Girlpower Gone Wrong: How the "Call Her Daddy Podcast" Radiates Internalized Misogyny
Though I am not "anti" Call Her Daddy podcast, it gives nothing but fake girl power and problematic underlying messaging as it maintains a partnership with barstool which is a company known for providing platforms for misogyny, direct racism, and promoting rape culture after the CEO was quoted on several occasions saying things like “I never condone rape, but if you’re a size 6 and you’re wearing skinny jeans you kind of deserve to be raped.”
Although the audience includes both male and female listeners, the podcast is supposed to be revolutionary for women because it delves into the nitty-gritty details of the modern dating scene from a heterosexual female perspective.
The issues stem from just that, while it seems inspiring and empowering to include women in the conversation of casual sex, it’s done so in the utmost surface-level manner and strictly does so through a dominantly male perspective.
Call Her Daddy co-opts feminism by reinforcing outdated ideas that keep straight, cis-gendered men at the top of the social hierarchy and it’s dangerous in the nature in which it tricks young views/listeners into believing they are consuming transformative progressive pro-women media, when they indeed are consuming misogyny wrapped in sugar, packaged with jokes and sold by two white women.
The podcast routinely encourages women to use manipulative power tactics, common of toxic, emotionally manipulative male partners; in order to balance gender disparities in dating and gain “respect”.
Using “power”, manipulation, and playing the game, it sets the feminist movement back as it provides platforms for men who objectify women to the highest degree and seek to manipulate and make jokes about the emotional abuse they have endured upon former sexual partners in return for sexual favors.
As always the conversations on casual sex and casual relationships are never the topic of concern, as female empowerment through sexual exploration has been and will continue to be supported by Growth For Green (as seen in our sex-positivity article)
However, the problem is in the hands of the contexts, the advice, and the messaging that is overwhelmingly perpetrated by podcast discussions.
It reinforces the idea that all men want in any form of a casual relationship is sexual favors, that in order to regain power obtain respect or love from that casual sexual r4elationship is to manipulate and participate in a “game” that often times can be categorized as emotional abuse.
Reinforces the idea that women are secondary to men, that we must prove ourselves, and that our worth derives strictly from the (sexual) relationships we have with men, referring to women as “holes” Which one guest directly did and both Cooper and former host Franklyn did r
Continuing to perpetuate women's value solely in their attractiveness to men, rating them on a numerical scale.” if you’re a 4, you should know you’re a four and you shouldn't be sleeping around”
The question is always who are you uplifting? What is the goal? And if the goal is just for this white woman to talk into a mic, to a predominantly white audience with a predominantly white roster of guests, then it should not be considered by any measure, a great expansion of feminist media. As we here at growth for green have previously discussed, these “girl power” emblems are, in most modern times more damaging than they are healing or uplifting.
There are many definitions to female sexual empowerment and sex-positivity, however in the most liberating sense, female sexual liberation is sex positivity, it allows women to do what they want with their bodies sans the constraints of the male gaze or –in the context of CHD– forms of emotional abuse.
It's not a “cancel culture”, it's AWARENESS culture.
I'd like to make it clear that this isn't a call for hosts to be “canceled”, which is commonly the deflecting response of those who are uncomfortable with criticisms surrounding “correctness”, however, it's more for her to reevaluate how she brands herself and her podcast if she is at all interested in participating in positive.
Sources
Call Her Daddy: the problem with mainstream feminist podcasts
A Strain of Feminism Palatable to the Common Misogynist
Opinion | "Call Her Daddy" podcast entertains and degrades