Know Your Enemy - Boys and Girls in America (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry)

Matt and Sam talk to screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry about families, gender, and the 2024 election.

Duration: 1h 23m
Broadcast on: 03 Oct 2024
Audio Format: other

This conversation is a little different. We thought that exploring the life of, say, Russell Kirk might not be the best way to spend the weeks before such a consequential election, so this is the first of a few episodes that won't be about a text or a life, but about the 2024 elections—hopefully digging a little deeper than most, and with a special concern for the themes and topics of Know Your Enemy. To help us get started, we had on a great friend of the podcast, playwright and screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry, to talk about a presidential campaign that "smacks of gender," from declining sperm counts to abortion to the lives of moms, dads, and children today. In short, it's an unguarded discussion of how we can better care for each other in a world that's making it harder and harder to do just that

Sources:

Dorothy Fortenberry, "The J.D. Vance sperm cups were probably a troll. But they got me thinking," Slate, Aug 23, 2024

— "'One of Those Serious Women': Andrea Dworkin's Radical Feminism," Commonweal, April 29, 2019

Mollie Wilson O'Reilly, "When Abortion Isn't Abortion," Commonweal, Mar 21, 2022

Listen again:

"Suburban Woman," Oct 29, 2019

"Living at the End of Our World" (w/ Daniel Sherrell), Sept 2, 2021

"'Succession,' 'Extrapolations,' & TV Writing Today" (w/ Will Arbery), May 4, 2023

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 101 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippen, your podcast co-host, and I'm not here as always with my great friend, Sam Adler Bell, but I do want to introduce this episode, our first pack in the saddle after celebrating our 100th. Thank you again to all the listeners who send in questions and all of our friends who helped us celebrate. This episode is something a little different. In the lead up to the election, we wanted to have some conversations just about, well, what we're talking about this campaign season, the issues, the themes that stand out to us, especially as they relate to the concerns of this podcast. And for the first one of these conversations, we wanted to have on our great friend, Dorothy Fortenberry, who's been on the podcast many times. Most of you will be familiar with her. But for those who aren't, Dorothy is a playwright and screenwriter. She's written for the Handmaid's Tale, the climate change show, extrapolations, as well as she writes for Slate. And she wrote for me often at Commonwealth was one of my favorite writers to work with. So we wanted to have on our friend, Dorothy, to talk about gender. There's so much going on with Vance Trump discourse about masculinity. Of course, this also is the first presidential election after Roe v. Wade has been overturned. And it's also an election in which so-called kitchen table issues, the price of eggs are in everyone's mind. And we know that who does the shopping, who picks up the kids, those kinds of distribution of labor in families often are very gendered. And Dorothy is just such a thoughtful and insightful and interesting person to talk about these matters with. In fact, it's a pretty unguarded conversation. So listen to it, charitably. And also, I think it's worth saying that in this kind of conversation, we also just take as a fact that the election is between Donald Trump and JD Vance on the one hand and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as the Democratic ticket. And that's unsatisfying in many ways, of course. But for these conversations, we're kind of saying, this is what we're stuck with. What sense can we make of it? And even how my Democrats do a little better? How might we increase the chances that Donald Trump does not retake power in November? It was a very fun conversation to have and we're very grateful that Dorothy gave us so much for time and insights. Well, now for some housekeeping items. As always, we're grateful for our partners at Descent. Just a reminder, we are being sued once again by the Young America's Foundation. Descent is a part of that lawsuit. So we're especially grateful for their support. One thing they do for the podcast is if you subscribe to Know Your Enemy at $10 a month, you can have access to all of our bonus episodes and a free digital subscription to Descent.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk to screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry about families, gender, and the 2024 election.