Enter Label: why aren't there any female Joe Rogans?

an impassioned plea to go beyond Bravo and the Manosphere

Dear Companions,

I’m a girl in the Manosphere. I’ve listened to thousands of hours of Joe Rogan, Shane Gillis, Lex Fridman, Dan Carlin, and a slew of cross bow hunters. I find myself asking over and over: How is that men are gobbling up all the newest ideas on spirituality, brain findings, nutrition and family life?

Why don’t women have a launching pad for personalities who embrace our trash reality TV, maybe, but also share about other important things in our lives—our health, our roles, our obstacles? Why do we have to settle for content that is uninspiring like the Real Housewives? The impact is far-reaching. It’s no wonder you can get a Neuralink in Austin but not an abortion. It’s not surprising we are missing out on building community and growing lonelier in our motherhood, jobs. Forget the glass ceiling, men and women are also separated by these walls of interest. But I know many women who find these walls artificial. It’s time for something more for all of us.

Life’s stressful

One of the first things I blame for this outcome is the advent of Reality TV. A perpetual network of escapism, Bravo provide a limitless array of instantaneous escapism, many storylines we have followed for years, with no character spared from an eventual downfall.

I speak with humility when I say that spending time there is decapitating the spirit of women. I know because I watch their shows, more than I care to admit. Despite my focus on higher-brow content, like last week’s selection of Japanese films, my illness led me further into this escapist pasttime—Housewives, Vanderpump, even Seeking Sister Wife, for which I can't provide a single reason why I watched a season. I seem to only draw a hard line at My 600-lb Life. So, I’m not talking down to anyone with this rant. This is more of a plea.

During a life stopping illness which began shortly after my daughter was born, at the tail end of an already impossibly long pandemic, reality TV became a distraction, and comfort. It is a form of disassociation that predates even the illness and childbirth. But the problem is that—like any drug—reality TV causes stress, and more so than a beach read like those I recommend here. Our Oura rings can confirm, we get wired while watching them because they are produced with that intent (if not scripted). Their addictive quality is what makes it difficult to fall asleep to. The damage is done not from one episode, but three or four or five.

It is dishonest to compare reality to a pastime like men’s sports TV. When my husband watches basketball, it impacts him like a melatonin, a dose of weed. He ends up falling asleep within the first ten minutes except during playoffs. The Bravo stuff is methamphetamine, a direct hit on the heart and dopamine centers.

Then there are the active Reddit and TikTok groups that did not exist back in the Real World or Jersey Shore days. To listen to people's opinions on matters that are entirely obvious and not that deep (like Nick Vail’s podcast) creates a venomous feeling. Self-hate maybe.

Perhaps as a woman, I am more critical of the spaces that are designed and marketed to me. I feel there needs to be a Bethany Frankl level reckoning, but instead of holding the networks accountable for grievances toward the cast, as is her crusade as an ex-RHONY, we must finally fight for the viewer.

The Manosphere

Reality TV while escapist did not help me survive a health crisis postpartum and post Covid. When suffering for hours on end, people fighting or hooking up on a yacht is anathema. For that, strangely enough I had to escape to the Manosphere, an arena for comedians, historians, hunters, and all things functional medicine.

I ran into the arms of Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman on Spotify, a Patreon with Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker, an errant Peterson or Sam Harris lecture on YouTube, a 10-hour Hardcore History series, a livestream with Shkreli on Twitch, and so on, to get what was missing from the Bravo realm: laughter, irreverence, camaraderie, knowledge. Countless book recommendations ordered immediately on Amazon, and roadmaps and rabbit holes to new, interesting topics made me feel I was advancing the pawn in life while stuck in my room. I found spiritual resources, deeper discussions on neuroscience, history, and even feelings. Feelings about life, aging, addiction, and parenthood—topics that Bravo touches on in the shallowest of ways, with cynicism, in-fighting, and staged clashes.

Never mind that Hashimoto, postpartum, pain, or self-compassion may never come up in Manosphere. Never mind that out of the past 28 speakers on the Joe Rogan platform, there was only one woman, Tulsi Gabbard. This was still the media that provided the most emotional, mental, even spiritual relief.

Mea Culpa

When I got sick, the number of hours I spent in the Manosphere people grew exponentially, as had the podcast space.

It wasn’t just about keeping the mind occupied. Irreverence, I found, while recovering from a three-year migraine, is the most reliable path to access humor in the darkness. Humor is necessary to rewire the mind that is bent on repeating the same things: you’ll never recover, you’ll always be in this pain, etc. From a neuroscientific perspective, play will always rewire the brain faster than learning. There is no shortage of laughter in that world, from Theo Vonn to Kill Tony, a livestreaming comedy contest on Mondays.

Listening to Healingvrse influencers who appear on platforms adjacent to that space, such as Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, the biologist Bret Weinstein, also left me feeling knowledgeable. They provided a springboard to deeper discussions in the Healingvrse. I’d wince at the publicized man-whoring of Huberman, but otherwise I pressed ahead, because of the virtual companionship, the feeling of a classroom, and most importantly, the laughter during a lonely time recovering from Long Covid and a lot of pain and isolation.

Mano-Critique

The Manosphere is not always a nice place. It includes people, sites, and podcasts that are offensive to women. Threats of sexual assault abound, and concepts like maintaining frame or masculine control in a relationship are shared. Andrew Tate, a cheap pickup artist, has a legion of fans whom he teaches to disrespect women. His followers send intimidating messages to women for absolutely no reason. And even without all that, it gets preachy, symptomatic of Rebecca Solnit’s concept of mansplaining.

But the Manosphere is vast, and the content I select lies on the opposing side of the same horizon, at a safe distance mostly, where, in fact, men may be getting in touch with their emotions and health. Not all women have an appetite for ignoring the offensive moments, but my interest in the content is overriding.

I have another selfish reason for my plea. After over a decade beginning with Marc Maron in 2009, the Manosphere is getting repetitive. Theo Vonn helped me fall asleep when even the strongest medications could not accomplish that. He made me laugh in the dark, and cry, as he cried sometimes too, but I feel as though I am growing out of him, especially as he is getting more famous and doing fewer solo episodes.

Many of the dudes I’ve mentioned also all appear on each other’s platforms, so the information becomes redundant as do the jokes. It isn’t giving me the fix like it used to. Tim Dillon, whom I discovered hilariously hosting a bitcoin conference a few years ago, has multiple recent appearances spotlighting his bit on boomers who refuse to sell their homes, thus leaving the next generation with nowhere to go. It was funny the first fifty times I heard it. I’m not really interested in Kevin Spacey’s apology tour, and now he’s showing up everywhere taking pictures with Peter Attia and Lex Fridman, just as Alex Jones did.

In part this repetitive nature occurs because Joe Rogan does not seem interested in platforming more women. He has stated repeatedly that he interviews those he wants to talk to, and while I think it would be better for his longevity to be expansive, I can appreciate his position. He has picked a few favorite women to appear on the show, like Tulsi Gabbard, Dr Rhonda Patrick or the hilarious Ms. Pat, but otherwise does not often introduce new ones, and thus his acolytes rarely feature new women as well.

Add that to the aforementioned fact that many aspects of life relevant to me go unaddressed, and all these frustrations converge to create a sense that I am at the end of my exploration there—that I need something more, somebody totally new.

Joan Wogan

The Call of the Wild

Imagine a podcast that discusses history, art, literature, but also the demystification on ovarian reserves alongside the newest Salt Lake City housewife. Instead of testosterone, we hear about estrogen dominance. Instead of muscle maintenance, we dive deeper into autoimmune disorders. Beyond addiction, we address chronic pain. Instead of pure hustle culture, we discuss true empathy. Here we would discuss the pink elephants like how Marie Kondo’s “tidying method” and Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” got immediately tossed the moment their life circumstances unexpectedly changed—more kids, no husband, etc. There are many women who must feel lost, that the feminist message of the 2010s was inadequate to account for the wholeness of a women’s life.

By no means would this platform have to be purely female-focused—an unnecessary, if not boring, limitation. The election, war, and the Fermi Paradox would still circulate. But we could create something more inclusive of topics that are often ignored by the male-dominated media. Perhaps with something like that, when I was hit by a battery of health issues after giving birth, I wouldn’t have felt so resourceless.

Imagine someone like Jewel, a homesteader raised in Alaska, who grew up with no indoor plumbing and an outhouse. She became famous while also living out of a car. She could talk about surviving outdoors with the best crossbow guys like John Dudley, who appears regularly on Rogan; but she also knows about motherhood—she has a son. I particularly loved her 2021 interview with Joe Rogan, a whopping 3-hour and 40-minute interview, which is long even by his standards, and which I remember listening to twice at the beginning of my illness. I am coming around to this feeling she expresses below.

"I don't think I started off young as a feminist. I read a lot of books in Alaska, I was pretty isolated where I grew up, and I think that I never thought I was any different than a man; I was raised in a place where pioneer women were very strong still. They'd shoe horses and build their own homes and were very self-sufficient. It wasn't really until I've gotten older that I really became a fan of women. And a fan of what women are capable of balancing and achieving, by just being them.

-Jewel

Jewel could be joined by Margaret Cho, a famous comedian, who recently said that it took her 13 years to recover from ingesting an entire smoothie worth of psilocybin. It seems her trip could compete with the trip of comedian Ari Shaffir’s who lived undersea for 6 months after ingesting a psychedelic (his trip was 15 minutes). Or Amanda Knox on forensic science, sharing in a debate about the low carb diet with Dr Rhonda Patrick, a Ph.D. in biomedical science, given the effect on hormones, something hardly addressed by the male keto fanatics.

No Real Community in Reality

This new platform would also provide a community which is sorely lacking for most women. The reality realm provides no real tangible, location-based community to draw support from. Except for the influencers who make a living at talking about the shows, or fans that go to Bravo Con and other specific events, there’s no gathering place, or water cooler that might inspire new friendships. Sure, there are active Reddit subs, but rest assured, those people are not going to be there when your life is falling apart. The conversations are narrow. Extremely. And save for maybe some rare examples, you would be hard pressed to build a universe of friendship on a narrow band like that.

With guys, they know what teams their friends support. Then they go build entire fantasy leagues out of that, rekindling old high school friendships and engaging in healthy competition and rewards. But I don’t know what shows any of my IRL friends watch. I know they watch some reality TV because occasionally we might say something like "The Bachelor this year is hot," but we don’t talk about it much.

How can we? The storylines are so obvious. The fights are obvious. The cheating scandals are obvious. The divorces are obvious. And then they get covered and blasted in the press over and over again. There’s nothing left to dissect, only to ingest.

A Wogan Manifesto…

So, what do we do? Or at least, what can I do? One way to start a resistance is to simply reduce the number of shows watched. Pick a few favorites, treat them as the guilty pleasures they are, and avoid loading up on every new one that comes along. Stick to a few that you enjoy, and that's that.

The other choice is more proactive: identifying and supporting a new class of female influencers who can become that missing "women Joe Rogan" (hereinafter known as "Wogan").

Instead of underground female comedians getting sucked into talking about reality TV like Claudia Oshry on her Toast podcast, whom I used to watch singing from her bathtub, perhaps they could find a new Huberman who specializes in thyroid disorders or popularize Dr Tamara Romanuk running patient led initiatives on X. I know there simply aren't as many female comedians today as there are male judging by contestants on Kill Tony but all the more reason to save them. And while the Rogan world is often more comedian than expert, perhaps the Wogan world will achieve a more balanced distribution.

In any event, there are sufficient options to build this platform. More female leaders, doctors, influencers, and comedians relative to the past. More women on boards (just under 20%). And just think back to school. Overall, the guys might have been more irreverent or louder, and thus, typically funnier. But in my experience, there were always a few girls who were exceptionally funny. Perhaps, because they were fostering something that society did not foster in them, they became the funniest people of all.

Where does that girl go? What’s her POV on the broad spectrum of life? I want to hear from her again. In fact, I would pay for it.

If you can share any names of people who are great Wogans in the comments, I definitely would appreciate it. I’m compiling a list. To Be Continued.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca