Unladylike

A podcast that both celebrates and challenges contemporary feminism? Consider us all ears. Lucy Ribchester chats to Unladylike founder and presenter Cristen Conger

What do foot fetishes, maiden names, the Illuminati, squirting, and nose jobs all have in common? No, they’re not categories on the new season of Pointless (arguably, a shame). Instead they have all featured as subjects on cult feminist podcast, Unladylike, hosted by Cristen Conger since 2018 and running into its 163rd episode at time of writing. Conger’s choices of subjects for each hour-long cultural dissection are varied to say the least, but what unites them all, along with their accompanying on-air deep dives, is their relevance to the lives of women.

Conger became drawn to the medium of podcasting shortly after graduating college, while working for the website How Stuff Works. ‘At that time, I was in my early 20s and in my first job that I cared about,’ she recalls. ‘Because of that, I was having my first overall awakenings to the realities of sexism, especially in the workplace.’ The feminist blogosphere was at the time ‘still pretty robust’ which gave her the idea to try creating a podcast in a similar vein. ‘Can we make a podcast looking at the world through the lens of gender and women, asking the questions: what does this mean for women? How do women contribute?’

Conger’s first podcast, Stuff Mom Never Told You, ran until 2016 and set the tone for Unladylike’s unabashed, rigorous discussion of cultural touchstones. But still being under the How Stuff Works umbrella, Conger didn’t own her intellectual property for the show, something she became increasingly aware of the more she discussed feminism on air. ‘I realised I was sitting here in a podcasting booth talking to women about knowing their worth and betting on themselves. And I needed to walk that talk.’ With preternatural timing, she left to begin developing Unladylike shortly before Trump’s election.

One of the greatest assets of podcasting, as opposed to blogging or essay writing, Conger says, is the intimacy it offers between presenter and listener, ‘that one-on-one time you’re spending with each individual’. As anyone who suffers from insomnia will know, podcasts can keep you company in the darkest of the wee hours, or, in Conger’s case, as she is going about dull household tasks. ‘It’s the kind of in-depth relationship that you don’t otherwise get. It’s powerful to hear only the voice. It forces you to do the thing that I think a lot of us, especially these days, have a difficult time with, which is simply listening.’

Often listeners will get in touch with Conger, surprising her with the candour of their personal stories, such as the grandfather who wrote to tell her he’d built a relationship with his granddaughter around listening to Unladylike. ‘It just created a way for them to talk about things that normally grandfathers and granddaughters probably wouldn’t talk about, and gave him insight as well into things that she might be going through.’

Other times Conger has found her own feminist views challenged, as was the case with an episode centred around maiden names. Conger had hitherto been familiar with the core feminist argument about keeping your name. But after the episode aired, she heard all kinds of stories as to why listeners had changed or not changed theirs, ranging from escaping an abusive upbringing to keeping connection with ethnic heritage. ‘That reminded me that a lot of times feminism gets boiled down to, and misrepresented as, a checklist of rules. And life is nuanced and complex, and that kind of purity test approach is also not intersectional whatsoever. So it’s hopefully showing the importance of taking feminism beyond the slogans and a set of actions that are supposedly right or wrong, good or bad.’

New episodes available every Tuesday at unladylike.co