Constance Grady
Appearances
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
My theory is that this was like the bro election and the bros voted and won.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
I mean, yeah, you're bro-adjacent. I'm specifically talking about like young men, I would say like 18 to mid-30s maybe. Bruh. Bruh.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
But yeah, when we talk about the bro vote, what we're talking about is like the coalition of kind of Gen Z male voters who have been leaning to the right in ways that kind of deviate from what we would think of as, you know, the kind of straightforwardly liberal youth vote. Right.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many different, like, reasons for it. I mean, part of the reason, yeah, like, in the 2000s, like, being, like, to the left was, like, what the cool kids did.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
You know, it was, like, anti-Bush and, like, anti-Iraq war.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
So right now, all we have are exit polls. We won't know, like, for sure things for another couple weeks. But it is showing that, you know, 18 to 29-year-old men are, like, favored Trump 49%. And 18 to 29-year-old women favored Harris by 24 points. So that's, like, a huge gap between what young men are voting for and what young women are voting for. And...
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
I think what we're seeing is a lot of young men reacting to, you know, the enormous strides that women have made in the last 50 years. You know, like more women out earn men, more women are getting college degrees. You know, these men sometimes feel very left behind. That's what they say. They feel, you know, Me Too was an overreach.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
They want to feel like they are in control of their lives, and I think the Trump campaign really spoke to those grievances.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
The Trump campaign really kind of threw out the playbook that a typical presidential campaign would do, which is like, you know, do every like cable news interview and do interviews with newspapers and things. He went straight to where people are paying attention. He did interviews that weren't even political at all.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
You know, like we have influencers who are just really popular with young men often because, you know, they cover gaming or sports or whatever. And those people interviewed him in this way that can reach the sort of like the nonpolitical bro vote.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
I mean, isn't that kind of his strategy even has like rallies? Like he just kind of gets up there and rambles. And I think like, you know, that's that's really quality entertainment, according to a lot of people. So we had Trump on Theo Vaughn.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Theo Vaughn is a comedian. He was on an MTV reality show, and now he just kind of like does this podcast and is really big on TikTok. Again, not a particularly political guy, just kind of talks about comedy. We have Aiden Ross, who is a live streamer and influencer.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
In 2023, one of his biggest hits is that he famously looked up the word fascism and could not literally read a single line of it because he can't read.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
prankster, boxer, kind of fighter influencers, and the Nelk Boys, who are kind of of the same ilk, both of them have been accused of crypto scams. So it's a real school of Athens when it comes to these people. And when Trump won, they shouted a lot of them out.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
It was pretty explicitly like this was a strategy to reach young male voters who typically wouldn't really care about politics, but they're listening to these shows.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
I mean, I think in the future, like candidates will have to go straight to the source. And by that, I mean, like professional influencers rather than going to mainstream media, because, you know. influencers now wield so much attention. There are so many of them. And so many of us are getting our news in these very kind of nichified spaces.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Like not everybody is pulling up a copy of the New York Times in the morning. We all have our subsects that we read, our influencers that we watch, our algorithms are all personalized to us. And so in order to reach a lot of people, you have to kind of go to all these different places where people are getting their news. And that landscape has shifted so much since 2016.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
And I think any politician that wants to reach a large number of people should learn from that.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Yeah, I think I think the kind of gender war thing that we're seeing in this election and also increasingly online is just it says so much about where we're at right now. And and the fact that so many women voted for Trump, too, should also say a lot because I report on Internet culture. And what I've seen from content targeting young women is a similar shift to the right.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
And it looks very different from these kind of bro influencers that we were talking about. But it kind of leads you to the same place where, you know, you have these trad wife influencers who are just making, you know, domesticity look very beautiful and ideal.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
And the truth is, there is no higher calling than being a wife and a mother for a woman. And it's sort of like an escape from, you know, the horrible economy and everything else that's, you know, bad about life right now. You have dating content that's like, you know, just use men for their money and all you are are your looks and that's how you can bag a rich man and be set for life.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
And, you know, all of these things, you know, imply that We should just lean more heavily into our gender roles, like men should be the head of the household and women are there to look pretty and take care of the home. And that's exactly what men are also getting. And so when you have a lot of, you know, people both seeking out this content and being served it, you got to shift to the right.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of them. And It's an attempt to put women back in their place to this imagined past where women weren't out here saying, we want the right to our bodies and the right to divorce and the right to speak up against assault.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
Yeah, and I think the Harris campaign kind of sort of implicitly acknowledged that in the sense that, like, there was really no emphasis on her being, you know, what could have been the first female president because, you know, this is what the Clinton campaign did and that failed.
Today, Explained
The Bro Brogan presidency
They were also seeing the same shifts that are playing out online where people are being turned off a bit by identity politics and over-association with gender and instead being, you know, driven to this content that just reinforces these kind of regressive gender stereotypes.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
This is something that I spent most of my life not thinking about at all. I'm pretty normie when it comes to clothes. I'm just like, I will wear my jeans and a T-shirt, tell me what width the jeans are supposed to be, and I am good to go. After lockdown, once I was vaccinated and starting to get out into the world again, I felt like none of my clothes felt right for me anymore.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
You know, I had all of these like business casual dresses and leftover skinny jeans and I just looked at them and I was like, this doesn't seem quite right anymore. Now that I've had this year of not dressing for other people, I've changed who I am and my clothes haven't changed in a way that will keep up with that. And it was so weird to try to think about
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
getting a whole year's worth of changes done to my wardrobe in one fell swoop that I ended up feeling like maybe it was time to be more intentional and figure out what I wanted from my clothes. But when I thought about it, I had all these really contradictory desires. You know, I wanted to look thin and also not care about looking thin.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
I wanted to buy really high quality things and not spend all that much money. I had a lot of desires from my clothes that realistically I didn't think could actually be met by them.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Well, once I had decided that this was something I was going to try to be more intentional about, I kept poking through the personal style universe. And that's when I fell way down the David Kibbe rabbit hole.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
He's this personal stylist who was very big in the 80s and kind of had a renaissance on social media.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Find your kibbe body type in two minutes. We'll start with bone structure. Let's talk about Kibbe's style IDs and how they relate to the costumes of Ever After. And getting into his work is like getting into astrology. Like you have to learn this really esoteric system with all these weird rules.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
It's all about the shapes that fabric makes when it's draped over your body and figuring out how to buy clothes that will suit those shapes best and then what kind of style vibe that leads to. Which is very fun for a certain type of personality, which includes me, but does also, I think, get a little exhausting and also leads to fixating on your body in maybe kind of weird ways.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
I did watch What Not to Wear religiously. And I think a big part of the appeal was that it was telling you, yeah, there are very strict clothing rules. Here's what they are. And if you follow them, you'll look great. And if you don't follow them, you'll look like an idiot and we'll all make fun of you on hidden cameras. Right?
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
It really teaches you that there's a correct way to wear your sensible wrap dress and your blazer. And we are going to walk you through what that is.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Yeah, this is also something where you and I working in digital media is a blessing and a curse for us because I have definitely taken meetings with people who are barefoot at our mutual office. I talked to a bunch of fashion experts about this. I was so fascinated by this question. In part because Clinton and Stacey have swung the other way too, right?
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
They're reuniting for a new show and it's called Wear Whatever the F You Want.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
This is a journey we're like all taking as a culture. So I talked to a bunch of fashion experts about this and I have three reasons for this swing. One that is cultural, one that is economic, and one that is more material. So culturally, over the past 10, 15 years, there's been a lot more space on the internet for the movements of body positivity, body neutrality, and fat acceptance.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
I used to be self-conscious about my legs, but I've recently realized it's none of my business what people think I look like.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Do you know what? I've just accepted I'm a big girl. All of which I think has kind of helped make space for people to think, OK, maybe the point of clothes isn't always to make me look as thin as they possibly can. You know, maybe this can be a place for more joyful self-expression that doesn't involve trying to conform to a very specific standard of beauty. Economically,
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
As fast fashion has taken off, the trend cycle has sped up so much that it is actually kind of impossible now to keep pace with trends the way you might have been able to 10 or 20 years before. So the idea of finding your personal style becomes really attractive in that situation because it's a way of releasing yourself from the trend cycle and from the textile waste that goes along with it.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
The final reason I have is more materials-based. This is one that comes from Kibbe himself, who I cannot escape, which is that around the 1980s, we started to put a lot more elastic in clothing than we used to before. And this has fundamentally changed the way fabric looks on our bodies.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
So what Kibbe says is that with elastic in our clothing, the silhouette stops being about the externally imposed shape of the clothes on our bodies and starts being about the way our bodies are shaping the clothes we wear.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
And that means that there's suddenly this huge possibility of what clothes can look like on us that has totally shifted the way that we can even let ourselves think about fashion.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
I don't really know that I found my personal style. I learned a lot about the kinds of shapes and colors and fabrics that I like. I think the main thing that I figured out was what fantasy the idea of finding your personal style is serving. For me, I think that fantasy is the idea of having some control over your individuality.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Because fashion is a space where the ways in which we lack control over our lives become really clear in such an intimate way. You know, there are all these... billionaires deciding what you should wear. There are all these marketers deciding how you should feel about your one human body.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
There are all these people who will see you every day and make their assumptions about you based on how you look. So I think when we talk about finding our personal style, we're talking about this kind of dream of finding ways to steal control away from those people and back towards ourselves.
Today, Explained
Why is personal style so hard?
Yeah, how about pants that fit? This is a journey we're, like, all taking as a culture.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Weinstein is currently facing retrial in New York State. He was found guilty of rape and sexual assault here in 2020. But last year, the verdict was overturned because of a procedural issue.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
In the 2020 trial, the judge allowed prosecutors to present testimony from women who had accused Weinstein of sexual assault but who weren't pressing charges against him in that trial.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So at the time, the argument was that their testimony would establish a pattern of behavior from Weinstein. But in the appeal last year, the judge was like, if you don't have enough evidence to actually charge him with the specific crimes that these women say he committed, then you really just shouldn't be presenting testimony about it at all.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So now the whole trial has been invalidated and they're doing it over again without that corroborating testimony.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
In a lot of ways, she is making a very similar argument to the one his lawyers are making.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
They both involve a lot of just like the most spurious bad faith possible interpretations of everything that the women accusing Weinstein have done.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Candace Owens has basically two central arguments in Weinstein's defense. The first one is 130 women.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
I do want to quickly name. She has said that he was convicted on the basis of three women's stories. That's not correct. He was convicted on the basis of three women's stories in New York and five stories in L.A. So that's eight women's total. For most people, that would be a lot. But it is true that for Weinstein, that's only about 10 percent of his accusers who made it to the courtroom.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She is making a lot out of the fact that a lot of the women who have accused Weinstein stayed in contact with him after their alleged attacks. How does someone get raped over five years? Some of them sent him friendly or affectionate messages, or they asked for professional favors. So Candace Owens' take is that this proves that they were being what she calls sugar babies.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
And that they were they had a quid pro quo set up of asking for professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
He said that he used to believe that Weinstein was guilty and that Candace Owens has convinced him otherwise.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She has two big demographics that are compelled by her story. And they're actually kind of similar to Joe Rogan's audience, but maybe more feminine leaning. So she has a lot of people who identify as sort of quote unquote free thinkers who don't like the narratives that are offered by the media and are maybe susceptible to some conspiratorial thinking.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She's also got an audience of young women who are not particularly engaged with politics and are kind of just there for her takes on celebrities.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Yeah, so Weinstein actually said that he originally tried to dissuade her from getting involved because of her history of anti-Semitism.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
But he has said that since then, after having a lot of conversations with her, he has changed his mind and he thinks that she's a star.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
This is something that I think we see happen a fair amount. Susan Faludi is a feminist scholar who first identified this phenomenon. She talks about it in her book, Backlash, which came out in the early 90s.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Essentially, every time that in American culture it looks as though women are making some sort of social or political progress, that's very rapidly followed by a period of intense backlash where people announce that this movement has gone too far, it's overreached, we have to roll it back and go back to a time when things are more sensible.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
One of the things that Susan Faludi says that I think is important to note here is that It really doesn't matter whether the feminist movement actually made any gains in this moment of apparent overreach. It's just that people think that things are changing. So in the MeToo movement, there weren't any real legislative changes. There were a few high-profile arrests.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
There were a lot of think pieces. But it's hard to say that there was a big material shift in how American culture works. But the perception that there might have been is enough to drive this kind of backlash.
Today, Explained
Snow White and the Seven Controversies
There is a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird. Weird. So we didn't do that this time. She told Entertainment Weekly that the original film was extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power.