Everything Is Awful Forever

Halloween is drawing near, and it's time for a little historical horror. This week, Jess and Philippa look at the how do's and who do's of voodoo, and how it's not too bad if you're open to a zombie apocalypse.

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We've discussed cannibalism before (S1E4) but our stomaches are still growling. Join Jess and Philippa for a second course of culinary culture. This week, we look at ritual cannibalism and the different forms that it might take across a variety of cultures.

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How have we survived as a species? I don't just mean in the sense that we've been awful forever, but how we actually come into this world. Childbirth was the most dangerous and harrowing thing in women's lives. From pasting the dung of dangerous creatures on ourselves, using tortoise shells condoms, to drugging women into a thrashing screaming state during labour and doctors walking around with a diseased womb in their pocket, the miracle of childbirth, it seems, is it's a miracle women didn't' decide to stop ever having children ever again.

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Turns out the archetypal femme fatale - lying and manipulating hapless men into their black widow spun webs of duplicitousness - is absolutely true...at least for these confidence lasses. This week the people are not just mendacious - they're women-dacious. Neither Jess not guest host Rosie will apologise for puns as we flim flam you into listening about women pretending to be royalty, selling snake oil or just generally, unapologetically scamming so many men you earn the moniker Confidence Queen. 

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Have you ever ended up with more national monuments than you have space in your living room and therefore need to sell on eBay? Got a magical country surprisingly in need of wealthy citizens? Neither did any of these men, but they didn't let this hold them back. Join Jess and Philippa as they look at everyone's favourite scheming shyster: the confidence man.

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Last episode, we looked at the connections between women and Satan. This week, it's time to look at what Rush Limbaugh oh so wittily refers to as witches with a "B". And how do women take control of such patriarchal narratives and redirect them to their own ends? And how does the successful witch keep her penis collection alive? Join Philippa and Jess as they ask the important questions.

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Evil deceiver or Romantic individualist? A monster of shifting boundaries or a cosmic force that transcends duality? This week, Jess and Philippa look at one of history's most enigmatic figures: Satan himself. Throughout history, we've been asking ourselves: is he really all that bad? And why are women just unable to keep their hands off of him?

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In our last episode, we looked at the beauty regimes of the upper classes. But what if you don't have an infinite supply of arsenic bath bombs? Or a bath? Or easy access to water? Jess and Philippa wallow amongst the lower classes of Victorian London to look at the methods by which they kept clean, and the ways in which efforts to assist them led to a new hobby for all.

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Water is dangerous - and nowhere more so than in the bath. In a world dominated by the great unwashed - the putrid proletariat - the upper classes fought to preserve a modicum of decency while fending off sudsy perils. Join us this week for clean conversation and Jess's disturbing skin song. 

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Was one atrocious failure of an expedition not enough? Want to hear about another wannabe explorer who set out into brutal conditions woefully unprepared in order to beat a more experienced explorer to the goal? While they were dismally short on supplies, the world has a bounty of idiots, and so this week Jess and Philippa set out into the outback to follow the trail of Robert O'Hara Burke as he journeyed to the north of Australia, gong in hand.

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