Episode 118 -- The Romantasy Boom

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)

A few months ago, as part of the research for his forthcoming book What Tech Calls Governing, Adrian took a drive down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back. This episode is about what the billboards along that stretch of highway tell us about Silicon Valley, about our tech elites, and about how technology is remaking society (it's not in the way you think).If you'd like to buy Adrian's book, it's available for pre-order in the German edition only for now.If you'd like to check out the work of Wendy Liu, whose column that Adrian and Moira refer to in the episode (and who did the drive with Adrian), you can find that here and here.

The Epstein files are many things: a study in elite impunity, a deep core sample of societal misogyny, a record of institutional failure. But they also give us a fascinating, if terrifying, alternate story of #MeToo and what came after. For this episode, Moira and Adrian take the recent drop of several million more pages of Epstein emails--and Moira's walk-on cameo in them--to think about networked antifeminism, #MeToo backlash, the traffic in women as social conduit, and the solidarity of (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) predatory men.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in Minneapolis. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into questions of gender, solidarity, whiteness and the MAGA imagination as they pertain to the murder and the reaction across media and society. Please note: We briefly mention the comparison sometimes made with the Nazi-era Gestapo. If this is a comparison that interests you, Moira and Adrian recorded an emergency episode on that group, its history, and the use of comparing it to ICE for our Patreon. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-119-149640913

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Abby Kluchin from the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast to discuss a recent publishing phenomenon and its implications for gender politics: romantasy, a genre that's been emerging over the last 10 years with renewed force. Series like Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and the Empyrian-novels by Rebecca Yarros mix fantasy tropes with costume drama and pretty explicit sex scenes -- and they rely on a very particular kind of trauma heroine, and what seems to be a very particular understanding of gendered trauma.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the conservative attack on birth control, and in particular the influencer-led, MAHA-adjacent surge of misinformation about menstruation and birth control. At issue is ultimately a deeply reactionary, and deeply troubling picture of the gendered body and women's autonomy. Topics covered include: cycle synching, the politics of "naturalness" and the weaponization of legitimate grievances with the medical establishment for ideological purposes.Here is the list of books/articles we refer to in this episode:-- Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (1998)-- Mikaeli Anne Carmichael, Rebecca Louise Thomson, Lisa Jane Moran, Thomas Philip Wycherley, "The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Athletes’ Performance: A Narrative Review"