A spiritual exfoliation for feminists
Comedian Frances-White says podcast was inspired by ‘talking about fury’
“I’m a feminist, but …”
This is always the first line of comedian Deborah FrancesWhite’s award-winning podcast, and sums up its spirit. “The Guilty Feminist” features Frances-White and guests sharing their lofty goals of gender equality and female empowerment, and the ways in which they sometimes don’t exactly achieve them.
Her signature anecdote is popping into a department store to use the washroom during a protest march, getting distracted at the cosmetics counter, and discovering when she left the store that the march was gone.
In the first three years of its existence (2016-19), “The Guilty Feminist” had 60 million downloads and is always recorded live in front of an audience. It’s now on its first North American tour and plays at the Danforth Music Hall on Sunday. For that Toronto date, Frances-White will be joined by co-host Zainab Johnson and several special guests. Other noted venues where the podcast has been recorded include the Sydney Opera House (Frances-Johnson is Australian and lives in London, U.K.) and the Royal Albert Hall.
I spoke with Frances-White on WhatsApp the morning after her first North American date at the Gramercy Theatre in New York City. Activist icon Gloria Steinem had been in the audience and came backstage for a chat; Frances-White was still feeling the feminist afterglow.
I asked her why it’s important to laugh at feminists’ own high expectations of themselves. “It’s an exfoliation process,” she explains. “To slough off anything that we feel guilty about that is actually laughable or trivial. We are encouraged to feel guilty about everything as women — that we’re at work when we should be raising children, that we’re not a good enough partner, daughter or friend … if you are feeling shame or carrying baggage about that — why?” The work of the podcast is to “just put all that on the table and laugh at it,” says Frances-White.
The podcast started up before #MeToo hit high gear in late 2017, but Frances-White says that she was, even then, responding to a shift in the zeitgeist. “I was feeling these rumblings,” she says. “Eight years ago, going to lunch with friends, we were talking about our careers and love lives. It shifted that we were talking about fury; we were talking about ourselves as a collective and about gender.” It was in 2015, she says, when these ideas and feelings started to “burst through,” and the podcast came out of that experience.
We’re now in a cultural moment, she says, where “we’re erring on the side of believing women” when they speak up around questions of unequal treatment, bias, harassment, and sexual violence. In time, she says she thinks things will balance out in a healthy way — which is another way of saying she’s optimistic.
“It’s a time of revolution,” says Frances-White. “There is a new generation of men who are watching and listening. Their behaviour is going to be different” than previous generations of men “who have not been taught how to empathize with women, because it was consequence-free.”
Both of her Canadian shows (she’s also going to Vancouver) have sold very well, which Frances-White says lets her know there’s a “kinship, something that’s working between me and Canada.” People can, of course, listen to the podcast whenever and wherever they want, but she suggests that coming to the live shows is about the collective experience: “You feel I am not alone in feeling this,” says Frances-White. “We need as many hands on deck as possible re-sharing what’s true, what’s fair, what’s possible. We can only do it collectively.”