David King, You’re a Dick ~ The Armpit Hair Episode

Tiny unionised dinosaur chooks. Humid shoulder pelts at Pilates. AFL commentary. Pre-peeled grapes.

This episode begins as a fruedian slip, turned into a feminist ranch fantasy and ends as a rant about women’s bodies, beauty standards, sport media, and why some jokes no longer land the way they used to.

Also: Kane Cornes says beer is the most overrated thing in the world, and honestly, I love that journey for him

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Feminist Rant Feminist rant rant feminist rant I think that's how we say it. Feminist rant incoming, although honestly a feminist ranch sounds divine. Heavenly. Tiny homes, big veggie gardens, chooks wandering around like tiny little unionized dinosaurs, women quietly fixing each other's lives with soup, advice, and cord as fucking drills. Bliss. Anyway, back to reality. I was listening to a footy podcast today, which honestly remains one of the last untouched ecosystems of the Australian Luke. If David Attenborough narrated SN, it would sound something like this. Apologies to Sir David Attenborough. Here we see two middle-aged men arguing about zone defense while slowly dying of untreated emotions. The loneliness epidemic was always just in the head. And look, I love AFL. I I have a passion for it. I care about the game, I care about the players. I am probably too invested in men chasing a leather ball around a field in little shorts singing songs. Not how I imagined my post-menopause unfolding, but here we are. And I love listening to Kane Corns. He's a sports journalist, particularly football. He's a little bit controversial, but he says enough smart things to keep me listening. And Kane did a great segment about things he thinks are overrated, and he counted back from 21 to 1. And I was so shocked by his number one. It was beer. Honestly, golf club. Deeply brave in Australian sports media. A man publicly saying beer is overrated. I support that journey for him. And then David King, also another media journalist, came in the next day with some additions of his own. Things he thought were overrated. And one of them was yoga. And he said something along the lines of he didn't want to stretch next to women with armpit hair. Yeah, that's right. He said that out loud quite a few times and backed it up, saying it was unhygienic. And I just thought, mate, you played elite men's football. You spent years in other people's sweat and armpits. You spent years in communal showers, change rooms, tackling men, sweating on men, existing in what I can only describe as a dense atmospheric soup of deep heat, moist towels, and male armpits. Professional men's sport is basically 40 years of communal sweating. But apparently, Tracy from Yoga is where we draw the hygiene line. Interesting. Because it's not actually about hygiene, is it? It's about which bodies are allowed to exist publicly without commentary. I would bet all that I own, given that's not particularly much, I would bet all that I own that David King has never once in his broadcasting career commented on a single armpit hair on a man's body. And yet, he has encountered more male armpit hair than most, and I have said armpit hair more today than I thought I ever would. He has encountered more blokes armpit hair than most humans ever will. More armpit hair, not just blokes armpit hair, more human armpit hair than most of us ever will. And yet, the first time he talks about armpit hair is because he doesn't like it on a women, a woman. Men just get to have bodies. Women, we're exected expected to present our bodies for inspection. It's a very different thing. Women are expected to be hairless, odorless, decorative, youthful, toned, but not toned enough to be threatening and natural looking, whatever the fuck that is. But also we have to be young. Apparently, we're all supposed to exist like pee pre-peeled. I was gonna say pe-peeled. We're all supposed to this is how you can tell this is off the cuff because I'm tripping over my words. I've got the hairdresser coming in minus one minute, and I want to get this out. I want to get this out while I'm still angry. Women are expected to exist like pre-peeled grapes. And can you imagine if a woman in sports media, if a female commentator talked about men's bodies the way male commentators, the way David King talked about a woman's? Yeah, look, I went to Pilates the other day, and Baz is probably a lovely bloke, but I really don't like his bald spot. There'd be a national inquiry by the morning. Half the country would clutch at their pearls and have to fan themselves and say, what if it was the other way around? I'm here to tell you that men commentate publicly and privately on women's bodies non-fucking stop. And look, before anyone says it's just banter, or you can't take a joke. I mean, I've got two answers to that. One, you're right, I can't take that fucking joke. And two, I have a perfectly well-defined, ridiculous sense of humour. I've had to survive through fucking humour. Australians love humor. Humor also tells you what a culture normalizes and what it's trying to hide behind. It tells you what a culture is trying, what a particular cohort in culture is trying to say without saying it directly. I got a question for you. My no my lawyer tells me I need to couch this question very carefully. Here's the question. Why are so many visible signs of adult womanhood treated like flaws? That's actually not the question. Body hair, wrinkles, aging, grey hair, saggy bits. Why? I don't like to say saggy bits, I'm just gonna say, you know, bits affected by the natural laws of physics, aka gravity. Why are they treated like flaws? Here's the question. Why are women rewarded for appearing younger, smoother, and less visibly adult? I'm not saying men who prefer hairless women are predators. I am very specifically not saying that. But I am saying we are living through a moment culturally where a lot of women and some men are re-examining beauty standards and asking where they came from, who they serve, and why visible signs of adult womanhood are so often framed as undesirable. That's a conversation happening, a really important conversation happening now. And I just want to amplify that. Look, and dear David and SN, women listen to sports radio too. We love woody. We know the stats of the drafts, the coaches, the scandals, arc reviews. It takes so long you could refinance your mortgage before they finish. We know all of it. What we are increasingly tired of is hearing women's bodies treated as inherently funny, as inherently funny, gross, decorative, publicly reviewable, while men's bodies are treated as neutral. Look, the culture is shifting, and honestly, about fucking time. I'm Catherine Redden, this is the C word. I'll see you in the next episode where I'll probably be just as ranty and you know disorganized. Bye!