Dire Straights – Details, episodes & analysis

In this inaugural episode, we wade into an internet subculture known as the “dark feminine,” a viral beauty trend turned hetero dating strategy.

Dark feminine influencers promise liberation from fuckboys and toxic straight relationships, with TikTok videos and ebooks that teach women the art of seduction—and not texting men back.

Behind the goth-meets-glam makeup tutorials and affirmations about “pretty privilege,” there lurks sexism, gender essentialism, and a truly dark view of both heterosexuality and feminism.

Remember: You can listen to our episodes on Substack or via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcasting platforms.

Show highlights

01:39 Amanda watches some TikToks that we don’t have the rights to play, but you can watch them here

03:00 Selling a fantasy of turning the tables on men

05:56 Dark femininity goes mainstream

07:21 Amanda affirms her “pretty privilege”

11:23 What do these women want?

15:06 The racial dynamics of playing with “darkness”

16:50 Tracy’s embarrassing Angelina Jolie anecdote

18:03 Myths, folklore, “shadows,” and the Carl Jung of it all

20:57 Witchcraft and feminine power

23:39 Dark femininity as a response to patriarchy

25:46 Shitty dating dynamics

30:38 The overlaps of “dark” and “divine” femininity

32:44 What’s this have to do with the femosphere?

34:43 The dark feminine and… sociopathy?

39:32 Feminine ideologies as an alt-right pipeline

50:01 Reimagining femininity beyond stereotypes and heteronormativity

Dire Straights is a 100% scrappy, aging-millennial feminist operation coming to you at exactly the right time in history. We’re not financially dependent on corporate media or advertisers. If we had normal day jobs, this podcast would probably get us fired from them. Paid subscriptions really do liberate us— and so do your little hearts and shares.

Welcome to Dire Straights, a feminist podcast critiquing heterosexual love, sex, politics, and culture. Dire Straights is hosted by Amanda Montei and Tracy Clark-Flory, a couple of longtime journalists, essayists, critics, and authors.

Our show is a skewering of straight existence—and an exercise in imagining new possibilities. Each episode, we’ll unpack the most dire elements of hetero culture, like:

* Couples therapy

* Dating apps

* Sex strikes

* Monogamy

* Age-gap romances

* Cries of “but what about men?”

* The orgasm gap

* Antifeminist “feminism”

* Sex positivity™

* The manosphere

* Decentering men

* Pro-natalism

* “Dark feminine” influencers

We explore sex and dating alongside marriage, divorce, and the relentlessly unequal realm of hetero parenting and the nuclear family. We also consider celebrities and politicians as case studies. Tech bros, tradwives, and TERFs are also up for examination.

Along the way, we turn to beloved feminist scholarship, call on radical contemporary thinkers, and share our own personal stories, as we try to sketch out more hopeful visions of love, sex, relationships, and romance.

This is a 100% scrappy, aging-millennial feminist operation coming to you at exactly the right time in history. We spend countless hours researching, writing, recording, editing, and producing each episode. We’re not financially dependent on corporate media or advertisers, and if we had normal day jobs, this podcast would probably get us fired from them.

Paid subscriptions are the best way to make our work possible, so head over to our show page at direstraightspod.com to subscribe and get full access to the show.

Free subscribers get:

* One full episode and one paywalled episode every month.

Paid subscribers get:

* Two full episodes a month. No paywalls, ever.

* Access to the Dire Straights community via chats and episode comment threads.

* A growing list of fun extras, including advice and bonus discussions.

Founding subscribers get:

* Annual paid subscriptions to both Tracy’s AND Amanda’s newsletters plus all paid Dire Straights perks. You save $50 for going all in on us and you'll be supporting the hell out of independent feminist media in a time of journalistic collapse and feminist backlash.

If you’re interested in supporting us more deeply in the long term, please get in touch at direstraightspod@gmail.com.

“Techno-optimism” is a system of belief currently fueling the very worst tech bros—from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg. So, we decided to do a close read of the movement’s manifesto to better understand its architects and their vision of the future, which includes becoming “Technological Supermen” and… invading space.

We turn to figures like Marc Andreessen, who have claimed this thinking as their own, to consider the broader implications of believing that endless innovation can save us.

As we dig further into this seemingly neutral but actually very straight-white-guy idea that technological advancements are inherently good for humanity, we find that capitalist definitions of progress are actually just the same old hyper-masculine, colonialist hero’s journeys, dressed up in VC-funded clothing.

And in all these visions of the future, I bet you can guess the role of women.

Looking at links between techno-optimism, pronatalism, and the manosphere, we ask what a more intersectional feminist vision of technology and the future might look like.

Artificial wombs anyone?

Show highlights include…

02:29 The origins of “techno-optimism”

04:47 The techno-optimist manifesto

07:07 The dystopia of “not utopia but close enough”

09:10 The romance and eros of technology… for dudes

9:58 The hero’s journey but make it tech bro

11:56 “Free thinkers” rebelling against their controlling mommies

14:12 Not that fringe, sadly

15:04 Vance’s stint in VC, inspired by Lord of the Rings

18:30 Web 3.0 ughhhhh

23:43 Dudes doing dude things (challenging each other to cage fights in the Roman coliseum)

25:30 Masculine energy™ bc the oppression of feminine energy, ofc

29:38 Futurist masculinity (and contempt for women) is not new or innovative

35:35 Pronatalist “techno-optimism” and women’s work in this version of the future

39:00 Unserious people in great positions of power, the pessimism of reproductive control, the role of women’s bodies and the American family, and, yes, eugenics, again

40:20 Red-pill thinking and the “cock carousel”

46:28 The nuclear family as anti-woke isolationism and imperialism

54:20 Leftist pro-tech philosophies that erase ecological destruction, global racial violence, and the feminist struggle to restructure work

55:43 Artificial wombs as the downfall of men… could be good? And other feminist visions of the future.

A huge thanks to everyone who has already supported us. Dire Straights is a scrappy feminist operation coming to you at exactly the right time in history. We don’t take any money from tech bros and paid subscriptions from listeners are the only reason we can talk about this stuff so freely and imagine a better future than the one these guys want.

We talk couples therapy—the good, the bad, and the unequal.

We look at sexism in the therapy room, consider how therapists try to save us from patriarchal socialization, and talk about the divorce stigma that shows up in the ever-popular belief that marriage is hard work. We ask: How does couples therapy challenge inequality in straight relationships—and how does it enable and excuse it?

Along the way, we discover the maybe not-so-surprising origins of marital counseling in white supremacy and eugenics, the field’s mid-twentieth century makeover, and the 90s-era therapy boom, which collided head-on with the woefully overdue criminalization of marital rape, giving us the “love languages” and “appointment sex” trends we know today.

After the paywall, we also share some very different, and very personal, couples therapy success stories—one that ended in divorce, and another in marital growth.

Show highlights include…

01:30 Couples therapy in pop culture—from Dying for Sex to Dr. Orna

5:40 Tabloid headlines about celebrities, like Barack and Michelle Obama, in couples therapy

10:30 The social and economic capital of being married

13:10 Meet the father of marriage counseling, a eugenicist

16:01 Marriage counseling evolved with the sexual revolution… or did it?

18:02 The 90s therapy boom and the criminalization of marital rape

20:20 John Gottman on wives’ “sour” faces and “divorce prediction”

24:05 Love languages and appointment sex

26:35 What is couples therapy for and how do we define it as a success?

26:00 Tracy on the widespread belief that marriage is joyless and punishing

27:18 Amanda on divorced women becoming an outlet for married people’s miseries

32:20 Women in straight marriages complaining about their partners with naturalizing language vs. women taking on the work of healing men’s patriarchal trauma: a memoir

34:40 Tracy asks: is couples therapy just a way of making the economic trap of marriage more survivable?

36:00 Divorce stigma

40:08 Reproduction of unequal power dynamics in the therapy room

41:50 Why couples stay in unequal relationships even when they believe in equality

43:45 Tracy and Amanda role play a couple in therapy lol

46:40 Questions for therapists to ask straight men in couples therapy

50:06 The moral quandary for therapists working with heterosexual married couples

56:34 Couples therapy as a powder keg

57:35 Amanda and Tracy go deep on their own experiences with couples therapy

Tell us ALL about your experiences with couples therapy in the comments.

We dive headfirst into the sex column at the alt-right women’s magazine, Evie, which journalist EJ Dickson called a “Gen Z ‘Cosmo’ for the Far Right.”

As we dig into Evie’s surprisingly graphic how-to-please-your-husband guides, we explore what the magazine tells us about conservative sexual politics today, including how the right frames their messages as empowering, educational, scientific, and even liberating, while actually selling young women strict, unequal, and objectifying models of sex and love.

After the paywall, we talk about how we once internalized the demand to perform for men during sex, and explore our own brushes with topics that show up in the magazine’s sex column—like riding cowgirl and grieving, as one Evie writer puts it, through our vaginas.

Show highlights include…

02:45 Evie imagery as Victoria Secret circa 1995

05:35 Amanda’s affair with Evie

10:00 Milk + cow + man with lasso as American Dream

11:40 Tracy on not being able to stomach the sour milk of trad discourse

14:30 White supremacist frontierism

17:15 Mr. Darcy teaches tradwives how to date in Evie’s relationships column—brace yourself

24:05 Reactionary feminists selling women crap instead of liberation

29:02 Evie loves vanilla sex

31:55 Tracy’s experience with cowgirl lol

35:58 The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and “sex positivity”

39:11 Tips for using the “backturn” to show off your “bum” in… the lap dances you give your husband

43:59 Disciplining women into straightness

46:45 Evie’s advice for women who avoid sex with their husbands “like the plague”

49:05 P.S. to future husbands

52:36 The “painful treatment” that “led to the most pleasurable sex”

55:45 The politics of the “familiar erection”

59:00 Sex ed for conservatives

59:19 Making marriage spicy again

1:00:00 Bunk science

1:01:45 Single reader discretion advised

1:03:43 Grief and spiritual sex

1:07:45 Anti-kink conservatives appropriating kink terms

How did you learn about sex? Was it condoms on bananas, reading Cosmo, watching MTV Spring Break specials, or something else entirely? Drop a comment below. And come join us in our subscriber chat!

In this episode, we’re talking about men who call their exes “crazy,” don’t text back, refer to women as “females,” and listen to Joe Rogan.

In other words, we’re talking about “red flags.”

Maybe you’ve seen a viral video of a woman listing off warning signs that a man is no good. Maybe you’ve seen that guy on TikTok who re-posts videos of straight people behaving badly and then runs around waving an oversized red flag to pass judgment on their dysfunction. Or maybe you’ve just listened to a friend talk about a guy canceling a date at the last minute and found yourself saying, “That’s a red flag.”

Red flags can guard against heartbreak or abuse, but they’ve also become a meme targeting everything from pizza choice to misogyny. We look at this viral discourse as a window into women’s greatest fears and hopes around hetero relationships.

This is a free episode, but paid subscribers make this podcast possible. You can upgrade at direstraightspod.com. You'll get access to the full episode, along with special bonus content, our subscriber chat, and more fun extras on our Substack.

Show highlights…

02:04 What is a red flag, exactly?

03:00 Amanda dated a guy who made fun of her hair

03:56 Tracy dated a guy with an “I’m sorry” tattoo

05:34 Amanda’s red flag was drunk dialing

08:04 Tracy’s red flag was writing about her sex life on the internet (also: hanging a weird Diane Arbus prints above her bed)

10:31 The viral Tea app was supposed to help women avoid dating “red flag” men—and then some “red flag” men hacked the app

15:09 The red flag has its origin in war and now it’s being used on “the battlefield of love”

17:22 The term took off in self-help books in the 80s as a way for women to try to identify misogynistic and abusive men

21:15 Our “old friend” John Gottman makes a killing off red flags that could spell the “apocalypse” of divorce

26:09 Now that it’s a viral meme, the meaning of a “red flag” has shifted

27:19 Like the “ick,” red flags point toward the cognitive dissonance of hetero relationships

28.58 The racist and classist assumptions behind “icks”

33:15 The most popular red flag themes are… [drum roll] listen to find out

38:52 Men listen to this podcast and like it! Green flags for them!

39:41 The bar is so low

41:28 What about men who are great to start and then… you get married and have kids

46:24 Women share signs a man is red-pilled

49:33 Is “simp” the new “pussy-whipped”?

53:39 Does red flag culture give a false sense of security?

56:43 The absurdist comedy of red flag videos on TikTok

58:54 Maybe red flag lists help enshrine certain behaviors as troublesome

59:00 Fighting words over pineapple pizza

01:11:43 Are we witnessing the enshittification of a useful concept?

01:01:29 Why do we love red flags right now? Is it #MeToo? Swipe-based dating?

01:06:05 How many red flags are about trying to avoid vulnerability and heartbreak?

01:07:41 What’s this have to do with divorce stigma?

01:11:32 “You don’t see something as a red flag when it’s been normalized for you.”

01:14:23 Red flags are about making a “bet” on lifelong monogamy

01:20:19 Paying for this podcast is a big green flag— put that on your dating profile

We got AI boyfriends for a weird and wild weeklong experiment—and now we’re reporting back.

There are dozens of popular apps that let users either design their own virtual romantic companions or choose readymade partners modeled after common straight-guy archetypes, celebrities, and popular characters from TV and film. You can even simulate a very realistic phone call with your bespoke digital boyfriend. And these guys always text you back.

We look at what the popularity of AI companions—and the technology itself—has to tell us about the state of heterosexual relationships today. And we get very personal as we share our experiences with several AI boyfriends, and one girlfriend. You’ll even get to hear from one of them. But the best parts are behind the paywall.

Our conclusions? You have to listen to find out. Let’s just say, we don’t like this future any more than you do—and yet, it’s here.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, trust us that now would be the time to upgrade. Just go to direstraightspod.com. You'll get access to the full episode, along with special bonus content, our subscriber chat, and more fun extras on our Substack.

Show highlights…

1:10 Tracy tries to make “polyAImory” happen

1:25 Amanda had a rough week with lots of breakups

4:37 AI is actually infiltrating every aspect of sex and relationships

8:27 The gendering of bots

10:00 To be clear, AI is categorically terrible obvi, 0/10 we do not recommend

17:35 Tracy & Amanda are suckers for a rebel artist because we never learn

20:00 Tracy & Amanda discover they dated the same rebel artist but choose sisters before misters, especially since the guy they dated wouldn’t even change his t-shirt

22:03 Breakup #1

23:23 Amanda dates a writer… she should have seen what was coming

24:05 S**t hits the fan

This summer’s pop music has a lot to say about heterosexuality.

It’s seen as a burden and an addiction—men are compared to children and cocaine. Haim is literally asking, over and over: “Why am I in this relationship?” It’s textbook heterofatalism when Sabrina Carpenter sings, “I swear they choose me, I'm not choosing them.”

But some pop stars are actually escaping sad straight relationships—or else abandoning the romantic fairy tale. Cardi B is living a divorce revenge plot, Lorde is discovering a more expansive sense of her own gender post-breakup, and Summer Walker is trading love for “the last four of your credit card.”

Since we can’t play all these songs for you, we’ve created playlists on Apple Music and Spotify to go with this episode.

Make sure to join us on Substack, where we have bonus content, subscriber chats, and more. Dire Straights is a scrappy feminist operation. We don’t take any money from corporate music execs. Paid subscriptions keep us singing, and we love being in this relationship with you.

In this episode…

01:25 Is it Single Girl Summer? Heterofatalist Summer? Neoliberal Feminist Summer?

04:08 Lorde's album cover is an X-ray of a pelvis with an IUD in it. A symbol of strength, refusal, and bodily defense? Or maybe it’s giving MAHA vibes!

11:32 Lorde sings about being “in the middle gender-­wise” and seems to be asking, “Who will love the ‘me’ that is stepping outside of heteronormativity?”

15:24 Cardi B teases her divorce album with a diss track about her ex (“Next time you see your mama, tell her how she raised a b***h”).

19:25 Amanda is (not) ready for her epic divorce era—and a football player boyfriend.

21:36 Subverting the single-girl breakup song.

22:49 Tracy makes Amanda watch Kesha’s “Boy Crazy” video because she loves it very, very much.

23:25 Amanda has thoughts about the MAGA-looking men in the video.

23:58 Kesha breastfeeds a grown man!

25:42 This is her Dr. Luke revenge era.

26:57 Tracy has regrets about being the privileged straight girl in gay clubs in her twenties.

29:02 Fletcher got her start as a lesbian icon.

30:52 But then she kissed a boy and she’s sorry about that!

35:10 Then she made some really bad merch about it. Also: is there some sort of bi-pessimism going on here?

41:00 Amanda is really annoying her kids by listening to Haim all the time.

44:21 To promote their album, I Quit, they recreated famous hetero paparazzi shots, like that Nicole Kidman post-divorce meme.

47:37 Why does “the Millennial divorce album” have no divorce in it?

50:27 Summer Walker is over the exploitation of love. “Buy back my love, you can keep your heart,” she sings. Also: “I’m trading a broken heart for a good life.”

51:55 Do yourself a favor and go watch Ciara’s “Like a Boy” music video from 2007.

01:01:00 We’re still not tired of talking about Sabrina’s “Man’s Best Friend” album art. Bonus reading: Tracy’s essay on the topic.

01:08:00 Amanda asks: Why do we treat pop music as “PR for some kind of moral womanhood”?

01:10:00 Sabrina is camp, yes. But what is she doing with “cuteness”? And does it actually help to highlight gender hierarchy and domination?

01:12:00 So what does this summer’s pop tell us about heterosexuality? We pull it all together.

This week, we’re doing an epic survey of American divorce plots, including the literature, film, TV, and cultural attitudes that shaped our understandings of divorce from a young age, teaching us about family, love, and heterosexuality.

That means we’re talking about tough divorcees of the 80s and 90s—including ex-wives who get a new lease on life after their husbands dump them for younger women—and the “chick flicks” of the aughts and 2010s that brought us reconciliation plots and Euro-travel as the ultimate divorce era milestone.

We even stretch back to beliefs held by the Founding Fathers and to literature that featured women throwing themselves into the sea to escape their oppressive marriages, because divorce was not an option, before exploring the gradual evolution of tragicomic stories about marital misery in pop culture.

As we dig into our own personal stories of resisting divorce myths and the stories we inherited about love and marriage, we also look at where divorce plots stand today in the midst of unprecedented authoritarianism, gender and political division, feminist backlash, and an increasing number of straight women choosing to remain single.

This episode is for paying subscribers, who are the only reason we can make this podcast. Free subscribers will see a preview of the episode. Upgrade for just $8/month to listen to the whole episode and to get access to all other paywalled shows, bonus interviews, conversations, and our subscriber chat on Substack.

Show highlights…

2:00 In case you forgot, the origins of marriage are in white men’s property rights

3:47 Henry VIII creating a whole new church to get out of his marriage as colonialist pop culture

5:01 Tracy reminds us that The Tudors is a good and hot show

5:55 Rich, connected white men get divorce in England

6:33 Women get poison

8:57 The Founding Fathers saw divorce as an essential freedom… until they realized it was a threat to white patriarchy

11:44 By the 19th century, women are writing about their bad marriages and things… don’t end well

15:39 Edith Wharton’s divorce plot

16:04 Hollywood takes on divorce… and then adopts a Christian censorship code

18:08 The love/hate marriage trope takes off

22:30 The lucky, happy family narrative emerges in the 80s

23:56 And men’s desire is positioned as the only threat to marriage

27:09 Enter: The Babysitters’ Club and The First Wives Club

31:38 The divorcee becomes an aspirational character

35:23 The not-quite-revenge plot

37:23 The most iconic divorcee scene yet

39:21 It’s the aughts—Amanda and Tracy are very much centering men

40:36 Marital misery as the real traumatic inheritance

43:19 Eat, Pray, Love and Get Married

46:03 Amanda is only 40— she doesn’t need a caregiver!

46:39 But social services would be nice!

51:57 Tracy plays divorce movie trivia

54:00 Somehow Ryan Gosling is hot even when he’s toxic??

56:47 The truest divorce plot: a couple caught between social scripts and the reality of their relationship

1:00:00 The “broken family” myth

1:02:05 The rise of the divorce memoir and hetero-exceptionalism

1:11:08 The “women choosing the right guy” myth

1:13:02 Political and religious differences also lead to divorce

1:16:34 Divorce stigma is not a strong enough phrase for what women face when considering divorce

1:17:57 Let’s party

Today, we’re talking about the fifth shift — all the labor and consumerism that heterosexual women engage in to maintain their marital sex lives.

Appointment sex, date nights, intimacy classes, coaching programs, books about desire, erotic subscription services, and hours of internet content about keeping the spark alive. And then there's pills, gummies, bacon-flavored lube (an actual thing), and many more late capitalist iterations of sex positivity.

In this episode, we look at the erotic hurdles that are baked into hetero monogamous married life, from inequality in the home to sex becoming chore-like, obligatory, and just… not that hot anymore. A lot of women fear that they are abnormal, or headed for divorce, if they don’t have constant mind-blowing sex with their husbands. And they tend to blame themselves. But we’re also witnessing a growing cultural interest in open marriages and midlife sexual awakenings.

Our personal experiences with the un-sexiness of the “marital bed,” and the much hotter possibilities of encountering a spouse as a bit of a stranger, are behind this episode’s paywall, so you’ll have to upgrade to get the juiciest stuff. And this is easily our juiciest episode yet.

Independent feminist voices like ours are under attack. We’re free to talk about the stuff no one else talks about because of our paying subscribers. If you believe in this podcast, support it! Head over to direstraightspod.com to become a paid subscriber and help make this podcast possible. You'll get access to special bonus content, subscriber chats, and more. If you're only listening to us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're missing out on the full experience--so make sure to hit the link above.

Show highlights…

2:03 We discuss alllll the shifts women work after the second shift, and it takes us almost ten minutes just to describe them all. Women are doing that much work.

9:45 We have arrived at the fifth shift. We’re already tired.

11:45 Despite how exhausted women are, they are pathologized for not desiring their partners at the end of the day hmmmm

14:15 But why exactly aren’t men putting in the work of maintaining sexual intimacy in marriage?

17:45 Post-MeToo consent shakes up the long history of sexual duty and obligation in marriage.

18:54 Lots of things sapping eroticism from married life.

19:32 Late capitalist solutions to the challenges of monogamy.

22:20 Do we really need bacon-flavored lube??

30:51 Should women be flashing their boobs at their husbands to get them to do chores?

33:31 Can cohabitation ever be hot?

35:00 Go to the “marital bed” in this economy?

37:30 Amanda spills the tea on her (very!) surprising and hot FWB situation—and what it says about men taking care of themselves.

38:14 Speaking of, should women be working so hard to help men undo their patriarchal socialization? Why not just… let the men do it themselves?

44:02 We need to talk about spiciness and risk.

49:07 Tracy shares the (very!) surprising experience that launched her into a midlife sex portal.

54:39 The hottest married sex is sex that provides an escape from marriage.

1:02:00 Enter sex positivity™

1:17:00 Straight people are encouraged to use sex to avoid deeper relationship problems.

1:20:00 Your regular reminder that marriage was designed to oppress women… but at least we’re finally talking about sexual consent in marriage?

1:23:00 You’re normal… but also a weirdo freak like everyone else and that’s why we love you.

Don’t forget to share this episode and rate it if you loved it! Thank youuuu <3