Just when we thought things had reached peak insanity on season 6 of “Love Is Blind,” receipts pointing to some questionable off-screen behavior of cast members started popping up all over TikTok.

Full disclosure! We taped our recap of episodes 10 and 11 last week, but then the gossip started pouring out: about Jeramey’s previous engagement, about the serious girlfriend Trevor allegedly had DURING FILMING, about the cast of “Perfect Match” 2, about what really went down between Laura and Jeramey during filming… and we knew that we simply had to hop back on and address it all. So bear with us this week — up top we get into all of the news and rumors that been floating around, and then we get into the meat of this week’s drop.

After watching episodes 10 and 11, we continue to be #TeamLaura, we continue to be deeply concerned about Jimmy and Chelsea’s toxicity (though we did love this sweet IG post and Chelsea’s comment on it), we continue to root for Johnny and Amy, and we continue to feel many mixed emotions about AD and Clay because AD deserves the absolute world and is the undisputed heroine of this season.

But honestly? Mostly we really just feel bad for Jeramey’s mom. Being the mother of grown son fuckboys sounds tough. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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On this week’s pod, we recap episodes 7-9 of “Love Is Blind” season 6, which has begun to take some unexpected twists after a strong opening. Though the first drop of “Love Is Blind” episodes ended in a grim place, with at least two of the five engaged pairs collapsing into conflict within hours of attending their first social function together, their honeymoon in Punta Cana ends with all five couples officially intact. But things are looking precarious as we push past the season’s midpoint this week. By the end of episode 9, a couple has called the whole thing off (and not the couple we expected last week), and almost all of them seem to be on unsteady ground.

Back in Charlotte, the couples begin to examine each other’s homes (Jeramey’s is so far on the sterile side of pristine that it even spooks neat freak Laura) and meet each other’s friends and families. The couples try to coordinate their schedules now that they’re back at work — in Clay’s case, now that he’s back to having a job and a handful of businesses. Johnny and Amy consider getting him a vasectomy for a couple years so they can have anxiety-free sex. Chelsea is rapidly devoured by her insecurities, while Jimmy struggles to become more effusive toward her quickly enough to save their relationship. Jeramey and Laura spend their time with her family showing off their romantic dynamic of tensely needling each other under the guise of banter. Kenneth is joyously reunited with his phone.

In short, a lot of things go wrong in a short amount of time — though we’re still hoping our angels Johnny and Amy figure out that vasectomies are not something you’re supposed to plan to reverse. In this episode, we try to litigate some of these big conflicts; wrap our heads around the most abrupt, low-key breakups in “Love Is Blind” history; and revisit our enemies-to-friends list. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Season 6 of Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” dropped its first six episodes on Valentine’s Day, and (obviously) we binged them all. The verdict? So far, so good.

After an absolutely disastrous season 5, which left multiple lawsuits in its wake, and two couples fully erased from the season, we were wary heading into season 6. But six episodes in, LIB’s Charlotte, North Carolina season is off to a strong start. We spend significantly more time in the pods this season, which lets us really get to know our main players. After 10 days in the pods, FIVE couples get engaged and are subsequently shipped off to the Dominican Republic to figure out if they hate each other IRL or not.

In this first drop of episodes, some themes begin to emerge. There is a distinct ~trad-vibe~ to this season — almost all of the couples seem to highly prize traditional gender roles. (Johnny and Amy seem to be our singular exception.) They talk about their desire to “submit” and “lead,” and they invoke biblical language like “lust” and “lay together.” The women all perform extreme femininity in the pods, while the men look like they just rolled out of bed to mosy on down to the golf course. And one woman, Sarah Ann, gets into her thoughts on abortion: “If two people lay down consensually and have sex, you should take responsibility for your actions,” she says, as if human children should be wielded as punishments. “The option should definitely be there, but I don’t think it should be used as a form of birth control.” (America!)

All this is to say… there’s a lot to unpack. In this week’s Rich Text pod, we dive in head first. We discuss how we think these couples will fare in the real world, the sweet and supportive friendship moments we saw in the pods, and how men will literally go on reality television instead of going to therapy. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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Ever since one-time Bachelor — and famed “Kissing Bandit” — Arie Luyendyk, Jr. appeared on the first season of the Peacock reality series “The Traitors,” the show has been on our radar. We heard about it on social media and from friends; we heard that Arie showed a different side of himself in the strategy competition setting, and that the show itself was wildly entertaining.

Nevertheless, we resisted.

We are not competition reality fans, but relationship reality fans. We watch dating shows by the bushel and dabble in narrative shows rooted in the power struggles within friend groups. “The Traitors,” a classic competition game show, was uninspiring to our romantic souls.

This season, another former Bachelor, Pete Weber (aka Pilot Pete), joined the cast, but we stood strong. For about five episodes, at which point our friend informed us that Pete was in the midst of executing a dazzling strategic gambit. Now this, we had to see.

So this week on the pod, we discuss the first six episodes of season two of “The Traitors.” Hosted by Alan Cumming and his Scottish sparklecore wardrobe — a seemingly endless array of kilts in bold colors, structural sleeves, and rhinestone-studded ensembles — “The Traitors” takes 22 reality show contestants, athletes, and a former member of the English Parliament, and throws them into a gussied-up game of Mafia. Every day, they awake in their rambling Scottish castle to find that the small group of Traitors chosen from within their ranks have killed one of the Faithful overnight. Then they work together to complete a convoluted challenge in order to win money for the prize pot. The day ends with a round table deliberation to choose one player to banish — the goal, of course, being to banish all the Traitors.

It’s an ornately produced show in many ways: the sets, Cumming’s costumes, the prop-heavy challenges (in one they have to build and fire a giant catapult). In others, it’s stripped down. Murders are almost always done simply through the sending of an anonymous letter — there’s no trail of evidence for the Faithful to use to find the perpetrators. Instead, they have to rely on vibes. This tends to highlight people’s biases and vulnerabilities, their preconceptions about what normal behavior is, and how gender roles manifest in the game.

We discuss all this, along with Pete’s bold strategic move, the gameplay of the Traitors thus far, and the divide between gamers and relationship show veterans within the castle. Hope you enjoy! xo

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“What is the penis to me? What is its nature?” Jacqueline Novak asks early in her show, “Get On Your Knees.” After some consideration she concludes that the penis is tender, responsive, and has “the soul of an artist.”

Like the organ it explores, “Get On Your Knees” has a tenderness at its center, wrapped in a package of genital humor.

It is a show that exists in the liminal space between comedy special, one-woman play, and long-form essay. It’s brilliant. It’s hilarious. And it’s about… the blowjob. What started as the germ of an idea in the form of a piece she wrote for a creative writing course as a student at Georgetown University in the early aughts ultimately became a 2019 New York Times Critic’s Pick, a 2020 Drama Desk Award nominee, and now, a 2024 Netflix special.

After watching about 10 minutes of the 90-minute Netflix special, which dropped Jan. 23, will surprise no one to learn that Novak studied creative writing in college, in addition to doing improv alongside a young John Mulaney. She has a self-described “poetic” sensibility, and “Get On Your Knees” (GOYK) actually grew out of a piece of nonfiction creative writing she had done years prior.

Natasha Lyonne, who directed the TV special, wasn’t exaggerating when she told the LA Times that she believed GOYK was “a framework for an explosion of genius.”

In this episode, we not only dig into some of the big themes of Novak’s special — and why it hits so perfectly for two anxious, wordy women like ourselves. We also revisit our own storied histories with the blowjob. What kind of blowjob-related folklore did we receive from other girls? Were we as motivated as Novak says she was as a teen to learn the craft?

We talk about it all. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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Just when you thought “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” would never be able to top the moment when federal agents tried to arrest Jen Shah during filming, the season 4 finale raised the bar to the heavens, delivering a finale as shocking and suspenseful as a scripted thriller.

In the final episode, a classic Real Housewives girls’ trip dinner turns into a “Knives Out”-style showdown as the matriarch of the show, Heather Gay, dropped a stunning revelation: a member of their friend group had previously run an anonymous gossip Instagram account that targeted the women of “RHOSLC” with vicious rumors.

Still reeling from the dramatic conclusion to this season, we asked Bravo expert and fellow Substacker Gibson Johns of Gibsonoma to join the pod this week to help us understand how this finale came together, where it stands in the Real Housewives franchise canon, and what is likely to happen next. Together, we walk through the essential threads of season 4 that led to this mindblowing conclusion, discuss some of the standout moments and characters from the season, ponder the implications of this unusual scandal for the franchise, and break down some of the literary and cinematic tropes this episode (and season as a whole) are playing with. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Content warning: We will be discussing infertility and IVF during this episode. If those topics are sensitive for you right now, we totally understand. Feel free to skip this week’s episode. Take care of yourselves, first and foremost.

When Sami Jacobson decided to start trying to have a baby, she was 33, and, anxieties assuaged by a doctor friend, she figured, “it’ll just happen.” But then… it didn’t.

Now, at 37, she and her husband are in the middle of one of the least-discussed fertility interventions — something that New York Magazine termed “the last fertility taboo” back in April: egg donor-assisted IVF.

According to the CDC, about 12 percent of all IVF cycles in the U.S. involve donor eggs. For the uninitiated, this means that eggs are retrieved from the donor (the same process as egg freezing) and fertilized with sperm to create embryos, which are then transferred to the expectant parent or gestational carrier’s uterus. It seems inevitable that these fertility interventions will only continue to increase in popularity, as technology improves and as women continue to have fewer children later in life. And yet, it’s not a subject you hear widely discussed — even as the topics of fertility and IVF have become commonplace on social media.

When Sami and her husband Mike were first advised that this was a route they may need to go in order to start a family, Sami looked around for stories like hers. And though they existed, they were few and far between. She barely had any friends who had required any kind of IVF, let alone donor-assisted.

“This shift was incredibly hard for me to metabolize,” Sami told us, “and it was the first time I felt this, like, sense of being kind of broken.”

Something core to the mission of this newsletter is creating a community where women’s lived experiences are taken seriously. In that spirit, we wanted to dig into Sami’s personal experience — the practical steps she’s had to take, the emotional journey she’s been on, and the ethical considerations she and her husband have had to grapple with. We also wanted to zoom out and talk about what the relative silence surrounding donor-assisted IVF is all about, especially when it comes to cisgender women in heterosexual relationships.

It was a deeply emotional conversation, but also a joyful one. Biggest thanks to Sami for having such a vulnerable, honest, complex discussion with us. And thanks in advance to this community for creating a safe space for her to do so. Hope you enjoy listening to this episode. Xo

• “Biohacked: Family Secrets” podcast

• “The Last Fertility Taboo” by Rina Raphael, The Cut

• The landmark University of Cambridge study we reference

• “Building Your Family” podcast

• “Let's Talk About Egg Donation: Real Stories from Real People,” by Marna Gatlin and Carole Lieberwilkins Mft

• We Are Donor Conceived

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This week, we finally got around to discussing the movie everyone has been talking about: “May December,” a film “loosely inspired” by the Mary Kay Letourneau-Vili case. Directed by Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, it stars Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress researching her role playing Gracie Atherton, a woman who became a tabloid celebrity in the ‘90s after being caught statutorily raping a 13-year-old boy who worked for her at a pet store. It’s now over 20 years later; Gracie (Julianne Moore) and the boy in question, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), are married and soon will be sending their youngest children off to college. Elizabeth spends time with the family and gets to know their social circle in hopes of bringing something true to her performance as Gracie — a genuine insight into her psyche or the trauma that created her. Instead, boundaries get blurred, shaking the foundations of Gracie and Joe’s family.

On the podcast, we get into the gender and racial politics of the film and of how the Letourneau story was portrayed in the media at the time. We also discuss the movie’s melodramatic flourishes and daring mixture of winking humor and lurid psychodrama, the subtleties of Melton’s and Portman’s performances, and how the movie implicates the audience and artists who remain fascinated by these sensational stories.

After we recorded, a Hollywood Reporter interview with Vili Fualaau dropped in which he lashed out at “May December,” saying he is “offended by the entire project.” He also said, “If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story.” We did not have a chance to discuss this new turn in the public conversation around the movie, but it reframes two important elements of the movie that we did discuss: one, the way the movie examines how Joe has been repeatedly exploited — by his now-wife, then by the media, and now by Elizabeth, as she tries to mine him for details and experiences — and two, the movie’s fundamental critique of artists who try to collaborate with real-life subjects in order to evoke something true about a tabloid story like this one. Through the former lens, Fualaau’s reaction makes the movie seem like a failure on its own terms; through the latter, it’s clear that the filmmakers would never have considered “collaborating” with a real-life subject. In fact, the movie is largely about how artistically pointless and even harmful this approach would be.

Perhaps “May December” did exploit Fualaau’s story, despite all the tinkering with the superficial details of the story. Even with different names and locations, different numbers of children, different jobs, it’s undeniable that the movie lifts headlines and tabloid spreads, even an entire exchange from an interview with the couple. But the fictionalization also doesn’t seem like a fig leaf to give them some plausible deniability that it’s a biopic. Instead, the filmmakers clearly wish to make a movie that isn’t really about Fualaau and Letourneau, but about certain ideas that are provoked by considering a case like theirs. That doesn’t mean it can’t cause pain to the original victim — pain that is very valid. That pain also doesn’t mean that it was the obligation of the filmmakers was to put him in a collaborative position; they had their own, very distinct artistic project in mind.

Ultimately, as with the original movie, the whole affair leaves us feeling uncomfortable and implicated. Where does our thirst for the sensational details of a tabloid scandal ever lead us, except deeper into complicity?

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FBoy? F, Hi. Again!

After being unceremoniously axed by MAX in 2022, our favorite, innovative reality dating show has made a moderately triumphant comeback. “FBoy Island,” a show from the creative brain of former “Bachelor” EP Elan Gale, just wrapped up its third season on The CW, and boy do we have thoughts.

First, there’s the good. We’ve been “FBoy Island” devotees since its first season in 2021. Instead of prioritizing constructed drama, “FBoy Island” prioritizes comedy and narrative. Comedian Nikki Glaser is back as the host (thank god!), and this season remained full of cheeky moments — moments that make you feel like the cast is all in on the joke, rather than the butt of it.

Season 3 also gives us a new archetype of the leading lady in Katie Thurston, the former Bachelorette who never seemed to quite fit into the typical box occupied by reality dating show stars. (And we mean that in the very best of ways.) Most women who are cast on “FBoy Island” are unknowns in the reality TV world with a lengthy history of dating FBoys. Katie is the exact opposite: already famous, and very much into Nice Guys. No man is too corny for our gal Katie. It was a delight to watch a lead take such a different path this season, and fun to see Katie come back to reality TV decidedly more relaxed and self-assured.

And yet… some of the magic was definitely lost as the show moved from a cable streaming service over to a network. We lost some of the racier jokes, the format got more streamlined, and most tragically, we stopped following the men once they got eliminated. Instead of an FBoy rehabilitation program in Limbro, we got… nothing. The arcs of those eliminated characters just ended. In short, it felt more like any other episodic reality dating show, whereas before it felt like watching one long carefully crafted movie that encompassed a whole world.

At the end of the day, we’d rather have a slightly neutered “FBoy Island” than no “FBoy Island” at all, but we’ll always miss the magic of those first two glorious seasons.

We get into all of this and more during this week’s episode. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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The holidays are here at last, and one thing Netflix guarantees us during this magical time is a Christmas-themed chick flick starring one to three early aughts icons. The plot? Thin as a single snowflake. The message? Don’t stop believin’ (in Santa).

“Best. Christmas. Ever!” wraps this whole package up in a shiny bow: Brandy Norwood, Heather Graham, and Jason Biggs star alongside Matt Cedeño in a flimsily plotted and produced movie about the importance of holiday family newsletters. Brandy (she needs no other name) plays Jackie, a glamorous and successful entrepreneur and mom whose annual Christmas letter broadcasts her family’s eye-popping accomplishments to all “friends, family, and fellow Earth dwellers.” Heather Graham plays her old friend Charlotte, who is persistently disappointed in her own career, kids, husband, and lifestyle — and who finds the annual reminders of her erstwhile buddy’s success infuriating. Somehow, Charlotte and her family wind up on Jackie’s doorstep just a few days before Christmas, hijinks ensue, and lessons about Christmas and friendship are learned. The plot twists get weirder and more upsetting as the movie winds toward its surprisingly bizarre conclusion. Brandy and Graham appear to be acting in entirely different kinds of projects, “acting” being a fairly generous term.

We discuss every absurd detail in this week’s pod. Hope this helps you get in the holiday mood! xo

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