I’ve been obsessed with the mind of Anne Helen Peterson for probably close to a decade now. I devoured everything she wrote during her time at Buzzfeed, and then followed her after to Substack. Talking with Anne Helen over the years, about her big ideas, has been a consistent high point of my career. She was also my very first solo book interview as a host, which means I’ll always be forever grateful. 

Something Anne Helen wrote about on her Substack a few weeks ago hit me so hard I knew I had to have her on my KCRW show to talk it out, particularly through the lens of pop culture. Especially TV and film. 

It’s this idea of “feminist exhaustion" and “feminist dystopia.” For Anne Helen, feminist exhaustion means two things. One: the term “feminism” has been so overused that it’s lost its meaning. And two: a lot of women who fought for a very long time for feminist ideals are increasingly disillusioned, because it feels like, on the whole, they are losing ground. Feminist exhaustion is what happens when it feels like feminism has failed.

As soon as I read the essay, I started thinking – where have we seen this in popular culture? How do you portray feminist EXHAUSTION, and do audiences even want to see that? Below is a version of our chat, edited for clarity and brevity. And you can find our episode of The Sam Sanders Show on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.  

Before the internet tore us all apart and streaming effed up our viewing schedule and habits, it felt like we had a version on TV of a certain kind of performative feminism 10 to 15 years ago. And now, when I think about you talking about this idea of feminist exhaustion that we're going through as a country, I don't know if I see it on screen.

Something like Scandal or Girls — there's so many shows that, to me, they are actually feminist dystopias. They are people living out this life that are ostensibly feminist. Like, “I have it all. I'm successful. I am juggling marriage and career – and everything sucks.”

Kerry Washington doesn't get the president, she's just cheating with him. All the girls in Girls are a mess…

Total mess! And not just because they're in their 20s. Dating and sex and all of these things are gross and bad.

They don't even like each other.

I say this in the piece: Every Nicole Kidman vehicle in the last 10 years, it's a feminist dystopia, because it's like, “Oh, you're so successful! You’re so rich—

“You should be happy. You've got the man, you've got the kids, the house, the job, everything.” And lo and behold, someone gets murdered.

Just abject misery. And I think that that speaks to that feminist exhaustion. It's not like a one-to-one of, “Look at this feminist! She's so tired!” It's more this twin fascination or magnetism to shows like that that  represent, in a way that seems resonant, just how miserable contemporary have-it-allness actually is. Then this kind of dual magnetism to these shows that are like, ostensibly trad-wifey, something like Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives – even though all those women actually work all the time, right? 

Yeah, they work more than their husbands do! I realize that anytime that I've seen something that felt like the perfect execution of aspirational feminists or feminism, it was actually kind of a lie. And so with all of this media… is it all just telling us over and over and over again, “There is no perfect attainment of these feminist ideals. There never was. You were too hopeful?”

I think at least under American society, under our current iteration of capitalism – no, we can't do it. Without subsidized childcare, without elder care… We need women in the workplace. We acknowledge this as like, “This is how our society works.” But also, “We should not make it easy for any woman.” And this is this tension between these foundational conservative ideals – all the way back to the founding of the country and Puritanism – but also with like, the theocracy that is trying to take hold of the government, like many of the rejections of any sort of plan for universal childcare, or for any care network, or thinking of care as infrastructure. It’s coming from these politicians who don't want to make it easier for people to be outside of the home, who still want us to live in this fantasy space: Every home has one adult who stays home with the children. Even though that's not the reality. But I think people want to keep that as this ideal, and so long as we're still working towards that, it's always going to be broken.

What I'm getting from this is that, when you think about it long and hard enough, there aren't many portrayals on screen that get at fully what it's like to be a real woman In the real world and the issues that real women deal with. I think about a show like And Just Like That — which many women in my life love, gay men too — but they'll tell you: It's a farce. It's absurd. It makes no sense, and it's not real. Why don't we have more real portrayals of the challenges that you're speaking of when it comes to being a woman in this world? I just don't see that on screen. 

I [also] don't think we see real portrayals of what it's like to be a man and negotiating contemporary masculinity on screen, right? 

Yeah. Most men's favorite person on a screen is an action hero, which is just crazy…

Right now, so much television, so much media that is fictional, is really leaning into genre in ways that allow it to not have to grapple with as many contemporary realities. Whether that's a thriller, or a mystery, or a historical romance – I like all of these shows, I like these movies, but they're not plumbing the depths of contemporary life exactly. And I think this escapist desire has so much to do with our contemporary politics and COVID and all of that together. If you're making a movie that is going to be big enough to hit film screens, you have to make it into this huge, legible, bombastic [thing], not connected to reality in any way. What comes to mind is something like Past Lives. Past Lives is a quiet movie that's just like: What happens when you are happily married, and then there's this guy that you used to be close with, and now he's in your life for a little bit again?

I think that movie was saying to everybody, like, “No marriage will make you actually happy, because you'll always think of another one that got away.”

Yes, you have to choose your choice, right? She chooses her choice. And it's not that she's desperately unhappy with him. It's just that there are these other lives that could have existed.

Does reality TV in some ways get at those challenges better than scripted? I don't watch all of Love Island because that is too many episodes, but there are these moments that flash up in that show where you see a woman on the show have to deal with a man being a bonehead, and she *deals* with it. 

I don't think that it's meant to be a representation so much. To me, the reality television narratives really remind me of how women have historically used gossip magazines and romance novels: It's a way to work through concepts from your own life in a slightly deferred way, right? It's distance… So you can be like: “Well, that is totally ridiculous that these women feel like they have to pray before they get their Botox on Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives.” But also, “Here is me thinking through my thoughts about how I balance my own personal code of morality with this desire, these ideals of femininity. What does my code of morals or religion or societal belief say about what a woman should look like? How do I think about that, or how do I think about how women should be treated if they've been through abusive situations?” There's just all sorts of things that come up in reality television. You might have those issues happening in your own life, but might not have a way or an opportunity to talk about them or to think about them specifically. It's a way to think about these things that is less intimate and scary than thinking about it in your own life.

What is a show that you would make that gets at some of these big issues we've discussed that American women are grappling with — lack of a safety net, untenable standards of excellence, spouses who don't show up the way that they should?

We're at this really fascinating moment [where] it feels like there's no monoculture, right? And part of that is the fracturing of streaming services. But I also think that people are watching and consuming in different ways across media. I'm spending far less time watching TV, but then I'm listening to [and watching] so many more podcasts. I have them on in the background while I'm cooking. I pull up the podcast on YouTube and it's just there. The new Amy Poehler podcast – that, to me, is a narrative of a woman who is very publicly negotiating what it's like to be someone who has been through the ringer when it comes to work. Had a very public marriage and divorce. How do you think about creativity as you age? How do you think about what work means to you and what body image means to you? All of those things are being negotiated on her podcast as this ongoing narrative, in a way that's really interesting to me.

And she's getting at what you're talking about: this idea of asking those big life questions in ways that scripted television and movies just don't. She, by doing that, is able to get someone like Dakota Johnson to open up.

And it's also a bit of show, and it's a bit of tell. So some of it is the question she's actually asking people, and then part of it is in the show itself. She has interviewed so many people already. The show has only been happening for a couple of months, but already has shown how much intimacy she has with men and with women. She has friends, she has good coworkers, she shows what it's like to be a collaborator, and that to me, as a feminist demonstration – showing what it's like to figure out all this stuff, like, how to make work. Especially as a woman, she's just barely over 50: What's your second act? What does that look like? These new forms of media, where these narratives are percolating, [it’s] not in mainstream television or film.

I don't think I can ever fully be a feminist, because I can never know what it's like to be a woman. But when I think of what would be the truest portrayal of the challenges of womanhood, motherhood, career, life, etc. – I would set a reality show in a Black church, because these days, most Black churches are actually run by women and not by men, and even if there is a male pastor as a figurehead, the women keep that church running, and all of them also have jobs, and a lot of them have kids, and a lot of them are not having the “Can I have it all?” conversation. They're having the: “This needs to get done” conversation. 

Would you do it in San Antonio [where you’re from]? Would you do it somewhere else? 

I think San Antonio is an incredibly interesting city to do it in, because it has been majority-minority for a long time. You walk outside of your door in San Antonio and you realize it's not central casting.

It's intersectional by default. So you'd be dealing with all of these things by default. And also, the very real political pressures of being in a state like Texas where so many of these political realities come to bear.

I have been in Southern California now for 10 years, and it's really interesting to me the way that the liberals and the conservatives avoid each other at all costs. And in Texas, in a place like San Antonio, you just usually don't ask; you just go about your day.

This actually reminds me that the TV show that I think best represented everything that we're talking about here with women, but also what it's like to live in America at a particular moment in time, is Friday Night Lights. Another Texas show. And everything Connie Britton was going through on that show is like: How do you negotiate a position of power when everyone actually thinks your husband is the boss of everything? How are you a mother? How are you tender? How are you a wife? What have you given up for your husband's career? What are you not giving up for your husband's career? It was shot in Austin. When something's actually shot in the place that it's supposed to be, it just feels different.

No one's watching anything together anymore, except like the Super Bowl and maybe Love Island, and you can feel like you're ingesting enough content without having to watch what everyone else is watching. Is that maybe better for some of these feminist ideals that we're speaking of, no longer having monoculture pressure?

I admire the argument. I would write a good college paper about it. But I also think it makes it so that it's difficult for us to have any conversation. I was able to make the argument that I did to my newsletter readers because I was pulling in all of these threads that they had been reading in my newsletter over the course of many years, and maybe they hadn't read every piece, but they knew this was something that I've talked about a lot. It's like we had been doing the reading over the last few years. And if you're reading me, then there's a lot of other newsletter readers who I'm linking to all the time, who you're probably reading that stuff too. We were in the same place to have this conversation. But I do think it's much harder to have these larger conversations. Now feminism really rallies around an issue. We're trying to fight this law, or owning it as an identity, not as something that you do. Second wave feminism, 1960s, 1970s, the thing that you did is you went to consciousness-raising groups… with other women and you just talked about things, right? You had this discursive space that wasn't a place that was broadcast. What you said wasn't there to be resurfaced in two years and embarrass you. It was just a place where you learned stuff. “This is how the patriarchy works,” basic stuff. But again, you're doing this every week, you are learning every week. And it's a place that you go and a posture that you embody, not just a T-shirt that you wear.

In all of your coverage of feminism and how it manifests in the culture, do you feel hope when you look at what women of Gen Z or Gen Alpha are dealing with, talking about going through?

I do feel like there's this real understanding that, whatever we're doing, if it's not intersectional in every meaning of the word, then it's bullshit. That wasn't around when I was in my 20s, right? It was: Diversity is good, but also like we're past racism, you know? 

I'm hopeful. But at the same time, I just think that conditions are bad, right? Let's say you're doing a six hour drive on a combination of treacherous roads and mountain passes and freeways… When the conditions are bad, that drive is always going to be really, really arduous, and a lot of people aren't going to do it. I hope that some of our exhaustion doesn't ward younger generations off, instead [I hope it] inspires them and says: These people, they lost the plot. Let's find a new one, and then they can join us.

If we are thinking about this idea of feminist exhaustion, I think we've kind of landed the plane by saying it might not be in a TV show or a movie, but there's probably a podcaster of a certain age who feels real enough to just talk about it. 

It's not Call Her Daddy. And it's not going to be necessarily where you think it's going to be. It might also be in your own friendships. Something that I think we've ceased doing is looking in the world around us. Sometimes I see my own visions of feminism, like an older lady that lives on the island, you know what I mean? Your visions can be elsewhere. 

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