Women in Pop Culture Saved the Economy—Why Are They Still the Punchline?

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If the entire US economy were worth $1,000, a few of those dollars would be driven by music and movies. Of those few dollars, just three people (of whom one is imaginary) were at the helm in 2023, driving 30 cents of it on their own: Barbie, Beyoncé, and Taylor, who together generated around $10 billion in economic value last year. 

But despite this strong showing, women’s media is still consistently belittled. Author, culture commentator, and host of the popular Be There in Five podcast, Kate Kennedy joins me to unpack the ways society often delegitimizes women’s interests, how pop culture shapes actual culture, and the (financial) power of women’s storytelling.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Kate Kennedy’s One in a Millennial

• Women drive 85% of consumer purchases

• The media industry worth in 2023

• NFL revenue in 2022

• Boosting global employment rates in the US could boost GDP by $6T, per the UN

• Wall Street Journal’s reporting on 2023 spending for women

• Beyoncé’s world tour, Taylor’s Eras Tour movie, Barbie at the box office

• Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post on Greta Gerwig’s Oscar snub

• US GDP is $27T

• Male critics harsher on female-driven media

• Soap operas and advertising to women

• Elise Loehnen of Pulling the Thread auditing male podcasters

• Reese Witherspoon on Hello Sunshine; selling Hello Sunshine for $900M

• Shonda Rhimes’ $300-400M deal with Netflix

• The Bechdel test; movies that pass and fail the Bechdel test

• The origin of the Pumpkin Spice Latte

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Katie:

Money is seen as a serious thing in some worldviews. It’s the most powerful thing in the world and in the industry I am in, that would be financial media—men abound. I hesitate to say that it’s male dominated, but nobody thinks twice about a man in financial media, right?

When I started writing about money, my content was not gendered. That is to say my website’s color scheme was black and white. The only feminine thing about my work was my female face on the author biography. But very quickly it became clear that women were more interested in my ideas than men. And as I gained traction, I noticed people perceived my brand as personal finance for women. Now, remember, nothing about my aesthetic choices or the subject matter at the time would have suggested that was the case, but because I was a woman, that was the assumption. And frankly, I have a raging feminist streak. So I was fine with this. I love women. I Sheryl Sandberg’d that ass and I leaned the **** in. But it wasn’t a conscious branding goal of mine at the outset.

I have a lot of wonderful male readers and listeners. Hello to all the men listening. I like to say that it’s only the truly secure men who are capable of enjoying what I do and the fragile ones who are threatened by it. So I don’t want to paint with a broad pink brush or insinuate that my work now is only for women. Just that the initial reception assumed it was because of my gender. But nobody looks at Dave Ramsey and goes, oh, it’s finance for men, it’s finance for boys. No, they go, oh, it’s finance for fundamentalists. Just kidding. I promise. I’m kidding. It’s just a joke. Anyway.

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Girly Swirlies. I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and today I am joined by Kate Kennedy, the host of the Be There in Five podcast and author of the New York Times bestseller, One in a Millennial. I have been fangirling over Kate’s work since I discovered it, and I am hoping after this episode she’ll want to be best friends with me as badly as I want to be best friends with her.

Friendship aside, I kind of feel like today’s episode reveals a string of trends and observations that I find increasingly hard to ignore in my own life and what I’m observing around me, women’s economic power and the varying degrees of derision and delegitimization that women’s interests face. After all, if money is the metric by which we judge power and legitimacy, women’s are incredibly powerful and legitimate. If you’re analyzing something like GDP or public companies in public markets, you would be hard pressed to point to anything other than money as your core metric unless your WeWork, in which case you’re using community adjusted EBITDA—justice for accounting pioneer Rebekah Neumann.

So women drive 85% of all consumer purchases. The industries of music, radio and cinema in the US were worth around $62 and a half billion dollars in 2023, and a significant portion of that amount came from just the sources: the Holy Trinity, Barbie, Beyonce, and Taylor. The entire NFL by comparison generated around $19 billion in 2022. So three women, one of which is a fictional character and all of the people they employ effectively generated half the economic value of the entire National Football League.

But my point isn’t that one form of entertainment is better than the other. It’s the opposite that they are the same, though one of which is often heralded as a respectable interest and legitimate way to spend one’s time. The other is typically ridiculed or viewed as unserious, which is something I want to explore in more detail today with Kate as this topic is her bread and butter. And she’s done a really good job of pointing this out.

And of course there’s another element of women’s economic power that’s indirect in the traditional sense, and I suppose traditional in the literal sense. The unpaid domestic labor born predominantly by women is part of what enables the economy as a whole to function. According to the UN, boosting global female employment rates to match that of a country like Sweden could boost GDP by over $6 trillion. Women still spend around two and a half times as much time on unpaid care and domestic work than men, and there’s an unfortunate but predictable negative correlation between female unpaid labor and female labor force participation. If we assign that unpaid labor, a monetary value, it’s thought to constitute between 10% and 39% of global GDP.

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

And there’s a pretty obvious reason why this focus on women’s interest in media became so relevant in 2023. But first, we will set the stage.

According to the Wall Street Journal‘s reporting, 2023 represented this explosive culmination of demographic and economic shifts that have been underway for decades. Women in full-time salaried roles are earning 28% more than they were just five years ago. And workforce participation among young women ages 25 to 54 is up about two percentage points from a decade ago.

Misty Heggeness, an economist and professor at the University of Kansas told the Journal, “Instead of women making decisions about purchasing traditional goods that are in some sense a public good for the family, they’re actually using their resources to purchase goods and experiences that bring them joy.” The article also pointed out something that I personally experienced as an attendee at the Eras tour, something that I really noticed strongly that evening, the feelings of solidarity women experience in these choices when they’re making these choices to see an entire football stadium filled mostly with excited, joyful women all patiently waiting in lines for merch or drinks, trading friendship bracelets with little girls half their age. These things were very special in their own right. I actually spoke with a bartender at Empower Field at Mile High Stadium in Denver where I saw the show who told me she’d been working Broncos games for 20 years and that that was the highest capacity she had ever seen the stadium.

So 2023 was truly a pink paradise and literally if you lived in Barbieland. By the numbers, these three cultural icons achieve success so vast and enormous that the numbers are actually a little hard to believe. So Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour, it was the highest grossing tour by a female artist in history generating $2.4 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in economic value for the US alone, which is on par with what the 2008 Olympics did for Beijing.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift was setting records of her own. She had a comparable $2.2 billion in US revenue, $5 billion in consumer spending in the US. Her Eras Tour movie made $262 million at the box office making it the highest gross in concert film to date. And then Disney paid another $75 million for the streaming rights.

And as for the other leading lady in the box office, Barbie made $636 million in US box office sales and $800 million internationally for a total of $1.4 billion, setting the all-time worldwide record for comedy. And it was written by my fellow Sacramento girl boss, Greta Gerwig and her husband Noah Baumbach and starred Margot Robbie and America Ferrera. So it was nominated for the Oscar for best film, but in a somewhat ironic turn of events, Greta was not nominated for best director and Margo was not nominated for best leading actress while Ryan Gosling was nominated for his role as Ken. And admittedly, I am not really an award show buff, but there is something a little too on the nose about Gosling’s nomination in lieu of Gerwig or Robbie’s, given the subject matter of the film itself.

YouTube clip:

The director’s branch, when they nominate the five finalists for the do tend to go with the kind of auteurist, technically rigorous, ambitious work.

Katie:

So that was Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post explaining that comedies aren’t considered art in the same way that other films are and that directors of comedies don’t typically get chosen for the Oscar nom. And I did scan the winners from the past decade. I’m not a film expert, but it is true that it did not appear as though there were any comedy directors listed. Now, I’m not trying to split hairs, but I do think it’s interesting to point to technically ambitious work as the gold standard insinuating that Barbie was not technically ambitious because I think if you’ve seen the film, you might raise an eyebrow at that comment or explanation, but I digress. America Ferrera was nominated too, which is worth noting. Whether you think the Oscars are silly or not as a form of validation of work as good, it is true that critical acclaim lends a certain legitimacy to art over time. More on that later, not to mention the huge financial impact on an actor or director’s career.

Regardless, between these three enterprises, we are talking about more than $10 billion in US economic growth. Keep in mind that American GDP is roughly $27 trillion for a sense of scale. So I wanted to simplify that because there are so many zeroes in these numbers that it’s honestly a little bit hard to wrap your head around. But if our entire economy was worth a thousand bucks, these three phenomena, the triumvirate of female success were worth about 30 cents of the entire thing, which I admit does not sound staggering. But keep in mind, only a couple of books came from music and movies at all. So for 30 cents out of the thousand dollars that the whole economy produces to be coming from effectively three entities is still pretty incredible, especially when you consider all the people who are or were employed by those operations via job creation and the trickle down effects of their impact.

So given the economic dominance of media made for women, the history of tonal differences between how we discuss male and female media arts and economic endeavors is fascinating to me. It’s helpful to examine the historical to topography of entertainment and conversations like this one because data shows that male film critics are less likely to review films with female driven plots, but they also tend to be harsher on the content when they do. Now, the fact that more critics are men and those men are more likely to ignore female driven content does have important downstream effects in culture. Think about the fact that there is no male version of the pejorative phrase, the “chick flick”. We discuss movies like The Godfather or Casino Royale as all-time classics, something that Greta and Noah actually poke fun at in the Barbie movie.

[Barbie Clip]

Katie:

Perhaps some of this degradation of content made for women can be traced back to the 1950s when gender roles became intimately tied to the Cold War. A woman’s prescribed role in this arrangement was pretty narrow. They thought, you know what ladies? You can best serve your family and by extension, American capitalism in the fight against communism, by remaining at home to take care of your husband and your children and by refusing to participate in a career. So there you have it, girl,  your ambition is a threat to national security. You heard it here first.

But because the Cold War itself was a competition between two different economic systems, the virtues of capitalism were seen as evidence of the US’ superiority over the Soviet Union, and capitalism relied on the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace, and who was primarily making purchasing decisions about the home women.

So how did advertisers target those women? Well, Kate writes in her book that one way they did this was through advertising around soap operas. Soap operas became the vehicles by which those ads were most easily delivered to women on daytime television. And soaps were excluded from critical commentary because they weren’t thought of as worthy of legitimate attention. In Kate’s book, she writes, “I think it’s telling that from the earliest days of television, the show’s driving network profitability were not taken seriously as long as they were created by women made for women or sold to women. This trend continues today where women’s interests are easily ridiculed or sidelined despite their economic viability as evidenced by romance novels consistently outselling other fiction genres, yet being referred to as trashy or reality tv dominating ratings, while they’re predominantly female, audiences are labeled as partaking in a guilty pleasure.”

And I think this is indicative of a broader dismissal, which is particularly poignant in fields where men outnumber women. We are now circling back. We’ve come full circle to my earlier point about the personal finance and financial media industries. So I was reading a personal finance book recently, and I noticed something while I was reading it. I started highlighting the references and citations to other people in the first 70 pages. Anytime another individual was cited for their thoughts or their opinions or their beliefs, I would highlight the name. And 57 of them were male figures or thinkers, and two were women. Two, it was giving this energy.

[Spongebob clip]

Katie:

But this is honestly really common. I have noticed it a lot in this industry. Women will reference the work of men and women, and by and large men almost exclusively reference the work of other men. I don’t fancy myself that 50/50 police. I’m not sitting there like, oh, you’re one percentage point off. But when it’s 98/2, there is clearly a deeper dismissal at play that suggests women just don’t have anything to say that’s worth mentioning, right? It’s all connected.

I’ve also noticed this in podcasts of other prominent credentialed men whose work I enjoy. I’ve been sharing this little by little in the newsletter leading up to this episode, but I had never sat down and actually counted. And Elise Loehnen, who writes Pulling the thread did. So she audited the feeds of some of the most popular podcasters in the world, Andrew Huberman, Sam Harris, Peter Attia, and Tim Ferriss. Of Sam Harris’s 376 episodes to that date, spanning across a decade, he had hosted fewer than 60 women, about 15%, and he had done the best. He was the most inclusive, had made the most efforts to include guests that were not white dudes. Tim Ferriss had spoken with fewer than a hundred women across nearly 700 episodes at about 13% total. Dr. Peter Attia had found only 28 women across nearly 300 episodes, so about 11% worth interviewing. One of them was his own daughter. And in two years, Andrew Huberman had interviewed a dozen women totaling 8% of his interviews.

She also noted that when women are invited onto these shows, it’s common that they are asked only about women’s health or women’s issues specifically while the men are speaking in a way that is generalizing the advice to everyone, that the default is that the male point of view would apply to everybody, whereas the woman’s point of view would only apply to other women. And you know what?

Honestly, her analysis is spot on as the rebuttal here is usually, well, we simply look for the best guests. It’s not our fault that all of those guests are men. And she writes, if these men were to look beyond their own fraternities for experts, they would find legions of equally credentialed academics, researchers, and doctors. After all, 54%, so the majority of medical school students are women, and women are out earning men in doctoral degrees by a similar spread in health and medical sciences. It’s a whopping 71% women to 29% met.

And look, you know what guys? I get it. I like Huberman. I like Tim. I don’t want to talk shit. But she’s right. These trends toward only looking to male experts or male opinions as generalizable to the whole are endemic of this broader pathology where we dismiss women’s experiences and beliefs. And a lot of the time I don’t even think we’re realizing that we’re doing it. And that’s the kicker. Many women share this internalized preference for perceiving men to be more authoritative, which Kate and I are going to talk about shortly.

But I have made this mistake in my own life only referencing work that came from men. I didn’t even notice I was doing it.

Still, there are women in media who are continuing to make big bets on the idea that women’s stories, women’s perspectives are money makers, that women in media are valuable by the metric that we usually use to gauge value aka dollar dollar bills.

In 2011, Reese Witherspoon read a terrible script that she felt was misogynistic, and she called her agents and she’s like, you guys, this script is gross and misogynistic. I am not doing this. And they told her, “Reese, every actress in Hollywood wants this part.” So in quite the Elle Wood-sy defiance turned business acumen plot twist, this really lit fire under her, and she decided to start making movies about women that centered their stories. Instead, she optioned Wild and Gone Girl and made those movies within a year starting her own production company called Hello Sunshine.

And then she released a lot of other really popular titles, a few that I personally have binged with Glee, including Big Little Lies, the Morning Show and Little Fires Everywhere. She says, “I was always told they don’t make movies about women because people don’t want to see them.” But she knew that turning women’s stories into media was a smart business decision. And in 2021, she sold Hello Sunshine for $900 million. As an aside, I tried to get Reese to come on the podcast, but she’s a little busy. So Reese, if you’re listening, we would love to talk.

And then there are others like Reese; Shonda Rhimes comes to mind who see these types of stories for the savvy business strategy they present. Shonda for her part is a producer, she’s an author, she’s a screenwriter. She created these little known indie shows called Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. Have you ever heard of them? She’s a pioneer in television having brokered an unprecedented deal in 2017 for her production company, Shondaland to produce streaming content exclusively in partnership with Netflix for an amount that was reported between 300 and $400 million.

She’s widely credited with the sea change that’s happened in Hollywood in recent years that now recognizes that, oh, look, diversity in casting and writers’ rooms creates larger audiences and more lucrative advertising opportunities and ultimately better media. Kerry Washington played Scandal’s main character Olivia Pope. She’s the first black female lead in a primetime show in more than 40 years. And not for nothing, Rhimes’s work has enriched her greatly. It’s estimated that her net worth is around $250 million.

There’s a popular shorthand for measuring this type of representation of women and women’s stories in media known as the Bechdel Test, which is something I now joke should also apply to the work of male podcasters who only ever cite other men. And it has only three rules. Does this movie have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man? And it would not seem that this test would be that hard to pass, but the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy fails it. Zero Dark Thirty, the Avengers, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. There are tons of popular films where the Bechdel test, this very simple mechanism is not passed. So you might be surprised, like I was to learn that Goodfellas and American Pie 2 did pass.

And sure, it’s a very blunt tool for assessing how hard an artist worked to make their work reflective of real life where half the population are women, but it’s still useful shorthand. So these are the things that I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently and why I wanted to talk to Kate specifically about the economic viability of women’s interests and how deserving they are of the same tonal legitimacy and power that serve as the default for male-centric media. And we will get to that conversation after a quick break.

Kate Kennedy, welcome to The Money with Katie Show. The reason that I love the work that you do is that you place this emphasis on the idea that depth can be found in shallow interests. I remember the first time I heard you say this, I was like, yes, yes, that’s exactly it. That there’s more than meets the eye to entertainment that traditionally codes as superficial. And usually we know when we say superficial, we means targets women. So you encourage us to interrogate that reflex and go, is this actually superficial or is this internalized misogyny? I was raised on a study media diet in the early aughts of calling women bitches and bimbos, there’s this quote from your book that I want to read to you and talk about. You say, every time I see the level of engagement on a social media post that pathologizes a woman’s vapidity due to her enjoyment of something as joyful as A PSL, I can’t believe we are made to believe this when it’s coming straight from people who spend their free time drafting make believe football teams. And you’re referring to this moniker of basic that women who enjoy things that are popular often receive. So I’m like, let’s just discuss that a little bit.

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah. Gosh, I love a poll quote. It’s so flattering, like, oh, did I say that? Yeah. I think it’s so interesting that society aggressively promotes things to women that we’re ultimately shamed for caring about or participating in. And we grew up in a world, I can only speak to my experience when millennials experience where conformity felt like a means of social survival. And in my case, popularity was everything. And nobody was interested in your unique experience. Nobody was talking about mental health. The thing the most out of fashion when I was in high school was empathy. The goal was to fit in at all costs. No one cared about your journey. And now uniqueness is genuinely valued, I think, in the way society has evolved. And to me, it’s understandable that we seek power and consumption and conform via social capital and trying to pursue those things.

And then the world kind of changed and suddenly became cool to be an individual. And then these male driven meme accounts is predominantly where I saw a lot of it first started reducing women to being void of taste if they had on Uggs in a north face. And then you almost feel like you have to get ahead of the joke and participate in the fodder and call yourself basic. If you dare to wear an expensive thing you bought several years ago when it was cool that you still or participate in things that are considered mass market or over popularized. Because at one point that’s exactly why you pursued it. It was popular.

So I think it’s just this catch 22 that’s impossible, where if you are drawn to mass media and popular things that are coded as feminine or unsophisticated, it would make sense because it reached you and it’s targeted to you and you like it. So then why are we being made fun of for consuming it? I, yeah, I don’t get it.

Katie:

I remember there was one time where I did feel like a meme of myself. I was holding a Starbucks PSL having just left a Taylor Swift SoulCycle ride, and I was like, I am a trope. And I sat there thinking about it. I started to kind of dog on myself a little bit for liking this stuff.

And I thought sometimes things are considered basic or popular. Sometimes things are popular good because mass market, a lot of people like it. But I do think that there’s something interesting about, we don’t see this, we’ll say not counterfactual, but there isn’t a male equivalent of this. That’s the piece of it that’s so interesting to me is that it’s almost inextricable from condescension to women and their tastes. And I think given your homage to the PSL, which for those who have not read this book, there is a hilarious passage about the barista yelling out pumpkin spice latte for Kate.

And you being like, that’s a HIPAA violation, because it revealed something that was somehow embarrassing about you that, oh, you like the pumpkin spice latte. And so I kind of got curious and I was like, I wonder what is the origin story of the PSL? And it was invented in a flavor lab for Starbucks by a man. It is their most popular seasonal beverage of all time. They’ve sold hundreds of millions of them. They’ve sold billions of dollars worth of this product. So it doesn’t really get any more economically viable than that for a business. Every business would love to have their own PSL, which indicates to me that the very only quality that would make it worthy of ridicule is that women like them.

Kate Kennedy:

Oh, totally. It’s like this crazy thing where, and I think about this a lot with, I feel like this is a common trope we talk about nowadays, which is the “Name Five Songs” phenomenon, interactions I love to watch is where someone’s wearing a band tee from, I dunno, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, but it’s cute and it’s available and it’s affordable. And someone’s like, oh, are you a Pink Floyd fan? Or whatever fan? And they’ll laugh at you for wearing a shirt about them if you’re not a fan. And then if you say you are, instead of defaulting to be impressed, usually the guy is name five songs. How many shows have you’ve been to or is kind of quantifying the legitimacy of your fandom, which suggests that even if you are a woman that does participate in respected, sophisticated, allegedly, or whatever you want to call it, male coded things, your very participation is caused for them to think that something is compromised of their own interests by you being involved.

And I think that that’s kind of what happened with the PSL. It’s like it was made because it was good and the girlies to carry around a beverage, I mean it’s happening now with the Stanley Cup, and pumpkin stuff is delicious and the fall is cozy as hell. There’s something about the PSL that represents something bigger that we all long for. It’s very pure and it’s very just a good beverage.

And it got mocked so much that the fact that I’m a grown woman, I felt genuinely embarrassed picking up a Starbucks order is wild. And it was even more embarrassing is that I was like, oh, we’re doing pumpkin cold brew now. I was like, I should have ordered a black coffee. Some people would think I’m interesting. I dunno. And yeah, I have so many swirling thoughts, but it kind of does seem like it was legitimate until it appealed to women. And then it was questioned as like, should it be legitimate? Because these are the people that like it.

Katie:

Yeah, there is something that happens in the, it’s funny to be like, so speaking of PSLs, let’s talk about wage stagnation. But there is something interesting that happens with occupational segregation in this same way where there is a narrative in the wage gap dialogue. And those spaces, which they did generate really quickly into hunter gatherer comparisons, which is always like it’s dicey internet territory, but there is kind a thought process that says, well, women choose lower paying work. Women are just drawn to fields that don’t pay as well. But when you look at the history of how a lot of these fields developed and how the compensation structures in these fields developed, it’s that the opposite is happening. It’s that when women enter a field, the average wage goes down. There was an amazing example of computer science and coding and how the first coders and programmers were all women.

It was seen as this kind of rote work that wasn’t complex, didn’t really require a lot of mental capacity. And over the decades, as it became more established and kind of perceived as being impressive, analytical, creative, important work, more men came into the field and it was like the bro grammar was born and the wages shot up.

So I think it’s kind of the similar, it’s the same coin, but on the other side where this is how your compensated for the work that you do and how your identity affects that or how your perceptions of your competence affect that. This is the other side of how do perceptions of your competence and validity as a human affect the way your consumption is framed, which just think is so interesting. And I think what I’ve loved about engaging so much with what you do is that it has kind of helped me to have that extra lens when I see people being mean about pop star fandom or things that are traditionally coded as feminine on the internet where they’re just getting enraged about it.

And it has me going, what’s happening there where female joy is so infuriating to you. And I think that that’s where I can imagine someone listening to this and going, well, who cares if we collectively decide things that appeal to women like reality television, pop music, that these things are basic and vapid? Why does it matter?

And I don’t want to quote you to you for the whole thing, but you are very quotable, please. You’re like, no. Okay, keep it coming.

You wrote, when we teach young women that their interests don’t matter, that their participation in something makes it less desirable, that their taste or ways of expressing themselves are fodder for mockery. We’re telling them that the things they like should be a function of being liked instead of doing what they love. And I think from the lens that I’m coming at this from just that their contribution to this collective pot via the economy or art they make, or products they consume, is somehow shameful and only legitimate insofar as it appeals to men, which is not an expectation that we have of entertainment, art consumption traditionally associated with masculinity.

So I guess I’m curious how you think about how this influences women’s choices and the types of careers they pursue, the media they consume, the art they make. I love the jokes about not being a woman in STEM, and you’re like, is it bad that I’m not a woman in STEM? But I do think that there’s an underlying thing happening there.

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah, it’s so layered, and the quote you read, and I appreciate you bringing that up. Who cares? Who cares? Can’t you take a joke? Yes. But I just don’t laugh at the ones that aren’t funny. And I think that there are so many deeper layers to this issue where it really comes back to young women being more conditioned to seek validation, external validation as a means to build their self-esteem and sense of identity. And if your goal is male validation, especially, I even feel like, but I have purity cultural roots, and I even feel like I was kind of conditioned to pursue male validation over romantic love even. But that’s a whole other can of worms…

Katie:

Different podcast.

Kate Kennedy:

So it’s like when you get your self-esteem through this external feedback loop of how people perceive you as you move through your adolescence, and as I like to say, stop looking at windows and start looking in mirrors, you become very reliant on other people’s opinions as authority for what you should care about for your value as a human. And it’s almost hard to tease where the root of assumed male authority in terms of taste comes from.

And when I was writing the book, at first, it was really research heavy, and I was trying to prove how men tend to feel a sense of authority in how they categorize something as in terms of its quality. But my editor was kind of like, I don’t think you need to overexplain this. It’s a thing that everybody knows and has experienced, but it’s so internalized. I think it’s even hard to explain to men because if you didn’t grow up so reliant on validation and followed your own compass and trusted your own taste because you were not shamed, you have that default setting of what I like is valid, what I like is right.

But if you didn’t grow up having that same replenishing source of self-confidence and being validated and were responding to shame, naturally your reflux is going to be like, is this okay? Is this okay? Will I be taken seriously? And I don’t know if that answers your question, but I kind of wanted to take it back further to when you try to make this point, it is always going to be dismissed. And it’s kind of a comedic example of therein lies the issue.

But I think the important thing is if I am going out of my way to prove to a man that I think that he thinks his authority matters, it’s kind of proving the point of I don’t need to explain stuff to him. The whole point is not to worry about that opinion anymore. And it’s just to acknowledge the context that makes us feel ashamed and to not breathe life into it.

I don’t need to convince people that it’s a valid standpoint, then I would still be relying on their authority. So I think there’s something maddening about a person utterly apathetic to your input. That’s the posture I try to operate from. Now when I’m engaging these conversations, I think in the book I talk about, okay, think about young female hysteria, which LOL hysteria, the root word is hysterectomy, is uterus. This term hysteria is inherently associated with being female.

And the Beatles, at first when young girls were screaming their heads off and teenagers were going wild, the Beatles weren’t even taken as seriously because teen girls liked them, therefore they couldn’t be making something of quality. And then over time, they completely went into another stratosphere of fame and respect, and all the teen girls who paved the way were kind of forgotten and still mocked for going crazy. And it is funny to me to think about how many times in college somebody was like, you like the Beatles, name five songs. And it’s like, we made the Beatles, Young Girls.

Katie:

I invented you.

Kate Kennedy:

Right? If you really sit down and think about the difference between screaming at a boy band concert, going to the Barbie movie shopping, getting your nails done, gabbing with friends at brunch, whatever, those are my personal hobbies, and going to a hundred Phish shows or Dave Matthews concerts or Star Wars or Marvel movie or sleeping outside of a Nike store for a sneaker drop, these things are the same, all leisure is valid.

Nothing is more objectively sophisticated than the other, but for some reason, ours are made fun of. And it’s just, I don’t have the answers and nor do I have all the root causes for that. But I think the goal of the book is to draw attention to these things, to not give them so much power and to just be kind and rewind as I like to say, and look at things from a different point of view.

Katie:

It’s interesting, the point you raise about, it reminds me of just if everyone has these cultural antenna where you initially as a little kid or as a young person, it’s like your antenna are drawn in. They’re going, what do I like? What’s interesting to me? And every time those choices are judged or ridiculed or shamed, the antenna, just get a little bit further out. And then before you know it, it’s like you are completely externally concerned. You’re no longer listening to your own voice or your own instincts because you’re just, it no longer feels safe to do so.

And I do think that you’re in a particularly interesting position as someone who has made a career out of basically you’re a professional opinion haver, which is super cool that people, you can make money by having opinions about these things, that even core primary material is often ridiculed as not being worthy of criticism or critical acclaim, what have you.

So to get a little meta and to think about this career that you have as a cultural commentator, I mean, you draw huge audiences. You’re doing live shows, people love you. I’m still working my way through the back catalog, but I do think that what people will find when they go into this back catalog is that you have a few episodes that really illustrate just how deep things like reality television can go. For example, you did this episode about the Duggars, about Shiny Happy People, the documentary, I mean, it was an incisive and impassioned criticism of these extraordinarily abusive, misogynistic religious cultures.

And I don’t know, I just think your observations are both thought provoking and entertaining. But you have shared in the past the way that you’ve been patronized, condescended, doubted, talked down to in both personal and professional conversations about the work that you’re doing, the media buyer, what’s his name, Fred, who didn’t take you seriously because of your subject matter and was like, do you even know about ad sales as a result of it? So I would love if you could speak to your experience in the business side of this business, what have you experienced as someone who makes media for women?

Kate Kennedy:

It’s an interesting question because sometimes, especially this past year, it’s like I’ve been trying to breathe into existence, this idea of what you feel validated in it, celebrate your interests, your sources of joy, whatever. And in this past year, people have been like, we did it the summer of Barbie and Beyonce and Taylor Swift, and then even in interviews for my books, and people were like, well, now that we’re having this cultural conversation, is this still relevant? Now we know that we should. You know what I mean?

And yes, it is a part of the broader cultural conversation to a point where even saying we should celebrate our interests sounds trite. However, the reason it has to be reinforced is because in private spaces, in workplaces, in interpersonal dialogue, these misogynistic tendencies are so alive and well. And the way we communicate and experience the world with one another is so different from the broader cultural conversation we perform.

And I say that because I think the thing I’m not always saying is that nobody experiences more of this than me in the job that I have because I professionally choose to talk about these topics. Women are incessantly criticized for the tone of their voice saying using too many filler words, being too chatty, talking for too long. The way people will just me to shreds for having two hour podcasts when the biggest podcast deal of all time is Rogan, who does three plus hour podcasts is wild. People hate when a woman takes up space.

And my career, even the choices I’ve made, I’m going to be a solo host. I’m going to almost talk to myself in a way that might make a lot of people uncomfortable, but that’s okay. I am going to talk for a long period of time because there are people that long form content.

And every choice I make is kind of to combat that. Best practices in podcasting often have to do with making the talent, the female talent palatable. I think that it’s just interesting how literally, even with my extended family, or I’m talking to somebody on an airplane or whatever and the pits in my stomach and I feel like I am like, oh, I know, yeah, but everybody has a podcast, podcast. I still feel a ping of that embarrassment and wanting to just get out of the conversation or change the subject. I used to just lie about my job and say I was an account executive or something. I was in marketing, and so I didn’t have to talk about the podcast a first, especially when no one really listens. People are not on board with your creative dreams until they’re successful. I feel this by way of content in terms of the topics I talk about in explaining my job to people.

I feel this from reviews from listeners who are really harsh on the way women speak and choose to take up space. I feel like if I could write another chapter of the book, it would be the mindfuck that is navigating your identity once you start to entertain people and live in a constant feedback loop. And I feel 13 all over again. Even the process of doing this podcast has kind of forced me into this state where I’m so annoyed that intellectually I’m so confident, but my reflexes are still 13 and a lot of times I’m sharing stuff that I desperately want to believe. I don’t know if that makes sense. I have endless thoughts about this, and people act like I’m so evolved and they wish they could be, and I’m like, no, I talk about these things because I’m not evolved.

Katie:

Because you’re working through ’em.

Kate Kennedy:

Yes, exactly.

Katie:

Well, first of all, for the audience, Kate is being humble about her reviews. She has like 7,000 reviews on the podcast app and 4.9 stars, which is basically unheard of. So she is very beloved by her audience. So I know that the few biting ones, and you probably get a lot of vitriol in your inbox, which is always fun to parse through.

Kate Kennedy:

I get a lot of DMs and people mean to send to one of their friends. Do you get that? And it’s always like, Ugh, she’s so long. She talks for so hard.

Katie:

Oh no. You’re like, that’s the job. No, but I’m picking up on this thread or this thing that you said about how people don’t take the creative seriously until it is successful aka until it is proven, commercially viable, which is why I think the last year and the pop star triumvirate of it all with the three leading ladies of 2023, it’s like that was so heartening for me because kind of believe in that Reese Witherspoon thesis of the more women’s art and things that are made for women show that they can be economic powerhouses and really move the needle. US dollar is the language everyone speaks.

So when it’s proven out time and time again, I do think that that lends an air of legitimacy, but it’s not enough. The conversations have to happen. And to your point about there is an air of it’s very entertaining to listen to and it’s really fun to engage with, but there’s also this something that’s ever, it’s a little bit of a paradox ever slightly so subversive about taking something popular really seriously and lending it that credence where everyone else is so apt to write it off. Does that make sense?

Kate Kennedy:

Yes. It’s almost like if I was at a dinner party, I would not talk for 90 minutes about my thoughts about the Duggars and in my regular life, do I really care that much? No, I move on with my day. But if we’re going to talk about it, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about why it matters. And I think that as a person who’s loved pop culture, for better, for worse, in not taking it seriously, I didn’t even absorb the messages I was internalizing. That’s a big thesis of one in a millennial. It’s like, I want to be allowed to pop culture, but I also think we should celebrate and criticize it because in not acknowledging its significance, I wasn’t realizing that I absorbed a lot of problematic messaging, too.

Katie:

Interesting.

Kate Kennedy:

And I think that’s a part of it. We don’t think about enough is like, no, this is influential and it’s worth a second look.

Katie:

So speaking of the influential part, Jessie Spano, the Saved by the Bell Jar. Yes. So basically I thought this was mind blowing, and I started to look back and I’m 29, so I think I was a little bit, the Saved by the Bell Jar happened a little bit before, but I was a big Boy Meets World watcher, and I didn’t even think about the way that they portrayed Topanga as they kind of make her the punchline of like, oh, here’s this wise young woman, and they use her as the joke. And I would love for you just kind of unpack your thesis about Jessie Spano a little bit and the way the laugh track is used so manipulatively.

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah. So there’s a lot of conversation now about the importance of diversity and representation on screen, which is incredibly important. But when I was writing my own story, I became obsessed with who wrote the stories that I loved and learned from throughout my life. And I started thinking about representation in the writer’s room. And I quote my friend Charlene, who I used to work with because my background’s in media market research, so this is why I think about these things. And her team did a study about how if somebody is watching a show, for example, about a community they are not a part of, they’re more likely to cite it as accurate. And when a show is a community you are a part of, you’re more likely to cite it’s inaccuracy and how stereotypes abound from mass culture. Because if we’re representing more narrow or historically marginalized experiences or whatever it may be, and they’re made from stereotypes, then that goes into public consciousness.

Even if you have the right diversity of actors on screen, if an old white male is writing about the plight of a young Black woman, if college aged dudes are show running for Saved by the Bell, those characters aren’t being written from actual experiences. They’re being written from male responses to their perception of an experience. And those are two very different things.

So that was part of that chapter just being like for kicks, go into IMDB at your favorite stuff and see who wrote it, and think about how on earth they knew enough about that experience to portray it accurately. And with Jessie Spano, I think she wasn’t inherently a nag or difficult or always pushing back, but I remember not liking her. I remember thinking, you’re such a drag. Why’d you wear a trench coat to the Miss Bayside pageant dress code bikinis? Relax, Jessie, I just was like, she’s so irritated. She’s so difficult because she won’t go with the flow like Kelly and Lisa.

And then watching it back, I’m like, wait a second. She never actually said or did anything fundamentally difficult, rude, annoying, brash. The reason I perceived her behavior that way is because of how the boys responded to it and how the audience laughed at them. And the laugh track, especially with live studio audiences, you can still do something called sweetening where on the backend you punch up certain audience reactions to get the writer’s point across, and it tells you who’s making a good point and who’s the punchline.

And Jessie would say something perfectly legitimate and not much response from the audience. And then she would say, have you heard of the women’s movement? And Slater would say like, oh, why don’t you move into the kitchen and make me a sandwich? Or one of those terrible jokes and the audience roars.

So what am I a 9-year-old in Shorepump, Virginia learning when I get to high school, if I want to talk about the women’s movement, the wave gap, equal domestic labor in the home, well, whatever she was arguing for, no one’s going to respond well to that, but they’re going to laugh at the person making fun of me for bringing attention to it.

And the Boy Meets World example I used was Topanga said something really beautiful about not needing to care about others’ opinions or valuing your inner compass. It was something actually really sweet. And Cory responds by going, you’re going to be one of those women or girls that doesn’t shave her legs, aren’t you? And I’m like, oh my God. Her point was completely lost in the audience roar for Cory’s jokes.

So anyway, point being, I think that when I was consuming media at a young age, I was on a fact finding mission about the world, and I was looking to understand experiences I hadn’t experienced yet or communities I wasn’t a part of. So I’m citing its accuracy. Meanwhile, I’m learning all the things I shouldn’t do if I don’t want to be made fun of. Having unlikeable feminist characters based off of stereotypes, I think is genuinely harmful because yeah, teaches you that your feminism isn’t an asset, it’s an object for comedy.

Katie:

Yeah, it’s not palatable. I mean, that’s a legitimate fear, I think especially the way that young women are socialized to seek approval and to put others at ease and to put other people’s comfort first. I mean, we see this all the time in negotiation research that women are more heavily punished for being assertive and speaking, and they’ll just the exact same script the man says, and they get a different result. I just like to have these conversations through that lens and to reemphasize why pop culture is so impactful in ways that should not be written off, and the real world consequences of portraying groups a certain way. And to your point about stereotypes, these have real economic consequences too. So given that, and to take things, I think to the opposite end of the spectrum, I saw you share an interview you did with Elise Loehnan this morning on your story. It was about the elephant in the room with many popular male hosted media, particularly podcast hosts, and these men have an overwhelming preference to only platform other men. It’s just crazy.

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah, I think it’s a broader metaphor for what we’re talking about. It’s like you can be a person that’s generally speaking open and welcoming and male feminist, that’s all for equality and have all the trappings of a pretty progressive person that supports women. But like I was saying earlier, when it boils down to it, I do think men pervert to converse with men. I do think, personally, sometimes I listen to men interviewing women. I’m like, I don’t know if they know how to talk to them. Somebody was DMing me today about how on Smartless, for example, one of the fans of that show, which just got an insane deal with Sirius, by the way, for a hundred million dollars, she was saying that every time they interview a woman, they cannot interview her at all. They’re like, so what does a mommy day off look like for you? This is a famous actress, mommy day off. So it’s like, I guarantee you, the dude’s a smart, I mean, Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, these are liberal men that I’m sure respect and appreciate women, but it’s like, oh, what do we talk about? I just think there’s a lot going on there. And Elise’s audit is super fascinating, and it kind of aligns too with the concept that there will be non-fiction books by female and male authors about very similar topics. The female authors will be shelved in self-help and the men will be shelved in leadership.

Katie:

I love it here.

Kate Kennedy:

It’s one of those things, it’s almost so blatant and frustrating that even when you talk about it, you’re like, I know that this is stuff that makes people eye roll and be like, everything’s sexism. It’s like, no, not everything is, but a lot is also. And I think that in formats that reach the masses, it does matter to have these conversations and the overtaking of podcasts, especially over the last decade, the utter domination of male hosted podcasts kind of serves to reinforce this assumption of authority in ways I find really interesting. I was interviewed by one man on a podcast, Ryan Bailey, who I love, who has a Bravo podcast for my book. But yeah, no one else. And to your point about reflecting the audiences, somebody was like, well, you almost only have women on your podcast. And I was like, because my audiences is women.

Katie:

Audience of women.

Kate Kennedy:

The fact that they’re not even doing the due diligence of representing their audience is what’s particularly insidious to me.

Katie:

Well, I loved it that she actually sat down and audited it because I have noticed it. I have a couple of friends that I’ve made through this podcast, guy friends now that listen to my show and it, and they’ll text me about it and we’ll talk about it. People I’ve never met in real life, but we just took the conversations from email to text, and there was one day, I don’t remember how it came up. I think one of them had texted me to tell me about some of the other shows that he was liking right now, and the entire list was men. And I was like, I just want to gently point out, did you notice this? And to his credit, he didn’t really get defensive, but he’s like, huh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I think you might be the only female podcaster that I listen to and what I talk about. It’s a fight that I still feel like fighting, I guess.

Kate Kennedy:

No, totally. And it’s just kind of a hard inconclusive thing that’s so internalized, and you almost feel unproductive sometimes talking through it because it’s like, well, what do we do? But what we do is if you just are aware of it, like you said, you started to notice, oh, this person hasn’t mentioned a woman in 50 pages or whatever. Those small moments I think make us advocate for more participation in women producing stuff that we want to consume, and maybe we’ll make more podcast listeners ask for female guests, and then we’ll benefit from the trickle down of that. It’s like just even being aware of these small things I think is super helpful.

And I’m super interested in your experience as a podcaster in a predominantly male space. That’s a whole other situation. But I love your perspective and your thoughtful questions too. By the way, my God, you’re a wonderful interviewer.

Katie:

Oh, thank you. Well, I feel like a Kate Kennedy historian at this point, so I’ve dove very deep beyond the snorkel. But thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Kate Kennedy:

Thank you for having me and check us out on my podcast.

Katie:

I highly recommend checking out Kate’s, Be There in Five. I think I’ve listened to every episode now, if you enjoy The Money with Katie Show, she is such a thoughtful observer of culture, and she really does a mindblowing job of drawing interesting connections between seemingly unrelated things. And frankly, I think she’s just super enjoyable to listen to for hours on end. So we will link her show in our show notes, and that’s all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place on The Money with Katie Show.

Our show is the production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content Officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.