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The New York Times seems to think that it’s discovered the female equivalent of the manosphere–the womanosphere, if you will–and it’s been sitting under our noses the whole time. In a recent NYT article, Jessica Testa chronicles Dear Media, a podcast-based media empire behind 100 shows aimed at women.
The shows cover such topics as pop culture, self-help and wellness advice; one offers rewatches of MTV’s long-cancelled reality show Laguna Beach (it went off the air 19 years ago) and behind-the-scenes details from former cast members Kristin Cavallari and Stephen Colletti. The most popular of all the podcasts is the awkwardly named The Skinny Confidential: Him & Her Podcast, hosted by Dear Media CEO Michael Bosstick and his wife, influencer Lauryn Bosstick, which features interviews with assorted celebrities and influencers, entrepreneurs, and so-called wellness experts.
There’s no question that Dear Media wields a lot of influence, for better or worse, in women’s media. But is it really the female equivalent of the manosphere, as suggested in the title of Testa’s article “Is This the ‘Manosphere’ for Women?” Testa’s argument is somewhat less than convincing.
The podcasts put forth by Dear Media, she writes, “are as freewheeling and chummy as those in the ‘manosphere,’ similarly hosted by comedians and content creators,” which could honestly describe about half of all the podcasts out there in the world, very few of which could be considered part of either the manosphere or the hypothesized womanosphere. She goes on to observe that in Dear Media’s offerings, “Joe Rogan’s alpha masculinity and Logan Paul’s unabashed idiocy are swapped for girlboss confidence and therapy speak.” Testa also notes that Dear Media’s shows “reject the overt conservatism that now blankets the manosphere.”
I’m not sure how being this different from what Testa considers the manosphere means that Dear Media’s podcasts are somehow the female equivalent to it.
Also, and this is rather a big sticking point, Testa (like a lot of people) seems rather confused as to what constitutes the manosphere in the first place, which she apparently conflates with “dude-driven content” in general. But there’s a big difference between “dude-driven” and “manosphere.” Logan Paul’s boyish buffoonery appeals to a lot of young dudes; this doesn’t make him a manospherian any more than the buffoonery of MTV’s Jackass crew made them manospherians.
Joe Rogan, Testa’s only other example of a manospherian, is a bit of a tougher case. The most popular of all the so-called “brocasters” is definitely manosphere-adjacent, and for some listeners he can be a gateway drug to the online world of misogyny. But he’s no Andrew Tate.
The term manosphere, back when it started to gain traction around the time I started this blog in 2010, used to apply only to a small selection of far-right pickup-oriented blogs that revelled in misogyny and racism. It expanded to encompass a much wider male-centric world, starting with sites like the Men’s RIghts subreddit and A Voice for Men and spreading out from there to MGTOW blogs and incel forums.
In recent years, as some of the central ideologies of the original manosphere have leaked from the fringes to infect male culture more broadly, the definition of “manosphere” has broadened in popular culture. But the essence of the manosphere was always its paranoid and aggressive misogyny–what Testa gently euphemizes as “conservatism.” And without that, the term “manosphere” loses all meaning. Again, the misogyny spewing alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate is part of the manosphere; Logan Paul is not.
And Dear Media, while woman-centric, is hardly the “womanoshere.”
Now, there are women-centric forums and media outlets out there that could plausibly be considered part of a “womanosphere.” There’s popular YouTuber Hannah “Ballerina Farm” Neeleman, a Julliard-trained ballerina who gave up that life to be a “tradwife” and mother of eight on a ranch. There’s the proudly retrograde Lori Alexander, who pushes “Biblical Womanhood” on her blog The Transformed Wife. There’s the peculiar online women’s magazine Evie, which offers fashion and beauty tips while pushing a reactionary antifeminist agenda.
But there is one way, as Testa rightly points out, that Dear Media echoes at least part of the manosphere and manosphere-adjacent figures like Rogan: its relentless proselytizing for dubious “wellness” practices and products. Pseudoscience buff Rogan famously promoted ivermectin as a Covid cure and shills the questionable Alpha BRAIN supplement. Dear Media podcasts, meanwhile, “promote raw milk, parasite cleanses and communicating with angels. … In April, a guest [on the Skinny Confidential podcast] claimed falsely that tap water contains birth control and that toilet paper is toxic. Ms. Bosstick sells bamboo toilet paper rolls, $33 for a dozen,” as Testa slyly notes.
For what it’s worth, tap water contains only tiny trace elements of birth control residue. And toilet paper, while containing some toxins that aren’t good for the environment once the TP is flushed, isn’t actually dangerous to use. Unless you eat it.
If anything, Testa understates the degree to which Dear Media’s podcasts promote the worst of so-called wellness culture. The Skinny Confidential podcast, the network’s flagship show, is positively awash in woo-woo, providing a platform for such figures as the self-proclaimed Medical Medium, an untrained wellness “expert” who believes in “chemtrails” and gets his medical advice from the spirit world, and Robert Slovak, cofounder of the company Water and Wellness, who fearmongers about the alleged dangers of tap water while selling a reverse osmosis water filtration device for $449.00.
Then there’s Dr. Daniel Pompa, another tap water foe.
One thing that Testa neglects to mention is that some of the guests–including Slovak of Water and Wellness–have paid Dear Media anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 to appear on the show, a fact that the media network didn’t even disclose until Bloomberg started asking them about it. That seems, uh, just a teensy bit problematic to me.
So, yeah, Dear Media may not be good for your health–or at least your pocketbook, if you buy too much of the dubious wellness merch promoted by the company and/or the guests on its shows. But is it the female version of the manosphere? Hardly.
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