Off-the-Record: Everything WAS Gender

0:04Happy Friday, Slatesters. It is that special, special time of week after days and days of crazy news that has broken my brain to some profound degree where we like to go off the record record. This is Lizzie, by the way, and my guest today is your What Next host, Mary Harris. We're doing some role reversal. Hey, dude. Hey, what's up? Maybe I should call you bro, like my child calls me. Hey, bro. What's up, bro? Hey, bro, where's my jacket? I'm not your bro, I'm your mother. I know people who try to ban the bro thing, and I just embrace it. Everyone's bro now. Bro. Bro. It's a gender-neutral term in my land.

0:44It is gender-neutral. Well, so I went with Bro because we're talking about gender, gender politics as our friend. Sometime what next guest, Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR, likes to remind us everything is gender. Yeah. So we're going to talk about how everything is gender and specifically in the realm of politics. So for the first year and a half or so of this second Trump administration, we definitely saw some one could say old fashioned or regressive gender politics of the MAGA movement. I'm going to say regressive. We could say regressive. I know. I know. I know. Pete Hegseth demoting female leaders, certainly women of color in the military.

1:29Far right pastor advocating against women voting was embraced by the White House. There are all kinds of like pro natalist things, including the way that American women are, I'm quoting here, under babied, which is an actual thing that Dr. Oz said in the Oval Office back in May. When people thought this was like a whole vibe shift. Yeah. Do you remember like you probably read that New York Times article about Evie magazine, the magazine that was like we're like cosmopolitan for sexy, celibate, like future housewives kind of people. Do you know what I mean? Like people really thought going to Trump.

2:07This is it, man. Yeah. We're going back in time. Like no pendulum ever stays in one direction. Right. Like that is the very nature of a pendulum. And in the wake of the midterms, it turns out that women do want to be able to vote. So here we are. Apologies to Susan Faludi. The backlash to the backlash to the backlash is on. it is mary how you feeling about all this mid i'm feeling mid i'm gonna i'm gonna explain my midness okay because like i'm still struggling with this i i've talked to so many people who look at this election and they're like filled with happy vibes of like oh my gosh like okay keisha lance bottoms first black american woman to serve as governor in the united states deb holland first native american woman to serve as governor uh peggy flanagan gonna represent Minnesota, first Native American woman to serve in the U.S.

3:03Senate, all sorts of like amazing breakthrough things, right? At the same time, the thing that I can't, I'm having trouble absorbing is how much it took to get to this moment, okay? Where people were willing to embrace some version of change. And I'm really feeling the pendulum thing. Like we have, so like I remember the 2024 election Donald Trump having a conversation with my friend Kat who's a producer of our WNYC she runs on the media and she was like I'm kind of calling around here sorry Kat she was like well this feels like a me too backlash election this Trump election right and so now I feel like we're on the other side of that we're having a backlash to the backlash And to me, that just means our pendulum keeps the swing in.

3:57Now, listen, the Senate elections mean that, you know, Democrats have a good they're going to be in the Senate for a while because those Senate seats like they last. These are like six year terms. Yeah. So I don't want to it's big things happened. Right. But I'm just feeling like I'm waiting. We've got to keep fighting, man. We've got to keep pressing the case because I don't feel like anything is settled here. Nothing is permanent here. I mean, you and I are old enough. I have PTSD. That's okay. You and I are old enough to remember, I believe, the 1992 Year of the Woman in Congress, which saw Patty Murray, Carol Mosley Braun, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer all get elected.

4:38Many people framed that as a backlash to the Anita Hill hearings. And then the thing that came as a backlash to the backlash was the 1994 midterm Republican Revolution. So none of this is to say that these things are not important and significant and big steps in exciting, interesting ways. Just that there's always context. There's always context. And there's always nothing. The story of America is a bunch of coalitions forming, breaking and reforming. Do you know what I mean? So we have this current coalition that has formed to make this election happen. We will see if that holds, how long that holds.

5:18That'll be interesting. I'm waiting for it. Yep. So let's start with a British guy. Yeah. So this is a story that we couldn't get onto the show this week. Let's talk about Russell Brand. So he was given a more than 10 year sentence for rape and sexual assault. What did you think when you saw that happen? OK, my first thought was literally like, can you remind me who Russell Brand is again? Like, I know who Russell Brand is, but like, why do we have to speak of him again? And I feel like we're talking about him here because he had become this like MAGA, MAHA influencer man. He'd been on this trajectory from I Am a Comic.

6:00Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Yes. And an actor. I married Katy Perry and divorced her by text. You will recall. Oof. Like there's just, there's a lot happening there. He's like, I think the way our producer Paige put it was like he had like a certain oily manness that was like always a part of his shtick. He was a quote unquote comedian and always kind of pushing the edge when it came to gender. Like so he had a whole political conversion. Like he had been kind of like anti-billionaire. Back in 2013, he was doing this like anti-billionaire climate changey kind of guy thing. And then COVID happened and he had a conversion.

6:41And, you know, everybody loves a conversion story. You know, if you read the free press, you know, we love a conversion story in this country. He had a conversion story to Magamaha, etc., etc. And it was in the wake of all that, that allegations that had been out there for a very long time were all of a sudden brought to the legal realm. These are, okay, so I'm just going to read a little bit of like what. Go for them. I mean, they're very dark. So let's do it. They're very dark. I mean, these are cases from as far back as like 2004 of him groping women. You know, and the judge in this case. So he's found guilty and the judge spoke in this case and just reamed him out.

7:23Was like, Russell Brand, you felt entitled to grab the breasts of this woman, this MTV worker in 2004. So like a long time ago, and now here we are more than 20 years later, like he's actually facing some kind of justice for this. I mean, there also was a real sexual assault here. And the sexual assault was for a woman who is very young, his youngest victim, who's he stored her name in his phone alongside the letter T for Tart. So you can just like see, yuck, yuck. And like, but this kind of fits with my other thing, which is like, what did it take to get him here, right? It took years, decades of movement to get us to this point where like now he's actually facing some kind of justice.

8:12And in that meantime, he became this person who was like a political guy who like stood in for the Trump administration. Just wild, wild. But yes, justice this week. That's it for now. And if you want to hear the rest of this episode, the way to do it is to subscribe to Slate Plus. Unlock Slate Plus now by going to slate.com forward slash what next plus.