Episode 9: What Normal People Wear

Details, credits, errata: This week’s episode is a fun one: Sam and Alissa talk to renowned feminist public intellectual Jessica Valenti about a movie of her choosing: Brian Dannelly’s 2004 Christian high school satire, Saved! It’s a movie neither of your hosts had seen because frankly they were afraid of being retraumatized but it turned out to be really sweet and funny and we recommend it highly.

Jessica is a remarkable writer and thinker and there’s a lot we mentioned here that I’ll try to run down: first, her 2009 book The Purity Myth, available here, and the other books and anthologies she’s contributed to, and her column at GEN. We also talk a little bit about The Vow, the new HBO documentary about weird misogynist cult NXIVM (which was covered well by the New York Times Magazine here), and Alissa briefly mentioned Bill Gothard, a Christian sex pest and founder of the Quiverfull movement. Sam mentioned a queasy incident at Christianity Today sister publication Leadership Journal, covered in depth here.

Our episode art on the website is Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth. Saved! can be rented from iTunes here.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Saved! is copyright 2004 MGM Studios. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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