In Bed With The Right

2023 was a year rich in truly cursed discourses, In Bed With the Right has already analyzed many of them. In this episode — our first annual CURSTIES — your able hosts (with guest Michael Hobbes) analyze a few that have fallen through the cracks, and vote for the most cursed discourse of the year!

Founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Morehouse College in Atlanta remains one of the most elite HBCUs. As Prof. Saida Grundy argues, the all-male college also sheds light on gender conservatism, Black masculinity and the politics of respectability.

Together with their guest, historian Samuel Hueneke, Moira and Adrian delve into the history of the homocons. Gay (and sometimes, very sometimes, lesbian) conservatives. Toggling between the beginnings of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the gay marriage fracas of the early aughts and today's anti-trans panics, they ask: is this an invariant of queer public life? Or is there a history and tradition here?

Moira and Adrian continue their earlier discussion of the thought and influence of Friedrich Nietzsche — morality and the critique of metaphysics, antisemitism and anti-feminism.

Every few years, it seems, a set of academics and pundits discovers marriage as a panacea for a host of social ills — poverty, unhappiness, social cohesion, research assistants. Moira, Adrian and their guest, New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister, are less-than-excited to report it’s back and just as threadbare as ever. But this time — since this is the 2020s — with a dollop of “this is something the woke left doesn’t want us to talk about”. A long conversation about feminism, capitalism, anti-feminism, the neocons, data and vibes.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is one of the 19th century's most versatile, counterintuitive and ... well, misogynistic thinkers. Moira and Adrian talk about the legacy of his thought in later movements, both feminist and anti-feminist, and about a specific style of irony and contrarianism that Nietzsche pioneered and that seems to thrive in the internet age -- often enough in league with reactionary gender politics.

Often considered the ur-text of trans-exclusionary feminism, Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” came out in 1979, but rehearses a bunch of tropes you could just as well get off JK Rowling’s Twitter feed. In their conversation with historian Susan Stryker, Moira and Adrian explore the very specific milieu from which Raymond and her book emerged — a radical lesbian feminist theology deeply disappointed with the Catholic Church.

It's Moira and Adrian's version of a classic Cher-song: Perverts, Creeps and Priests! This episode takes deep dives into three texts that illuminate contemporary "crisis-of-masculinity"-debates: those that invoke the Bible, those that invoke science, and those that invoke only their own proudly flaunted neuroses. Where are these right-wing discourses about masculinity in agreement, where are they in conflict? Everyone agrees men are in crisis -- who gets to decide what exactly the crisis is?

Moira leads Adrian through the endless discourse about the "crisis of masculinity" -- where it comes from, what has motivated it in the past, and why we're having it again. Together, the two of them take a long tour de dudes: from Silicon Valley to Mike Pence's bedroom, from the Old West to Jordan Peterson's couch. What is the unique state of emergency that men find themselves in? Is it real? And why is it -- once again -- supposed to be feminism's fault?

Ever since the 1960s, the figure of the “fag hag” — a (mostly) straight woman hanging around gay men — has been a mainstay in and around queer spaces. As a woman who refused heterosexuality she aroused the ire of social conservatives, but also critiques from within the community. In this episode, Moira and Adrian investigate: why did conservatives hate the hag? How radical was this figure really? And is she still a thing?