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Hello and welcome to the waves for Thursday, May 23rd, the Thirst Correspondent Edition.

I'm Christina Caudrucci, a staff writer at Slate and host of the Slate Podcast Outward.

Hi, I'm Nicole Perkins, a writer and co-host of Thirst 8Kitt. And I'm Marcia Chetland, a history

professor at Georgetown University. So this week, we have a special guest. We are going to talk to

Josh Levine, who's my very own slate editor.

He's got a new book out about Linda Taylor, the con artist who inspired the vicious stereotype and myth of the so-called welfare queen.

That book is called The Queen.

It's out this week.

Then we'll talk about the romanticizing of women's bodies versus the medical condition of pregnancy with regard to both the way Republican legislators have been talking about abortion rights and the fact that professional athletes often lose their income from endorsement deals when they get pregnant.

And finally, we're going to review the new Netflix movie Wine Country and talk about what

one writer has called Mom Gene movies, films about women over 45 having fun with their friends.

And Marcia, what are we doing for our Slate Plus segment this week? So for this week, the question is,

is it sexist how Game of Thrones decided to render its female characters in its final season?

And here's a little snippet of that discussion. Okay, is it sexist? Game of Thrones aired its series finale on HBO on Sunday. And a lot of fans were disappointed and actually had been

disappointed for, you know, this whole final season about the way women were treated on the show.

A lot of people believed that the writers and the producers had kind of set up the last season

for a victory for female leadership. The women on the show, starting around season four,

I would say, had really become the engines of the show's humanity and most interesting plot lines,

and they were really seen as sort of the possible righteous future of Westeros and also the

most evil characters. So there are spoilers here.

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