#3: Call Her Daddy is Problematic
Serving toxicity and mean girl vibes
Hello!
For this newsletter, I had to sit down and listen to a good amount of Call Her Daddy podcasts. Needless to say, I have lost brain cells in the past few days. Call Her Daddy touts itself as a comedy podcast but strangely enough, won Best Advice/Inspirational Podcast at the 2020 iHeartRadio Podcast awards. The show’s hosts, Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn (who has since left the show due to a major fallout last year) offer insights into casual dating and modern day sex life but I find fault with their execution. The conversation about casual dating and open relationships isn’t the problem with the podcast -- the problem is that Cooper and Franklyn embed tenets of internalized misogyny and overall toxic dating advice into their episodes.
I, like many others, listened to Call Her Daddy when it first became a sensation two years ago. I listened nonchalantly when I had the time but never committed to it and that was probably the best thing I did for myself. After listening to more CHD episodes for this newsletter, I can safely say that while I appreciate the podcast’s goal of flipping power dynamics between man and woman, the show’s messaging is far from revolutionary, and, at its core, disempowering.
While there is a certain novelty and barrier-breaking element inherent to women-led discussions about sex, Cooper and Franklyn’s shallow takes on modern feminism completely disregard so many intersecting factors that women of all colors and sexual orientations face. Sure, a bit on the Gluck Gluck 3000 is humorous and honestly, could be considered sound advice, but the podcast in and of itself is white feminism wrapped up in the voices of high school mean girls and sealed with the logo of Barstool.
They talk about women in the same degrading way that men talk down on women. In one of the episodes, “YOU’RE JUST A HOLE” (yes, in all caps), Cooper and Franklyn push the narrative that women are really just sex dolls for men and that’s okay as long as you know how to play the game, which boils down to yet another way of shoving all men into a negative category while simultaneously conditioning women to normalize and accept this kind of treatment. “Girls, most men are like this so I hope your ears are perking up and I hope you’re feeling like shit about yourself,” Franklyn said. Great way to empower your audience of young female listeners!
They tell their listeners to “cheat or be cheated on,” and that “boys love the crazy.” They tell listeners to make their hookups feel insecure. They play into the stereotypes that girls are crazy and manipulative, and that boys are liars and cheaters. These are prime examples of toxic dating and hookup advice and honestly serve no purpose other than to reinforce the twisted power dynamics that are already established in modern relationships.
They also look down on women through the exact same male gaze they supposedly find so much fault with. In one of the early episodes, Cooper and Frankly discuss rating women on a numerical scale and acting accordingly to the number that you are. According to their guidelines, if you’re a 9 or 10 “he knows you’re not just gonna spread your legs, [he has] to get dinner first, and have to talk about life.” However, if you’re a 6 or 7, “get your squats in today bitch, you are getting slammed into the wall, you are pulling out all the stops.” If you’re a “hard 5,” “you should know your place, you should know that you’re in it for the dick only and that you’re lucky to get this thing right up in you.” They follow this disturbing scale with the final rule that if you are a 3 or 4, you might as well climb into the window and not be allowed to speak then crawl out the window right after the sex.
I don’t think I need to go into further details as to why this is simply not an empowering “feminist” podcast. To criticize women on their appearances as they use a numeric rating scale to determine your worth with a partner is just astronomically misguided. There’s really no other words that I can find to fully encapsulate how this podcast and the hosts are perpetuating the exact same systems and standards that they claim to want to dismantle. They’re radiating fake neoliberal feminist energy mixed in with popular mean girl who peaked in high school bullying energy.
If you know me at all, you know that I’m all for sex positivity and I appreciate the podcast’s initial goal of wanting to destigmatize and break taboos through casual conversations surrounding casual sex and modern dating but at the end of the day, their advice (if you can even call it that) is extremely hyper-focused on pleasing a male partner, and is the perfect depiction of internalized misogyny. It’s irritating to continue to hear Call Her Daddy glorified to be a feminist show despite the fact that if you peel back the layers on their outlandish anecdotes, they’re only feeding their listeners a superficial brand of feminism that fits only into the heteronormative, white identity.
The danger of Call Her Daddy lies in the fact that it champions a monolithic ideal of femininity that is compliant with patriarchal values. Instead of listening to Cooper (Franklyn has since left the show), here are some other podcasts to listen to:
“Guys We F***ked” hosted by Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson that discuss topics ranging from sex politics, experiences of the LGBTQ community, the culture surrounding sexual assault, and polyamorous relationships.
“Black Girl Experiences,” a sex and relationship podcast by Jasmine Danielle which offers a more diverse perspective than “Call Her Daddy” and actually considers multiple identities, sexual orientation, self-love, and spirituality.
See y’all (hopefully) in two weeks with a fresh newsletter!
With love,
Jasmine
Top 5 Things I Digested in the past two weeks
Fearless (Taylor’s Version), a callback to third grade Jasmine when she was crying over an ex she never had. Also, fuck Scooter Braun.
“The Cross,” a poem from my lovely and beautiful friend Zoe Keeler (also check out her crafts account)! Here is a blurb about the poem in Zoe’s own words: “When I wrote this piece, I was contemplating the cross. I think everyone who was raised in catholicism has a deep relationship with the image of the cross and I wanted to utilize the way the shape of the cross itself is so overbearing, in this sense, my language, thoughts and words can’t even escape the shape of the cross. It, like catholicism, is a confining and restricting process.”
Seaspiracy, a documentary on Netflix that dives into the corrupt fishing industry.
“You & Me” by Skrux, a fun EDM tune to listen to as you drive along the PCH.
This orgasmic eggplant hummus with pita bread from Elephante, a restaurant in Santa Monica.
