“Rachel Hollis is a manifestation of a larger ideology about women's place in society. That if you just try hard enough, all of these structural issues that are making your life really, really hard can be solved if you just wash your face. .” - Anne Helen Petersen Anne Helen Petersen is one of our most essential cultural observers. Her work at Buzzfeed culminated in her 2020 book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Now she’s using Culture Study, her Substack newsletter, to explore everything from The Unified Theory of Peloton to how to make friends. In the episode, Laura and Anne unpack the faux empowerment of Rachel Hollis, the ways we sell quick fixes to systemic problems (like how a bath bomb will overcome the ways our society devalues women, and, particularly mothers) and the myth of “having it all.” More than ever, this is one to share with your favorite people! Readings mentioned in the show: Culture Study - AHP’s newsletter and community. Towards A Unified Theory of Peloton by Anne Helen Petersen How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen “Girl, Wash Your Face” Is A Massive Best-Seller With A Dark Message by Laura Turner A Quick Explainer On Why People Aren’t Happy With Rachel Hollis Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST and keep it ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/ Join our free online community (it’s NOT a Facebook group!): https://www.tmstpod.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Anne Helen Petersen on Burnout and The Myth of "Having It All"
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, Laura here. I'm really excited to introduce you to an incredibly smart, cool woman today.
[00:00:11] Anne Helen Peterson: Rachel Hollis is a manifestation of a larger ideology about women's place in society. That if you just try hard enough, all of these structural issues that are making your life really, really hard in America in particular, they can be solved if you just wash your face.
[00:00:29] Laura McKowen: Anne Helen Peterson is a journalist, author, and a professional culture writer. She got her start in academia and the subject of her doctoral dissertation is... you gotta hear it in the episode. It's awesome. Her January, 2019 Buzzfeed article, how millennials became the burnout generation gave voice to the experience of millions and became a book that is still making waves.
[00:01:00] She is a delightful person to talk to. So it was no surprise that we covered a lot of ground, including that bit. You heard a second ago where we're digging into the question. What does the cautionary tale of Rachel Hollis tell us about hustle culture and this lie that we can have it all? So this conversation with Anne is exactly why we make TMST.
[00:01:24] We want to introduce you to brilliant, interesting people and connect you to work that could make a difference in your life.
[00:01:35] Oh. And listen closely at the end. Anne teases a project she's considering doing, when she said it, I yelled so loud. I almost broke my microphone.
[00:01:46] Enjoy.
[00:01:51] It's good to meet you. First of all, instead of just tend to jump right in. I've loved going through your work. And I was laughing because I just recently read your Peloton piece and like the Peloton, I just did a ride earlier today. Mikel knows I'm obsessed with Peloton from a culture standpoint, like how they fucking do what they're doing. And it's a little creepy, but a little great. And you did it, you did it so well.
[00:02:21] Anne Helen Peterson: I mean, there's so much, like the reason I didn't write it for so long was because there's so many components and like the way I finally prompted myself to do it, I was like, fine. It'll just be a series. Right? Because otherwise there was no way that I could get it all into what I wanted to do. And that is my privilege as a newsletter writer.
[00:02:39] Laura McKowen: It is your privilege. So let's start with a wide frame. And I want people to know you and how you think, and what's behind your work. So what is the driving idea behind culture study and what is culture study?
[00:02:54] Anne Helen Peterson: I think that there's two things that I primarily engage with when I, when I try to think about like what the work I do is, is first of all, that, like, everything is interesting. Like if you just think about it for a while, like every single thing, there's a history there's sociological implications. Like you just have to drill down a little bit. And I think that the interesting- ness of it blooms out. The other thing too, is that like it's beneficial or useful and interesting and worthwhile to think more about the things that surround us and especially the culture that surrounds us.
[00:03:30] And the name of my newsletter is kind of a play on the larger field of cultural studies, which really flourished and still flourishes today. But it began to flourish in the 1970s in the UK and its guiding principle was that like pop culture is worthy of study, right. That like things that are popular are worth thinking about and there had been a historical dismissal of things that were popular just in terms of like, if they had any sort of value, if they were worth a place in the academy as objects of study. And so to me, I try to like take some of the advice that I also gleaned at Buzzfeed, which is that like, we think about low culture in a high culture way and high culture in a low culture way.
[00:04:14] I really reject any sort of very firm understandings of like what low culture, like low brow culture, middlebrow culture, a highbrow culture is like the traditional understanding is that like, of being like, opera is high brow and then reality television is low brow. And so if you're just thinking in those terms, you want to look at reality television using tools like, that you would usually use to analyze something like opera or a novel. But then what, if you look at opera or politics or anything that is usually serious art and you use like memes to talk about it, right. I think there's oftentimes really interesting analysis that comes out of approaching topics in a way that you don't actually approach them.
[00:05:07] Laura McKowen: I think culture for a lot of people is just something that's there. And I'll just go out and say, you're foolish if you think culture doesn't affect you at no matter where you are, but I'm definitely guilty of the know, looking down upon low brow culture, especially celebrity type culture, but it's real.
[00:05:24] And it matters. And I tend to shy away, I think from culture analysis explicitly, but I dove into your work and you're incredible at what you do. So how, how did you get here? Like how did you become this person doing the thing you're doing?
[00:05:45] Anne Helen Peterson: Well first, can I ask why you shy away from culture analysis just generally?
[00:05:50] Laura McKowen: Um, God, that's such a good question. It's this, I care a lot about music and maybe you can find another what this really is. I didn't watch, for example, the Avett brothers, one of my very favorite bands, documentary for like four years, because I just, I was like, I don't want to see all, like, what if I, I just don't want to see it as too much.
[00:06:16] And I do that with a lot of music. So I shy away from, uh, from it, for that like, like I want, I just want it to change the way I write and experience it.
[00:06:29] Anne Helen Peterson: Some people don't want it spoiled. I mean, the interesting thing about that documentary is that it was not, you know, it was a documentary with their full participation. So I don't think it was any form of analysis. It was just like, let's have more footage of the Avett Brothers looking sad, writing songs, you know, just like lots of facial hair and looking sad.
[00:06:50] Music: "When I'm in my sweet daughter's eyes, my heart is now ruined for the rest of all time. There's no part of it left to give. There's no part of it left to give."
[00:07:09] Anne Helen Peterson: Whereas I think there is this reticence to have things spoiled, right? Like whether it's something that you think of as a guilty pleasure that you don't want to be like, oh, here's the capitalist feminist critical race theory critique of this. And one thing that I think I learned, and this is a way to answer your original question, I learned first when I was an undergrad and studying film studies and then as I went into grad school and really dove into cultural studies, is that analyzing doesn't destroy pleasure, it textures it. Right. It makes it richer. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I also think that we, as humans are really complicated and as complicated people can hold the critique and the appreciation side-by-side right.
[00:07:58] So like, I understand that John Mayer is a douche and also-
[00:08:03] Laura McKowen: Genius in his way.
[00:08:05] Anne Helen Peterson: I love his music. Like I, and that is a tension that is really interesting for me to push at, to be like, here are all the ways that I understand who this person is and like why there are things that I really dislike about that person.
[00:08:16] And also things that I find endearing about his TikTok presence. And just kind of layer that. Like, have this layered understanding of him. And I don't think that, you know, we used to use the word problematic to discuss some of these texts. I don't think that that word necessarily has the currency or clarity that it once did, but the tagline to culture study is like, think more about the culture that surrounds you.
[00:08:40] And so instead of avoiding thinking more about, say Peloton, right. Instead of being like, oh, this is something that I'm kind of embarrassed about. You can be like, huh. Well, here are the ways that like, why am I addicted to it? Or why do I hate it? Why do I hate everything that it represents? Like, again, pushing at that thing a little bit more.
[00:09:01] Laura McKowen: And this is me coming from someone who's never actually thought about this stuff before.
[00:09:05] Not explicitly, I think a lot about alcohol culture a lot, because that's the world I live in, but there are certain areas where I, I think I previously prior to maybe the last 10, 5, 10 years thought of it as just a not serious thing. And I think that's what you're hinting at. How did you get this way? Like how, how did this come to be that you've done this work?
[00:09:30] Anne Helen Peterson: I think, I think that my academic training like that, you know, I have a PhD in media studies. I wrote my dissertation on the history of celebrity gossip, like looking at a hundred years of celebrity gossip.
[00:09:39] Laura McKowen: Which is the greatest thing I've ever heard.
[00:09:41] Anne Helen Peterson: Like how could you write a dissertation on that? And I'm like, how do people write any sort of like long thorough, history of any part of media, right? Like there's history, there's evolution. There's the way that, uh, our norms about like what stars look like and, and what their lives are like, like there's all these different shifts in the way that we understand them and the way that that information was transmitted and the way that people reacted to it, like, yeah, it's just history.
[00:10:08] And so that really has informed the way that I approached pop culture just generally is I always think like, okay, if there's an object in front of me, Like, let's say again, going back to the example of Peloton and I'm writing like a series on Peloton right now. I know that there is like an iceberg underneath it in terms of history.
[00:10:28] Right. So when I want to write about it, I'm going to look at like the history of exercise culture. Like, how did we get to this point of these kinds of parasocial relationships with our trainers and coaches as they're called, or, but then also like just the evolution of home fitness and how is this substantively different from say, what Jane Fonda was doing in the 1980s.
[00:10:49] But then also I try to think horizontally in terms of how does Peloton fit into our broader societal moment, right? Like, it is both a symptom of the way that we conceive of exercise and self optimization, but also a very particular symptom of exercise and self optimization during the pandemic, right?
[00:11:11] Yes. Like Peloton was popular before the pandemic, but it did not become a societal phenomenon, the way that it has, that's kind of my approach to all, I call them texts or objects.
[00:11:22] Laura McKowen: You call them texts?
[00:11:24] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. Like it's a remnant of my academic training is that just like any book, like when you think of a book as a text, write a film is a text, a star image, which is like the whole constellation of information about a celebrity. That's a text, you can read it and analyze it. So Peloton is a text.
[00:11:42] Laura McKowen: Can you, uh, give people sort of a timeline of your work, where you started, you know, talk about Buzzfeed because that feels important. And then, and then where you are now and, and how you're operating as a journalist now.
[00:11:58] Anne Helen Peterson: So I got my PhD in 2011. The market was crap. I did not get a job. I went and taught at a hippy progressive high school that's a working dairy farm in Vermont. I got a job in academia teaching at my Alma mater for two years, and then again, didn't get a job. But during this time I also, this is a crucial part of the story, I first started blogging on like an old school WordPress blog under the name celebrity gossip, academic style.
[00:12:29] This is when like academic blogging was very popular before it got cannibalized by Twitter. And then from there, you know, post recession, there was a bunch of websites that popped up that were very bare bones that paid little to nothing that gave springboards to a lot of writers who were willing to write for little to nothing.
[00:12:48] And a lot of those people were academics. And I have a lot of mixed feelings about that in hindsight, but writing for the site, The Hairpin, which was a sister site to The All was my first experience with public facing writing. And I wrote this series for them called scandals of classic Hollywood that looked at old scandals in Hollywood and why they happened the way that they did, why different things are considered scandalous at different moments, that sort of thing.
[00:13:16] Laura McKowen: Okay. I have to ask you, have you ever, do you read Taylor Jenkins Reid's work?
[00:13:20] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah yeah. I, I, that was the first book I ever blurbed was Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
[00:13:26] Laura McKowen: Which was fucking phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. That book was great. I just keep thinking, as you, as you're talking about your PhD and your work that like, she deep dives into this, into that world.
[00:13:38] Anne Helen Peterson: She is able to fictionalize it in a way that I never could, you know?
[00:13:43] Laura McKowen: Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. Anyway, go ahead.
[00:13:47] Anne Helen Peterson: And like the first time I got paid to write one of those pieces, I got paid a hundred dollars. I was like, this is the best day of my life, right? Well, yes, because academics are so used to not getting paid for their writing.
[00:14:00] And I wrote for a couple of other places, Buzzfeed asked me to write a piece. This was when Buzzfeed was first like really trying to venture into things that weren't lists. And I wrote about Jennifer Lawrence and the history of cool girls, like looking at either famous stars who had a similar image.
[00:14:18] This was like peak Jennifer Lawrence time back in 2014. And the piece was one of the first long form pieces for Buzzfeed that went viral and essentially wrote my job description. Like Ben Smith called me up. He was the editor then and said, why don't you come and do what you do. So that was very broad.
[00:14:37] Yeah. I could kind of walk around and do different things that I wanted to do. And I gave my last final and got on a plane the next day and moved to New York. And I learned so much at Buzzfeed. I learned how to report. I learned what a lede was, I mean, like I had been writing ledes, I just didn't know that that's what it's called.
[00:14:58] And the reporting part was really essential though, because I had done a ton of analysis that just basically requires you to like read things and then decide what they mean. And reporting requires you to talk to people and feel sick to your stomach because you're nervous. And it really pushed me. And I think that that push that made me develop as a writer and as a thinker.
[00:15:21] And, um, and I worked at Buzzfeed for six years and then last summer I had been writing, uh, a sub stack for some time, just like an unpaid sub stack where I just kind of catalog thoughts that weren't really a Buzzfeed piece. And they had recruited me for some time trying to get me to go all paid. And I had been like, I don't want to, I don't want to make people pay for this if I'm still working at Buzzfeed, because it will be a huge, additional obligation.
[00:15:48] And they offered, they're essentially like runway deals. So what they do is they make it so that you feel comfortable in leaving your full-time job and coming over to go full-time for them. And so they gave me health insurance and similar salary to what I was getting at Buzzfeed. Like promised that for a year.
[00:16:11] I mean, and this is the thing about a lot of people in media. Like I wasn't going to go and do this venture where I was like, relying on people converting to pay to subscribers. Like I was in academia and then digital media, if there's one thing that I know is the overarching precarity of the industry. So for me, in order to make that sort of risk especially with like my internalized fear of always losing my job, which is just part of being a millennial, I think, um, I needed some sort of runway.
[00:16:42] Laura McKowen: Yeah. It's awesome. I think it's the right way to do this.
[00:16:47] Anne Helen Peterson: This is a meta discussion, but like the way that people talk about the sub stack pro deals is that like, oh, sub stack is throwing money at people. And like, what they're doing is they're trying to make it feel safer.
[00:16:58] Laura McKowen: A sustainable way to actually work well. Yeah, you're an author. So tell us quickly about the books.
[00:17:05] Anne Helen Peterson: I forgot about all those!
[00:17:06] Laura McKowen: You're an author, by the way.
[00:17:08] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. I've, I've written three books. One is Scandals of Classic Hollywood, which was a reworking and addition to the columns that I've written for The Hairpin.
[00:17:20] And then I wrote a book called Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud, the rise and reign of the unruly woman, which is looking at. A group of 10 female stars, uh, from the late two thousands and early 2000 tens, looking at the various ways that they were unruly in there and the way that their bodies work, the way that their humor worked, just like their place in culture, but then also looking at the way that, that incited backlash as well.
[00:17:48] And then my last book is called Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. And then I have a forthcoming book that I wrote with my partner. That's coming out in a couple of months that's called Out Of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. And it's really about the future of work flexibility, and, and also just reconsidering our relationship with work broadly.
[00:18:12] Laura McKowen: Yeah. I can't wait to read that. So I'm in your sub stack. What is that like, like having, you're having a community now as a writer, because that's different, right? From your prior?
[00:18:27] Anne Helen Peterson: It's really different because these are people who I'm interacting with a lot, right? Because I have two weekly threads where people get in these intense conversations and also in the comments.
[00:18:39] And then also we have this discord server where a certain, you know, probably 20% of subscribers are ever on there at any given point.
[00:18:47] Laura McKowen: It's gotta be an age breakdown because I can't
[00:18:53] Anne Helen Peterson: It's great. Hey, I mean, it's just, the funny thing is that I think some people who are older, like I can't deal with discord. What's this discord and it's just AOL chat rooms. It is just an AOL chat room. Like if there's anyone who knows how to navigate this space, it is someone who hung out in AOL chat rooms in the late nineties and early 2000s.
[00:19:11] Laura McKowen: And I did, maybe that's why I just, I it's like it's going back or something. Do you sort of feel like it's a symbiotic relationship between your work and the community?
[00:19:23] Anne Helen Peterson: They give me ideas all the time. I noticed a lot in the discussions on discord, but also in the threads and that sort of thing, is a lot of questions about money and how to deal with money, how to deal with this feeling of precarity. And so it seems like a really good idea to have a finance column. So I have sought out like a rotating cast of people who were going to answer finance questions.
[00:19:49] And then all of the questions are sourced from subscribers. And like, even just now I was trying to figure out like, what are we going to call? Like, what's a punny name to call the series. And so they came up with a bunch of ideas and then like, I'm, I'm having a graphic designer who is actually part of the community and paying them to come up with a logo and he's going to come up with three and then I'm just going to let people in the community vote on it.
[00:20:15] You know that to me, I don't really care, ultimately, which one of those three that we choose, but it helps people feel like, oh, I'm involved in this. You know, this is something that I am participating in. I haven't had any of the toxic, like, how dare you write about this? Or like, you know, I think sometimes people really think that when people are paying them directly for their work, that this feeling of beholdenness comes.
[00:20:41] That has not been an experience. Not at all.
[00:20:43] Laura McKowen: Wow. That's great.
[00:20:44] Anne Helen Peterson: And like the times, like I just took a week off, um, for just kind of 4th of July-ness and, you know, I announced in my newsletter, I was like, I'm taking a week of like my first week, totally off the newsletter. I haven't taken a full week off since, since Christmas.
[00:21:03] And like so many people just emailed back and were like, enjoy your break, get some rest, you know, like there's no resentment taking a week off because I think part of it is the gospel that I try to preach with the newsletter is like, we need to have healthy relationship with work. So yeah.
[00:21:19] Laura McKowen: It would be very odd if your community based on your work,would bitch at you about that.
[00:21:24] Anne Helen Peterson: Like, how dare you?!
[00:21:26] Laura McKowen: I love that you qualified it though. You were like, I haven't had a break since Christmas.
[00:21:31] Anne Helen Peterson: Right? Well, I also think that sometimes because people are writing at the community in different moments, right? So someone who has been there from the start, they know, right. Like the consistent state, but let's say you just paid your $50 yearly subscription and your next letter is like, I'm taking a break off, you know, but I do think you're right. That I do like many people have a compulsion to, to make the case.
[00:22:18] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of the podcast at TMS team. We're passionate about having conversations that bring us together and help us stoke our love of life. That's why we created a dedicated site for the show it's free. It's not a Facebook group and we aren't mining your data to target you with ads.
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[00:23:56] Laura McKowen: I wonder if you'd be willing to sort of workshop a cultural thing with me and just do it in real time, because I think that's what I want people to get is a taste of the way that you think, and the ways that we can think about. Okay, back up, I want to talk to you about this cause selfishly I want to talk about it, but I also want them to feel how it, how you can look at culture and not take it personally or not be so attached to the point of view as being, you know, that you have to fall on the side of right or wrong, or you have to, yeah.
[00:24:36] You have to know everything about, about something in order to study it or whatever it is. It's sort of hangups that we have about culture. So I want to talk about Rachel Hollis. Yeah, if you're willing and I want to talk about it from a study standpoint, like what can we learn? What is the Rachel Hollis personality, empire, whatever we want to call it.
[00:25:01] And maybe look at from the side, like the horizontal view and the vertical view and what a, what can we learn from it? I think it was a massive moment when she had this public sort of, I don't want to call it a meltdown, but there was a moment.
[00:25:18] Mikel Ellcessor: Okay. We don't want to slow down the whole conversation by going into the blow by blow of what happened with Rachel Hollis, but suffice to say, in a Instagram live, Rachel Hollis mentioned having someone come to her house twice a week to clean.
[00:25:33] And when a commenter responded that mentioning having a cleaning person was quote, privileged and quote unrelatable, uh, Rachel Hollis took to TikTokto respond. The post is now deleted. The whole thing didn't go well. And I say, it didn't go well, it was kind of the equivalent of driving situation off a cliff, having it explode into flames and then dropping a Boulder on it to fix it.
[00:25:59] But other than that, it went perfectly fine. If you really want to know all of it, we've got a link posted in the show notes. You can catch up there and then we'll continue with our conversation.
[00:26:13] Anne Helen Peterson: Some people had known the truth about, or had been doing this thinking before.
[00:26:18] Laura McKowen: I think that's why it was such a moment.
[00:26:20] Anne Helen Peterson: Right. And then it turned for people who hadn't been doing that thinking yet. Right. So the first thing I want to say is that, like, I think there's a real difference between like white ladies, not wanting to engage in like Rachel Hollis critique and people like struggling to engage in media that really dehumanizes them and threatened bodily harm or psychological harm.
[00:26:50] Do you know what I mean? Cause I think sometimes like these conversations about like wokeness and like, you know, the anti wokeness brigade or like, why can't you like not have a content warning on this or whatever. Like oftentimes that comes from people who are in positions of larger power who never feel threatened.
[00:27:11] Whereas like I read something, I read something as a white, straight lady. Like, I feel this when I read things that are about reproductive freedom, like if it feels viscerally, threatening to me and that's as like someone who has a ton of accumulated societal power, like that's just one of the instances, like that's an instance that I feel, so if you are in a marginalized or like a disenfranchised community in all of these other ways, like, and you're like, yeah, this makes me feel like crap to read this.
[00:27:41] This makes me feel incredible threat. This person doesn't think I'm a person. I, one thing that I've tried to do over the last, like, I don't know, an ongoing process is to continue to understand that. Like, just cause I don't feel that like, because I can maintain that analytical distance when I'm reading.
[00:28:00] Or consuming some piece doesn't mean that someone in a different position, like doesn't feel active harm from that, you know? Yeah. So with that said, I think Rachel Hollis is a great example because I think a lot of the people who feel threatened by critique of her are her primary consumers, which are predominantly white ladies.
[00:28:20] Laura McKowen: She'd been around for a long time. And I don't even want to think about her as the person, but sort of the messages, right. I mean, right. She is a person and I don't, I don't want to go into a shaming territory. I want to go into like, what is this? What fueled it, what's behind it. And, and what are the sort of big cultural, meta themes that we can learn from it?
[00:28:42] Anne Helen Peterson: To me, Rachel Hollis is a manifestation of a larger ideology about women's place in society, in the 2000s, the 2010s that if you just try hard enough, all of these structural issues that are making your life really, really hard in America in particular, they can be solved if you just wash your face.
[00:29:02] Right? Like if you just work hard enough, if you just like stop complaining and get your ducks in a row and just do it all, right. If you hustle and, and you just try and stop complaining, then you can make it work. And I see her as part of this larger constellation that like includes someone like Sheryl Sandberg, who says, okay, I can see all the ways that I am, I have less structural power within my organization. And instead of saying, we need to fix the organization, she says, I'm going to try harder to insert myself into those conversations. And so the message again is like, and this is very American, is that instead of addressing any sort of structural issues, the individual tries harder. And if you fail, then it's your personal failure. It is not that the system is set up to fail you.
[00:29:59] Laura McKowen: Okay. Uh, yes to what you just said. I, when I tried to boil down what the, the crux of the Rachel Hollis constellation is, it's an outgrowth of this. You can have it all, like as a woman, you can have it, all this idea that you can, and if you can't figure out how to do that, you're failing.
[00:30:19] Anne Helen Peterson: Yes. And it's your fault.
[00:30:24] Laura McKowen: Yeah. I was squarely in this space, you know of, I graduated from college in 1999.
[00:30:33] Anne Helen Peterson: High school, 1999.
[00:30:35] Laura McKowen: So high school, 1995. So I'm just slightly older than you. We're going along the same trajectory and it's like you, yeah, you can have it all. And then, and then I became a mother and.
[00:30:46] You know, for me, the Rachel Hollis story is very interesting too, because it's so tied up in an and alcohol for me and drinking and drugs, because something has to hold up the backend right. Or diminish the, the fact that you can't do it all. And the failure around that or the voices or the all just there, there has to be something in there.
[00:31:09] So I inevitably also see this hustle culture type of thing, paired with
[00:31:17] Anne Helen Peterson: Wine mom. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And like the fact that wine mom's stuff is like always these kind of cutesy jokes. It's trying to deflect from the very real acknowledgement of our society doesn't like women and is particularly antagonistic towards mothers.
[00:31:38] Yup. As much as we like give, I think lip service to the fact that we venerate mothers, like it's kind of like how we venerate essential workers. Like the people that we venerate the most with words are the people who we actually value the least with the way that we arrange our various systems. And the deck is stacked against mothers.
[00:31:56] It is particularly stacked against single mothers, the kind of ideological object refuse that is left in the trail of that fact is like tea towels that say like wine o'clock, is pretty interesting right. I think back to like the 1950s and 1960s when there were also these incredibly constructive ideals of what, uh, like the ideal mom should be and how, at that time, you know, the, the problem that had no name like Betty Friedan's idea of like.
[00:32:34] This, the ennui that, that afflicted women in these positions, like the way that those women deflected from it was alcohol was smoking and was like, it was pills. Like my grandma was put like her doctor put her on pills that just knocked her out. Right.
[00:32:51] Laura McKowen: My grandma was like a legit drug addict at 90 years old.
[00:32:54] Anne Helen Peterson: They didn't know. They didn't know how to even speak the name of what was going on.
[00:33:01] Laura McKowen: Yes, yes. Yes. So is the, you can have it all this overcorrection of feminism
[00:33:09] Anne Helen Peterson: oh, well it's post-feminism right. It's the, so post-feminism is this kind of like vague, ideological, like cloud that blocks out the sun of feminism, uh, over the course.
[00:33:24] The late eighties, nineties, and it's essentially, you know, it's very similar to the idea of post racism. It's we have solved patriarchy. There's no longer a need for feminism. Yeah. And apart from the, the fact that like, there, there was no accounting for the ways that like the feminism that was seemingly solved was like a very, like middle-class white feminism, that wasn't even solved.
[00:33:49] Right, just because like, there were women lawyers now, that doesn't mean that feminism was solved, but there was like this whole backlash against feminism, particularly in the early nineties. And you could see it in like a positive way in films, like pretty woman, but then you can also see it like films, like disclosure.
[00:34:10] Do you remember this movie with like Demi Moore and Kirk Douglas? It's like women will use sexual harassment claims in the office in devious ways. Yes. And like, I'm sure you remember this too, growing up when we did feminism was a dirty word. It was a word that you did not, you did not ascribe apart from, I think yeah.
[00:34:34] Feminazi like people who were there were still obviously feminists during this time. But I think in mainstream society, or like where I grew up in a small town in Idaho to say that you were a feminist was to like really ostracize yourself from the rest of society. Even though like my mom espoused feminist ideals. And I certainly believed those things, I did not call myself a feminist until late in college.
[00:34:59] Laura McKowen: I don't know how much we want to say about the Rachel Hollis thing. I'm very curious about the intrigue and I don't think the people who appreciate her work or followed her are all stupid or ignorant or anything like that.
[00:35:16] I don't, I'm genuinely curious about, I mean, I have friends that, that have liked her work and I have, you know, I think I'm aged out of her demographic, but I'm curious, like, what is that? And what's the upside of it?
[00:35:33] Anne Helen Peterson: I don't think there's an upside. I don't think there's an upside. Like, I don't think that like Rachel Hollis in particular was actually giving women any messages that were powerful really even. It was faux empowerment, but like the thing that I try to convey in my work and that I think creates a posture that doesn't feel like judgment per se, is that like ideology is an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly strong force. And when you are deep within it, you can't see. Right. And the work that it does is it invisibilizes itself.
[00:36:07] And it makes itself into the status quo, which means that no one is questioning it. So the idea that you should be able to be really hot, be a really good mom that does all of the things that we currently expect of like bourgeois motherhood, be incredible at your job, have a side hustle, have a gorgeous home, like make homemade dog food.
[00:36:29] Laura McKowen: Cook all the meals, all the beautiful organic meals have this, you know, very successful doting husband in her case.
[00:36:38] Anne Helen Peterson: There's very little that says to you, this is bullshit. This is an unrealistic expectation and it is a symptom of patriarchy and, and I have no support system. You know, I like we have no structural support systems that make this possible.
[00:36:55] There are other ways outside of the United States that have shown that there, you know, there are other alternatives, but when you are deep in it, when all of your friends are also aspiring in similar ways. And there's no one who's saying this is bullshit. Like, it is so hard to see outside of that.
[00:37:12] And so something like what happened with Rachel Hollis as an individual, her quote unquote breakdown was enough of breaking that wall of like, of course you do this, like, of course this is how it is. Like, it was something about it that like punctured the cometic seal that made it be like, oh yeah. Okay. So she, she also, not only is she not perfect, but like, I mean, this goes into larger conversations about like, authentically messy and like perfectly imperfect, which is also just like a performance of, of like, oh, I'm so I'm such an imperfect mom. Cause like there's laundry on my bed.
[00:37:56] Laura McKowen: I have stretch marks on my belly.
[00:37:58] Anne Helen Peterson: Right. Yeah.
[00:38:00] Laura McKowen: I want to come out with something helpful about this because I don't want to just say like, yeah, that was a terrible moment. I think what I'm trying to say is like I realized I had my own moment of what is this thing we're saying about, you can have it all. And it was really when I got sober.
[00:38:21] Because I felt like a failure all the time, either as a mom or, you know, I worked this full-time job in advertising and I don't even think I'm necessarily super primed for this perfectionism or wanting to do all the things. But I cared enough that I felt like a failure all the time. How do you propose that women navigate this stuff?
[00:38:43] Like how do you find your center? You are very much a journalist and you have a beautiful way of writing about things that are difficult and opinionated with a lot of empathy. Where do you find your center and how do you hold that when you're mired in the culture that we're talking about?
[00:39:05] Anne Helen Peterson: I think a lot of it is rejecting individualism and like, thinking that like, this is just my problem or that I failure is my failure. And so a good way to illustrate this is larger thinking on burnout, which oftentimes, you know, in concert with what we've been talking about in terms of like having it all, mothering burnout in particular, women's burnout is often the result of trying to do all of those things all of the time for a very extended period of time and always feeling like there's not really any other option, right?
[00:39:44] Like, of course, like I hit the wall and I keep going. I keep going. I keep going. Cause I have to wake up tomorrow morning and my kid has to get to school and like, I have to impact them. I'm still is going, yes, life still is going. And a lot of the responses or treatments to burn out are often individualistic. It's like have some me time, take a bath with a bath bomb. Like to me, the bath bomb is somehow this like this larger object. I hate the bath bomb so much. Cause it's like, why don't you purchase this object? And put it in your bath. And it also, like, it takes 10 minutes for the bath bomb to dissolve. You're like, okay, my bad, my bath bomb is done.
[00:40:24] My rest is done. It doesn't fix anything. Right, and, and most consumer solutions like anything that requires you buying something or taking a course or doing a new it regime or something like, like facial care, like any sort of skincare, it's not going to fix it. Right. But a useful way to think about these problems is instead of like a personal failure is, oh, this is a systems problem, right?
[00:40:52] This is something about the way that, that our country in particular or whatever country you live in, treats women values women, treats workers, values workers, treats my profession in particular. And being able to think about that and like, okay, so what I want to do to cure it, like obviously I have to like do some things in my own life.
[00:41:13] But the structural cures are things that won't just alleviate my burnout. They're also going to alleviate the burnout of people who aren't like me because they deserve it too. Right, like if we are in a society of burnout, like if you carry your own, if you figure out some sort of work-life balance, it doesn't matter if like everyone else is suffering.
[00:41:34] Laura McKowen: Where does individualism come in? How do you balance that? How is that not a hopeless feeling?
[00:41:43] Anne Helen Peterson: Right. Well, and I also think that sometimes it can feed into like the selflessness that is expected of women in particular, right. That like, you should never care about yourself or your needs, but I'm not saying that at all. No, I do think it is oftentimes really hard, right? Like, especially I think during the Trump administration, there was a real difficulty in finding, finding hope and that things could change. And maybe it's just my posture towards the world. I am a realist about what our politics are, but I also just feel so strongly that the way things are right now does not have to be the way that things will be. Like, how much society has changed even over the last a hundred years, even over the last 50 years, like there's proof there that we can change.
[00:42:33] So there are times too, when I feel like we are still on a downswing, right? That like it's still going to get worse. But then I also, there are thinkers that I admire who have looked at various economic indicators, just looking broadly, sociologically about like, maybe we are, we hit the we're hitting the trough. The historian George Packer calls it a plastic hour.
[00:42:58] Like this is a moment where change is possible. And I do think that we are experiencing some of that. It's not like seismic. Maybe it's just like a little bit seismic, but I do think this re-evaluation is taking place.
[00:43:10] Laura McKowen: I'm just thinking of this through my own lens. I'll just compare it to a sobriety journey or talks about how I would balance the collective massive problems. I see structurally with the way we view alcohol and women and all that. And then the internal, emotional, spiritual, psychological things that I have to walk through individually and, and balancing that because it's very easy for me to lose hope or to feel very powerless when I think the system is completely fucked.
[00:43:45] Yeah. And there's nothing I can do about it, but individually, I guess what I want to get at is how do you operate in your life as a woman, knowing that, you know, even just the minute details of how you structure your time and do you spend time a lot of time online and how do you manage that? And you know, when we talk about boundaries, like how do you approach your, your life as a mom and a woman and a partner and someone who works because you're, yeah, you're in that.
[00:44:14] Anne Helen Peterson: Not a mom. I'm not a mom. They're not kids. I have dogs. They just have like people names.
[00:44:22] Laura McKowen: Is one Henry or something, or charlie?
[00:44:25] Anne Helen Peterson: Charlie's my partner.
[00:44:26] Laura McKowen: Charlie's your partner. I knew that.
[00:44:28] Anne Helen Peterson: Sorry, my dogs are named, they're named Peggy and Steve.
[00:44:33] So it'd be easy to mistake them. This. Is a great question. Yeah. This is a great question because like there is personal responsibility, right? Like there is personal action and volition and agency within, and that's always true within these larger structures and maybe like something like climate change is, is an interesting thing to think about because I think when you have the balance wrong, it turns into shaming people about recycling, right. About individual choices that they are, or are not making. And they're the right balance is like, yeah, we have to be thinking about personal responsibility, but like in proportion to the larger societal stuff.
[00:45:23] But in my own life, I am constantly working on my own burnout and my own work-life balance and like very knowledgeable of the ways in which the mindset that I internalized about like, you must work all the time. Like that is, is a process to unlearn that. And other ideologies like fatphobia which like millennials internalize this incredible, these incredible understandings of fatphobia over the course of our young adulthoods and same with Gen X and boomers too. But like the, I was looking particularly at like a set of texts that were incredibly influential in the nineties and two thousands that taught us the way that we should think about our bodies.
[00:46:05] Laura McKowen: I know I read that list. And it was like, oh my God, that was the water I have swam in.
[00:46:13] Anne Helen Peterson: The water you swim in. I can, you can continue. Like, it takes a long time to get out of the water, but you can continue to be like, there's the water? There's the water. There's the water to use the language of therapy like I'm always working on it. Right. I'm always working on that process and sometimes I'm bad at it. Sometimes I fail and sometimes I regress and then, but I acknowledge that it's a process. And I think for people when you can name the thing, right, like name them when you can name it, when you can be like that's alcohol culture, that's fatphobic culture, that's burnout culture, that's hustle culture. That's post-feminist culture like that allows you, it's like in some way, naming it allows you to see it.
[00:46:56] Laura McKowen: And to see your self as not it. As, as, as a separate autonomous being that can extract, that you can extract yourself from it, you know.
[00:47:07] Anne Helen Peterson: And it acts on you and sometimes uses you as its vessel, right? Like sometimes like you become part of that force. Yeah. But you can separate yourself too. Yeah. Like sometimes I'll be like, oh my God, that's a burnout behavior. Like when I have a book that I really want to read at my bedside table, and I'm just scrolling through Instagram, like burnout behavior, like right there.
[00:47:30] Laura McKowen: That's helpful. There's a lot to complain about. And there's a lot of things that are broken and there's a lot of, there's a lot of systems that are broken. And I don't want people to feel hopeless or that it's just one big, you know, we're doing one big list of why Rachel Hollis and that constellation, all the others are a problem. It's more like, how did this happen to us? And can I call it, can we call it out so that you can see it and name it?
[00:47:59] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. Well, and I feel like I've used so many different like discipline names, but it is a form of like archeology, right? You're like kind of unearthing like where did Rachel Hollis come from?
[00:48:10] And there's a whole long history there of women who are preaching very similar ideas and either like cultural texts that she's building on. And when you see that she's standing on the shoulders of like thousands, hundreds of thousands of other women, it's easier to not be like Rachel Hollis is the devil and be like, no, this entire like structure.
[00:48:33] Laura McKowen: Yeah. She's a participatory sacrificial. When that Instagram post came out of that tiktok video, it was like, oh, okay. She just said the quiet part out loud. Like I was not surprised. But there it is. Now we've heard it.
[00:48:47] Anne Helen Peterson: A piece that was written several years before this recent blowup on Buzzfeed is by the author, Laura Turner, because, you know, Rachel Hollis kind of operates in these Christian spheres as well. And Laura is firmly rooted in that.
[00:49:04] Laura McKowen: I'm deeply interested in that, you know, that the I see Glennon Doyle is coming out of that.
[00:49:13] Anne Helen Peterson: Glennon Doyle I think has done a lot more thinking on all of this stuff. Like a lot more self interrogation.
[00:49:20] Laura McKowen: I agree. I totally agree. But she came from that world.
[00:49:24] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah, totally. That's where I first saw her speak was like at one of those tours where female Christian influencers speak. I was there to do a report it, or like I was reporting on female Trump voters. And I went to one of those events. Cause I thought it would be a really interesting place to like see how women at evangelicals were, were approaching the election.
[00:49:46] Laura McKowen: So how do you, how do you look at or think about, I guess we can call it influencer culture. I would never ever call myself an influencer, but I built, I built a, something on Instagram. It started there and on writing blog posts, and then now I have a book and a company and stuff, but I'm also super critical and I feel very dubious about influencer culture and like what's done to people and what it's doing to us like that to me is a big water we're swimming in conversation.
[00:50:20] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. It requires oftentimes opening up every part of your life as fodder for content. And this was true with reality celebrity as well, but that was the kind of the precursor, huh? Yeah, totally. And it just accelerated with influencer culture. And I think it's really corrosive and leads to bad places.
[00:50:44] And so I don't have conscious boundaries. I'm not like this is part of my life that would never, like, I have not written out a list of things that I would never put on social media, that sort of thing. But like, I think I subconsciously do shelter things and I'm careful about the way that I talk about things. I don't have as big of an Instagram following as you do.
[00:51:07] But like sometimes I'll be hanging out with my friends and their kids and like, they don't have a no kids on social media policy, but like if I ever take a cute picture of their kids, I'm like, is it okay? Right. Because to them, it is really weird a thousand people that they don't know, like a picture of their son.
[00:51:24] They're like, here's a picture of my son eating a corn on the cob, you know, like, why did these people like this? It's a weird dynamic. And I think the more that people are mindful, thoughtful about it, the easier it is to kind of preserve that part of yourself that feels essential.
[00:51:42] Laura McKowen: The people that are doing that work, but for the people taking it in. So you said, you said it can be really corrosive. So talk about what, some of the ways that you see that being corrosive, either for the people doing it or the people taking it in.
[00:51:58] Anne Helen Peterson: Well, I think that one thing that I have seen actually several influencers say. Over the past year is like, this is not the whole of my life. Like whatever assumptions you are making about the whole of my life and the whole of my person you are doing so through a limited representation of my life. And so, but I think that the illusion with influencers with reality television is that you are getting the whole of a person's life. You can make judgements about that, judgements about them accordingly. So if something is not represented in their social media in some way, then that's something that they don't care about. Right. When there are all sorts of things that I talk about that I care about that are crucial to me and who I am and my thinking.
[00:52:44] And are not part of my social media right now. Cause I'm not documenting all of them.
[00:52:49] Laura McKowen: Yeah. They can't even be reduced nor would you want to. Okay. I heard a Rob Bell podcast recently where he's was talking about, you know, people that live on the edges, where they, they live on the edges of where they meet the outside world all the time. And it's that it's very hard to have a center in that way. And now there's increasingly, there's millions of people that you could aspire to be like, or look to as role models versus smaller, smaller segments that, you know, even 50 years ago you wrote about like Hollywood celebrities used to be this sort of larger than life.
[00:53:29] We can't be like them. No one can be like them, you know? And, and we have limited access to them and now those boundaries are all destroyed. Right? Yeah. You can tune into almost anyone's life that will allow you. So like, what does that do to us?
[00:53:48] Anne Helen Peterson: Well, I think it creates a, a sense of intimacy that is sometimes great and sometimes powerful and meaningful, especially if you don't feel like you can find friendship or comfort in the place that you are. Right. So like that would have been really important to me growing up the way that I did. Like, if I could have found people online that were more like me, right. Or like just represented different ways of being, so there's that positive aspect to it. And I think this is so true with like LGBT kids, like kids who are growing up in isolation in one way or another people who are adopted, like, you know, just finding your community.
[00:54:29] Like there's a real strength in that at the same time. I think that sometimes it allows the in-person strength, like our in-person relationships to address. And relationships that have a real two way dynamic, a real give and take, instead of just a give, give, give, and on the part of the individual or on the part of the influencer.
[00:54:48] And so I think that like, if you let allow those to atrophy, you're, you're losing a part of yourself. And I don't even mean like, go hang out all the time. Like not everyone wants to hang out all the time. Right. It can just mean talking on the phone with someone for 30 minutes, like talking on the phone with someone who is, it's just you and that person, and you were having an exchange of information, ideas.
[00:55:08] Laura McKowen: Like it is, uh, a not public conversation.
[00:55:11] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. Yes. And, and not performative, like there are so many things that we do that are performative so many things that don't involve influential cultures. So I had to, like, I don't want to say that like, only things that influencers do are performative, but I do think that there is something about actual intimacy and community that is not for performance.
[00:55:33] Yeah, right. It is just for the strength of being with one another and create and support systems and feeling loved and known. And that's hard to do, I think if your only forms of relationships or parasocial relationships with influencers.
[00:55:51] Laura McKowen: Yeah. That's a great way of putting it and, and, you know, the upside that you've talked about, I, I mean, I found sober people . If, if I was limited to my town, say, you know, to go to meetings in my town, it was a tiny universe. And I might've, I felt a lot of, you know, despair about that because I didn't see people that I felt I could be friends with, frankly. Whether that was true or not, who knows, but it matters, you know, so it widens the lens on the aperture and the types of people you could connect with and the topics you could talk about in close community. So the positives are easy to see. I think, I don't think we have even a slight grasp on the, the ways that we're affected by it negatively.
[00:56:38] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like, even like circling back to our discussion of like the community around culture study, I really try to like, de-center myself, it's never about like, what does Annie say about this or whatever. Like, it's, it's very much, not only do I like give the newsletter over to Q and A's that are almost like, it's another person's words for seven eighths of the thing. And I do that, you know, almost every other week, but then also, even in something like the threads, like I wait purposely wait 20 or 30 minutes, so that my comment on like a thread about like a prompt is not the most important thing.
[00:57:16] Right. I am just one. I am part of the community and the community is only as strong as the people who are participating in it. Which is important, right? Because if it's just me, it's worthless, you become the guru and you become the thing that you didn't intend to become.
[00:57:32] Laura McKowen: Yeah, no, I'm taking notes because that's something that I, I'm still trying to figure out how to do. If I can do social media and be the same person. Yeah. So I'm taking notes on that. What do you hope the next, what are the next chapters looking like? Or at least the next one?
[00:57:51] Anne Helen Peterson: Well, I'll tease something that I have not said out loud before, which is, I think I might write a book about Taylor Swift.
[00:58:00] Laura McKowen: Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. I'm saying that screaming. I don't even know if you fall on the like, fan side or just a cultural phenomenon,
[00:58:11] Anne Helen Peterson: Both. Like the way, like my like very preliminary way, which might end up being the subtitle or something is like seven ways of looking at Taylor swift and looking at her and her career, which is so multifaceted through like a lens of personal artistry, but then also politics and like how she thought of politics, the genre, whiteness, femininity, you know, like this tradition of romance and narrative that is grounded her. So that just seems like a very fertile text.
[00:58:42] Laura McKowen: Oh my God, please do it. Please do it. There are a few things that I have just sort of obsessed about at culturally. One has been Peloton I'm just as someone who runs a community and a brand, not my personal brand, but my company's brand The Luckiest Club. Seeing why it's the phenomenon that it is. And I, I want everybody to read your series.
[00:59:07] Anne Helen Peterson: I'm going to do an installment on there, the way they've done community, because it is very effective and they have countered effectively countered I think so many of the criticisms that were lobbied at them.
[00:59:22] Laura McKowen: Yeah. They're just really good. You've done a great job of breaking down some of the pieces of that. So I want people to go ahead and read that, but Taylor Swift is another one, you know, as a person who loves music, just admiring her music and her songwriting,
[00:59:35] Anne Helen Peterson: She's so freaking good at social media, like the way that she has like made herself into an over the course of time, like really changed her social media strategy, but also like made herself into a elusive commodity the way that she teases things like,\ there's very little there, but it's really interesting.
[00:59:55] Laura McKowen: She's at this sort of mega mega mega star status
[00:59:59] Anne Helen Peterson: And there aren't a lot of her level anymore.
[01:00:02] Laura McKowen: No, no, there aren't. It used to be that there was a small pool, you know, and, and big stars. And there's just a big pool now. Yeah. And very few stars. Yeah. I hope you write that book. So where can people find you your sub stack?
[01:00:19] Anne Helen Peterson: Yeah, my self stack. You can either Google Culture Study or you could it's Anne Helen, which is my name at substack dot com. And then my Twitter is Anne Helen and my Instagram is Anne Helen Petersen.
[01:00:30] Laura McKowen: Okay. Well, I can't wait to see what else do you keep doing. I was very grateful to Mikel our producer for turning me on to your work and I'm a fan now.
[01:00:40] Anne Helen Peterson: Awesome. This has been wonderful. Great time.
[01:00:43] Laura McKowen: Thank you. Thank you for being here. Yeah.
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