In Bed With The Right

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is one of the 19th century's most versatile, counterintuitive and ... well, misogynistic thinkers. Moira and Adrian talk about the legacy of his thought in later movements, both feminist and anti-feminist, and about a specific style of irony and contrarianism that Nietzsche pioneered and that seems to thrive in the internet age -- often enough in league with reactionary gender politics.

Often considered the ur-text of trans-exclusionary feminism, Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” came out in 1979, but rehearses a bunch of tropes you could just as well get off JK Rowling’s Twitter feed. In their conversation with historian Susan Stryker, Moira and Adrian explore the very specific milieu from which Raymond and her book emerged — a radical lesbian feminist theology deeply disappointed with the Catholic Church.

It's Moira and Adrian's version of a classic Cher-song: Perverts, Creeps and Priests! This episode takes deep dives into three texts that illuminate contemporary "crisis-of-masculinity"-debates: those that invoke the Bible, those that invoke science, and those that invoke only their own proudly flaunted neuroses. Where are these right-wing discourses about masculinity in agreement, where are they in conflict? Everyone agrees men are in crisis -- who gets to decide what exactly the crisis is?

Moira leads Adrian through the endless discourse about the "crisis of masculinity" -- where it comes from, what has motivated it in the past, and why we're having it again. Together, the two of them take a long tour de dudes: from Silicon Valley to Mike Pence's bedroom, from the Old West to Jordan Peterson's couch. What is the unique state of emergency that men find themselves in? Is it real? And why is it -- once again -- supposed to be feminism's fault?

Ever since the 1960s, the figure of the “fag hag” — a (mostly) straight woman hanging around gay men — has been a mainstay in and around queer spaces. As a woman who refused heterosexuality she aroused the ire of social conservatives, but also critiques from within the community. In this episode, Moira and Adrian investigate: why did conservatives hate the hag? How radical was this figure really? And is she still a thing?

Susan Sontag (1933- 2004) was a writer, critic and activist, one who isn’t thought of (and didn’t think of herself) as conservative. In this episode, your hosts talk with Prof. Merve Emre to think through Sontag’s writing on gender and on the women’s movement. How do Sontag’s leeriness about identity and identification, her ambivalent attitudes to bodies, sex and beauty, and her elitism land in today’s political climate and landscape?

Midge Decter (1927-2022) has often been called the "grandmother of neoconservatism" -- hers was in some ways a pretty classic trajectory, from New Deal liberalism to profound unease with the social movements of the 1960s, to the center of the conservative movement and Republican politics. But unlike most of her fellow neocons, Midge Decter always framed her trajectory quite openly in terms of gender: repulsion from a certain kind of women's liberation, and attraction to a certain kind of masculinity. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into the weird, cantankerous world of Midge Decter with the co-hosts of Know Your Enemy, Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell.

For their inaugural episode, Moira and Adrian delve into right-wing (ahem) contributions to the gay marriage debate. Ten years ago the Supreme Court decided Windsor v. US and Hollingsworth v. Perry, which together spelled the beginning of the end of the gay marriage debate (gay marriage would be established nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges two years later). But did the issue really go away? How did the terms of the debate back then on the right influence today's moral panics, how do they motivate a far-right Supreme Court?

Get a sneak-peek at the all new, upcoming show In Bed With The Right hosted by Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan.