Sad Girl Syllabus

Sad Girl Syllabus is spending their sixth season abroad. Following the trope of Americans abroad in Europe for a summer vacation, the season begins with the sweet and sweaty, and quickly turns into something much darker. In this first episode, Bethany and Mary discuss two romance-centric films of Americans exploring Europe: An American in Paris (1951) and Call Me by Your Name (2017).

The girls sat down with Jaya and Jessie Nicely, founders of Compound Butter magazine to talk about our favorite subject: food! We ponder the mutual influence of food on culture and culture on food. Topics discussed are: food traditions and rituals, what we eat when we’re sad, and whether or not there’s actually a sourdough starter in the tabernacles of Christian church altars.

Compound Butter is a biannual publication about food, art, and all the things in between.

Sign up for our newsletter: https://sadgirlsyllabus.com/

Become a patron: https://patreon.com/sadgirlsyllabus

For the final episode of season 5, Bethany and Mary continue to explore the connection between food and spirituality by talking about… not eating. They discuss fasting and asceticism, the phenomenon of Victorian Fasting Girls, and reflect on the season as a whole. Note to listeners, the content in this episode is at times graphic.

Things get metaphysical as Mary and Bethany discuss ancient food cults, alternative theories about Early Christianity, cannibalism and spirituality, and more.

Books discussed:

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro

Who Cooked the Last Supper? by Rosalind Miles

Sign up for our newsletter: https://sadgirlsyllabus.com/

Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/sadgirlsyllabus

In this episode, Sad Girl Syllabus explore the dark side of food and spirituality, namely poison and cults. From the Heaven’s Gate poisoned pudding to the Rajneeshee poisoned salad bars to the dark underpinnings of Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime tea, Bethany and Mary discuss the use of food in US cult practices, especially as a method of control. Be careful out there and watch what you eat!

The connection between food and spirituality is the topic of the new season of SGS, and the girls kick things off with a conversation about influential lifestyle brand GOOP. Cleanse culture, wellness, cycle syncing, seed oils, it’s all here! Is wellness culture flourishing because most of the food in global circulation is making us sick? Do girls have IBS because they’re hot, or because they have a gut full of plastic? Has religious-flavored authoritarianism seeped into wellness culture? We discuss all this and more. Subscribe to our newsletter! sadgirlsyallbus.com.

In this extra credit episode, Bethany and Mary discuss the new cottagecore bonanza lifestyle store, Six Bells, and its creator Audrey Gelman’s trajectory from The Wing girlboss to cottagecore purveyor (and yes, that wedding feature in Vogue), and what it means to commodify and romanticize rural and homespun.

Welcome to the finale of Girlboss Interlude! And the finale of Hulu's The Dropout! Watch along with us as we finish our journey with the one girlboss to rule them all, Elizabeth Holmes. And we have some exciting announcements about the pod in this episode! Keep up to date by subscribing at sadgirlsyllabus.com.

The Sad Girls get into it with Hustlers (2019) starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu and based on the true story as reported by the one and only Jessica Pressler in 2015. Bethany and Mary discuss myth-making the Sad Girl to Girl Boss arc, Sad Girl origin stories in the Joker, Wuthering Heights, and Phantom of the Opera, and finding purpose in a postmodern world.

The watch-along continues this week with Mary and Bethany commentating on the final episode of Netflix’s and Shondaland’s Inventing Anna. As Anna’s court case wraps up, the girls draw conclusions of their own as to who’s really a scammer and who’s really a #girlboss and where the boundaries lie.