Welcome to Dire Straights, a feminist podcast critiquing heterosexual love, sex, politics, and culture. Dire Straights is hosted by Amanda Montei and Tracy Clark-Flory, a couple of longtime journalists, essayists, critics, and authors.
Our show is a skewering of straight existence—and an exercise in imagining new possibilities. Each episode, we’ll unpack the most dire elements of hetero culture, like:
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
On the show, we explore 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.
This is a 100% scrappy, aging-millennial feminist operation coming to you at exactly the right time in history. We spend countless hours researching, writing, recording, editing, and producing each episode. We’re not financially dependent on corporate media or advertisers, and if we had normal day jobs, this podcast would probably get us fired from them.
Paid subscriptions are the best way to make our work possible.
Free subscribers get:
One full episode and one paywalled episode every month.
Paid subscribers get:
Two full episodes a month. No paywalls, ever.
Access to the Dire Straights community via chats and episode comment threads.
A growing list of fun extras, including advice and bonus discussions.
Founding subscribers 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.
If you’re interested in supporting us more deeply in the long term, please get in touch at direstraightspod@gmail.com.
Media is in collapse and feminist backlash is in full swing. Now, more than ever, if you want to see cool and crucial shit like this in the world, you have to vote with your dollars. Join the fun.
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