#85. Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy?

Cheers to all the women out there not aspiring to be humble

In case you missed it, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris went on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast on Sunday to talk about women’s rights.

Call Her Daddy is the #2 podcast in the U.S., and it’s the #1 most-listened to podcast for women. I don’t listen to every episode (since the pandemic stole my long commute, my consumption of podcasts in general has gone waaaaaay down), but I’m definitely a fan. (Would I say I’m part of the ‘Daddy Gang’ though? Unclear.)

Here’s a description of Call Her Daddy’s audience from The Atlantic:

“Call Her Daddy, which began as part of the notoriously fratty Barstool Sports network, has mellowed along with Cooper. Its listeners are neither anarchist feminists nor aspiring tradwives, but the great middle of American Gen Z straight(ish) women, who think sex before marriage is fun but also dream of settling down with Mr. Right. This group definitely leans Democrat, but Cooper’s Barstool connection means there will be conservatives listening too, as well as many women who might not vote at all. The Republicans are struggling with this group of voters, seeing them as more radical than they really are, while some evangelical leaders even hope the abortion bans will be a disincentive to premarital sex. But most young women intuitively understand that their sexual and economic freedom are linked: They make their own money, so they can date who they want.”

Of course, Alex is getting a lot of hate from the conservatives in her audience after this interview; many of whom are saying they will never listen again. This kind of reaction is not at all surprising in a political environment where both sides increasingly feel so fucking incensed by the other. If you’re a former sex podcaster turned major celebrity interviewer who almost never discusses politics, you can’t touch public policy with a 10 foot dildo without pissing people off.

Alex must have known that would happen, and decided to do the interview anyway. The nation’s #2 podcaster didn’t offer an official endorsement for the Vice President (strategic, no doubt), but it seems pretty clear to me based on passion alone who she’ll be voting for on November 5th.

The whole interview is decently interesting, but there were a few things that stood out to me the most. I’m sure you know where this is going, me being me:

Alex Cooper: “I want to ask you a question because, again, in speaking about women, there has been a very big fixation on biological children, step-children, women that have children vs. women that don’t have children – it’s like a huge point somehow of this entire election. I saw the governor of Arkansas said, ‘My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.’ How did that make you feel?”

Kamala Harris: “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who are, one – not aspiring to be humble. Two – a whole lot of women out here who have a whole lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life. And I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”

“Family comes in many forms, and I think that increasingly, you know, all of us understand that this isn’t the 1950s anymore. Families come in all shapes and forms, and they’re family nonetheless.”

I looooooove this line about women not necessarily aspiring to be humble – it feels like a perfect, punchy statement swirling in the embers of Brat summer. It also reflects on her own ambition, as potentially the very first female president of the United States, too – women who are “too humble” would simply never make it all the way to the oval office. As the first female vice president, she’s already halfway there.

Kamala Harris might win the presidency in part because she’s isn’t the picture of a very “traditional” woman, in the 1950s sense. (I don’t think Hillary Clinton necessarily was, either). She proudly said she owns a Glock on ‘60 Minutes’ recently, and told Oprah that anyone who breaks into her home is “getting shot.” This is clearly sending a message (mostly to men) that she can hang – that she’s strong enough for the job. (Dare I say… manly enough?)

But this is where things get interesting.

In this same part of the conversation with Alex above about family, Kamala Harris refers to her husband’s children as “her two children” (repeating, very clearly: “they are my children”), and herself as “Momala.”

There is only one former president of the U.S. who had no children at all, biological or adopted (shoutout to James K. Polk, who was president in the 1840s). One third of the first 15 U.S. presidents had no biological children; in fact, being childless used to be seen as a virtue for the office of the presidency in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But not anymore.

There are only five (out of 45 total) U.S presidents who never had any biological children. And there hasn’t been a (biologically) childless president in over 150 years – the last was James Buchanan in 1861 (but he had two adopted children).

(Warren G. Harding, who was president from 1921-1923, never had any children with his wife, but apparently had one with his mistress. Scandal!)

At first, I thought Kamala Harris might be trying to soften her image for the benefit of any center or conservative-lite women who listen to Call Her Daddy but aren’t drinking the Trump kool-aid. It seemed like she might be trying to persuade these women over to her side by making it very clear that she identifies as a mother – maybe trying to establish some common ground. And that might be part of it.

But it also may be the fact that she’s simply trying to fit in with the traditional image of a president in this country (and proving that she has a stake in the future, as per comments made by J.D. Vance). And that means having children.

She leans in to her role as a parent rather than away from it; she never directly addresses the fact that she doesn’t have any biological children herself, only that she does have children and it doesn’t matter one iota that they came to her through marriage. “My husband’s ex-wife is a friend of mine!” she exclaims. Which is great, by the way – it just sucks that, despite saying we’ve moved on from the 1950s (or the 1860s), we haven’t. Not really.

We live in a country where the number of childfree-by-choice people is increasing, but the reigning sentiment (mostly from the right) is still that childfree people are selfish, heartless, and hollow. And women who choose not to have any children cannot possibly be humble without children to make us that way, no – we’re all automatically ambitious, robotic assholes. Didn’t you know?

Alex even set the VP up to bitch-slap J.D. Vance with a childfree battle cry, but she didn’t take the bait:

Alex Cooper: “J.D. Vance called women who don’t have kids ‘childless cat ladies.’ What message do you think this sends to women who cannot conceive, or who just don’t want kids?”

Kamala Harris: “I just think it’s mean. And mean spirited. And I think that most Americans want leaders who understand that the measure of their strength is not based on who you beat down, the real measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”

Golf clap. What restraint. This was the right answer.

And I get it. I thought the Vice President felt relaxed and sharp throughout the episode, but just because she’s on a podcast that talks about sex and women’s rights doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand who she’s trying to potentially reach with this appearance. It isn’t me. (She already knows she has my vote).

After wiping the floor with Donald Trump at the debate last month, which probably left orange skid marks it was such a beating, I guess I was expecting something a little more ~spicy~ from this interview, considering how unfiltered Call Her Daddy is (or used to be). It was fine, if surprisingly tame, and I think her campaign knew exactly what they were doing with this appearance. Whether it moved the needle in any way remains to be seen.

“On The Run From Netflix Autoplay” by Evan Waite and River Clegg for The New Yorker

It must be election season, fam, because a vast majority of the pieces on my favorite media sites right now are grim! Enter this lovely little fluff piece that had me laughing out loud:

“My heart is hammering, my eyes darting, my thighs and back now biologically indistinguishable from the couch. I’m so alone. My wife got taken out by the “Beef” finale and went to bed. I glimpse my reflection in the screen and don’t recognize the viewer I’ve become.

I should have cancelled my subscription long ago, but I am a coward. Instead of facing my fear of not being entertained for literally a single second of my life, I ran and ran until I came to a depressing streamer on the outskirts of relevancy. That’s right: Paramount+. I thought that if I got off the grid and disappeared for a while into a second-rate service, the autoplay wouldn’t be able to find me. But it did, and it tried to get me to watch “Tulsa King,” whatever that is.”

“Personal Boundaries Versus Book Promotion” by Emma Gannon for

News & Reviews by Bri Lee

There is a lot of ‘me’ in the book I’m writing and I plan to own that, but this essay explores how the marketing expectations for women authors are uniquely different than men, and I never really thought about it this way:

“For many female authors, we are immediately assumed to have written about our personal lives; there’s a collective inability to believe that things are made up—that we haven’t just written down ‘our feelings’. I do believe this is definitely thought of as ‘less literary’.

Perhaps I’ve become so used to women being tied up with the themed marketing campaign of their books that it’s become the norm to assume novels are a thinly disguised memoir. Many writers choose to be more closely embroiled in the story they write and actively enjoy the outward-facing publicity, that’s all well and good for them. But I’m starting to resent the immediate assumptions.”

“The Unbranding of Abercrombie” by Chantal Fernandez for The Cut

Six years ago, something weird happened. I started shopping at Abercrombie again after maybe a decade not setting foot inside one of Abercrombie’s dimly lit stores, shopping inside a noxious cloud of cologne. This piece is all about how this once loved, then hated mall brand “pulled off the most exciting makeover in American retail:”

“Another shopper pulls out a long, satiny, olive green strapless style from the rack to show her mother. “My friend just got married and all of her bridesmaids wore this exact dress,” she says, reminding me of weddings in the 2010s, when so many dutiful friends wore similar matching silky dresses bulk-ordered from J.Crew. “Huh,” says the mom, moving on to another section of linen blazers and shorts.

“Huh” just about sums things up. The Abercrombie brand, once an easy cultural punching bag, now brings in more revenue than it did when it dominated teen culture in the aughts. (Last year, sales reached $2.2 billion.)

To get here, Abercrombie’s leaders did something deceptively simple. They killed almost everything the preppy, testosterone-driven brand once stood for — sex, privilege, wealth, good breeding. Today’s Abercrombie has replaced that fantasy with a humble practicality, offering a reasonably priced uniform for the TikTok-adjacent life where every outfit is familiar but unidentifiable, minimalist but just trendy enough. The result is less a rebranding than an unbranding, untethered from any particular aesthetic. And yet this iteration of Abercrombie says just as much about American style today as it did 20 years ago. Because without the logo, what exactly are we buying?”

This was the big statistic shared by Alex Cooper in her interview of Kamala Harris, so naturally I fact-checked it. According to the World Health Organization, it’s true.

Former First Lady Melania Trump came out as pro-choice in her newly released memoir, Melania, out this week. This isn’t a memoir I plan on reading, but the news is interesting nonetheless, especially so close to election day… 👀

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Wow I die for Emily Henry after this interview! (She read Animorphs as a kid? Say no more!) I made a half-hearted attempt to read Beach Read this summer, but now I’m definitely going to finish it.

Is it possible to be both humble and ambitious, though??? I’m from the midwest, so I’d like to think so... Did you listen to the interview on Call Her Daddy this week? What did you think? Are you as nervous for the election as I am?!