Welcome to Dire Straights.
A feminist podcast about heterosexual love, sex, politics, and culture, hosted by Amanda Montei and Tracy Clark-Flory.
A “What I’m Listening To This Weekend” pick by New York Magazine
The Meteor says, “Finally, someone’s going to help the heteros heal themselves. Good luck, ladies!”
Episodes combine rigorous journalism, feminist scholarship, and personal stories to critique heteronormative politics and culture—and sketch out more hopeful visions of love, pleasure, relationships, and connection.
Here are a few of our most popular episodes:
What listeners are saying:
“Invest in this podcast now! The episodes are funny, spot on, fulfilling and the cultural intellectual discourse many of us are missing. As soon as I finish one episode, I am immediately on to the next. These are the conversations so many more people need to be having.”
“I started listening to one of the free episodes and about ten minutes in signed up to be paid because I didn’t want to miss a word. It was like drinking water when you hadn’t realized how thirty you were.”
“A smart and approachable way into very tricky topics. A great podcast if you like the word ‘unpack.’”
“Just so good.”
T & A
Dire Straights is produced, edited, and hosted by Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei. One of us is married to a man, the other is divorcing a man. Both of us are attempting to free ourselves from the suffocating constraints of heteronormativity.
We may or may not identify as dire straights (you’ll have to listen to find out).
Tracy has worked as a journalist for over 16 years. She was a senior staff writer at Jezebel and has written for mainstream magazines like ELLE, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, the Guardian, Wired, and others. For a long time, she covered the sex beat, writing about everything from feminist porn to the science of “squirting” to sex worker’s rights. She still gets emails about a long-ago article she wrote about micro penises (it’s mostly men asking her to evaluate their dicks).
Now she writes a weekly newsletter on feminism, sex, and pop culture.
“Intimate, challenging, and so very smart… a gift.”
—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad
She’s the author of the forthcoming memoir A Woman Like That: Finding Myself in My Mother’s Past and Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire, an NPR best book of the year, and one the San Francisco Chronicle called “luminous, funny, big-hearted... majestic.”
Amanda is a former Ms. Magazine intern turned author, critic, and public academic. Since receiving her MFA in writing in 2011, and her PhD in literature in 2019, her essays and criticism have appeared at the New York Times Magazine, ELLE, The Guardian, The Believer, Time, Slate, Vox, Literary Hub, Electric Lit, and others. Amanda gets DMs from women (and men!) thanking her for her work, while the conservative women’s mag Evie says her honest depictions of women’s subjectivity are “why so many people are fed up with the feminist nonsense.”
“Amanda Montei takes her place among the most rigorous feminist thinkers of our time… with an exacting critical eye balanced by striking prose and emotional depth.”
—Allie Rowbottom, author of Jell-O Girls and Aesthetica
She’s the author of the cult favorite Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, called “trenchant and revelatory” by The Boston Globe and “a rare feat” by The Cut, as well as an indie-press-published memoir about growing up in Los Angeles, titled Two Memoirs.
She writes the popular newsletter Mad Woman, where she covers books and culture with a feminist lens.
Why subscribe
We’re both independent writers and thinkers, and after many years lamenting the fall of feminist media, and media writ large, we’ve taken matters into our own hands. Dire Straights is a 100% scrappy, aging-millennial feminist operation coming to you at exactly the right time in history. We’re not financially dependent on corporate media or advertisers. If we had normal day jobs, this podcast would probably get us fired from them.
That means we are fully beholden to you, our dire listeners, and we like it that way.
Together, we bring to bear decades of experience in journalism, academia, literary and cultural criticism, political commentary, personal writing, and living life as committed feminists. We spend hours researching, writing, editing, producing, texting about, and publishing feminist conversations you really cannot find anywhere else.
Free subscribers get
One full episode plus one paywalled episode every month.
Paid subscribers get:
Two full episodes a month. No paywalls, ever.
A growing list of extra features, including advice, bonus discussions, and full access to all Dire Straights Live guest shows, including conversations with Koa Beck, Frankie de la Cretaz, and others.
Access to the Dire Straights community via chats and episode threads.
Want more? Us too!
Become a founding subscriber for $160 and you get:
Annual paid subscriptions to both Tracy’s newsletter TCF Emails AND Amanda’s newsletter Mad Woman, plus all paid Dire Straights perks. Basically, you’re saving $50 for going all in on us.
To support the hell out of independent feminist media in a time of journalistic collapse and feminist backlash.
