Culture Study Podcast

We’ve had listeners asking us to do an episode on sapphic pop for months now, and were trying to figure out who we wanted to co-host. Then Melody sent me a text: I FOUND THE PERFECT PERSON. That person is Trish Bendix, who just published a sprawling look at the past and present (and popularity) of sapphic pop, from Big Momma Thornton to Chappell Roan. I absolutely loved this conversation, where we did our very best to answer your questions about everything from the ‘80s sound in contemporary sapphic pop to Jojo Siwa “inventing” the genre. Plus we talk about “Constant Craving” at least three times (which Melody had never heard!!!!) Make sure you check out the show notes to links to all the songs we mention in the episode. Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world. If you're already a subscriber-- thank you! Join us in the discussion thread for this episode! Got a question or idea for a future episode? Let us know here.

• Read Trish’s piece on NBC News re: the history of sapphic pop

• Subscribe to Trish’s newsletter LIT FEMME!

• CONSTANT CRAVING 4EVER!!!!

• Some of the ‘80s flavor in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”

• We didn’t go into it but the Michigan Womyn’s Festival/MichFest shut down in 2015 amidst ongoing arguments from TERFs (including the festival’s founder) that the festival was only for “women born women.” You can read an overview here.

• Indigo Girls “Ghost”:

• Indigo Girls 1200 Curfews Live Album (especially recommend the cover of River)

• Tracy Chapman, “The Promise”

• Questions about queer romance that aren’t related to “why are all these women writing about romance between two dudes” (which we will definitely tackle, don’t worry)

• What happened to the summer blockbuster?!

• How do people access/consume celebrity gossip these days

• Midwest [Dad] Masculinity

• WTF is going on with [insert clothing brand/website] here

• Gwyneth? The new Brad Pitt / George Clooney movie?

• We’re definitely doing a Paul Mescal episode but I’d love your ideas about who should be my co-host

• Still want to do a Sydney Sweeney and Gen-Z Stardom ep!!!!!

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is a dream come true of an episode: we got the owners of The Ripped Bodice to talk to us about all the ins and outs of running a romance-only bookstore. We talk about everything from the genesis of their annual State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Report to their fav recommendations for tweens and teens …..and how they deal with “vintage” romances in the store. I found everything about our discussion fascinating — plus, if you’re a paid subscriber, you get very good advice on how to recommend books to others!

• FOLLOW THE RIPPED BODICE ON INSTAGRAM!!!

• Or even better, go to one of their actual bookstores in Brooklyn or Culver City

• If you can’t get to LA or Brooklyn, here’s a Reddit thread compiling a list of more romance bookstores

• The Ripped Bodice State of Racial Diversity in Publishing Report

• Listen to our previous romance-specific episodes:

  How Romance Novels Center Marginalized Joy

  How Romance Writers Rewrite Publishing’s Rules

  The ACOTAR Chokehold

• A fascinating piece on the use of “spicy” as a descriptor for romance novels

• Some of the books and authors mentioned in this episode:

  • Chuck Tingle

  • Don’t Want You Like A Best Friend by Emma R. Alban

  • The historical romance writers Bea dealt out of her backpack as a kid: Lisa Kleypas, Sarah MacLean, Julia Quinn, Lorraine Heath, Loretta Chase

  • Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney

  • The Ripped Bodice’s collection of used and rare romance novels

  • The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

  • Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon

  • For YA recs: Alexandra Bracken, Rebekah Weatherspoon, Sarah Kuhn, and Elise Bryant

• We’re still looking for questions about queer romance that aren’t related to “why are all these women writing about romance between two dudes” (which we will definitely tackle, don’t worry)

• Women’s Sports and/or Gender Panic in/around Women’s Sports

• SAPPHIC POP, SO HOT RIGHT NOW (especially want to talk about Chappell Roan but we can go in so many directions)

• How do people access/consume celebrity gossip these days

• How we talk and think about cancer

• Midwest [Dad] Masculinity

• WTF is going on with [insert clothing brand/website] here

• Gwyneth? The new Brad Pitt / George Clooney movie?

• We’re definitely doing a Paul Mescal episode but I’d love your ideas about who should be my co-host

• Still want to do a Sydney Sweeney and Gen-Z Stardom ep!!!!!

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode is the Culture Study Podcast’s version of a Just Trust Me. It’s difficult to describe exactly WHY it’s so good, just that after we finished recording (with Lilah Raptopoulos, host of the podcast Life and Art) Melody and I both immediately texted each other with: SO GOOD!!! The episode is ostensibly about figuring out how to cook in the world of infinite recipes, but it’s also about how we pass down recipes (or gatekeep them), recipes as a form of memory making (and retrieval), recipes as heritage… capped off with some practical advice about how to organize the recipes you do have (and how to ascertain if a recipe is “good”).

I can’t wait for you to listen, and if you don’t think you’re a person that invested or interested in recipes: just trust me.

• Follow Lilah on Instagram and listen to Life and Art here (it’s so good!!!)

• Lilah mentions Fuschia Dunlap’s The Food of Sichuan and Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat

• I mention Melissa Clark’s Dinner which is just filled with keepers

• A lot of Culture Study readers swear by the Paprika app for recipe organization (I cannot vouch for it but maybe this is the day I actually try it out)

• SAPPHIC POP, SO HOT RIGHT NOW (especially want to talk about Chappell Roan but we can go in so many directions)

• Women’s sports— our societal thinking on gender and athleticism, broadly conceived

• How we talk and think about cancer

• How do people access/consume celebrity gossip these days

• Midwest [Dad] Masculinity

• WTF is going on with [insert clothing brand/website] here

• Gwyneth? The new Brad Pitt / George Clooney movie?

• We’re definitely doing a Paul Mescal episode but I’d love your ideas about who should be my co-host

• Still want to do a Sydney Sweeney and Gen-Z Stardom ep!!!!!

• Why does it feel like thrifting sucks now

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re more than twenty years into the current reality boom — and things are getting complicated. What are the unspoken and spoken ethics of signing up to become a reality star? What resources (about harassment and protection, about brand deals) should be made available to anyone who signs a reality contract? Are reality stars scabs during strikes — and should they unionize? WHAT MAKES THESE MELODRAMAS SO COMPELLING? WTF IS SCANDOVAL??? Hollywood correspondent Natalie Jarvey joins me to talk through it all.

(And just to be clear, even if you’re not a huge reality television person, this episode has something for you — I watch very little but I’m very invested in reality melodrama reality labor as labor)

• Some of my favorite Natalie Jarvey pieces: The Year That Broke Hollywood; Why Are Movies Sooooo Long? An Investigation; Actors Don’t Want a Yacht — They Just Want to Survive Peak TV

• The truly WILD profile of Tom Sandoval in the New York Times Magazine

• A detailed timeline of Scandoval if you really want to go down that wormhole

• So much great writing on the production and legacy of Cops: The Unreality of Cops; Cops: the violent legacy of a TV show that sculpted America's view of police; Is ‘Cops’ Committing Crimes Itself?

• How Netflix Became the New King of Reality TV

• From the Triple-A segment: ARE YOU IN THE PORTAL???

• SAPPHIC POP, SO HOT RIGHT NOW (especially want to talk about Chappell Roan but we can go in so many directions)

• How do people access/consume celebrity gossip these days

• Midwest [Dad] Masculinity

• WTF is going on with [insert clothing brand/website] here

• Gwyneth? The new Brad Pitt / George Clooney movie?

• We’re definitely doing a Paul Mescal episode but I’d love your ideas about who should be my co-host

• Still want to do a Sydney Sweeney and Gen-Z Stardom ep!!!!!

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jennifer Romolini is one of my favorite thinkers about ambition, and workism, and the stories we tell ourselves about what we must endure in order to find a modicum of security and pride — and she also happens to be a true scholar of all things Ben Affleck. Months ago, I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about the intersection of Affleck and ambition, but we held the episode for a bit to give it some distance from the (also excellent!!) J.Lo episode. But we’d had it scheduled for today for several weeks — and I’m writing this intro just hours after the news broke that Lopez had filed for divorce.

The good news is that everything Jenn and I talk about re: Affleck’s star image, ambition, striving, his relationship to stardom just generally — all of that still holds true. Just ignore the part when I say that I don’t think they’re going to get divorced. And I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

• Follow Jenn on Instagram (lots of good Ben content!)

• Buy Ambition Monster! It’s so fucking good!

• Subscribe to Jenn’s great newsletter:

• My BuzzFeed piece The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck

• Obsessed with this photo of Affleck and Paltrow from the Armageddon premiere

• Affleck being horrible in Chasing Amy

• THE BACK TATTOO

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

TikTok is filled with wonders. It’s SO weird. It can make you feel like the algorithm is telling you something you don’t even realize about yourself….or it serve you a whole bunch of cyst draining videos. In order to answer your questions about WTF is happening in your feed, I knew I needed a weird internet aficionado who also understands the way our tech platforms actually work. I needed Katie Notopoulos. Join us as we talk about the parallel dimension that is TikTok Live, the difference between Reels and TikTok content, those bizarre “bugs all over me” videos, nail tapping ASMR, the clean girl aesthetic, and SO MUCH MORE.

Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world. If you're already a subscriber-- thank you! Join us in the discussion thread for this episode! Got a question or idea for a future episode? Let us know here.

• Read all of Katie’s great and weird reporting over at Business Insider

• Follow Katie’s weird reels on Instagram

• Some Chainsaw Testing

• CLEAN GIRL AESTHETIC

• MORE CLEAN GIRL

• SICK ROPE CUTTING

• The vaguely Patrick Bateman ASMR clean living guy on Instagram

• A classic in the hoof cleaning genre

• My favorite sheep herding dog guy

• One of the fake bug videos (I PROMISE IT’S FAKE)

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the explicit goals of Project 2025, J.D. Vance, and Christian Nationalism in general — will make trad wife life just, well, life. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens incrementally, as choices are very slowly taken from you, or made more attractive. To get to what lures women into this life, and just how difficult it is to escape, I wanted to talk to someone who gets it in a way that those lurking in the Instagram comments simply cannot. So today we’re talking with Tia Levings, who left her trad wife life and, through a bunch of therapy and processing and support, figured out how she wanted to tell her story.

Content Warning: In our conversation, we talk explicitly about emotional and physical abuse and coercion. If you’re not in a place where you want to listen to that discussion, I’d suggest skipping this episode.

• Tia Leving’s book, A Well-Trained Wife, is an absolute must-read. As Melody put it: I’m not even a memoir person and I devoured it. You can find it here.

• You can find more about Tia, her work, and how to book her for interviews here.

• Tia’s Fundie Baby Voice TikTok (I also recommend exploring the rest of Tia’s Toks)

• Tia is also in the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, about the Duggars, Bill Gothard, and the Institute for Basic Life Principles. Here’s the trailer:

• I didn’t talk about this in the episode, but I highly recommend Seyward Darby on the place of trad wives in the white supremacist vision of the future

• My piece on Trad Wife Life as self-annihilation and some reflections on the recent Ballerina Farms discourse, which ramped up after we recorded this episode

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do the politics of taste and HGTV shows intersect? Why do we watch, why do we feel the way we do when we watch, and how is taste shaped in the process of watching? When Jonathan Menjivar, host of the fantastic podcast Classy, told me he wanted to talk all things HGTV, I was thrilled. In this episode, we discuss the aesthetics of “quiet luxury,” Ben and Erin Napier vs. Chip and Joanna Gaines, the newly ubiquitous neo-farmhouse look and so much more.

• Listen to Classy and read my interview with Jonathan about the making of the show and “Am I Classhole??” here

• You can read my big feature on life in Waco in the post-Fixer Upper world here

• One of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done in Culture Study = talking to Rebecca Lee Potts about the “shiplap frontier”

• When I interviewed Ben and Erin Napier for Townsizing

• Jonathan mentions Donald Judd furniture— here’s a sketch of a Donald Judd stool that costs $3,200

• The culture of conspiracy theories!

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A seven-part Netflix docuseries on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders called America’s Sweethearts? Oh my god, WHAT a rich text. The uniform, the dances, the body norms, the coded language, the particular feminine ideals, the intersections with Texas culture and evangelical culture — there’s just so much there. And I was thrilled when Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford, two of the co-hosts of the indispensable Vibe Check, agreed to help answer all of your (excellent) questions. (We couldn’t get the rights to Thunderstruck, but you can just imagine it playing over the intro and on repeat forever.)

• LISTEN TO VIBE CHECK, IT’S SO GOOD!!! Plus: Sam’s IG and Zach’s IG

• Caitlin Dickerson’s fantastic piece in The Atlantic that includes the “Who Am I….?” page from the DCC handbook that Sam reads in the episode

• The jump split that tears up the hips!

• How much money to NFL cheerleaders get paid? It’s complicated.

• Alex Sujong Laughlin makes the case for cheerleader unions in Defector

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How are romance writers — and the recent romance boom — chipping away at the norms of Big Publishing? Does self-publishing lead to more diverse authors and characters? How has Amazon both expanded and limited the market? That’s what we’re grappling with in today’s episode.

Back in June, romance novelist Nisha Sharma broke down all the tropes and trends of contemporary romance. Next month, we’ll have the owners of a romance bookstore explaining the the big (and complicated) business of romance-only bookselling. And today, we have Christine Larson, author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, walking us through the labor dynamics of romance publishing. If you like thinking about different ways of organizing labor, you’ll find all of this fascinating — and if you’re a romance fan, it’ll make you think a lot about which books end up in front of you and why. You’re gonna love it.

• Find Love in the Time of Self-Publishing here and learn more about Christine’s work here

• Janice Radway’s foundational scholarly work on romance: Reading the Romance

• Chris’s recent romance rec: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

• A good summary from 2021 of what went down within the Romance Writers of America organization

• Since we recorded this episode, RWA has filed for bankruptcy

• WHAT’S GOING ON WITH PODCASTS! This is kinda meta, but we’re doing a whole episode about the current state of the podcast industry, so you can take that general theme in any direction you’d like.

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.