Vice President Kamala Harris went on a media blitz this week, visiting CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “The Howard Stern Show”on SiriusXM radio, CBS’s “60 Minutes” and ABC’s “The View.” Harris unveiled a smattering of new policy proposals as well, including an idea to cover long-term care under Medicare, which would ease the burden on middle-aged women who often serve as the primary caretakers for aging parents.
It was Harris’ appearance on the hit podcast “Call Her Daddy” that garnered the most attention from her critics.
While those visits, with the exception of Stern’s, were fairly par-for-the-course appearances by a presidential candidate looking for low-pressure interviews designed to hit fairly low-information voters, it was Harris’ appearance on the hit podcast “Call Her Daddy,” followed by 5 million mostly Gen Z female listeners, that garnered the most attention from her critics.
In her interview with podcast host Alex Cooper, Harris talked in depth about women’s issues like abortion, a topic Cooper said in a pre-interview video that she felt most comfortable asking about. The interview was friendly, and at times, poignant, with Harris recounting how a high school friend’s story of sexual abuse once inspired her to seek the job as California's top prosecutor. At another point, the two talked about what young women should do when they are being sexually assaulted.
Some political commentators, however, felt that, with that appearance, Harris was showing a reluctance to move away from friendly ground during an election that has seen an extreme gender split among young voters. New York Post columnist Kirsten Fleming called the interview a “joke,” saying, “it is a safe spot for Harris — who has been showered with soft-focus media features and fawning takes on her cooking and clothing — to once again be treated like a glittering celebrity.”
Personally, I think we missed getting more substantive, in-depth policy questions that more experienced journalists at others would have asked. You can’t deny the reach of the "Call Her Daddy" audience, but someone more familiar with the finer points of abortion or sex discrimination policy could have perhaps extracted more detailed responses from Harris. But then again, I can’t fault Harris for going on a show so popular with young women.
I can’t fault Harris for going on a show so popular with young women.
According to a Harvard Institute of Politics poll, Harris leads overall among voters under 30, 61% to 30%, but a quick look at the gender split tells a more interesting story. Among young women, the poll shows Harris leads 70% to 23%, while she only holds a 17-point lead among young men. Now it’s true that every Democratic candidate has won young people as a whole in recent elections, but the gap has been narrowing. Biden won voters under 30 by only 24 points in 2020, according to Pew Research.
The Harvard poll numbers come as former President Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to tap into the youth “bro” vote.
Over the last few years, there have been countless outlets that have popped up designed to stoke the misogyny and racism of young white men, and a whole movement was born to appeal to young male gamers who are sick of “woke” content. Trump’s campaign has sought to ride on the coattails of this movement, with the candidate making appearances with popular young conservative streamers like Adin Ross and Félix (xQc) Lengyel. It’s significant that Trump still hasn’t won a majority of them despite making in-roads, despite the exponential growth of conservative media designed to appeal to the demographic.
Harris’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” can, in a way, be seen as the gendered opposite of Trump’s stream appearances. But the two gender-focused media ecosystems aren’t nearly the same. While conservative commentary outlets like The Daily Wire and streamers like Ross have ridden the anti-woke, white male-oriented zeitgeist to prominence, women’s media has largely fallen apart over the last decades.
Feminist giants like Bitch Media and The Toast have long since disappeared. Jezebel is a shell of its former self and under new ownership. We are now a long way away from the dramatic heights of the feminist blog era, which found its peak in the late aughts and early 2010s. Corporate greed, advertiser squeamishness and the tech bros controlling today’s algorithms have simply killed the feminist voice, or twisted it into a tool to spread transphobic hate.
That has left a void in women’s media to be filled with podcasts like “Call Her Daddy,” which got its start as the property of the consistently misogynist outlet Barstool Sports, run by sports bro turned conservative provocateur Dave Portnoy. Cooper and her podcast left Barstool in 2021, and she signed a $60 million deal with Spotify, making her the highest-paid female podcaster in the U.S. In August, she signed a $125 million deal with SirusXM.
There’s no feminist media counterbalance to the “bro-verse” that freaks out whenever a woman or a person of color appears in a popular piece of media.
Cooper identifies as a feminist, though some critics have questioned her girlboss, masculine-behavior-coded version of the term. But “feminist” has also become a pejorative to many people. Being a feminist is often seen as uncool, or not sexy. Even worse, many women (and some men) believe in the core tenets of feminism: bodily autonomy, equal rights under the law, etc., but still eschew the label.
And who can blame them when there’s no real feminist media counterbalance to the growing “bro-verse” that freaks out whenever a woman or a person of color appears in a popular piece of media.
That’s partly why I and a group of nine other experienced creatives are launching The Flytrap, a new feminist newsletter blog project that seeks to bring back the halcyon days of feminist media at a time when we need it most.
Trump winning this election will be disastrous for the bodily autonomy of women and trans people. Women across the globe continue to suffer under oppressive regimes, especially in Gaza and Afghanistan, and a Trump win will likely make those situations worse.
Like Trump has with young men, Harris should have more media options to reach young women. Her appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” then, shouldn’t be seen as something negative. It should be seen as proof of the important conversations we’d be having, and the more informed young women voters would be, if there were a more robust women’s media sphere.