College girls around the country have discovered Spotify’s dirty little secret, and it’s not just the discount for university students. Call Her Daddy is a podcast ran by Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn through Barstool Sports. It has relationship advice, sex tips, and crazy fan-submitted stories. It is mindless entertainment at its finest. The hosts are like your most boy-crazy friend from high school who would fake their pregnancies to trap their boyfriends. They are, as they wear on their Call Her Daddy sweatshirts, unwell. However, they have a massive following and deserve recognition for spreading information, albeit unhealthy, to the masses. Their Instagram page has nearly a million followers, as a testament to their following.
They release hour long episodes every Wednesday, and thousands of college aged people tune in. I listened to them for the first time by chance, while I was studying abroad in Paris. My friends who had come from San Diego State University and the University of Miami had both listened in, and I felt a bit left out for not having any idea what the Gluck Gluck 9000 was. So, I decided that I would download the first three episodes and listen to them on the metro. I got approximately twenty minutes into the first episode and had to turn it off. I had an emotional response to their giggling storytelling; I was angry that these girls were basically acting as auditory prostitutes, and it made me uncomfortable how often they mentioned that their parents will be tuning in to hear all of the salacious details of their sex lives.
I texted a few of my friends back home and asked them if they had ever listened and encouraged them to check it out and tell me how it made them feel. A straight male friend of mine said that he didn’t like the podcast because he felt like he was listening in on a locker room conversation or something else that should be kept private. This point is solidified by the fact that the tagline for the show is ‘Exploiting their lives to make you feel better about your own’. That sums up the idea of the show, which I am embarrassed to admit, I listened to in its entirety. It was part morbid curiosity, and part loneliness and the desire to connect with other females that I got hooked. Their grating voices grew on me, and I even found myself talking like them when relaying stories on the phone.
What I had previously greeted with abhorrence, I began to delight in because their raw, raunchy stories made me feel like I was part of an inside joke. The episodes went from ‘how to please your man in bed’ to a much darker, more revealing place. In one episode, one of the hosts even relays how she defecated into a hookup’s mouth. One of the nastiest bits of the show included a fan submission that involved using mayonnaise as lubricant (I promise, that is all you want to know about that one). I ended up thinking about Call Her Daddy a lot because their advice had some truth, and sounded like things I have told my friends in the past. As a warning, they do tend to go into great detail on how to cheat and get away with it which I found annoying as a woman who has been cheated on and deceived in previous relationships.
Despite all of this, Alex and Sofia are painfully self aware, which is why their show is even listenable. They repeat that their show is in the comedy section, not the health and wellness section, usually right after giving tips to hack your boyfriend’s computer. It is a rollercoaster ride, and I think that anyone who listens to their show will go through the stages I did. It is extremely difficult to enjoy right off the bat, but it grows on you. It made me consider things I had not thought about before, like the way technology has dramatically changed the way we date and seek partners.
My mom told me today that according to Erikson’s theory of personal development, people my age are developmentally looking for a partner and that is the focus of my twenties. Although this might have just been a motherly ploy to marry me off and provide her with grandchildren, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Call Her Daddy girls. They are 24 and 26 years old, unmarried and committed to no one but each other. They consistently remind their audience that they will never get married, and their singleness is the fundamental reason for the success of their show. It is refreshing for someone like myself, who has a failed engagement from a cheating ex, to hear women so comfortable with their age and their inability to ‘put a ring on it’. Call Her Daddy taught me that millennials are changing their views on marriage, sex, love, and what it means to have a partner. Alex and Sofia make better partners than most married couples I know, and despite the annoying parts of their podcast, they are worth a listen—as long as you aren’t too squeamish.