In Bed With The Right

In recent months, the call to repeal the 19th amendment and rescind American women's right to vote, has proliferated as a hashtag, meme and a shibboleth in certain far-right spaces. But how serious are those championing the cause? In this episode, Moira explains to Adrian that while we needn't worry that the 1920 amendment is going anywhere soon, this demand is about jockeying within the masculinist coalition that brought Donald Trump to power. While the supposed "arguments" for a repeal don't really bear engaging with, the history of the demand and its proliferation at this moment tells us a lot about gender and the (far) right: specifically about an alliance and a competition between tech bros and religious fundamentalists.

For this episode, Adrian and Moira talk about gender and food -- specifically about the figure of the chef, visible and invisible labor and masculinity. Their main exemplar is Guy Fieri, the self-declared Mayor of Flavortown, but they also discuss 2022's The Menu, Anthony Bourdain, #MeToo in the restaurant world, and the baffling appeal of Gordon Ramsay. Please note: this is a preview for a Patreon-episode, to hear the whole thing, please go to our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/InBedWiththeRight.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902). Famous as a pioneering feminist intellectual and crusader for women's suffrage, Stanton is today also remembered for the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that dominated the second half of her incredibly long career. We explore how these two go together, and what Stanton's life tells us about the effects of political disappointment.Find Ellen Carol Dubois's new Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life here.Read (or "reëncounter") Moira's review essay in the New Yorker here.

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange, disturbing world of looksmaxxing. We try to spend less time asking where this phenomenon comes from, less time gawking at the weird terminology and rituals of this subculture (though we do spend some time, we're only human!)--but our main question is what a phenomenon like looksmaxxing says about masculinity, right-wing gender politics, and heterosexuality.

This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis-metaphors, the Best Little Whorehouse in Grailland, and the final split in the bromance known as Nietzgner (probably? We're talking about Nietzsche and Wagner).

Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do with what you think of as persecution. Sam's book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany will be out in April and can be preordered here.

In the second half of our two-part series on one of In Bed with the Right's bêtes noires, Adrian and Moira chart the resistible rise of Bari Weiss's from her time on the canceled-person circuit to the pinnacle of American news media. Topics covered: the rise of the Free Press and the decline of the free press; how a certain kind of Silicon Valley creep fell in love with what Bari was selling; how she rode the "vibe shift" among tech elites to maximum profit; and why the Trump-era may well prove her undoing.Some of our sources for this episode:On Bari's reign of terror at CBS: Clare Malone, "Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS"Radley Balko's takedown of the Free Press piece about George Floyd: "The Retconning of George Floyd"If you read German, and want to know more about the tech elite's "vibe shift" around 2020, you can check out Adrian's new book! (Or you can wait until September 10 to get the English version!)

It's the first half of our (possibly? hopefully?) two-part series on In Bed with the Right final boss, Bari Weiss: reactionary centrist extraordinaire, #MeToo backlasher and the woman who parlayed a grifty "cancel culture" Substack into running pretty much 90% of the news you're still allowed to air on TV. This first episode deals with her origin story, up to her high-profile exit from the New York Times.CONTENT NOTE: Yes, we know we're mispronouncing her name. It's really hard to get out of the habit, but we promise promise promise to get better at it before Part 2! We meant (in this one very specific instance) no disrespect.

Last week, Adrian and Moira went to the movies and watched director Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (trailer here). In this episode they explore the gender politics of the novel, of this adaptation and what it says about the fate of romance fiction in the 2020s.Here are some of the texts we refer to in the discussion or used in preparing for it:Elizabeth Hardwick, "Working Girls: The Brontës"Georges Bataille, "Literature and Evil"Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Madwoman in the Attic"

One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira, herself a graduate of Bard (Class of 2012, baby!) walks Adrian through what the Epstein/Botstein friendship can tell us about the last 50 years of anti-feminist politics. Here is a non-exhaustive list of articles we refer to in the episode:-- Botstein's 1999 op-ed "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood" can be found here-- Botstein's book Jefferson's Children can be found here-- Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable can be purchased here-- Reporting on the various lawsuits and Title IX investigations against Bard and its president can be found here (2015 case), here (2016 case), here (2020 case), here (2022 case)