anything you want to be in this limitless

upward mobility, as long as you avoid being abducted at any moment, you know, like from a playground. I'm from Minnesota and I grew up in the shadow of the Jacob Wetterland trial. And there's been some developments in that case just in the last few years. And like, that was a permanent shadow over my entire child. Like that was always the cautionary tale. That's actually interesting to the different experiences of boys and girls growing up in that era, too. You know, this is another thing that's I think emerged as we've done the show together, that the messages that I received about sort of physical safety and danger were so different than the ones that Sarah received. At one point, my parents told me that they would give me $100 if someone attempted to

kidnap me and I escaped. It's just really weird. It's a really weird. Because like they thought they were incentivizing me to like fight back and run away if something terrible happened to me. But also I was a really avaricious kid. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm going to sit closer to that van. Like maybe, maybe something will happen. I'll get $100. It makes me also think that they thought you were like a fickle child who would like choose the kidnapper. If there wasn't a financial reward. This was an abysmal strategy. But there was like this sense of safety. But I think that I don't think I was put into like the meat grinder of the sort of what would become the true crime industrial complex, the way that I think young girls were at that time. Obviously,

moral panics exist all the time. The true crime industrial complex never sleeps. And if anything has gotten more powerful over the years. But something that comes up again and again on your podcast is that when you look at the 70s and 80s, it is just clear how concentrated media were that people were consuming. These stories were inescapable in the way that they are kind of not anymore. Right. I thought that the satanic panic is a pretty good example of this. Like precisely because there wasn't that much TV, there wasn't that much radio, right? Like if it managed to get onto CBS, like a large number of American parents would be like, well, what does my child listen to? And today, unless they get the right email forward or like click on the right Facebook page, they may

well never get freaked out by this. I say this as someone who lived through the 80s, but better or for worse. And my parents got very concerned about my and my friends Dungeons and Dragons playing precisely because of this. Oh, we need to do an episode on this. Fantastic. Oh my God. I want to hear it because yeah. And the funny thing is like they sort of were like, we're not comfortable with this. We should talk about this. And then they eventually sort of got deep down enough into the rabbit hole to get to the Virgin Mary shit and realize, oh, this is a fundamentalist Christian thing. But my parents hardcore atheists were like, well, fuck this, play D&D if you want to. But there was this kind of month where they're like, well, our neighbors are concerned about this.

The nice white man on the TV is concerned about this. Like, should I be concerned about this? And today, I think it would just completely pass them by and be like, whatever the kids are playing, whatever they're playing, you know, yeah. So has that changed has the quality of this, the mono myth of the eternal victim, right? Has that shifted because we get our true crime from all these different positions that we can choose to some extent what we listen to. Something I wonder about is there's so much good and the fact that media has diversified. And also in the fact that, you know, voices of doubt can gain traction on social media in a way that just wasn't, I think voices of doubt and their ability to gain any kind of audience are a really important part of any

kind of a healthy public discourse ecosystem, I guess you could call it. But then we have the fact that, you know, we have these like Facebook groups and QAnon forums where people who are conspiracy minded and interested in, you know, looking for symbolism in photographs and kind of people who are going to flourish if they find like minded conspiracy hunters are able to do that in a way that they weren't before. So I always am trying to answer the question of whether this is better or worse. And I think that's the wrong question. I guess to me, the answer is that like the urge to band together in search of conspiracy will always appear somewhere in a media landscape. And I guess the question is how do we manage that? And also I think the need to see patterns and

conspiracies can be healthy because like there are conspiracies. We do talk about real conspiracy theories on the show where people conspire to further capitalism and stuff like that. Yeah, I was just going to say capitalism is a conspiracy. Patriarchy is a conspiracy. White supremacy is a conspiracy, you know, like there are real conspiracies. Big ol' conspiracy theory. Big ol' conspiracy. I mean, you know how somebody did this analysis of Ice Cube's Good Day to find out like which actual day it was? Have you guys seen this? Because, you know, he says like he mentions, I think it's a Wednesday, he mentions like the Lakers beat the Supersonics, like there's a finite number of days that it could have been. The media shift that has taken place, it's like

we've gone from a 70s and 80s media ecosystem where there's way too few gatekeepers, where it's basically like 75 mostly white straight dudes decided that they didn't want an opinion to be expressed in American public life. It wouldn't be. You can call that a conspiracy and you're not wrong. We've then shifted from far too few gatekeepers to what we have now, which is no gatekeepers at all. And so anything, these little weird ecosystems like anti-vax ecosystems can form on Reddit or on Facebook or like these weird vigilante groups that are hunting around for human traffickers. And then it always seems to me like in that shift, one to the other, there's like one day that you can pinpoint where it was like the right balance, right? Like August 13th of like 2004

was like the day where like we hit like, because obviously you need a mix of both of those things. You need some gatekeepers, but you don't want too many. It would be a funny project to try to be like, yep, this is the moment when the balance was right. And I don't think anybody knows like what that day would be or what that balance would be. I feel like that would be a very good question to ask a group of really stoned people if you wanted to just have silence for 20 minutes, you know. I'm curious from a structural point of view, how you arrived at the podcast structure, wherein one of you is always teaching the other one, the sort of pedagogical structure, because I think, you know, Adrienne and I as like real life teachers are like very nerdy for this

structure. And clearly you guys also both have a relationship to academia and research and literary criticism and all those things. So just love to hear sort of how you conceive of that structure and where it came from. So the first reason for that structure is laziness, because if you do a podcast with two people and only one person has the research, then you can put out twice as many podcasts. So that was like, you could call that laziness or you could call that production savvy. I would say, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I'll take the savvy. Laura, we have to take it. It's also, I mean, this was always something that we had in mind that first of all, one of my favorite podcasts ever, which is now unfortunately defunct was called Trust Issues, where one person

would research a particular conspiracy theory and then explain it to the other person. And it was by these two great journalists in Seattle. It was one of my favorite podcasts. I was obsessed with it. And I basically stole the format from them or like the idea came from them that you need a sort of audience surrogate, because otherwise one person will go too far down a rabbit hole. And they'll be talking about like weird, like conspiracy, like acronyms, they'll be like, it's like four trap or whatever. And the other host has to be like, what the hell is that? Like you need to start over. So you just need to have like a normal person who hasn't gone down these rabbit holes, right, to bring the person back into reality and be like, sorry, explain this to me. Like,

I don't know what you're talking about. Right. That was always something that we wanted to do. And also because that it's more fun, like to me, it is so much more fun to step into my closet, knowing that I'm about to have a topic that I have intentionally kept myself in the dark about in the run up to the episode that like it's going to be explained to me rapid fire for like two to three hours, which when I put it that way, it doesn't sound fun, but it is fun. It's fun. I love, I love being told about stuff. I love learning about weird stuff like prom mom and just being like aghast. It feels like having a weekly branch date with someone who is like, let me tell you about this crazy thing that I have been obsessed with. And I think for me, it grew out of the

conversations that I'm accustomed to having with friends, because I love talking to people about what they're doing and what their work is. And I've always had a lot of friends that are writers. I've always had a lot of friends who have, you know, specific research areas that they're very focused on and passionate about. And it's also just like, to me, there's a joy in hearing the way people talk about things they're genuinely passionate about. Like, yeah, it's just a different it's like a tone of voice that I don't think comes out at any other time. And I'm just like, some of my happiest moments are just like talking to people about clearly the things that they love most, you know. And also, it's a function of the show that like, not always, but a lot of the time,

like we're talking about topics that we have some kind of genuine emotional investment in. And I think that that's part of what makes the show compelling to the people to whom it is compelling. I mean, if I can also just be like self grandiose for another second, I also think that when I listen to other podcasts, there have been podcasts I've had to stop listening to because they talk to me like I'm a child and they do this like, now let's explain the 50 states were founded, like this really like way back to basics approach. And I think there's also something about the fact that when I'm doing one of these shows, I really am doing it for Sarah. I'm finding details that I think Sarah is going to react to. I'm telling Sarah things, knowing what her background is,

what her knowledge is. And so I'm explaining it to someone who is smart and who's analytical, but just doesn't know about this specific topic, which I think is very different than explaining it to someone who's like, stupid, which seems like some podcasts are like, we're just going to pretend that you don't have any idea how to live your life. And we're going to tell you about like wheat futures or whatever. What else do I feel like if you had any kind of audience proxy on the show, even if they were like, just completely unschooled about like any aspect of what you're talking about, if you had to start from zero, like you still wouldn't explain it the way shows do that, you know, have this kind of like theoretical audience

they're talking to who they just aren't really talking to as if they're a person, because it's hard to do that if there's not a person there. Like that's, I don't think I could do that. That's why I talked to a person. It's a trick. Yeah. I mean, you'd risk recapitulating something that makes true crime troubling sometimes, right? I mean, not that you only deal with true crime stories, but there is a lot of it. Yeah. And one of the things that's always bothered me as someone who likes these kinds of stories, but it's also kind of freaked out by what they can make happen in the world, right? I've often been sort of freaked out by their hand holding, right? Like you surrender to a storyteller and the storyteller is going to walk you through it. And in a good case, you

end up with a capable storyteller who is being responsible. And you guys are really great at unmasking these tropes where like something truly manipulative happens. And I do think that like having an audience surrogate sort of in the podcast is extremely powerful, at least for me as a listener, because it sort of says, no, no, you have to ask questions. This is going to be arranged in such a way that you can make sense of this. You're not at the mercy of this story. And a lot of these tropes that you, I think, very reasonably make fun of in the podcast are ones that really are meant to deprive an audience of agency, right? Like, well, this was really going on, but you'd never know it. And I was like, well, great, that's a great lesson to

learn. Like don't ask any questions. Everyone's lying all the time anyway, right? Like, no, ask good questions, plausibility, smell test, whatever, ask questions, that's it, right? And I do sometimes worry that podcasts in some ways can repeat some of these mistakes that, you know, we would have made fun of TV shows back in the day. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, podcasting is an intimate medium. And that's what people like about it, right? That it feels like spending time with people that you know. And that's also something that can very easily be weaponized or something that can very easily lead you down a path of like, because the hosts aren't having inherent skepticism, you might not have as much skepticism as you need. And because it feels like, oh,

it's just my buddy telling me stuff, you don't always have your sort of guards up for the kind of misinformation that you might get, I guess. And so I like to think our podcast doesn't do that because we try to fact check our episodes. And like oftentimes after the episode, after we recorded it, we'll double check stuff and we'll take stuff out if we find out that it doesn't hold up. But it's something that we're aware of and we're cautious about. I think just presenting the story as something that can be called bullshit on at any time is a useful way of presenting it. Yeah. And I think having someone there who's like prone to incredulity who like, if something strikes them as a little weird, they'll be like, that sounds a little weird. Yeah. Yeah. I think as someone who

has consumed a lot of true crime for my whole life, as an example of true crime, like I love forensic files, everyone does. And so many people have said to me like, I fall asleep to forensic files. And it's like, oh yeah, a lot of people do. Like Rachel Monroe mentions in her book that like the ratings for true crime exclusive TV channels stay steady throughout the night. Like people are consistently sleeping with it on. Yeah. You can't say if that's good or bad, like it's happening and it's not going to unhappen anytime soon. And so I think what you can take from that is like, here is one of the functions of true crime. And it's for it to be this sort of throbbing white noise where like every 25 minutes someone is caught and arrested. And that's the kind of

true crime that I grew up with. And growing up in the 90s, this is kind of all true crime that you encounter on TV can do. That's the one that it's not asking to be interrogated. It's not asking for you to be critical about it. That would ruin it. Like you just let it wash over you. And we're doing something else. Like imagine if the true crime narrator had this co-narrator who was like an animaniac who every five minutes was like, what? You wouldn't fall asleep to it as easily. But Sarah, that's so dark that people are falling asleep to true crime stuff. It's like it's so formulaic. As someone who has done the same in my life, this is not weird behavior. People will shyly admit to it, but it's like having a baby that you didn't know you were going to have.

It happens way more than you would think. I mean, the fairy tales of the modern era, aren't they? Scary stories to have not often. To what extent would you say interrogating true crime involves interrogating questions of gender and sexuality? I don't think true crime has anything to do with gender. Just a gender-neutral, race-neutral, completely normal genre of entertainment. Intersectional. No, it's just straight up crime. It's not reinscribing white supremacy or patriarchy or anything of the kind. I mean, what Mike I think was alluding to with this idea of me having gone through the stranger danger meat grinder, the true crime meat grinder is my consistent perspective of having grown up with the idea of you are prey. At any second,

the owl will come down from the sky and you're a little mouse running through a field. If he shows up, he's just going to get you. Just this idea of you can't walk around alone at night because the bad men of the world are like Freddy Krueger and they can just apparate in front of you and their arms stretch out real wide. This idea that I really strongly rebelled against as I entered young adulthood, already regretting the years that I had lost in my life so far, this idea of like, I don't think that the entire world is hostile to me. I think that there are real threats out there, but that these threats tend to correspond with the ways that a person's life is dangerous and marginalized already. It took me years to get to this perspective, but what I think now is that

true crime is one of the most powerful fables that patriarchal white supremacy ever created in defensive itself because stranger danger and these true crime narratives create a world where the seat of white male power, which of course is also the police state and mass incarceration, is constantly defending itself by saying there are wolves at the gate and we're the only ones who can save you from that. White women stay with us. Keep collaborating with white supremacy because if you don't, you will be murdered the next time you walk past a streetlight. I feel this great sense of investment in altering or destroying those narratives because I was raised to trust the people I should have feared and fear the people I should have trusted. Thank you for wrapping

that up so beautifully because that was exactly what I wanted to ask you about. It seems like there's probably some commonalities between your upbringing and mine in terms of sociological framing. I guess I've been asking myself some really tough questions lately and these are not the first time I've asked myself these questions about how patriarchy and white supremacy begin in the home, but really, really interrogating the timbre and the meaning of the voice that tells you all of the other things that you have to fear, you know, and how much violence that voice itself does beginning in childhood. Does that land for you? Does that resonate for you? What does that make you think about? Yes, what's interesting to me is that these narratives that allow us to

surrender the power that we have also are useful in maintaining a status quo. I was really raised on the narrative and also I was raised on this because my mother was brought up on this and absolutely bought it and of course her anxiety as a parent is naturally going to import these cultural myths that she was brought up on so we get just these narratives coming in through the home and through the nursery stories and so I was raised with the sense of like my life is constantly in danger. I need to live in fear. I need to protect myself and like it's in adulthood that I was like, sure, like there's ways that you're vulnerable just going through the world presenting as female, but those were not the things I was taught to be afraid of being raised

just to ignore the power and the privilege that you have in society and the ways that you can use it partly because you are constantly focusing on the ways that you might be endangered by forces outside of society like also Rob's women of their revolutionary power. It's also interesting of like the focus I think on true crime stories and like things like law and order and the proliferation of podcasts that we've seen in the last 10 years telling these sort of individual true crime stories. There's also something interesting that when you tell these individual stories one by one, you miss all these macro trends that the biggest story about crime since the 1990s is that it's fallen by I believe more than half that crime is way down, interpersonal violence is way down,

child abuse is way down. You also have at the same time the mix of who is getting murdered and why has changed really significantly. I'm working on an article about this right now that in the 1960s police solved 93% of homicides and that's now about 50-50 depending on the city. And so what has happened is there's been a huge decline in police competence. There's been a huge decline in the kinds of murders that are taking place that the kinds of murders that you know interpersonal violence, somebody kills their wife, somebody kills their girlfriend, those are relatively easy to solve and those used to be around 30% of murders and now they're around 10% of murders and what you have is this huge proliferation of basically like fights that escalate like two dudes

in a bar and one guy looks at another guy's girlfriend or one guy owes another guy 25 bucks, they fight, one of them has a gun, one of them pulls out a gun, shoots the other guy and people don't want to talk to the cops about these crimes because the cops have basically through the policing techniques through everything they've done through stop and frisk and all this other low-level bullshit have completely destroyed their credibility with these communities and so a lot of these crimes that are extremely solvable end up not getting solved because nobody trusts the police and like of course they don't trust the police but like you don't hear about these crimes because those sort of like two dudes fight in a bar and one guy gets shot those stories are so common

and they're not that interesting they're like unexotic it's not like oh we found a bone fragment and we're linking it to the dental records or like this bullshit that you see on csi it's like yeah two dudes that like kind of knew each other and they got in a dumb fight and one guy ended up dead like that is by far the most common form of homicide in america but we haven't sort of reckoned with like the escalation of that form of murder as really the paradigmatic form of murder that takes place in america it's men between like 16 and 34 in an argument who like know each other kind of but like sort of not really these often get called gang related because the cops have no idea who's in a gang and who's not and oftentimes they classify it as drug related if one person

has like a bag of weed on them they're like oh it's drug related even if it's a bar fight like the complete transformation of the kinds of murders that we see in america and the competence of the agencies that are allegedly solving them we can't tell those stories because it's like we focus on on like the one dead white girl in minnesota that happens once a year like statistically you're gonna get some number of these cases and it's like we zoom in on these cases and we don't see these big umbrella trends that most americans have an extremely incorrect idea of the kinds of murders that are taking place and what is being done about them did a rape right like that rape is another crime yes our entire carceral structure operates on a completely false premise of what

the typical or average rape is yeah and those clearance rates are 40 percent now that's 60 percent of rapes go unsolved that's something that i was actually wondering about like to what extent are stories around me too true crime because on the one hand of course like they can have that kind of energy and impetus at the same time i do think that the true crime format the traditional one is really kind of ill-suited for precisely because it's like oh there's this bone fragment it wants to do this kind of forensic work that you just can't really do there i watched the Larry Nasser documentary that's on netflix now like they kind of try and it kind of doesn't work because like no one disputes the facts the facts are horrifyingly out there the mystery is how the fuck no one saw

this for like years and years and years yeah it's not really and then in a shocking twist it's like there is no shocking twist the thing that the women were saying all along happened and at some point powerful people had to notice yeah the end right right and that's not who done it it's why are we incapable of listening to women and girls then exactly and so it's and so the mystery you get to solve is like it inevitably involves introspection and involves looking at society right i mean i would say that the me too movement is at this interesting loggerheads with the ways that girls and women in america are often taught to believe that we are of value which is that someone will be locked up on your behalf and right one of the things i see in aspects of the me too movement

specifically in chanel miller's memoir is this expression of the fact that the system was supposed to help me and it did some stuff but like also i was explicitly promised things that i never got and that people knew that i wouldn't get and i was used as evidence and treated in a way that didn't mitigate my trauma and in fact violated me again why is the system promising that it carries about me when it appears to see me as very best a secondary concern at very best you know to me one of the things that's exciting about me too is that it is showing everyone if they care to observe the ways that true crime has taught us to put our trust in the police to protect women and what we're seeing in these stories is that they are unable to do it they're

and interested in doing it and the process of solving crimes seems to retraumatize victims perhaps even more so as it is falsely promising them that it's for their welfare and for protection of their rights that the process is like this because the process wasn't set up with victims in mind and we can't ret con it into something that behaves that way i think everything you were just saying about chanel miller too sarah reminded me of like you know how many generations back this kind of misapprehension goes i was just thinking of how similar that is actually to my angelu's like kind of origin story that she tells and i know why the cage bird sings wherein she was raped as a child i believe by a relative and she didn't tell anybody at first and then when

she did the man was killed and she didn't speak for something like eight years after that because it was her understanding that her voice had killed a man you know that's such a poignant story from a child's eye view especially when she tells it but it's also a really powerful testimony to how in exactly the same way you just described to chanel miller that outcome runs directly counter to any mode of transformative justice that might put the survivor at the center and her wishes at the center those misapprehensions and sort of overriding of survivors actual needs and wishes continues to happen all the time and has been happening for as long as anyone can remember and the use of the sexual assault survivor or sexual abuse survivor or a victim of murder who

can't say anything about what they would have wished i really feel like we're potentially having this very exciting moment culturally where we can say as women specifically as white women this infrastructure was built allegedly for my benefit and like for me and this has my name on it and like i don't want it actually it was never meant to help me i divest defend whatever this thing you gave me you know and like and just the yeah the idea that the things that we do that are allegedly for the benefit of survivors of sexual assault or abuse or murder victims are things that white supremacy is interested in doing anyway yeah divesting oneself from a role as potential victim which i think is the role that was offered to me as i was growing up

and the way that i was allowed to think that i was a value of society was like well if someone kills you people will be really sad and growing up with this weird sense of like would people like me more if i weren't around there's been a lot of media that really critically explores that recently as well but i think there's there's something very interesting about noticing that you have been given this role that seems to benefit you in all these ways there are all these promises like if something bad happens we'll protect you like don't worry and if we can't protect you we'll avenge you and at a certain point being like okay why do you want to avenge me so badly like why can't you protect me now why is Bruce Wayne keeping all of this money to fight

individual muggers when he could just improve the schools in Gotham like what's wrong with this picture i've been watching a lot of batman movies that's really deep and dark and relatable sarah and this is a really personal story but it did remind me of a terrible moment in my life in my teenage years when my super catholic parents first learned that i had had sex with my boyfriend in an extremely like what was then a very loving relationship their first reaction was to say did he force himself on you and it has struck me so many times in the distance of memory that that was more legible to them yeah like it was somehow more comprehensible to them if it had been non-consensual on my part than if it had been

consensual like that feels very much a testimony to the kind of obfuscation you're highlighting right dude yes yeah and because it's morally better to have been raped than to choose to have sex in that worldview so exactly yeah exactly we actually talked about this on our duke lacrosse rape case episode that in this sort of we have the social construction of like false rape claims as like she's out to destroy men and like she's a bra burning feminist blah blah blah but it sounds like the research shows that a lot of people who make these false rape claims are actually conservative and christian people who can't admit to their parents that they had consensual sex their parents catch them and they're like uh he uh forced me oh my god and so because it is

more legible whoo now you guys know what it's like to have a conversation with us just like down into the abyss just 45 minutes in you're like fuck what is it like being with these people in real life it's like this it's bad it's not bad but um but i do feel like i need a drink one thing i did think about in terms of gender as well is on the one hand with the satanic panics and with nancy grace of course the anti true crime position which i i think we've also been implicitly a little bit been taking is of course also kind of gendered in the sense that you know in keyword hysteria right the fact that we accuse people of irrationality and one of the things that me too brings home i think is that like if you hear the same story 50 times it could be a moral panic

it could also be that the same thing happened 50 times and your society is incredibly blind to it do you ever sort of deal with that is there ever a moment when you sort of think the bunking this in a particular way right would commit us to a kind of sexist trope of like well people are just making shit up or do you find that honestly the truth sets you ask good questions you could put pressure on it some things will crumble some things will sort of survive yes sarah why are you so mean to nancy grace i want to know i think that the satanic panic is the best subject area to talk about this in because it's you know the neighborhood rice but mindless time and also the fact that to me what makes it so complicated is that we are seeing

people coming forward with stories of sexual abuse many of these specific cases mc martin jordan in minnesota the fran and dan keller case etc are just demonstrably untrue like you really have to believe some stuff that that logically doesn't scan and that is is really unsupported by all the factual information we have in order to believe in the plausibility of these stories and yet they're coming forward at a time when you know the police and the public have just started talking about the sexual abuse of children is something that even exists or something that exists enough to not be like either this weird thing that almost never happens let's not talk about it or something that like if it happens like don't talk about it don't make a big deal and

the child won't form negative memories like this is the attitude that a lot of women in the boomer generation and earlier seemed to have grown up with and so i think you also see this moment of you know in the early 80s this is when boomer women are having children and i am led to believe by my research a lot of them are saying like never again like my child isn't going to experience what i experienced either in terms of the trauma that i experienced that wasn't addressed or just no one caring we're talking about the ways that they can be abused by somebody and so there's this very real reckoning that needed to happen and needed to happen somehow that gives birth to these dozens upon dozens of wrongful convictions and so when you talk about that i feel like

what i tend to focus on is the fact that you know these imagined traumas seem always to come from some actual trauma like this need that parents have to protect their children from these it turns out sometimes imaginary foes that we see in the 80s i think comes from the fact that they really have been through or their generation has been through trauma that no one wanted to talk about with them and no one wanted to acknowledge with them ever that's interesting and so i think with moral panics i mean something that i feel about pretty much every moral panic that we've looked about on the show and something that i really tend to look for now like when i'm starting to educate myself about something that seems like a moral panic is that the fear that people express if it will be directed

at some proxy object that's unrelated to what's going on but it will be real and it will be relevant it will be you know right it would be reasonable to be directing it somewhere else and i think in the satanic panic there's this revelation that we start to see in terms of increased literature and studies of child sexual abuse of like this seems to be a problem with men in the home or men in the family like should we look at radically altering rebuilding from the ground up our concept of the family because that seems to be what we need to do and then they're like no no it's the lesbian daycare teachers it's not right the dads or the boyfriends or the male relatives or no people the child knows at all you know who i think it is immigrants it's immigrants probably yeah let's not let's not deal

with the fact that our country is held together with like tape and not even new tape but tape that's kind of old and gritty yeah it's the immigrants that right and just the need to find a proxy fear and also that you know if you have fear or reasonable anxiety about something that is an aspect of mainstream culture or something that seems like an immovable part of society as it is then you will then take that fear and bounce it on to an out group that doesn't have very much power and and members of whom you can kind of quickly and cathartically incarcerate i really think that's a perennial theme i mean redirection is one way to describe the processes that you're tracing in your podcast in general right like how things get rerouted in ways that are convenient sort of

lifelies for a society but that ultimately right leave the festering problems untouched and keep inventing problems that either don't exist or aren't correctly framed right that are misunderstood we get these moral panics keep getting redirected to the same things right right it's always either the outsider to our society or it's a group within our society that is becoming morally depraved right right it's stranger danger or it's like street gangs right those are like the two ways that we know how to channel those marces professors so dangerous these oberlin undergrads final final question if you could say anything to jessica simpson what would you say oh my gosh uh i would say jessica i think that the timing of your like reckoning with your life inviting all of us

into that circle like was just so perfect and i appreciate you and i just thank you for bringing in high-rise jeans because somebody had to do it i have some ideas for a song about john mayer that's it i would want to i would want to workshop those well jessica simpson if you listen to this podcast which we know you do she certainly is i'm sure she does i'm sure she does i'm having confidence yeah we're here jessica let us know yes