BONUS — Why we should stop apologising for the culture we love with Caroline O'Donoghue
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I don't know how to stop that flare. Sorry, that's a bit yuck, isn't it? You look cool. Are you in a kimono?

Oh, my God, Caroline's here. Hi! This is Elsa. She's a producer on this show and the shrieking is because she's speaking to Caroline O'Donoghue, acclaimed author and host of the podcast Sentimental Garbage. It's a big moment for my family, Caroline, who are all, like, think that we're your best friend because everyone listens to Sentimental Garbage. My family group chat is like, oh, my God! Very exciting. Your family, as in, like, your mum and dad. Yeah.

I thought it was like, oh, she's somebody who refers to her housemates as her family. But like, no, it's your mom. No. My parents. Aside from the family group chat blowing up, Elsa's also really excited because she thought this chat would never happen. Because every woman in our lives is busy. But as a journalist, novelist and podcaster with a whole bunch of projects on the go, Caroline

Caroline's life is next level. And after several cancellations and reschedules, well, I'm doing this in my bathrobe from home. I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to hang out with you. It's been a terrible couple of months. How dare you apologise? We are so stoked to have you and it's such an honour to have you. Thank you so much for being so understanding.

We're stoked to talk to Caroline O'Donoghue because in her podcast Sentimental Garbage, she fluffs her pom-poms and champions the movies, music and books that women are often made to feel ashamed for loving. Remember when Taylor Swift conquered the world on her Ears tour? The most successful tour by a recording artist in history.

There were teenage girls, mums, middle-aged women, grannies, all the gays, all of them euphoric and weighed down by friendship bracelets having the time of their lives. But then the backlash. Why are these broads so hysterical? What's so good about Taylor Swift anyway? Wouldn't even write a decent song.

This isn't new, of course. When the culture is something that's considered masculine, be it footy or rock and roll or, like, the Roman Empire, dudes lose their minds over it.

Dare I say, they get hysterical and that's called passion, man. And it makes sense because these things are a big deal. But female-led culture, whether it's music or movies or a book, well, that's girl stuff and it's not serious nor important and it attracts derisive names like chick lit and reviews peppered with words like shrill, inconsequential and irritating.

Why are we forced to pretend our cultural tastes are either anti-intellectual, ironic or poor judgement? I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies, we need to talk about celebrating female culture with Caroline O'Donoghue. MUSIC

I do think having unbridled joy for culture that you love is one of the most satisfying things ever. Caroline O'Donoghue refuses to be ashamed of her fandom of everything, from Sex and the City to early 2000s rom-coms, musical theatre to girly pop. And she wants us to stop apologising for the pop culture we love as well.

The way women often explain themselves to each other is through Jane Austen, Carrie Bradshaw or Beyonce. The way men explain themselves to themselves is by watching Goodfellas or movies about cars going really fast or whatever. Why am I talking about men? We've always had stories, right, to explain ourselves to ourselves. And those stories can often be gendered. Chick lit, comedy,

romance and then superhero films, war movies. You get it? I don't think it's necessarily bad to have like gendered ways in explaining yourself to yourself. But what I think is bad is when we put a value judgment on those things.

Something I always come back to is if you were to go into like a teenage boy's bedroom in the year 1999 or something, and you would see like a Fight Club poster and like a skateboard and maybe like a Rolling Stones CD. All the cultural touch points that you could pick up in that boy's room are things that you would still celebrate in him for enjoying as an adult man.

Whereas if you were to go into a girl's bedroom in the same year, and you'd sell Britney Spears and like pony club memberships and all that kind of stuff. They're all things that women have since been like, Oh God, when I was a girl, when I was a kid, I used to be into ponies. So cringe. There's all this asterisk next to everything that we used to enjoy or have enjoyed. And I think when you're explaining yourself to yourself through culture,

you then learn to dislike yourself as well as the stuff that you like. And I think that's a huge thing at the center of like female self-esteem actually is like everything I like is shit, you know. Did you ever drink the Kool-Aid of that though, where you were a little bit complicit in poo-pooing?

the culture? My entire late teens, early twenties was just like only reading novels by important men. Like the cool girl vibe of like only wanting to hang out with men, wanting desperately to be an artist, seeing artistic communities as being male led, like watching every Tarantino, watching every Scorsese, watching

Bing-bang into Ridley Scott, which I think, by the way, I still enjoy. But it was just like this completely uneven diet of stuff that didn't care about me, but I was caring about it. You know what I mean? Caroline has felt the burn of this sexist cultural cringe firsthand. When her first novel, Promising Young Women, came out, there was a lot of interest.

I was being interviewed about it and there were journalists, you know, as a journalist always do, you kind of, it's not enough to be like, this book is good and this girl seems interesting. You sort of have to have like a spin. They kind of said that, oh, this is like the gothic Bridget Jones or this is like the, you know, millennial Marion Keats. It would always be the something, something we don't respect. You've taken this bad thing and you're trying to make it good. And this is like a better version of chiclet or something.

But the thing is that Caroline didn't see the chick lit category as something to be embarrassed about. I kept being like, no, you're putting me in this category of bastardizing things that I adore. And I think that the people who are not analyzing these texts or not thinking well of them have missed the point completely. And what they're doing is they're sort of judging things.

people that they, you know, deem to be, like, less intelligent or less academic or less intellectual than them, and they're using the culture to sort of shame them. And I have so many thoughts and feelings about that whole practice. So Caroline set about righting the wrongs of her Kool-Aid consumption and the worldwide cultural tendency to drag female-led culture.

And so that's what mental garbage came from, was trying to correct that balance. I totally see the way that you rehabilitate those memories for people to kind of go, no, that's actually still pretty cool. Let's talk about what's great about it and do it in a way that's not sort of snarkily ironic. Here's a question, though. When you do revisit the canon that we loved back then, that exclusive diet of white male men,

artistic creation like Goodfellas and what's that, Reservoir Dogs. Yeah. How does your body react to those kinds of artworks now? I still love them. I adore them. My favourite thing to do on a Friday night is get stoned and watch Master and Commander. Like, that is a film with no women in it. That is a wild night at your house, Caroline. LAUGHTER

I'm obsessed with that film. Why are you obsessed with Mastering Commitment? This is the Russell Crowe on a ship one, right? It's amazing. I just think that like, there's no film that makes you really feel like you're in a time and a place more than that movie. And that like, wow, I can really feel like what it might be like to be on a Napoleonic war sort of vessel. And I just think it's so exciting, but I also think it's really cozy because like, Ooh, all the men are in their bunks. They're all tucked up for the night. I,

It's never occurred to me to watch that. I think I'm in the over-correcting phase because my diet was also exclusively white male art and shoegaze rock and roll and grunge and all that. And so I've since been trying to fix it by having a diet exclusively of female-led creations. One of the things that I've seen you do repeatedly is find the joy in things and eschew cynicism, which was, you know, it's so easy to turn to kind of being cynical and

Are there some things that haven't made the cut because you're like, no, I would just be too bitchy? Oh my God. Yes. So many things. I think because like sometimes it's going to be called a guilty pleasure podcast and sometimes we call it like an anti-snobbery podcast. But the reason it's an anti-snobbery podcast is because like I am the patient zero of snobbery. Like I am actively working to get over my snobbery and that's what the podcast is really. It's a project in me trying to get over that. But there's also like

some things are just bad. Sometimes what I fear that I do with sentimental garbage is by being so actively anti-snobbery, so being so actively like the things you like, it's okay to just watch romances, that we are lowering a standard that continues to get lower. Like for example, there's like all these rom-coms that come out on Netflix that

that are made with the explicit intention of being kind of so bad that they become talking points. What Caroline's talking about here are crappy movies and TV specifically targeted at women that are clearly written by an AI robot munching down on gummies while sitting on a toilet and shitting out reams of terrible, terrible script.

Some things do have flaws and some things are cheesy, but that doesn't mean that they aren't striving for something really remarkable. There are cheesy moments in some of my favorite things, but that doesn't mean that they're bad. But I also don't want that to be confused with lazy, sloppy, bad bollocks that's being just shoved in front of us. And that like pisses me off. Doesn't mean I'm right, but it's just the gut feeling it gives me when I watch it. And I don't ever do episodes about stuff like that.

In the years since starting the Sentimental Garbage podcast, Caroline has continued to write novels, and because they're seen as chick lit, she struggles to get reviews in serious publications. I guess what I've gotten in the trade-off for that, or maybe I don't really get reviewed by and reach any kind of critical consensus like that, is that I live within this very feminine media space

society, I guess, where there are so many women, many of them Australian, who are just ready to receive you and like who are so ready to get behind you, ready to support what you do, ready to engage in what you do, ready to send you amazing emails about what you do. And I feel so privileged. Yes, I don't think I am really getting the respect of any kind of mainstream platform in the country I live and work in. But I think what I'm getting in the trade-off is superior.

because it makes me feel like my work is actually making a difference to real people and less faces, it's also more profitable.

Like being a critical darling often doesn't pay your mortgage. You know, one of the things that we get from listening to your podcast is your friendships. And I love sort of being a witness to that because it feels really rich. It feels really soul filling for you. And just witnessing it, I get the vicarious good vibes. Do you have some advice for listeners about how to nurture, grow, initiate really meaningful friendships? Yeah.

It's been so lovely over the last few years because you're right, the cast of Sentimental Garbage, I feel like it's 70% reoccurring friends. And of those friendships, like some of those people have like giant media profiles, like my friend Dolly Alderton, but most of them are just my past. And so it's nice to build a creative community around the people who are your community already. Do you have some advice for listeners about how to nurture, grow, initiate,

really meaningful friendships? I'm not that great a friend. I can be very selfish. I think my worst attribute of being a friend is that I'm a dreadful replier, like really bad. Like I really, I almost resent anybody who texts me ever. I frustrate so many people in my life over that. And I am terrible for remembering birthdays.

So I'm quite a bad friend in those aspects, but I think I'm a really good friend in that I'm like an unbelievable cheerleader for my friends' choices. I think I hold them to account pretty strongly over like,

whether or not something is really good idea. But once they've chosen something and I can tell that even if it wouldn't be my choice, that their heart is in it and they've thought about it, I will be aggressively supportive. One of the central relationships in Caroline's life is her friendship with writer Dolly Alderton. The pair have been pals for years and Caroline has seen Dolly's star rise and rise. Dolly sent me a script she was working on once and I read it and then I rang her

And I started crying because I was just so happy. I've seen that woman get more and more famous year on year. I just said to her, I was like, I always wondered how you were going to get bigger. And now I can see that you're getting bigger on the inside. It's like your gift is getting bigger and your soul is getting bigger. And it's so beautiful to see, you know. It's the overly emotional, very sentimental, but also aggressive cheerleading. I think those are the ways in which I'm a good friend. But having said that,

Of the six years we've been friends, I have missed four of that girl's both days. A lot of us got to know the teary, girly, giggly friendship between Caroline and Dolly Alderton during COVID when they made a podcast miniseries together re-watching Sex and the City. It gave listeners something to help escape the grim realities of the world. I asked Caroline what her own favourite escapist content is these days.

There's obviously the old familiars, right? If you see your cultural diet as a liquor cabinet or whatever, like the Jack Daniels and the Smirnoff vodka, the stuff I'm going to all the time is like Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls and The Simpsons. Like that is like if I've come home and I have like 45 minutes till dinner, I'm throwing on an episode of one of those.

And then if I kind of went higher up the shelf, it would be like old movies. There's a form of misery that I get into sometimes where you get very sensorily fragile kind of thing. You can't stand loud noises and breaks.

too bright colors so then that's when kind of old movies come in because they have a soft kind of lulling thing they're beautifully written they look gorgeous nothing is too strong on the eye and so that's the sort of slightly like more expensive whiskey that I go to and then like the kind of alcohol pops and sugar

tends to be gaming. I was sick recently and then I had to do a work event that like, you know, when you're still recovering and then you do something where you like really stretching yourself and then the next morning you're like back below zero again. Like you've really overstretched and then you're dead. And so I spent the entire weekend just playing my Nintendo. That,

That is very unsexy, but I love that you admitted it. Hey, thank you so much for coming on, Ladies We Need To Talk. We have had such a lovely time and we're so grateful to you for taking the time to hang out with us. I've adored this. I'm kind of sad it's over, to be honest. Like, I really go on. I know everyone always says that, but I really could. That's very appreciated. Thanks so much for your time. Have a great day. You too.

This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Kranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan. Music

Ladies, we're not quite done. I've got some smart, witty women with me just for a change. They're the hosts of pop culture podcast Stop Everything, Hannah Reish and Beverly Wang. Hi!

Hi. Okay, now besides being host of one of my favourite podcasts, you're also pop culture connoisseurs. I did listen with great care to your discussion about Kendrick Lamar's pants at the Super Bowl. Also the endless chats about twinks at the Oscars. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, Adrian Brody, based on your episode of Stop Everything, I loathe him. Oh, no!

No. But Yumi, no, we lust after him. You can both loathe and lust after him. Life's complicated. Yeah, exactly. So, Hannah, what can listeners expect on the show this year? Basically, every week we're going to deep dive on some corner of pop culture that has captivated us. Yeah, so for example, we're going to be talking about trad wife culture. We're going to be talking about kids' pop culture, the dilemmas parents face. And we also love to debate things, really important things, like the perfect

length for a feature film. And yes, if that's not enough folly for you, we also end every episode with what's in our pop culture universes that we're just extremely chuffed about that week. So ladies, if your hobbies include eavesdropping on laugh out loud funny people talking about doom scrolling, flare jeans, how to understand rap, what does skibbity actually mean? Join Beverly and Hannah on Stop Everything. Thank you so much, Yumi. And you can find and follow Stop Everything in the ABC Listen app.