Bitch Media: Popaganda and Backtalk

This week, Dahlia and Amy update on the latest horrifying policies the Trump administration are hoping to force into law. Beyond the midterm elections, the monsters in the White House are working overtime to push through harmful legislation, including limiting gender to being recognized to what one is assigned at birth, an end to birthright citizen, and more terribleness. In this week’s Amy vs. Dahlia, we’re debating the worse fake politician: Veep’s Selina Meyers or Idiocracy’s President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho! Text “Politician” to 503-855-6485 to let us know what you think!

This episode is all about how cool the Devil is, especially for people of marginalized genders and sexualities. The devil is all over popular media, not as a straight symbol of absolute evil, but as something a little more nuanced and approachable—and sometimes even a little queer. Is this a sign of the end times and the moral degradation of humanity? Or does the character’s appeal to young people speak to a greater rejection of good vs. evil binaries? To find out, Soleil spoke with two experts. First, you’ll hear from Megan Kennedy, the executive director of Utah’s Religious Education Series, on the political side of evil. Then you’ll hear from Holly Lyman Antolini, the rector at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on what it means to disregard the idea of absolute evil. We hope you enjoy the show!

This week, Dahlia and Amy get creepy and ghouly about screen horror (as opposed to the horror of our everyday lives). In this Halloweeny episode, we dig into the role of horror film and TV and how it helps us cope with our lived realities. We've also got a Petty Political Pminute starring our least favorite ventriloquist dummy, Jared Kushner. In this week’s Amy vs. Dahlia, we're debating the metaphor of the Haunting of Hill House: Is it all about childhood trauma or white supremacy? Text “Haunting” to 503-855-6485 to let us know!

Even if you’ve never heard of Rebecca Solnit, you know who she is. It was Solnit’s 2008 essay at the blog TomDigest that identified the concept we know today as mansplaining. (“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”) But long before Solnit became a patron saint of the extremely online, she was an activist, a historian, a mapmaker, and a prolific author of books on a dizzying breadth of topics: the history of walking (2000’s Wanderlust); the motion-photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (2004’s River of Shadows); the emerging evidence of climate change (2018’s Drowned River); and ambient cultural misogyny (2015’s essay collection Men Explain Things to Me). Solnit’s new book of essays, titled Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (And Essays), connects the Trump administration, economic inequality, Indigenous history, police brutality, and gentrification gracefully, tying them together with meditations on American exceptionalism and the importance of precise language that gets right down to the lived facts of politics. Call Them By Their True Names doesn’t boil over with long-simmering ire on behalf of democracy and social justice, but rather deploys Solnit’s trademark precision, dry wit, and enduring optimism toward an absorbing whole. All the more reason to get her on the phone to talk about the role, and the necessity, of anger in a world that tosses up fresh outrages at least once a day.

On this episode of the show, we’ll be talking all about veganism and the politics of eating plants and meat. Is it possible to reduce it to a diet or wellness thing, or is it inherently political? What is the connection between industrialized meat production and patriarchy? And why does Western culture conflate eating meat with masculinity, and what does that have to do with climate change? Soleil will talk to two folks about the place of veganism in politics. First, you’ll hear from Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and a recent cookbook, Protest Kitchen, on masculine anxieties around meat-eating and the progressive case for veganism. Then, Alicia Kennedy, a food and spirits writer and host of the Meatless podcast, on the complex relationships all people have with their own food choices.