Welcome to Dire Straights.
We are not OK.
Dire Straights is a feminist podcast about heterosexual love, sex, politics, and culture. In each episode, we pick apart a new element of straight culture.
Some examples:
Couples therapy
Dating apps
Sex strikes
Monogamy
Age-gap romances
Cries of “but what about men?”
The orgasm gap
Antifeminist “feminism”
Sex positivity™
The manosphere
Decentering men
Pro-natalism
“Dark feminine” influencers
Our pod explores sex and dating, alongside marriage, divorce, and the relentlessly unequal realm of hetero parenting and the nuclear family. We also consider celebrities and politicians as case studies. Tech bros, tradwives, and TERFs are also up for examination.
Along the way, we turn to beloved feminist scholarship, call on radical contemporary thinkers, and share our own personal stories, as we try to sketch out more hopeful visions of love, sex, relationships, and romance.
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 public academic, critic, and author. Her work has since 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 some men) thanking her for her work on the politics of motherhood and marriage— but the conservative women’s mag Evie says her honest depictions of motherhood and women’s subjectivity are “why so many people are fed up with the feminist nonsense.”
“Montei is leading the charge in a new wave of feminism—centering care as a fundamental value but challenging the notions that women have to do it all.”
—Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play
Most recently, 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. She also writes the popular newsletter Mad Woman, where she covers books, culture, and craft 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 and bonus discussions.
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
AND Amanda’s newsletter , 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.
