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- [00:00]
A
Hello. You are listening to a preview of a premium episode of Blocked and reported. This time, we are going back to Lindy West Thruppel. I am pleased to report that there is more drama even than when you last heard us discuss this. Lindy's husband has come out. He has spoken for him slash themself. And what he slash they has to say, well, let's just say he's not happy. You're going to hear at the beginning of this episode. If you want to hear the entire episode, you've got to become a premium subscriber. For just $7 a month, you get access to this episode, our entire back catalog, three extra episodes every month at least, and much more. It's also the best way to support the show. So please join us black. Org.
- [00:54]
B
I just want to get your response to want you to read this and get your thoughts on it. I'm going to paste it in the show notes. Okay?
- [01:00]
A
Mm. Quadruple amputee cornhole player fatally shoots man, authorities say. I have questions.
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B
Yeah, well, go for it. Just so do I.
- [01:08]
A
What's cornhole?
- [01:10]
B
I just want to say one thing. She's. My brother sent me that screenshot, and literally the next thing he said, and this is why. He's my brother, read this headline to Katie right now mid recording, because he knew I was recording. So thank you. Thank you to my brother. What are we.
- [01:23]
A
What's the story?
- [01:24]
B
I don't know. I haven't read it yet. I just see the headline. Isn't the headline enough? Quadruple amputee cornhole player fatally shoots man, authorities say.
- [01:31]
A
Okay, so he has. Has no limbs, and yet he's able to not just play cornhole, which I actually know what that is. That's. That's when you throw a beanbag at someone's butthole. He was also able to.
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B
You try to get it. No, not at. You try to get it in the butthole.
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A
In the butthole. He was also able to use a weapon. Okay, we're gonna have to.
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B
We'll do some further reporting on this.
- [01:49]
A
Yes. Yes. Okay. So for now, though, today, Jesse, I had planned an episode on ballerina farms, raw milk woes. But that is going to have to wait because there is more to say about Lindy west and the ongoing fallout from her book Adult Braces, which I just read. Oh, you wait, you read the book?
- [02:02]
B
I read the whole book.
- [02:03]
A
Oh, nice. But before we get to that, I'm gonna forget this if I don't say it now. So in April, and in fact, if
- [02:11]
B
we're if we're being honest, you did. You already did. Forget it once. And we had to go back and record this, which is fine. I'm not complaining. I just. People want to know about the process.
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A
We're talking.
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B
You forgot it.
- [02:19]
A
We're talking. Okay.
- [02:20]
B
We're talking.
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A
We're in the future.
- [02:21]
B
Ben Franklin's present. Oh, in the future. Wait, no, we're in the past now.
- [02:24]
A
Okay. We're in the future and the past. And what I forgot to mention and what I'm mentioning now is that the Puget Sound blocked and reported meetup group, Seattle Puget Sound group in April. The April meeting is going to be extremely inconvenient to everybody except for me. It's going to be out. I won't say the name of the place, but. Jesse, do you remember where we went and when you were here?
- [02:48]
B
I do. That place was delightful.
- [02:49]
A
Yes. So we can reserve tables and I need to know how many people will be there. So if you're interested, email blockstringreportedpodcastmail.com or you can directly email the organizer. And the email there is seattlebarpod meetupmail.com the meeting right now is scheduled for April 25th, and we just need to have kind of rough numbers. It's a delightful location, I promise you, but it will.
- [03:16]
B
It is. I can vouch for that.
- [03:18]
A
It will probably require getting on a ferry or making a very long drive to the peninsula, but it'll be. Hopefully it'll be a nice day in April. You could go visit, go check out Port Townsend, go look at some of the sandy beaches here. Very nice area. And then come and meet some fellow listeners. Okay.
- [03:37]
B
Lindy West.
- [03:37]
A
Lindy West. So this is like the fifth episode in a row that we've mentioned this author and this book. And for people who haven't already listened, I recommend going back and listening to my episode with Helen Lewis if you want the full book review. And also read Helen's latest piece in the Atlantic about this. The writing is incredible. She uses the term rapid onset bisexuality. It's so good.
- [03:57]
B
Do we have a link to that in the show notes?
- [03:58]
A
I'll put it in. I'll put it in. Uh, even Matt Walsh, who I don't think has ever read a woman, posted this article.
- [04:06]
B
Well, but that makes sense because Helen. Helen's piece is talking about this marking sort of the end of millennial feminism.
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A
And Matt Walsh, he's a millennial feminist.
- [04:13]
B
It makes sense he would retweet it, but it's just such a good piece He's a millennial feminist. Slash, he wants to replace it.
- [04:18]
A
Helen. Helen's piece is great. There's been a lot of great pieces, really, about this. But the book has dominated the online discourse now for weeks. And you know, I think for an author, this is both the dream and the nightmare. Because on the one hand, the book is getting attention, on the other hand, the book is getting attention.
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B
How's that? How's it. I completely disagree with you.
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A
What do you. What do you think?
- [04:37]
B
It's not. This is all like, I'm sure in the moment Lindy and Por put upon. What's his name? Aham. I'm sure, like, they have some stressful moments. This is exactly what you want for a book. You want it to just blow up the discourse. It's not a dream and a nightmare. It's a dream.
- [04:53]
A
Okay. No, the dream is that the book blows up the discourse and everybody loves it. This is the opposite. The book blows up the discourse and everybody hates it.
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B
I'd have to see sales figures to know if this is a dream or the nightmare.
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A
I have heard that it is not actually selling well. I don't know.
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B
Well, you can usually. There's a decent proxy, I think, from Amazon reviews. Let's look it up. Adult braces.
- [05:12]
A
Okay. Check that. Yeah, I checked the reviews the other day and there were not many. It was like there were like a dozen when I checked the other day. Maybe 16.
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B
That can't be that bad. Oh my God, that's really dark.
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A
How many are there?
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B
26 reviews? Yeah, just 26. And it does that annoying thing where it's like number one new release in humor essays. But those categories are complete bullshit.
- [05:30]
A
I mean, yeah, like, we know, like Olivia Nutzy's book, like hers blew up the discourse and it didn't sell. So we don't actually know if this is translating to sales itself. I would assume that this is doing better than Olivia Newzi's book because.
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B
Well, the other thing is, it's this weird thing where, like, I know the number of substack subscribers. She has surprised me for being quite.
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A
There's how many?
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B
It's like 36,000.
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A
She had 33,000. Okay, so she has gained 3,000 subscribers in the past, like two weeks.
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B
Sure, free subscribers, which is good. It's good, but that's like not a high number. She's like nowhere near as.
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A
She's not a bestseller.
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B
Big as like Richard Hanani or even me. But she's this category of person who was just huge, so represented that discourse during like peak Jezebel and I, I just. There's a subset of these people where it's like, I'm just not sure how big of a natural audience they had. But yeah, I don't know. I'm confused. I thought she was like super. I thought she was like super famous.
- [06:24]
A
I thought she was so too. But apparently a lot of people, this is the first they are hearing about her. And so. Jesse, I know why I'm enjoying this story. I'm enjoying this story because I'm a petty, jealous bitch and Lindy's sister in law tried to publicly not tried successfully publicly humiliated me multiple times, as you've mentioned. So imagining Ijomo Luo opening threads and seeing Roxane Gay talk. Her brother is my Christmas. It's my Roman Empire. It's my Keane gay.
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B
Roxane Gay joined in the shit talk.
- [06:54]
A
Yes, she has. Lindy has lost Roxane Gay. So I could talk about this story every week. I'm sure our listeners would love that. But I'm curious, why are you enjoying this story? Why do you think other people are enjoying it?
- [07:06]
B
I don't. Anyone who thinks that, like there's been too much discussion of this book. I don't think that's possible because I read it and it's. There's so much there. So first of all, she's like, she's obviously a good writer. Obviously, like, like she's a funny writer. She. The book gives you just enough to hate. Not regardless of your views on polyamory or on the characters. There's also these moments where you're like, Jesus Christ. Lindy. Both. Whenever she talks about America, she just sounds like the most like vapid MSNBC pill. Like white people just take and take and is that cause of their broken psych? And it's just like Jesus Christ, it's not 2016 anymore. And she does the annoying things that I think Helen Lewis called out just like the 20,000 question marks.
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A
It's very bloggy.
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B
More like shitsburg. Yeah, exactly, Very bloggy. Which she doesn't need to do because she can also. She's like, I think she's a really good writer.
- [07:59]
A
We don't need to do a full review of the book, but I also think so there's this section, there's this at the beginning of many of the chapters, not all of them, but many. She does this thing where she just like publishes the voice note the voice memos that she was speaking to herself as she drove across the country. And it reads to me as Very lazy. Like she was trying to pad her word count. And I think a lot of this book is. Reads as like sort of half baked. You have 300 pages about the road trip and the drama and the polyculate. Like when she decides to join the throuple. That's limited to like the last seven pages of the book.
- [08:37]
B
The lack of. And I don't want to retread stuff you talked about with Helen because I really thought your guys episode was excellent and it made me jealous I wasn't there. There's. There's no actual.
- [08:47]
A
We couldn't be a throuple.
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B
Exactly. There's no very. I'm agreeing with you. The level of actual Lindy had previously.
- [08:57]
A
Right.
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B
Rapid onset bisexuality. She had identified as straight. You would think that would require some degree of like personal transformation or whatever to now not only like coming out date a woman, but basically be sort of married to a woman. And there's no fucking exploration of that. There's also the profound lack of curiosity about America, the country she drove across and back. And so it'll be like first section of Wikipedia level details about like oh, this part of Florida is. Has spring fed, whatever the fuck, swimming holes, cenotes. But like no, like she, she. It's not just she doesn't care about the people. She. She has such contempt for a lot of the people she meets and it comes across as so grating. But these are all reasons why the book is good discussion fodder.
- [09:44]
A
Kat had a good observation. Kat Rosenfield had a good observation.
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B
No, it doesn't sound like her.
- [09:48]
A
About. About Lindy's view on America because so much of Lindy's work is about sort of this effort, this attempt to love herself and her fat body, which in shrill, she does. She makes it seem as though she has gone through this journey and she has come out, it's come through the other side loving who she is, accepting who she is and. And then in. And then in adult braces you learn that that's all basically bullshit. But Kat had this good piece on her substack. I'll post a link in the show notes about how Lindy is. She's driving through basically red America, the part of the country that is the fattest in the part of the country where she is the most likely to actually not even like be like accepted, but like it's just stand out.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
It's unremarkable. It is, it is. You will stand out in a place like Seattle, where Lindy spent most of her life as A fat person. There's not that many fat. Like, there's probably, there's like some Samoans, but there's just, it's like a pretty, you know.
- [10:47]
B
No, it's a no reading this. And, and, and I, I, I had not read her at length, but like, I found this stuff about being a fat person, like, very moving. But yeah, in, in Berkeley, where I'm based now, or like when I go back to Brooklyn in like the, these writerly, there's not a lot of fat people and then there's other parts of America where it's largely to mostly fat people. And that's a totally fair point.
- [11:13]
A
And those are the places she shits
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B
on and those are the places she hate. And like a lot of it. Look, I don't care if like a lefty or liberal writer mentions disliking Trump or disagreeing with COVID stuff, but it's just this sort of like lazy, over the top, like she goes on a cruise and just sort of. I forget if she calls basically everyone like this touristy cruise in the Key west, like either racist or Marjorie Taylor Greene supporters. She's like, barely talked to any of these. It's like it's every stereotype that we grapple with about progressive America that I think really does to a certain extent help to fuel populist right wing bullshit. It's just her in one book, right?
- [11:51]
A
Okay, so what I want to talk about now is the response to her book and more importantly, her response to the response to the book and even more importantly, her husband's response to the response to the book. Yeah, we will be, we will get to the emails. Don't worry. So I had assumed that Lindy's legion of fans from back in her Jezebel days, or even earlier her stranger days or her shrill days would be loving this book and buying her narratives that sometimes feminist empowerment and sleeping in the guest room while your husband fucks his skinny girlfriend. But no, that is not what is happening. She's getting gently raked over the coals, not just from haters and, and not even really from conservatives who honestly are not. Have you noticed this? This discourse is. It's like old Twitter in a way. Like, this is mostly progressives and leftists and liberals who are talking about this book. Matt Walsh did retweet Helen's piece, but mostly it has been Lindy's presumed readers talking about this. And I do think that the, the general vibe has been more pity than anything else. And this is someone who in part got famous because of all of the online hate that she got from like men's rights types and, and, and now she's getting it from her own readers. And that is a whole different kind of Internet hate. It's a totally different experience. It's one thing to get shit on by trolls or by dudes who are just going to call you a fat pig. Like, it's pretty easy to dismiss that. I doubt she cares about their opinions. But now it's coming from inside the house. And so Lindy is on book tour right now. She's driving. She's. Once again, she's in a van. She's driving across America and she's doing it alone, which I find interesting. Aham is not with her on book tour. So she's back in the van by herself. And once the book came out and the responses started to come in, the reviews, the, the substacks, many, many substacks, the podcast, she started responding. And she has done at this point like she did like a 40 minute Instagram live while she was driving between book events. Later, she did another probably 40 minutes on Instagram stories responding to online criticism which she insists that she isn't reading. And I didn't save her stories, unfortunately, and they've now disappeared. But in these particular stories that I was watching, she was just savaging her readers. Yeah, particularly the readers who are, who are judging her husband based on. That's it. That's all. You get to listen to the rest of this and get access to all of our content. Join us Blocked and reported dot org.