Hello, I'm Adrienne Dob.

And I'm Myra Dodd again.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, one of my favorite podcasts, which I was actually lucky enough to go on last year,

it's called You're Wrong About.

It is Sarah Marshall's series about the forgotten, the little known, or the misapprehended artifacts of American culture.

And one of their best series, I think, is something that Sarah has called the Malign Women of the 90s.

So they did stories on the likes of like Monica Lewinsky and Tanya Harding and other women who were subjected to media attention in ways where these kind of broader cultural anxieties and resentments about gender got projected onto them.

So in the media and in sort of the popular imagination, these women's lives got factually distorted.

Their behavior was misunderstood and misrepresented. They were lied about or they were judged by these

unreasonable and sometimes just kind of bizarre standards. Because what was being metabolized through

their stories in the media and in the public consciousness

was not really about them at all, but about making them into symbols of a greater gendered

conflict. So these were women who could be collectively reviled and punished and discarded

in a way that women as a whole or gender relations more broadly couldn't be.

Right?

So like we couldn't throw away the ambition and woundedness of working class women, even though

it kind of shamed us to look at it.

So we just threw away Tonyer Harding instead.

And we couldn't throw away the discomfort and hypocrisy generated by the post-sexual

revolution behavior of like boomer straight men. So we threw away Monica Lewinsky instead.

And Sarah talks about this as a feature of the 90s, but I think it's very much still something we do now.

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