The 2020 election is looming ever closer—and in this special episode of Popaganda, host Carmen Rios talks to some of the rabble-rousers leading the fight for a feminist agenda on Capitol Hill and political journalist Prachi Gupta about The Squad’s persistent leadership on the issues that matter to the movement, and what it will take to continue empowering women in politics to shake up the system.
A’shanti Gholar from EMERGE America and Erin Vilardi of VoteRunLead talk to Carmen about why gender matters in policy-making—and what changed in 2018 that will shape the long-standing movement for parity in politics. Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, opens up about the untold story she’s determined to scream from the halls of power: one about the power, and urgency, of women of color leadership in politics. Jennifer Mandelblatt, founder of PLATFORM, talks about how women can own their political power—off the ballot and beyond election day. And Gupta, political reporter for Cosmopolitan and author of AOC: Fighter, Phenom, Changemaker, dissects the inspirational and viral power of The Squad, and reflects on the reverberations they’re already having on the scene.
Carmen knows the power of women in politics: she’s been covering the subject for the last decade. But in this episode, she digs even deeper and challenges listeners to imagine what an entirely new political system would look like. That system, she argues, has enough seats at the table for all of us, and makes space to tackle every issue we care about. Determined to figure out what it would take to build it, she susses out next steps and urges everyone to take action. (It goes without saying, of course, that she also assumes that next November, you’ll turn out.)
SHOUT-OUTS
Let’s start with the basics: We’re assuming you wanna know more about all of these trailblazers.
-
Do not pass go until you have registered to vote.
- If you’re interested in running for office, register today to be part of EMERGE and VoteRunLead. If you want to help fight for fierce women of color, join the She the People community. And stay active all day, every day, no matter when polls are open, by getting involved with Platform.
- Click here to buy Prachi’s book about AOC. You can also find her political pieces from 2016 and 2018 at Cosmo.
- The Center for American Women and Politics is the perfect one-stop shop for anyone interested in data and analysis on women running for office at every level. Click here to check out their 2018 numbers specifically, made pretty with Politico.
- Carmen has been covering gender and politics for the last decade for various publications. If you’re interested in learning more about women in politics, you might want to get lost in her Rebel Girls column for Autostraddle; if you’re interested in reading reports from the 2016 and 2018 elections, comb her archives with Ms. (Carmen also previously interviewed Erin Vilardi for Ms. on Facebook Live. Click here to watch the full conversation.)
- Also, Carmen once had an entire political podcast dedicated to this shit. Click here to listen to old episodes of THE BOSSY SHOW, the political talk show she co-hosted with Jill Gutowitz. (You may remember Jill as the Spice Girls Stan from Carmen’s very first episode of this podcast!)
Photo via Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Subscribe to Bitch’s podcasts on iTunes, Soundcloud, or the Stitcher mobile app.
Subscribe to Bitch’s podcasts through our audio RSS feed.
A’SHANTI: They know that the things that they say, that they do, even how they wear their hair, their nail color is really going to be impacting this next generation of women that they can see Ayanna Pressley wear her hair in Senegalese twists. That they can Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her red lips and Ilhan with her black nail polish and say, “I look like a congresswoman.” They’re challenging those norms that you can still be authentically you and serve in elected office. And I think back then, it was still, you gotta wear your suit, you gotta have your dress on with your stockings. And for them, they’re like, no, you are enough. And I think that’s fabulous.
CARMEN: They’re not about to kowtow to anybody or any party.
AIMEE: AOC, we look at Deb Haaland, we look at Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota. We should also look at Veronica Escobar, the congresswoman from Texas. We should look at Lauren Underwood, the congresswoman from Illinois. All these women are in their first term. Not a single one got support from the Democratic party in their primary, not one! Not Lauren Underwood, who was in a flip district, who had to defeat five white dudes to win. Not Deb Haaland who was from New Mexico, which is right now a purple state. Not AOC who was in a district that was decidedly Democratic, but some, you know, an old, kind of out-of-touch guy was representing the district. Each one of those women had to organize differently and bring in new voters in order to win in the primary. So, what we know is The Squad isn’t dependent on the same monied interest. So, they came out, more than any other particular group of leaders, swinging clear, showing a moral example and showing such courage that they were the first ones to call for impeachment. They were the ones who were calling for Green New Deal and other things that are the game changers right now. They’re giving the Democratic party relevance in an age where a lot of people are like, what are you doing?!
CARMEN: [Chuckles.]
AIMEE: So, I’m really, really proud. I want them to be successful. And so, that’s why I’m organizing a million women of color nationally. We need our leaders to be successful, but we also need to identify more like them. If we think that those are the only women [laughs] in the country who are willing to lead, there’s a lot more.
CARMEN: And they’re damn proud of it.
ERIN: These are representatives and have lived experiences in the U.S. that have yet to be in public office, as four women of color, as first-generation and immigrant women, as Black women that have just not simply had enough of them. So, their visibility around social media, their sort of inhibitions when it comes to being public, right? Like they’re like, yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s do it. They call out journalists. They really live and operate in their values. And while I don’t think that some of these other new women that have come in are any different, I just think they have a real, I hate to say the word “savvy,” but a real savvy about how to do it. Like they’re smart. They know what they’re doing. They know how to use all the tools in their toolbox.
CARMEN: And the best part? They’re not the only ones. The Squad is a symbol for an entire generation of women in politics who are determined to fix structural problems nobody else has cared to acknowledge, even if it means playing the game from inside of an institution that wasn’t built for them.
AIMEE: The Squad isn’t four women in Congress in their first term. The Squad is tens of millions of us and generations of blood, sweat, and tears to have representation.
A’SHANTI: I love the fact that they say everyone is a part of The Squad. I think that for them, they really take to heart what they are representing. And that because they are in a new time, they have more eyes on them, and they have a much wider reach, particularly for young women.
[recorded clip of a press conference]
AYANNA: Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world. And that is the work that we wanna get back to. And given the size of this squad and this great nation, we cannot, we will not, be silenced.
A’SHANTI: Women know that there is way too much at stake, period. And especially with this administration, this president, we’re just seeing so much damage being done on a daily basis. We know that we can’t keep quiet, and we have to say loud. And we have to let other people know what is happening and ask them to join us and mobilize. We can’t keep quiet. And I think The Squad knows that. Every single woman who has stepped up to run for office since 2016 knows that, win or lose, that we really have to be the leaders.
So many people feel that their elected officials have failed them. A lot of those elected officials are the ones who have said, “Well, I can’t take a bold position. I don’t wanna do that.” And that’s why they’re seeing a lot of challengers. And I do definitely believe voters are paying attention. They’re no longer just looking for the candidate who has the name recognition, who can raise a lot of money, who has a big war chest, or is getting all the endorsements. They’re looking for that person that they can relate to, that person who’s going to speak to them, and that person who knows that they need change. So, that’s why we see women leading the charge because they are those people that voters are looking to in this day and age.
PRACHI: I think we can only go from two analogies or thinking about what comparisons AOC herself has said. And she’s often said that she sees, that basically, she sees herself as part of a group that’s bringing the Democratic party back to its roots. So, she heralds back to FDR’s New Deal, which is part of where the name of the Green New Deal comes from. But I think it basically is, in some ways, it’s a total overhaul, but in some ways, it’s not. It’s just a reprioritization, refocusing the priorities of the Democratic party, of national politics, leading, you know, creating more regulations against, you know, just creating more protections that prioritize the working-class people over corporations. And shifting priorities, I think, is a really big part of what they’re trying to do.
So, I think that there’s a lot of, I think, scaremongering talk about a complete overhaul and changing, you know, turning America into a quote-unquote “socialist country.” But I think that what they’re ultimately trying to do is change the priorities of the government and fix things that have long been broken that, within both the Democratic party and beyond, that haven’t really put the interests of people of color, immigrants, minorities first. I think that what they’re ultimately asking for is a reprioritization of the government’s initiatives and priorities.
JENNIFER: You know, this system was not built for all of the people. It was built for the power for a limited few. And I think that women today recognize—I mean, women have always recognized that—but are willing to and are able—not willing, ‘cause they’ve always been willing, sorry—are more boldly and finding more community around speaking out and calling out the way that these systems don’t serve people. And so, I think that there is both a level of understanding the system so that you can disrupt it. And so, playing the game a little bit, but also defining new rules and saying this might’ve been how it was done before, but that doesn’t mean it has to happen now. I mean, one of the things we’re doing is we’re teaching young women who have no traditional powers of money and privilege to lobby. And that’s a pretty wild thing to do. When you think about lobbying, you think of bald guys in backrooms with big cigars and bigger wallets.
CARMEN: [Laughs.]
JENNIFER: [Chuckles.] And that’s not who we’re putting in elected office anymore or putting in the rooms with their elected officials anymore. And I think it’s because we understand that there’s a system that we have to play with, but there’s also a system that we’re willing to undo and define on our own term.
ERIN: I do think a lot of these women who ran for office do believe government deeply has a role. You know, this isn’t a sort of Tea Party wave of women that wanna shut it down. They do believe that our institutions of a positive force for good because those institutions need some major, major rewriting about how they’re built.
A’SHANTI: When we think about this as women, we are playing in a system that did not exist for us. Politics was made for white, land-owning men. They didn’t envision us having these roles. If you’re a person of color, they most certainly never envisioned you sitting at those tables. So, even for me, when I think about what I do at Emerge, I walk into a room a lot of times, and I’m the only woman there, and I’m the only woman of color there. So, my presence lets them know that I have disrupted this system. So, not only am I sitting at this table as a disruption to the system, I’m here to tell you that I’m also gonna recruit and train more women to run for office and disrupt this system some more. That scares the hell out of a lot of people because it’s not just their power as individuals. It’s going to change this entire system, and a lot of people focus politics on themselves. So, the people who get scared are those who are in politics for the selfish reasons. For those who are doing it for the right reasons, they don’t get scared. They welcome this change.
CARMEN: The Squad is marching toward that change, and they’re succeeding at transforming the political landscape.
PRACHI: What we’ve seen is that they have, you know, they practiced what they preached. So, they came in with a lot of energy, and then it remained to be seen whether they would actually follow up, you know, whether they would continue to speak up against corporate interests, speak up against Donald Trump, speak up against people within their own party when they made mistakes or said offensive or racially-insensitive things. And time and time again, they have done that, and they haven’t really backed down. And they‘ve continued to be about the things that they’ve talked about. And that has been really inspiring. And to see a block of young freshman Progressives come in with that much force and keep it sends a strong message to so many people, especially young women and people of color that this is possible.
People talk about pulling a seat up at the table, and if there’s no seat, you make one or you make a new table. And I think we’re seeing that in action, and it’s very inspiring. And that’s, I think, going to have a lasting impact on this generation of people who are getting involved in politics for the first time and realizing that there is a place for them. And that if there isn’t in their local, state, federal levels that they can force their way in and make room for themselves. That there is always that option. And I think seeing this group of women do that has helped other people realize, in their own lives, that they can do that as well.
AIMEE: I started this work, there was almost no public acknowledgement of women of color, both as a group, you know, as a voice, as a set of politics. And now, you have people like Dan rather tweeting, oh, Trump is afraid of women of color ‘cause they see right through him. Dan rather was on TV for 40 years and never mentioned us. Never! [Laughs.] You have the Democratic party leadership #ThankBlackWomen as if we were just new on the scene. [Laughs.] Yeah, our culture’s changed, and that’s the work.
I mean we organized a presidential forum, the first presidential forum focused on women of color, way back in April. And I had this very compelling argument, which was telling reporters—and these are from the New York Times, Washington Post, the Boston Globe. I mean, just every, Politico, every major outlet. And MSNBC came in, CNN, NPR. I mean, we had 150 credentialed members of the media. And the reason is, is because I think that those who shape public opinion, starting first and foremost in the media, realize that they’d missed something really important in 2016, and they wanted to tell that story differently. And when I say it’s not race and women, there is no women’s— Like the consciousness around lots of things associated with women of color, not only how powerful we are. Just to tell women of color, “You are powerful” is to interrupt the BS stories we’ve been told our whole life. But to tell a reporter that you have a missed the major drivers of American politics and that you’re not seeing something that’s important is a very compelling thing for reporter.
So, a lot of the coffees and stuff on background I would do is to say, I’m gonna tell you something. “Women of color will deliver the White House.” And they’re like, “Why?” And I say, “There’s seven states where Trump won where women of color or one of four voters, where the Democratic party did a piss poor job of talking to us and engaging us and went to us six weeks before the election when Hillary Clinton was on the ballot. And if we focus on women of color, who are six times more likely to vote for Democrats than white dudes, we forget about switching Trump voters ‘cause they’re gonna stick with their dude. And we focus on women who are most likely to vote Democrat and carry those states, we’ll have enough electoral votes to win the White House.” And they’re like, “Holy shit. I’ve never, [laughs] I’ve never heard of that!” And I’m just like, “I’m gonna just tell you what’s gonna happen! Because we’re positioned to do that. Then we’re gonna win. Then we’re going to take credit.”
CARMEN: It’s true that we all stand to benefit from The Squad’s legacy. But it’s gonna take work to sustain it and even more work to extend it. It’s gonna take all of us to dismantle the system and even more of us to build a better one.
ERIN: I’d like to see things like ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is one of those voting systems where it’s not a winner take all system. So, if there’s 11 candidates in a primary, you actually get to vote for your top five candidates. You get to rank them. Here’s choice number one, choice number two, here’s my third favorite, fourth favorite, right? And the way the math works is if nobody gets a majority, then the sort of the overall majority wins. So, the last guy gets knocked off, and any of votes that he, you know, his number twos all go to the people who were his number two or number three. And it’s a really more inclusive and fair way of actually having the voters really get to decide writ large who is their representative as opposed to 50 percent plus 1, right? So, there’s a much more collective agreement on who that representative is, and the results that we see around the country actually end up with more women city council members, women mayors, more people of color in places that you see ranked choice voting being used. So, that’s one.
The idea around expanding the House of Representatives, right, that now these representatives in some places are one representative to millions and millions of people. And is there sort of some level of expansiveness to the literal number of people that we have in office at the congressional level. Fair district drawing of maps. How critical the census is right now to making sure that those voices who have, those people, that have been left out, that literally have not been counted, are not only one, counted, but two, then proportioned in a way that they’re not all the sort of communities of color, immigrant communities are drawn into a squiggly line of a district. I mean, gerrymandering comes from the word “salamander,” like that is a squiggly line of how the shape of a district can be drawn.
CARMEN: [Chuckles.]
ERIN: It’s political folklore, but it’s exactly that idea that we’ve set the rulemaking in an unfair way and given it to a small group of people who then get to decide how to kind of keep the oligarchy alive.
PRACHI: I think that we are still sort of learning what the long-term effects are going to be. Obviously, there’s something called, the way the media has dubbed the “AOC effect” that 2018, we ushered in the most diverse Congress in us history. And more and more women have been inspired to run, and we’ve learned that when women run, they win. So, all of that’s really positive. But I think what we’re also learning and discovering is that, just because we have this new energy doesn’t mean that that’s translating into institutional support. We still have the old systems of, entrenched politicians have this huge machinery behind them that supports them the way Joseph Crowley did in Queens. And we still are seeing that machinery all over the country, and it’s very hard to dismantle that.
So, while more women are excited, while there are more organizations like Justice Democrats is supporting insurgent challengers, it’s still really hard to overcome this sort of mentality within the party, especially from the party leaders that say, well, you know, AOC did what she did because it was a very blue area, and that’s not gonna translate anywhere else in the country. And you know, there’s still, even within the Democratic party, you look at the D triple C blacklists, they support incumbents, even at the risk of an incumbent being a moderate versus a new progressive woman of color challenger. So, I think it’s showing us that there are, while it’s a really exciting moment, there are still a lot of institutional challenges that we need to overcome and that the party is at this sort of critical moment of figuring out where it’s going to go and what it’s going to be.
JENNIFER: When we talk about why people show up in activist spaces, in elected office, in all of these different converging political spaces, I know that as a Jewish woman, there are spaces where my rights are on the line. But I also know that in many spaces, and in most spaces, I’m good. I’m okay. I have a college degree, I am white, and I can navigate the world on my terms. And for so many of these people who are risking at all, it’s because they have to. And I think we have to reframe a little bit of the way we talked about activism in politics to understand how personal it is and what it means for people to show up when everything is on the line and when there’s no choice to engage. And that is why we have to be doing what we’re doing.
And so, for these incredible Squad members, the members of Congress who come from communities that are experiencing horrifying Islamophobia, who are being told to go back to their countries, who are being told that they are insignificant members of Congress, that their districts are small, they’re fighting for the real needs of people. And the way that we support that is by changing who gets to define what power is. And right now, the people who define what power is are those with money. And so, we need to overturn Citizens United. We need to get money out of politics. And it needs to be about the people who are showing up. We need to reinstate all pieces of the Voting Rights Act. And if we put the power back into people’s hands, the people are going to show up for members like The Squad—AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna, Pressley, Rashida Tlaib—because they’re fighting for real solutions that impact real people. And when we create a system where the power is truly in the hands of the people and not the corporations acting like people, we have a better shot of supporting candidates who actually support us.
CARMEN: What I’m saying here is, what happened in 2018 was earth-shattering and important. And what happens next matters just as much.
A’SHANTI: This work does not have an end date. When we talk about parity, that’s basically 50/50, but parity doesn’t mean that every state is going to have 50 percent women. That doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be 50 percent of women in all of these elected offices. It most certainly doesn’t mean 50 percent women of color, LGBTQ women, disabled women. There is a lot to do. So, we still have a lot of work to go. But that system means that when we have women sitting at the table, it is normalized. When we have multiple women running for the same position, that is normalized. Women shouldn’t be told that they can’t run because there’s another woman running. It is when we open up magazines about politics and see women, when we turn on the TV, and we have another woman Speaker that isn’t just Nancy Pelosi, when we have multiple women that are presidents, that is what the new power structure will look like, where we’re really not thinking anymore about the first woman, the first woman of color, the first LGBTQ woman. It just becomes a norm in this country. And that’s what we’re fighting for at Emerge.
CARMEN: For Emerge, the next step in this fight is continuing to empower every woman who looks to them for resources with the support they need to get Democratic campaigns off the ground and take over every single district in every single state in the whole damn country.
A’SHANTI: One of the things that I say all the time is when I look at the political map, when I look across the country, I don’t see red states, I don’t see blue states, I don’t see purple states. All I see is opportunity: the opportunity to get more women recruited and trained and running for office. And for me, that’s where I’m gonna be focusing my efforts for the next several years. I know where all of my colleagues will be focusing their efforts and everyone in our network. There’s still so much to do, so many offices that have never had a woman, a woman of color, an LGBTQ woman. Again, the work has no end date. So, it’s continuing to let women know that the Emerge Network exists to get them trained to run for office, to support them when they’re running for office. But even when I think about the women in our network, they inspire women who aren’t in this network.
I just had a dinner event, and Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small was there. And she told the story of how she was at the airport in New Mexico, and this woman ran up to her, and she said, “I saw you run your race. It inspired me so much that now I’m going to run because I saw you do it.” So, our alums inspire other women, so this is just going to continue to keep growing until we change the power structure in this country.
CARMEN: VoteRunLead’s mission heading into the 2020 election is similar, with their larger goal to recruit more and more women from the margins to come to their trainings and to focus in on state legislature races.
ERIN: So, VoteRunLead is continuing to train. whether that is, gosh, every like six to eight weeks, I feel like we are [chuckles] somewhere in America doing a training, if not hosting a webinar.
CARMEN: [Laughs.]
ERIN: So, you know, VoteRunLead.org/events, and you will find a variety of places that we will be. I was just in South Carolina for the first ever Rural Women’s Summit. Really diverse room. You know, not just of course, from women coming from all corners of America, but around the racial and ethnic diversity, the religious diversity that was in the room. So, really going forward in 2020, we’re gonna be looking at rural women, rural women of color. We’re gonna be focusing on the state legislatures because we saw once women got in 2018 and the state legislatures, what happened in the states where you see close to 40 percent women? Bills got churned out like crazy, and they got done in bipartisan ways. And they protected reproductive rights, and they passed bills on climate change and common sense gun reform: all these things that we know 70 percent of American women care about. When you put women into these state legislatures, they actually get it done. So, we’re really looking at a particular program around state ledge. We’re looking at rural women of color. We’re looking at, we make room.
We make room for our Republican sisters. We make room for our center-right sisters. VoteRunLead will never deny a political education to any woman in this country who wants to learn how to run. And it is really that diversity of thought of getting women in a room with one another because we bring your values, come talk to people who don’t have the same values as you, let’s have these conversations. Because what we’re doing now in the sort of two-party system and the leadership that’s there, we’ve gotta, like I said earlier, really rethink, not only who’s in power, but who’s writing the rules.
CARMEN: Aimee at She the People will continue, in advance of the 2020 election, to put women of color at the center of political discourse and to mobilize millions of women of color at SheThePeople.org to do the same in their communities.
AIMEE: Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. We win those states, we win the White House. And we win those states by focusing on women of color. So, what we’re doing is we’re creating a voting engagement process over the next 12 months. Notice, I didn’t say six weeks before election day. It’s 12 months to create a political home and voter engagement specifically for women of color, by and for women of color, to elevate turnout nationally, but also in those states. And so, people can be supported by going to SheThePeople.org and being part of it, registering, by donating, by being a part of it, participating in our calls, and things like that.
We just, part of what we do is we elevate the groups on the ground who are doing phenomenal work. So, we had a woman named Amy Castenel from the New Georgia Project. They are the most amazing women of color-led statewide kind of voter engagement group in Georgia who are responsible for elevating turnout to historic levels in 2018. They now are continuing doing the work, preparing for 2020, and we had them talk about how they’re doing voter protection. So, people in the She the People network who live in blue states are like, what do I do? Freakin’ join the New Georgia Project and help phone bank to let people know that the Republican governors are trying to take people off the voter rolls. There’s concrete things that the entire national network for She the People can do in order to win in 2020.
CARMEN: And until election day, and long after it, Jennifer will be building Platform and transforming women everywhere into politically-savvy lobbyists who can make magic happen wherever pressure needs to be applied in the halls of power.
JENNIFER: On election day, the skies aren’t going to clear. The angels aren’t going to sing. We have a lot of work to do every day after because yes, there were a lot of wonderful campaign promises. Now we actually have to make them law. And we navigate this place of election day is important. You gotta show up to vote. But there’s also a way to engage every day after. And so, one of the things that we’re really doing is we typically do the national convention. Right now, we are in conversations about doing state summits in battleground states where we have energized and mobilized young people to talk about before the election, to say, “Here are the issues that matter to me. My issues are on the ballot, and that’s what I’m voting for.” And so, it’s not just about single champions. It’s not about an elected official or a candidate being our saviors and saving graces. It’s about what are they running on, and how are they gonna work with me to make that happen and make that law?
And so, that’s what we’re really aiming to do is, is to go into communities where we have strong bases, help connect them to leaders who are on the ground in their communities. We’ll be asking a lot of the officials and candidates to take that pledge and say, “Do you want our votes? You have to protect our rights. And are you going to work with us as a partner in progress?” So, that’s how we’re mobilizing our base is these issues are on the ballot. What are you doing about it?
CARMEN: Now, look. This wouldn’t be a political episode without a call to action. So, here it is. As soon as this episode is over, I want you to go online and sign up to participate in or support the programs and campaigns being run by all of the women in this episode and the dozens of feminist organizations working on every level to shift the political system. Nominate your friends for political incubator programs. Volunteer for feminist candidates. Get your own campaign off the ground. Learn to lobby, and tell your friends how they can do it, too.
It’ll take each and every one of us to make that win happen. But together, we just might burn down the house and finally build the equitable, inclusive government we deserve.
AIMEE: We have big forces, but all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not defeat Trump! Because Trump represents something pervasive and generational. I mean, he’s like, he represents something terrible that we’ve known has been part of this country for a long time. And in order to defeat him, we have to have new ideas, new leaders. And, also it’s not just that one dude. He’s a terrible person, but he represents millions of people and institutions that we have to dismantle. How do we do that? We’ve gotta do it with a new way of thinking, and we gotta do it with love! I mean, I just wanna say—and it might not be that popular to say—but electoral politics has never been about power over, for me. It’s been about love and justice, creating a country of belonging, and making this democracy live up to its promise for all of us. And these core values are what’s gonna save us.
[theme music]
CARMEN: Okay, folks. That’s all for this installment of Popaganda by Bitch Media. This episode was edited by Emily Boghossian and produced and hosted by me: feminist writer, editor, and activist Carmen Rios. Our jingle is by Mucks & Owen Wuerker. Today’s guests were Aimee Allison, A’shanti Gholar, Prachi Gupta, Jennifer Mandelblatt, and Erin Vilardi. And you can find out more about them and the work that they’re doing at BitchMedia.org.
The conversation doesn’t stop here. Use the hashtag #Popaganda on social media to share your thoughts and feelings on the show. And follow Bitch @BitchMedia on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to get more feminist stuff like it in your feed (algorithm willing). And find me @carmenriosss (with three s’s) for behind-the-scenes selfies and unsolicited excerpts from my secret Tumblr. You can also send me hate mail at CarmenFuckingRios.com.
Popaganda is produced by nonprofit, independent, Bitch Media. Our feminist response to pop culture is funded entirely by our community. So, if you loved what you just heard, you can support this show directly by joining The Rage, Bitch’s monthly membership program for fed-up feminists like you, at BitchMedia.org/Rage. Members get print and digital subscriptions to Bitch magazine, a members-only Filled With Rage mug, and other sweet feminist swag! And if you wanna make sure you never miss an episode of the show, you know the drill: subscribe to Popaganda on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher. And while you’re at it, go ahead and leave us a review.
Stay tuned for our upcoming GLAMOUR season, which will premiere NEXT WEEK! on December 19. ‘Til then, I’ll see you on the internet.