Alex Cooper, Kamala Harris & The Fear of Politics
Not on my 2024 bingo card: Kamala Harris saying 'Daddy Gang'
From upset conservative fans of the show to admirers saying it was Harris' best interview, I cannot believe it all, at all.
I saw a woman on TikTok speak about the controversy Alex Cooper’s interview with Kamala Harris initiated in the comment section of a promotional TikTok for it.
God, my algorithm knows I’m messy.
According to a few commentators, Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper’s podcast, had no reason for being politicized. Call Her Daddy was an oasis in the desert that was life, quenching our collective thirst for fun. Seemingly tainted by bias and partisanship, the frustrated fans hinted at how the podcast no longer held value as a neutral source of entertainment because of Kamala Harris’ appearance on the show. Others spoke about Cooper’s interview with Harris with awe, claiming it to be ‘the best interview Kamala Harris has had’.
That is a bold statement.
We cannot deny the unprecedented impact Call Her Daddy has had on the podcasting industry. Cooper closed a deal worth more than $60 million with Spotify, making it “Spotify’s biggest exclusive deal for a woman-led podcast” in 2021. As this one door closes, another one opens leading to SiriusXM for another multiyear deal, this time being “worth as much as $125 million.” The podcast, initially hosted by a duo with Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, rose to success through conversations around personal stories about sexual experiences and giving sex tips to their audience. Growing apart from Franklyn and towards a more conversational interview style, Cooper is seen interviewing Kate Hudson, Simone Biles, Jojo Siwa and now, the Vice-President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.
Cooper reiterates the focus of the interview, which is women and women’s issues: “I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women and I’m not a part of it,” she expresses. The conversation between Cooper and the Vice-President of the United States of America brings forward the issues of autonomy and agency, or the lack thereof, for American women. Wanting to know Harris more personally, the Call Her Daddy host inquires on Harris’ late mother, how she raised her and what’d she say about the candidate’s presidential political campaign. Harris congratulates Cooper for her voice, her realness and her devotion to her listeners. Personally, I fail to see how this interview is a threat to Cooper’s conservative fans or how this is Harris’ best interview.
In a segment preceding their conversation, the host carefully defends her decision with welcoming Kamala Harris on her show. With an awareness of her mixed audience when it comes to political affiliations, Cooper reassures that the goal with the interview isn’t to influence or to lure people to the left. She recognizes that she doesn’t usually discuss politics and preemptively suggests that she wants Call Her Daddy to be considered as a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.
That very last statement signals something to me.
Believing that as a host of a sex-positive podcast, the platform that you’ve spent years building and the experiences you’ve shared online are apolitical signals something. And as a member of the Daddy Gang, perceiving a young woman speaking candidly about sex as apolitical, say it with me now, signals something.
Those beliefs, seemingly shared amongst Cooper and her membership, inherently point to a fear of politics, which is addressed by Michaele L. Ferguson in Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics. Ferguson introduces choice feminism as a soothing agent to three principal critiques of feminism: feminism as too radical, feminism as exclusionary, and feminism as judgmental. Therefore, choice feminism seeks to embody a nonthreatening approach and becomes a “capacious movement that welcomes all supporters —however discordant their views — while demanding on the thinnest of political commitment.” Cooper’s expressed desire for her platform to welcome all, while engaging in discourse about agency and autonomy, which are political and yet, hoping to maintain apoliticism exemplifies the host’s fear of politics.
It baffles me that Alex Cooper hasn’t considered her platform to be political, knowing that sex, agency, autonomy and womanhood do not exist in a vacuum. They are lived personally, but additionally, politically. When societal and political discourse around women’s bodies focus on men’s entitlement to women and their wombs (I bring your attention to the following headlines: JD Vance Agrees “the Postmenopausal Female” Exists to Raise Grandchildren, Andrew Tate wanted to turn women into slaves, Romanian prosecutors allege, and finally, Gisèle Pelicot's husband is accused of inviting men to rape her. She wants you to know her name), it expeditiously becomes political. When, as a podcast host of an enormous audience, benefitting from multi-million dollar deals, you engage in conversations about sex, abortion, health care and relational dynamics to men in dating and through sexual intercourses, this is at the very least political. Hence, this reluctance for being perceived as political as Kamala Harris sits across from you is at the very least ironic.
Cooper does not want for her audience to feel like she is challenging them. However, speaking about womanhood requires challenges and bringing forth the idea of women as autonomous, in terms of their reproduction, their finances and their sexuality, as both Harris and Cooper did on the podcast, in today’s world is still a matter of political resistance. When confronting choice feminism, Ferguson offers these thoughts that echo my concerns with Cooper: “Yet judgment, exclusion, and calls for change are unavoidable parts of politics. What is ultimately being expressed in a choice feminist position is a fantasy of a world without politics: a world in which we are never called upon to defend our views to those who disagree, in which we never offend anyone because we tolerate everyone, and in which we do not attempt as a collectivity to bring about structural changes. This is a vision of a world in which we all get along not because we agree, but because we studiously avoid conflict. What good is a political consciousness if we are afraid to use it?”
With an aspiration to contribute to the conversation that is currently happening about women, I struggle to understand what impact Cooper was looking to have with how fearful she seems to have been in discussing political matters or in being perceived as political. I acknowledge the business and political strategy behind both Cooper and Harris with engaging in this conversation, which I, believe it or not, did enjoy. As E. J. Dickson writes in Why Kamala Harris Went on ‘Call Her Daddy’, “Cooper’s goal appears to have been to firmly entrench her brand as the comfy-cozy girl next door, someone who makes listeners and world leaders alike feel like they’re best friends doing a first-date post-mortem in her living room. And Harris’s goal — to reach Cooper’s enormous audience of Gen-Z and millennial female voters, a demographic that can make a huge difference in an uncomfortably close election — was not at odds with Cooper’s here.” I agree with E. J. Dickson, that they both succeeded in achieving their respective goal. I am also comfortable assuming that with this interview, Cooper has guaranteed to successful pitches for anything she’d like to accomplish in the industry for a few years.
On a separate note, stating that this was Harris’ best interview as the discussion addressed topics that had already been previously discussed is, again, a bold statement. I would argue that some find it to be the best, but really, it might be one of the few political interviews they understood in its entirety.
I partially don’t blame them for it.
As a political science master’s student who has had a radio show for three years that discusses local, national and international politics, understanding politics can be difficult. Often, politics demands your time and attention, but can also need to be analyzed and dissected meticulously. Politics asks you to have an incredible knowledge, or be open to fostering it, and to engage with challenging texts, books and general information to make connections between people, past policies and potential repercussions. Politics demands for you to be involved, to be angry, to love your community and when talking about women’s rights, it requires for you to defy the status quo.
So again, as Ferguson so beautifully inquired, “what good is a political consciousness if we are afraid to use it?”
Oh, I loveee this, I'm not a regular CHD listener but commend Alex's decision to have her on and think it was a good interview but her introduction to the episode was cowardly. This is a great piece.
"Everything is politics!" sing it with me now