Bonus Episode! Sarah and Mike on "The Feminist Present" Podcast

Sarah and Mike tell Laura and Adrian about how we met, how we research and what we would say to Jessica Simpson if we ever met her.

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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Transcript

Mike: Hey, debunk mates, Mike here, just letting you know it's a bit of a different episode today. A couple of weeks ago, the cohost of the Feminist Present podcast, Laura Goode and Adrian Daub got in touch with us to ask us if we wanted to be on their show. And their show is really good, and really interesting, and has interviewed some of our favorite writers, and so we said ‘yes’. 

And since they asked us a lot of the stuff that listeners often ask us things about, like how we met, and how we research the show, and stuff like that, we thought we would just put it into our feed so that if you're interested in that you can take a listen. So this is us, chatting with Laura and Adrian about true crime, and the nineties, and feminism, and Jessica Simpson. So enjoy, and we'll see you soon.

Laura: How did you guys meet and why are you friends? 

Sarah: Ah, Mike, you tell… well okay, I’ll tell the first part. The beginning of how Mike and I met is that in 2010, I started looking at the legacy of Tonya Harding, who I had grown up with the idea of as someone who grew up in Oregon and became obsessed with her and how she had been done wrong by the media and just lectured people in bars about it. And over the course of like four years of just like thinking and obsessing over it and really like growing into the subject and growing into the kind of writer I had to be to in any real way, hopefully do her right through a piece of writing, and published a piece on Tonya Harding. And then Mike, this is where your story begins.

Mike: Yeah. And then enter Mike. And then I read the article, which is called Remote Control, and is still among probably the five best things I've ever read. And it was a completely new way of looking at history to me. And there were two sort of things about it that really stuck out to me. One was it was extremely well-written and extremely empathic. And then secondly, it was sort of like this retelling of the Tonya Harding story, but without using secret sources or declassified accounts, or like, “I spent days and days with Tonya Harding.” It was like, no, it was all there all along, all we had to do was pay attention in the first place. And the extremely tragic and human story of this woman was there, we just ignored it. And that, to me, like a light bulb went off in my head and it was just a completely fascinating and really exciting way of looking at the world.  And so I emailed Sarah on her Tumblr, whatever her, you have those little like contact forms you have on Tumblr, and I was like - and at the time I wasn't a journalist - I was like, “Hi, I'm a random guy. I live in Berlin and I work at a human rights organization. I think you're cool.” And that was it. And then when we both joined Twitter, I followed her and then we chatted on DMs a little bit. And then eventually, this is like years later, I ended up working at HuffPost and we talked about doing some stories together. We basically just like stayed in touch with each other on the internet as millennials do. 

Sarah: It was kind of this journalistic When Harry Met Sally, like the time kept not quite being right, but getting closer. 

Mike: And then eventually two years ago, I had this idea of like, let's do a podcast about this. And I asked Sarah if she wanted to record some test episodes, and then we just kept recording. And it's been more than two years and almost a hundred episodes. I think we're at like 90, something like that. 

Sarah: 92, something like that.

Adrian: Yeah. It's an impressive catalog. I mean, I've been bingeing quite a bit in preparation for this. I may be functioning on no sleep and mostly You’re Wrong About. 

Sarah: Okay. I hope it hasn't been too stressful. I feel like all of our episodes are unbelievably dark, except for like this one little series on Jessica Simpson. 

Adrian: It was frankly a lifeline, I have to say. I love how you're describing it in terms of the kind of digging that you do. That it's not really about finding new and hidden information, that the kind of wrongness you seem to trace preferably is kind of one that's all about kind of laziness. You know, people sort of build these fictions into their lives and never sort of bothered to ask, like, is that really what happened with the prom mom? Is this is what really happened with Nancy Grace's fiancé, right? It's like easier to get along if you just leave it. Would you say that that's the overall theme, or have you created a taxonomy of wrongness over the years? Are their episodes where you’d say, “Oh, no, actually that's about something different, actually there was something to be revealed there or there was something where the average person on the street really couldn't know what's really going on? 

Sarah: We're definitely at the point where we're doing episodes now that are like, beyond the template of people were wrong, they entirely missed the point. We've done episodes lately, like we weren't completely really wrong about this, but it's weirder and more complicated than we really have had time to dwell on culturally. Let's have fun with that.  Like I feel like maybe the OJ Simpson trial episodes are the best example of that, because we came back and had a big cultural reckoning with that trial in the last few years and have kind of accepted how complex it was. What that trial did more than anything was show us how limited our position in society was and therefore our viewpoint. But there's no big, ‘it was hiding in plain sight all along’ type thing with that story. It’s more just like, let's slow down and talk about Faye Resnick, and talk about all these elements that maybe we didn't misapprehend, or maybe we did, but it's just worth exploring more deeply. So I think that the intent of the show has grown more. 

Mike: Yes. I mean, a lot of it is just sort of recontextualizing, and especially just telling stories chronologically. Because oftentimes when you're in the middle of a news event, you learn it in order of importance, you don't learn it in the order that it happened. I mean, there's also episodes where like, people got it fucking wrong. 

Sarah: Yes. There is always going to be plenty of those. 

Mike: I mean the one that I keep coming back to and that like really radicalized me and made me want to do an episode of the show about everything that's ever happened in my life was Terri Schiavo.  You know, it was this thing that was presented to the public as like the medicine is so complicated, and the ethics, and the law is so complicated. 

Sarah: And who can say? And her husband's intentions seem dark. 

Mike: It’s so murky. And then you look into it and there's 20 different legal trials, and all 20 of them ruled in favor of Michael Schiavo. And every single doctor who looked at Terri Schiavo said, there isn't a lot of complexity here, there isn't an ethical gray area, this is someone who is not meaningfully alive. And yet, it was presented to the public very consistently as like, oh, we couldn't possibly say that one side of his debate might not be acting in good faith. It was like, let's hear out everybody. And again, these are legal documents. These are like PDFs that you can find, and they're like four pages long. I mean, you can read all this stuff in an hour. And just like, nobody did, I guess. 

Sarah: I also think of the show as just kind of a time-saving device. People live lives, and like, yeah, you could go back and learn what was going on with Terri Schiavo, but people have children and grout that needs to be disinfected periodically, you know, and just this…. To me, it's really meaningful to kind of take the energy and the time necessary to care enough, or to be invested enough, about these old topics to really go back and find what is there and accessible, but which needs this time and energy to be added to the mix in order to be turned into something that can be useful to someone to listen to in kind of an hour span of hearing versus a 10 hour span of reading and contemplating. I mean, it's kind of like saying like, God, I mean, there's so much wool out there, but a lot of it isn't sweaters yet. And it's like, yeah, it’s just you have to have people to make the sweaters. 

Laura: I love both like the textile and the archeology analogs. I love both of those as useful metaphors here. 

Sarah: Mike's chuckling because I've been using a lot of wool metaphors lately.

Mike: I like the wool thing. I’ve heard the wool thing a number of times and I like it. 

Laura: Let’s stay with the ovine, I like it. And Michael, I also loved what you were saying about how in its first iteration news is delivered to us in order of importance, because that begs the necessary second question which is, important to whom? And like who decides that ranking and that triage of order of importance, right? There's so much reordering of history that you guys do, as you say, according to publicly available and accessible documents.  And I'm reminded of my single all-time favorite episode of yours is the one on Nicole Brown Simpson. And I think that's such a good example of that kind of subtle paradigm shift, because certainly most people in the world know her name. Right. You know, like that's not an unfamiliar person or topic to most Americans. But I cannot think of a single other piece of OJ universe media, including the historic and iconic OJ: Made in America by Ezra Edelman, that focused so deeply on Nicole's point of view and what it meant for her to be someone who met her future abusive husband, when she was 17? When she was 16 or 17. 

Sarah: 18, yeah. 

Laura: And that was her whole life from the time she was a teenager forward, was him being in control of her image. It was just a really, that was an especially powerful act of feminist reclamation to me, for you guys to endeavor, to tell that story from her point of view.

Mike: And again, what was, Sarah's like extremely innovative research method for that was reading publicly available books. Like anyone could have done this. It just takes the interest in this person. And so much of it is just like people have not shown interest in these stories. 

Adrian: I guess the easy question here would be to say, what's your research process. But as you were saying, part of the point is that anyone can do this. But so what's your non-research process? Because one of you always sort of goes in having just what they retain from back when it was happening. And I think that's really, really powerful because in many cases, my recollection is a hundred percent coterminous with what you remember. I was like, oh yeah, that was that case in Florida with the thing of the alligator and whatever like that, that level. How do you make sure you stay that pure when the other person is doing their deep dive? 

Laura: How do you maintain your purity? 

Mike: Yeah, I was just, I was just the other day, like my boyfriend randomly brought up Jon Benet Ramsey, and he's like, “Yeah, when they found her…”, I was like, shhhhhh, I know we're going to end up doing an episode and I don't want to know. I have only the vaguest memories of what actually took place. And so I do that very often in conversations when people will bring up like, I don’t know Casey Anthony or Laci Peterson, and one of these crimes, I really did not follow at the time at all, because I want to stay super fresh for those. So part of it is just us being weird in our personal lives and telling people not to talk about historical events around us.

Sarah:  And also that we're explaining to each other things that tend to be kind of in our wheelhouses like, he'll notice that I don't do a lot of episodes that focus on systemic infrastructural failings, because those are hard for me to grasp and then to explain to people. And Mike doesn't do a lot of episodes on tabloid court TV, type trials from the eighties and nineties, because he's not obsessed with those.

Mike:  I’m not like a feelings person. I'm not a true crime person. I'm not a feelings person. And Sarah's not like an exploding Ford Pinto, go read a bunch of extremely tedious business memos person. I think we have really different ways of researching too.

Sarah:  I think that I get really excited if I get to order a bunch of pulpy out of current true crime books on eBay and read them and you get really excited if you get to watch a bunch of Senate testimony.

Mike: Yes. I get to go on LexisNexis and like read a bunch of news sources from like 1976, like original documents and like, yeah, I was just reading Senate testimony this morning. Yeah. 

Adrien: But I guess it's true. There's two kinds of people in this world, those who pick up a paperback copy of Michelle Remembers from the mail, and those that do not.

Sarah:  Yeah. Yes. That's one of the ways to divide people. Speaking of the wrong-omoter, we've included a different kind of episode that we've been doing since Coronavirus began, which is to do these deep dive, book club episodes, which that Michelle Remembers episodes were the first ones of where the point is to kind of go on this Safari through, in my case, like terrible books. And in Mike’s case, like fun books that are fun to explore.

Adrien: That by the way, just as a literature professor, it makes me so happy. Because it's in some way, it's centering these books that we are not used to thinking of as literature as a literary text. And really ask them what's the rhetoric here, what does the structure communicate, et cetera, et cetera. I think that so few people of course consume them in that way. That's what makes them fun that you don't consume them that way. But if any of these sort of get people to think more critically about these kinds of media that we consume the close read of Nancy Grace is not something I would want to undertake, but oh boy.

Sarah: Do you want to hear someone who's crawled out of it? There was a long period in my life, what feels like a long period now, where I believed academia was where I was going to be for my entire life. And one of the things that I love and miss about it was just this feeling that like, it reminds me actually of the Ghostbusters slogan. Like no job is too big, no fee is too big. Like no text is too small, no book is too silly to be taken seriously. Because like, there's nothing that shouldn't be taken seriously because everything is produced by humans with some sort of context and some sort of intent. 

At the top of every episode, I mention that I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And so one of the things that I've loved getting to do on the show is to work with the literature that the Satanic Panic produced, because it's many kinds of odd social movements and moments create bodies of literature. And then these books kind of go out of print, they experience a brief popularity or a brief period of being influential. And then society kind of moves on, but there remains this literature that I think is very fun to explore. And again, like people living normal lives where they have to do all kinds of difficult tasks and jobs all day, like don't want to sit around, waiting around, looking for the meaning in a book that is like, repetitive descriptions of satanic torture. But that's what I get to do.

Adrien: With the Virgin Mary showing up at the end.

Sarah: With the Virgin Mary showing up and speaking French, obviously.

Adrien: Yes. She would, wouldn’t she. 

Mike: Yeah, but that's another one where like one of the great revelations of that was that when we get these big moral panics, we always lose the primary documents or the cases that began them. Right. Where we have at the beginning of the satanic panic, one of the books that inspires it is a woman describing how there's all these Satanists in Victoria, BC, and they cut off their own, what was it? Ring fingers or middle thing?

Sarah:  Middle fingers. And they're sacrificing white kittens. And its only white kittens that they need, like hundreds of white kittens per satanic, right. And you're like, tell me about the boom and a white kitten breeding on Vancouver Island in the seventies, then.

Mike: And it’s like if people have read this with any skepticism or any like critical view of any kind at the time they would have said like, hey, wait a minute. This doesn't smell right. I'm going to look into this more. But like that process doesn't happen. It's like we take the most convincing parts of these texts and these cases, and we can just throw out the stuff that just makes no sense.

Sarah: Inevitably, a lot of people, when these books came out, read them and were like, I don't buy this. But then they were like, if only there was some kind of square of light, I kept in my pocket and I could write, I don't buy this. And then send it onto some kind of internet where strangers could see it and understand the sense in my argument, but I can't because Star Wars just came out.

Adrien: Yeah. That's something so interesting about using it as a window into this whole period of American history, right? Like it is about like a lack of technology, unawareness, lack of media savvy in terms of how media often gets sort of woven into the panic checking sort of didn't happen the way, I guess, the Christian right was sort of starting to take over sort of school boards and everything. Right. 

Mike: There’s also something. Okay. Can you guys tell me if this is like a shower thought and like not worth expressing?

Sarah:  Oh, I love shower thoughts. Come on.

Mike:  Okay. There was like a tweet that went around a couple of months ago about how when the Wonder Years was made because, you know, the Wonder Years is about the sixties and it was made in the eighties. And there's really only like a 20 year gap. And somehow like this 20 year gap, that was enough for like nostalgia to form. And yet it feels, and again, tell me if I'm totally off base on this, but it feels like we don't have a similar relationship to the nineties. Like we don't see it as a historical period, even though it's quite a long time ago. now.

Sarah: I think that what we're experiencing right now is a historical period. Like I think zoomers are going through the experience that the baby boomers had in the sixties. And I think the nineties were like this sleeper moment because, what I remember about growing up in the nineties was growing up with this weird kind of bubble protected middle-class white child's sense of like, don't listen to Bill Nye, global warming isn't going to be that bad, everyone's terrified for you all the time, but you're going to rise up and be the best of anyone at anything, and everything's just going to be up, up and up. There's a great big, beautiful tomorrow. And the boomers gave everything they had to the millennials to get them to rule a great and just world and make things great by continuing to hoard all the resources and be important and not listening to anyone else, the middle-class white kids. 

And then we just sort of crashed and burned because everything was impossible and there were no jobs in the sort of privileged, echelon boy that was supposed to succeed just sort of like ended up living on futons for years. No one knew what to make of this time of prosperity collapsing like a souffle. It's hard to feel nostalgia for that. I feel like I grew up expected to do something that like, I'm glad I didn't get to do. Because society needed to sort of collapse in a way that meant that like there was no system left to buy into or very little left to buy into. Yeah. I feel like what teenagers are experiencing now is like the kind of thing that you would then look back on from a more tranquil time if you've sold out, maybe in that tranquil time and be like, yeah, that time was about something. I don't know what this one's about. 

Mike: I think It was about a lot of very distinct things that I don't think we really noticed at the time. Right. I mean, you never noticed the historical context and like, you know, you always, to know what an era is you have to know what comes before and what comes after. And we didn't know what was going to come after at the time, but looking back now, I mean, we see, we do see the satanic panic. We see these weird moral panics about stranger danger. We see the rise of the American right, completely transforming in these ways that wouldn't become clear to us until now, but all of that stuff was starting to form in the eighties and nineties. We see the mergers and consolidations that we're seeing now, a lot of that stuff started in the nineties, the private equity stuff started in the nineties, financialization started in the nineties. There were all these things happening then that are culminating now, but I don't think we sort of knew that that's what's happening. We were like, huh, that's weird. Like we had like a little tech, boom.

Sarah:  No one wants to make a show today that's like, that was the day I got my first kiss from Winnie Cooper and Enron went down.

Laura: It was the day they published the star report. First of all, Michael, I don't think that's a shower thought at all. I think that's definitely worth further investigation. And Sarah, I agree very much with your characterization of like white middle-class childhood in America. And I would add to it in addition to sort of the gifted child unlimited upward mobility sensibility you were describing, I would add to that the like, stranger danger ever present ominous clouds, which made the message something like, you can be anything you want to be in this limitless, upward mobility, as long as you avoid being abducted at any moment. 

Sarah: Yeah, like keep from getting murdered and you’ll be golden.

Laura:  I'm from Minnesota and I grew up in the shadow of the Jacob Waterland trial and there's been some developments in that case just in the last few years and like, that was a permanent shadow over my entire childhood, like that was always the cautionary tale. 

Mike: That's actually interesting too, the different experiences of boys and girls growing up in that era. You know, this is another thing that's, I think emerged as we've done the show together, that the messages that I received about sort of physical safety and danger were so different than the ones that Sarah received. At one point, my parents told me that they would give me a hundred dollars if someone attempted to kidnap me and I escaped. Just really, it's a really weird incentive structure. Cause like they thought they were incentivizing me to like fight back and run away if something terrible happened to me. But also, I was a really avaricious kid. And I'm like, I'm going to sit closer to that van. Like maybe, maybe something will happen. I'll get a hundred bucks.

Sarah:  Yeah. It makes me also think that they thought you were like a fickle child who would like, choose the kidnappers.

Mike: If there wasn't a financial reward. Me and my parents have talked about this, this was an abysmal strategy, but there was like this sense of safety. But I think that, I don't think I was put into like the meat grinder of the sort of what would become the true crime industrial complex. The way that I think young girls were at that time.

Adrian: Obviously, moral panics exist all the time. The true crime, industrial complex never sleeps and if anything has gotten more powerful over the years, but something that comes up again and again on your podcast is that when you look at the seventies and eighties, it is just clear how concentrated media were that people were consuming. These stories were inescapable in the way that they are kind of not anymore. Right. I thought that the satanic panic is a pretty good example of this, like precisely because there wasn't that much TV, there wasn't that much radio. Right? Like I had managed to get onto CBS, like a large number of American parents would be like, well, what does my child listen to? 

And today, unless they get the right email forward or like click on the right Facebook page, they may well never get freaked out by this. I say this as someone who lived through the eighties, for better or for worse, and my parents got very concerned about me and my friends Dungeon and Dragons playing precisely because of this.

Sarah: Oh, we do an episode on this.

Adrian: And the funny thing is like, they sort of were like, well, we're not comfortable with this. We should talk about it. And then they eventually sort of get deep down enough into the rabbit hole to get to the Virgin Mary shit and realize, oh, this is a fundamentalist Christian thing. But my parents are hardcore atheists, well, fuck this play D&D if you want to. But it was just kind of like, well, our neighbors are concerned about this. The nice white man on the TV is concerned about this. Like, should I be concerned about this? And today I think that would just completely pass them by and be like, whatever the kids are playing, whatever they're playing, you know? 

So has that changed? Has the quality of the monomyth of the eternal victim, has that shifted? Because we get our true crime from all these different positions that we can choose, to some extent what we listen to?

Sarah:  Something I wonder about, is there's so much good in the fact that media has diversified, and also in the fact that voices of doubt can gain traction on social media in a way that just wasn't. I think voices of doubt and their ability to gain any kind of audience are a really important part of any kind of a healthy public discourse ecosystem, I guess you could call it. 

But then we have the fact that, you know, we have these like Facebook groups and QAnon forums where people who are conspiracy minded and interested in looking for symbolism in photographs and people who are going to flourish, if they find like-minded conspiracy hunters are able to do that in a way that they weren't before. So I always am trying to answer the question of whether this is better or worse. And I think that's the wrong question. 

I guess to me, the answer is that like the urge to band together in search of conspiracy will always appear somewhere in a media landscape. And I guess the question is, how do we manage that? And also I think the need to see patterns and conspiracies can be healthy because like, there are conspiracies, we do talk about real conspiracy theories on the show where people conspire to further capitalism and stuff like that. 

Laura: Yeah, I was just going to say, capitalism is a conspiracy. Patriarchy is a conspiracy. White supremacy is a conspiracy. You know, like there are real conspiracies.

Mike: I mean, you know how somebody did this analysis of Ice Cube’s, Good Day, to find out like which actual day it was. Have you guys seen this? Cause you know, he says, like he mentioned, I think it's a Wednesday, he mentioned like the Lakers beat the Supersonics, like there's a finite number of days that it could have been. The media shift that has taken place, it's like we've gone from a seventies and eighties media ecosystem where there's way too few gatekeepers. Whereas basically it's like 75, mostly white, straight dudes decided that they didn't want an opinion to be expressed in American public life, it wouldn't be. You can call it a conspiracy and you're not wrong. 

We then shifted from far too few gatekeepers to what we have now, which has no gatekeepers at all. And so anything, these little weird ecosystems, like ant-vax ecosystems can form on Reddit or on Facebook, or like these weird vigilante groups that are hunting around for human traffickers. And then it always seems to me, like in that shift one to the other, there's like one day that you can pinpoint where it was like the right balance, right? Like August 13th of like 2004 was like the day where we hit, because obviously you need a mix of both of those things. You need some gatekeepers, but you don't want too many. It will be a funny project to try to be like, this is the moment when the balance was right. And I don't think anybody knows like what that day would be or what that balance would be. 

Laura: I feel like that would be a very good question to ask a group of really stoned people. If you wanted to just have silence for 20 minutes, you know. 

Laura: I'm curious from a structural point of view, how you arrived at the podcast structure, where in one of you is always teaching the other one, the sort of pedagogical structure. Because I think, you know, Adrian and I as like real life teachers are like very nerdy for this structure. And clearly you guys also both have a relationship to academia and research and literary criticism and all those things. I would just love to hear sort of how you conceive of that structure and where it came from. 

Mike: So the first reason for that structure is laziness, because if you do a podcast with two people and only one person has to research, then you can put out twice as many podcasts. So that was like…

Laura: You could call that laziness, or you could call that production savvy.

Mike: I mean, yeah, I'll take the savviness. We have to take, it's also, I mean, this was always something that we had in mind that first of all, one of my favorite podcasts ever, which is now unfortunately defunct was called, Trust Issues. Where one person would research a particular conspiracy theory and then explain it to the other person. And it was by these two great journalists in Seattle. It was one of my favorite podcasts. I was obsessed with it and I basically stole the format from them or like the idea came from them that you need a sort of audience surrogate, because otherwise one person will go too far down a rabbit hole and they'll be talking about weird, conspiracy acronyms. There'll be like, it's like four trap or whatever. And the other host has to be like, what the hell is that? Like, you need to start over. So you just need to have like a normal person who hasn't gone down these rabbit holes. To bring the person back into reality and be like, sorry, explain this to me, like, I don't know what you're talking about. That was always something that we wanted to do.

Sarah:  And also, just that it's more fun. Like to me, it is infinitely more fun to step into my closet knowing that I'm about to have a topic that I have intentionally kept myself in the dark about, in the run-up to the episode. That like, it's going to be explained to me rapid fire for like two to three hours. Which when I put it that way, it doesn't sound fun, but it is fun.

Mike: It's fun. I love being told about stuff. I love learning about weird stuff like prom mom. I just love being aghast.

Sarah: It feels like having a weekly brunch date with someone who is like, let me tell you about this crazy thing that I have been obsessed with. And I think for me, it grew out of the conversations that I'm accustomed to having with friends. Because I love talking to people about what they're doing and what their work is. And I've always had a lot of friends that are writers. I've always had a lot of friends who have, you know, specific research areas that they're very focused on and passionate about. And it's also just like, to me, there's a joy in hearing the way people talk about things they're genuinely passionate about. It's just a different tone of voice that I don't think comes out at any other time. And I'm just like, some of my happiest moments are just like talking to people about clearly the things that they love most, you know. And also, it's a function of the show that like, not always, but a lot of the time, like we're talking about topics that we have some kind of genuine emotional investment in. And I think that that's part of what makes the show compelling to the people, to whom it is compelling. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, if I can also just be like self-grandiose for another second. I also think that when I listened to other podcasts, there have been podcasts I've had to stop listening to because they talked to me like I'm a child and they do this, like now let's explain the 50 States were founded, like this really way back to basics approach. And I think there's also something about the fact that when I'm doing one of these shows, I really am doing it for Sarah. I'm finding details that I think Sarah is going to react to. I'm telling Sarah things, knowing what her background is, what her knowledge is. And so I'm explaining it to someone who is smart and who is analytical, but just doesn't know about this specific topic. Which I think is very different than explaining it to someone who's like stupid, which seems like some podcasts are like, we're just going to pretend that you don't have any idea how to live your life. And we're going to tell you about wheat futures or whatever. 

Sarah: Well, and also, I feel like if you had any kind of audience proxy on the show, even if they were like, just completely unschooled about like any aspect of what you were talking about. If you had to start from zero, like you still wouldn't explain it the way shows do that, you know, have this kind of like theoretical audience they're talking to who they just aren't really talking to as if they're a person. Cause it's hard to do that if there's not a person there, like that's, I don't think I could do that. That's why I talked to a person. Yeah.

Adrian: I mean, you'd risk recapitulating something that makes true crime troubling sometimes. Right? I mean, not that you only deal with true crime stories, but-

Sarah: There is a lot of it.

Adrian: Yeah. And, and one of the things that's always bothered me as someone who likes these kinds of stories, but it's also kind of freaked out by what they can make happen in the world. Right. I've often been sort of freaked out by their hand holding, right? Like surrender to a storyteller and the storyteller is going to walk you through it. And in a good case, you end up with a capable storyteller who was being responsible, and you guys are really great at unmasking these tropes where like something truly manipulative happens. And I do think that like having an audience surrogate sort of in the podcast is extremely powerful. At least for me as a listener, because it sort of says, no, no, you get to ask questions. This is going to be arranged in such a way that you can make sense of this. You're not at the mercy of this story. And a lot of these tropes that you, I think very reasonably make fun of in the podcast are ones that really are meant to deprive an audience of agency, right? Like, well, this was what was really going on, but you'd never know it. I was like, well, great. That's a great lesson to learn. Like, don't ask any questions. Everyone's lying all the time. Anyway. Right. No.  You can, you ask good questions, plausibility, smell tests, whatever, ask questions, that's it. Right. And I do sometimes worry that podcasts in some ways can repeat some of these mistakes that, you know, we would have made fun of TV shows back in the day.

Mike: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, podcasting is an intimate medium, and that's what people like about it, right? That it feels like spending time with people that you know, and that's also something that can very easily be weaponized or something that can very easily lead you down a path of like, because the hosts aren't having inherent skepticism, you might not have as much skepticism as you need. And because it feels like, oh, it's just my buddy telling me stuff. You don't always have your sort of guards up for the kind of misinformation that you might get, I guess. And so I like to think our podcast doesn't do that. Because we try to fact check our episodes. And like oftentimes after the episode, after we recorded it, we'll double-check stuff. And we'll take stuff out if we find out that it doesn't hold up, but it's something that we're aware of and we’re cautious about.

Sarah:  I think just presenting the story as something that can be called bullshit on at any time is a useful way of presenting it. And I think having someone there who's like prone to incredulity who like, if something strikes them as a little weird, they'll be like, that sounds a little weird. Yeah. Yeah. I think as someone who has consumed a lot of true crime for my whole life as an example of true crime. Like I love forensic files. Everyone does. And so many people have said to me, like I fall asleep to Forensic Files and it's like, oh yeah, a lot of people do. Like Rachel Monroe mentions in her book that like the ratings for true crime exclusive TV channels stay steady throughout the night. Like people are consistently sleeping with it on you. Can't say if that's good or bad, like it's happening and it's not going to unhappen anytime soon. 

And so I think what you can take from that is like, here's one of the functions of true crime and it's for it to be this sort of throbbing white noise where like every 25 minutes someone is caught and arrested. And that's the kind of true crime that I grew up with. And growing up in the nineties, this is what kind of all true crime that you encounter on TV can do. That's the one that it's not asking to be interrogated, it's not asking for you to be critical about it. That would ruin it. Like you just let it wash over you and we're doing something else. Like imagine if the true crime narrator had this co narrator who was like an Animaniac, who every five minutes was like, what? You wouldn't fall asleep to it as easily. 

Mike: But Sarah that's so dark, people are falling asleep to true crime stuff. It's like, it's so formulaic.

Sarah: As someone who has done the same in my life, this is not weird behavior. People will kind of like shyly admit to it, but it's like, it's like having a baby that you didn't know you were going to have. It happens way more than you would think.

Adrian: I mean, they're the fairy tales of the modern era. Aren't they scary stories too. Not all. To what extent would you say interrogating true crime involves interrogating questions of gender and sexuality?

Mike: I don't think true crime has anything to do with gender. I don't think that’s irrelevant. Just a gender neutral, race neutral, normal genre of entertainment.

Sarah: Yeah, no, it's just straight up crime. It's not re inscribing white supremacy or patriarchy or anything of the kind, I mean, what Mike I think was alluding to, with this idea of me having gone through the stranger danger meat grinder. The true crime meat grinder is my kind of consistent perspective of having grown up with the idea of like, you are prey, and at any second, the owl will come down from the sky and you're a little mouse running through a field. And if he shows up, he's just going to get ya. And like, just this idea of you can't walk around alone at night because like the bad men of the world are like Freddy Krueger and they can just apparat in front of you and their arms stretch out real wide and just this idea that I really strongly rebelled against as I entered young adulthood, already regretting the years that I had lost in my life so far to this idea of like, I don't think that the entire world is hostile to me. 

Like, I think that there are real threats out there, but that these threats tend to correspond with the ways that a person's life is dangerous and marginalized already. It took me years to get to this perspective. But what I think now is that true crime is one of the most powerful fables that patriarchal white supremacy ever created in defense of itself because stranger danger and these true crime narratives create a world where the sort of seat of white male power, which of course is also the police state and mass incarceration is constantly defending itself by saying like there are wolves at the gate and we are the only ones who can save you from that. White women stay with us, like keep collaborating with white supremacy, because if you don't, you will be murdered the next time you walk past a streetlight. I feel this great sense of investment in altering or destroying those narratives, because I was raised to trust the people I should have feared and fear the people I should have trusted. 

Laura: Thank you for wrapping that up so beautifully, because that was exactly what I wanted to ask you about. You know, it seems like there's probably some commonalities between your upbringing and mine in terms of sort of sociological framing, I guess. I've been asking myself some really tough questions lately. And these are not the first time I've asked myself these questions about how patriarchy and white supremacy begin in the home, but really, really interrogating the tambour and the meaning of the voice that tells you all of the other things that you have to fear, you know, and how much violence that voice itself does, beginning in childhood. Does that land for you? Does that resonate for you? What does that make you think about?

Sarah: Oh yes. What's interesting to me is that these narratives that allow us to surrender the power that we have also are useful in maintaining a status quo. I was really raised on the narrative and also, I was raised on this because my mother was brought up on this and absolutely bought it. And of course her anxiety as a parent is naturally going to import these cultural myths that she was brought up on. So we get just these narratives coming in through the home and through the nursery stories. And so I was raised with a sense of like, my life is constantly in danger. I need to live in fear. I need to protect myself. And like it’s in adulthood that I was like, sure, like there's ways that you're vulnerable, just going through the world presenting as female, but those were not the things I was taught to be afraid of. Being raised, just to ignore the power and the privilege that you have in society and the ways that you can use it, partly because you are constantly focusing on the ways that you might be endangered by forces outside of society, like also robs women of their revolutionary power.

Mike:  It's also interesting of like the focus, I think on true crime stories and like things like law and order and the proliferation of podcasts that we've seen in the last 10 years telling the sort of individual true crime stories. There's also something interesting that when you tell these individual stories one by one, you miss all these macro trends, that the biggest story about crime since the 1990s is that it's fallen by, I believe more than half, that crime is way down. Interpersonal violence is way down. Child abuse is way down. You also have at the same time, the mix of who is getting murdered and why, has changed really significantly. I'm working on an article about this right now that, in the 1960s, Police solved 93% of homicides. And that's now about 50/50, depending on the city.  

And so what has happened is there's been a huge decline in police competence. There's been a huge decline in the kinds of murders that are taking place, that the kinds of murders that interpersonal violence, somebody kills their wife, somebody kills their girlfriend, those are relatively easy to solve. Those used to be around 30% of murders. And now they're around 10% of murders. And what you have is this huge proliferation of basically like fights that escalate, like two dudes in a bar. And one guy looks at another guy's girlfriend or one guy owes another guy twenty-five bucks. They fight. One of them has a gun. One of them pulls out a gun, shoots the other guy. And people don't want to talk to the cops about these crimes because the cops have basically, through the policing techniques through everything they’ve done, through stop and frisk and all this other low level bullshit, have completely destroyed their credibility with these communities. 

And so a lot of these crimes that are extremely solvable end up not getting solved because nobody trusts the police. And like, of course they don't trust the police, but like, you don't hear about these crimes because those sort of like two dudes fight in a bar and one guy gets shot. Those stories are so common and they're not that interesting. They're like unexotic, it's not like, Oh, we found a bone fragment and we're linking it to the dental records or like this bullshit that you see on CSI. It's like, yeah, two dudes that like kinda knew each other and they got in a dumb fight. And one guy ended up dead, that is by far the most common form of homicide in America, but we haven't sort of reckoned with like the escalation of that form of murder as really the paradigmatic form of murder that takes place in America. It's men between like 16 and 34 in an argument who like know each other kind of, but like sort of not really. These often get called gang related because the cops have no idea who's in a gang and who's not. And oftentimes they classify it as drug related. If one person has a bag of weed on them, they're like, Oh, it's drug related, even if it's a bar fight. Like the complete transformation of the kinds of murders that we see in America and the competence of the agencies that are allegedly solving them, we can't tell those stories because it's like we focus in on like the one dead white girl in Minnesota, that happens once a year. Like statistically, you're going to get some number of these cases. And it's like, we zoom in on these cases and we don't see these big umbrella trends that most Americans have an extremely incorrect idea of the kinds of murders that are taking place. And what is being done about them.

Laura: Did a rape, right? Like that rape is another crime that our entire carceral structure operates on a completely false premise of what the typical or average rape is.

Mike: And those clearance rates are 40%, now, that's 60% of rapes go on unsolved.

Adrian: That's something that I was actually wondering about, like to what extent are stories around me too true crime? Because on the one hand, of course, like they can have that kind of energy and emphasis at the same time, I do think that the true crime format, the traditional one, is really kind of ill-suited for it, precisely because as I go at this, is bone fragment. It wants to do this kind of forensic work that you just can't really do there. I watched the Larry Nassar documentary that's on Netflix now. They kind of try and it kind of doesn't work because no one disputes the facts, the facts are horrifyingly out there. The mystery is how the fuck no one saw this for like years and years and years. It's not really then in a shocking twist. It's like, there is no shocking twist. The thing that the women were saying all along happened. And at some point, powerful people had to notice.

Sarah:  Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it's not who done it. It's why are we incapable of listening to women and girls then? So the mystery you get to solve is like it inevitably involves introspection and involves looking in society. I mean I would say that the me too movement is at this interesting loggerheads with the ways that girls and women in America are often taught to believe that we are a value, which is that someone will be locked up on your behalf. 

And one of the things I see in aspects of the ‘Me Too’ movement, and specifically in Chanel Miller's memoir, is this expression of the fact that the system was supposed to help me. And it did some stuff, but like also I was explicitly promised things that I never got and that people knew that I wouldn't get. And I was used as evidence and treated in a way that didn't mitigate my trauma. And in fact violated me again. Why is the system promising that it cares about me? When it appears to see me as very best, a secondary concern, at very best. 

To me, one of the things that's exciting about ‘Me too;, is that it is showing everyone if they care to observe the ways that true crime has taught us to put our trust in the police to protect women and what we're seeing in these stories is that they are unable to do it, they’re uninterested in doing it in the process of solving crimes seems to re-traumatize victims, perhaps even more so as it is falsely promising them that it's for their welfare and for protection of their rights, that the process is like this, because the process wasn't set up with victims in mind, and we can't retcon it into something that behaves that way, I think.

Laura: Everything that you were just saying about Chanel Miller, too, Sarah reminded me of like, you know, how many generations back this kind of misapprehension goes. I was just thinking of how similar that is actually to Maya Angelou’s kind of origin story that she tells in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she was raped as a child. I believe by a relative. She didn't tell anybody at first. And then when she did, the man was killed and she didn't speak for something like eight years after that, because it was her understanding that her voice had killed a man. You know, that's such a poignant story from a child's eye view, especially when she tells it. But it's also a really powerful testimony to how in exactly the same way you just described the Chanel Miller, that outcome runs directly counter to any mode of transformative justice that might put the survivor at the center and her wishes at the center. Those misapprehensions and sort of overwriting of survivors’ actual needs and wishes continues to happen all the time and has been happening for as long as anyone can remember.

Sarah: And the use of a sexual assault survivor, or a sexual abuse survivor, or a victim of murder, who can't say anything about what they would have wished. I really feel like we're potentially having this very exciting moment, culturally, where we can say, as women - specifically as white women - this infrastructure was built allegedly for my benefit and for me, and this has my name on it. And like, I don't want it, actually. It was never meant to help me. Whatever this thing you gave me, you know? I divest. And like, and just the idea that the things that we do that are allegedly for the benefit of survivors of sexual assault or abuse or of murder victims are things that white supremacy is interested in doing anyway. Yeah. 

Divesting oneself from a role as potential victim, which I think is the role that was offered to me as I was growing up. And the way that I was allowed to think that I was a value of society was like, well, if someone killed you, people will be really sad. And growing up with this weird sense of like, would people like me more if I weren't around? There's been a lot of media that really critically explores that recently, as well. But I think there's, there's something very interesting about noticing that you have been given this role that seems to benefit you in all these ways. There are all these promises, like if something bad happens, we'll protect you, like don't worry. And if we can't protect, we will avenge you. And at a certain point being like, okay, why do you want to avenge me so badly? Like, why can't you protect me now? Why is Bruce Wayne keeping all of this money to fight individual muggers when he could just improve the schools in Gotham? Like, what's wrong with this picture? I've been watching a lot of Batman movies. 

Laura: That's really deep and dark and relatable, Sarah. And this is a really personal story, but it did remind me of a terrible moment in my life. In my teenage years, when my super Catholic parents first learned that I had had sex with my boyfriend in an extremely, like what was then a very loving relationship, their first reaction was to say, “Did he force himself on you?” And it has struck me so many times in the distance of memory that that was more legible to them. Like it was somehow more comprehensible to them if it had been nonconsensual on my part than if it had been consensual. Like that feels very much a testimony to the kind of obfuscation you're highlighting.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. And because it's morally better to have been raped than to choose to have sex in that worldview.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. 

Mike: We actually talked about this on our Duke lacrosse rape case episode that in this sort of, we have the social construction of like false rape claims as like, she's out to destroy men and like she's a bra burning feminist, blah, blah, blah. But it sounds like the research shows that a lot of people who make these false rape claims are actually conservative and Christian people who can't admit to their parents, that they had consensual sex, their parents catch them and they're like, uh, he, uh, forced me. And so because it is more legible. Now you guys know what it’s like to have a conversation with us, just like down into the abyss, just 45 minutes, then you're like, fuck, what is it like being with these people in real life? It's like this, it's bad. 

Laura: It's not bad. But, um, but I do feel like I need a drink. 

Adrian: One thing I did think about in terms of gender, as well as on the one hand with the satanic panics and with Nancy Grace, of course the anti-true crime position, which I think we've also implicitly a little bit been taking, is of course also kind of gendered in the sense that, you know, keyword, hysteria, right? The fact that we accuse people of irrationality. And one of the things that me too brings home, I think is that like, if you hear the same story 50 times, it could be a moral panic. It could also be that the same thing happened 50 times and your society is incredibly blind to it. Do you ever sort of deal with that? Is there ever a moment when you sort of think that banking this in a particular way would commit us to a kind of sexist trope of like, well, people are just making shit up, or do you find that honestly, the truth sets you free? You ask good questions. You could put pressure on it. Something will crumble. Some things will sort of survive. 

Mike: Yes. Sarah, why are you so mean to Nancy Grace? I want to know. 

Sarah:  I think that the satanic panic is the best subject area to talk about this in because it's, you know, the neighborhood where I spent my most time. And also the fact that to me, what makes it so complicated, is that we are seeing people coming forward with stories of sexual abuse, many of these specific cases, McMartin, Jordan in Minnesota, the Fran and Dan Keller case, et cetera, are just demonstrably untrue. Like you really have to believe some stuff that, that logically doesn't scan. And that is really unsupported by all the factual information we have in order to believe in the plausibility of these stories. And yet they're coming forward at a time when, you know, the police and the public have just started talking about the sexual abuse of children as something that even exists, or something that exists enough to not be like either this weird thing that almost never happens. Let's not talk about it or something that like, if it happens, like don't talk about it. Don't make a big deal and the child won't form negative memories. Like this is the attitude that a lot of women in the boomer generation and earlier seem to have grown up with. 

And so I think you also see this moment of, you know, in the early eighties, this is when boomer women are having children. And I am led to believe by my research, a lot of them are saying like, never again, like my child, isn't going to experience what I experienced, either in terms of the trauma that I experienced that wasn't addressed or just no one caring or talking about the ways that they can be abused by somebody. And so there's this very real reckoning that needed to happen and needed to happen somehow, that gives birth to these dozens upon dozens of wrongful convictions. And so when you talk about that, I feel like, what I tend to focus on is the fact that, you know, these imagined traumas seem always to come from some actual trauma, like this need, that parents have to protect their children from these, it turns out, sometimes imaginary foes that we see in the eighties, I think comes from the fact that they really have been through or their generation has been through trauma that no one wanted to talk about with them. And no one wanted to acknowledge with them, ever. So I think with moral panics, I mean, something that I feel about pretty much every moral panic that we've talked about on the show and something that I really tend to look for now, like when I'm starting to educate myself about something that seems like a moral panic, is that the fear that people express, if it will be directed at some proxy object that's unrelated to what's going on, but it will be real and it will be relevant and it will be, you know, it would be reasonable to be directing it somewhere else. And I think in the satanic panic, there's this revelation that we start to see in terms of increased literature and studies of child sexual abuse of like, this seems to be a problem with men in the home or men in the family, like, should we look at radically altering, rebuilding from the ground up, our concept of the family? Cause that seems to be what we need to do. And then they're like, no, no, it's the lesbian daycare teachers. It's not the dads or the boyfriends or the male relatives or people the child knows at all. 

Laura: You know who I think it is? Immigrants.

Sarah: It's immigrants. Yeah. Let's not, let's not deal with the fact that our country is held together with like tape and not even new tape, but tape that's kind of old and gritty. Yeah. It's the immigrants, that’s right. And just the need to find a proxy fear. And also that, you know, if you have fear or reasonable anxiety about something that is an aspect of mainstream culture or something that seems like an immovable part of society as it is, then you will then take that fear and bounce it onto an out-group that doesn't have very much power and members of whom you can kind of quickly and cathartically  incarcerate. I really think that's a perennial theme.

Adrian: I mean, redirection is one way to describe the processes that you're tracing in your podcasts in general, right? Like how things get rerouted in ways that are convenient, sort of lifelines for society, but that ultimately leave the festering problems untouched and keep inventing problems that either don't exist or aren't currently framed, right. That are misunderstood. 

Mike: These moral panics keep getting redirected to the same things. Right, right. It's always, either the outsider to our society, or it's a group within our society that is becoming morally depraved. Right? It's stranger danger or it's like street gangs. Right. Those are like the two ways that we know how to channel those things.

Adrian: Marxist professors.

Laura: So dangerous. 

Sarah: These Oberlin undergrads will be the death of us all. Yeah. 

Laura: Final, final question. If you could say anything to Jessica Simpson, what would you say? 

Sarah: Oh my gosh. I would say, Jessica, I think that the timing of your like reckoning with your life, inviting all of us into that circle, like was just so perfect. And I appreciate you. And I just thank you for bringing in high-rise jeans. Cause somebody had to do it. 

Mike: I have some ideas for a song about John Mayer. I would want to workshop those.

Adrian: Well, Jessica, if you listen to this podcast…

Laura: As she certainly is. 

Sarah: I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does.

Adrian: I have every confidence.

Mike: Yeah. We're here. Jessica, let us know. Yes.