← The Riley Gaines Show
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Who is Ethel Cain? And why is Instagram showing me his junk like I'm talking full bush and beans? Boy, do we have an episode for y' all today. A few days ago on Instagram, I posted a poll and I asked you guys if you had seen this Instagram post made by singer Ethel Cain. And to my surprise, so many of you said that it also came up on your feed. And you were curious about the lore behind all of this. Well, as much as I really did not want to, I did the research and shocker. This is very clearly a disturbed person. I'm talking background of trauma and incest and autogynephilia. If you don't know what that is, we're gonna get into that today controversy with Lana del rey killing CEOs and more. All of which which led to this nude fetish concoction that showed up on my Instagram feed. And a final point I want to make in this very brief introduction is how in the world does Meta allow for a post like this to stay up? Pornography, to be very frank with you, but censor people like me. Okay, I'm going to do my best to describe the visual that I saw on my Instagram. You can picture it now. Innocent little Riley over Easter weekend, sitting at home on my couch. I'm just scrolling through Instagram again during Holy Week, mind you, and this post pops up from an account with the handled username being Mother Kane. Admittedly, I'd never heard of this person. So this person is sitting on a bed wearing like a corset top. In the first photo, he's wearing no pants. And in the center of this photo, as I described, is a man wearing a corset with his smushed up junk hanging out of the bottom of this corset. I almost tripped running to the comment section to see what other people were saying. And unsurprisingly, the comment section was filled with virtue signaling social justice warriors who were very quick to affirm Ethel Cain by telling him how beautiful and how brave and iconic and stunning this post was. Let's just read a few. This one says, I love women. Wow. This person says, as a trans individual, seeing someone with my type of body makes me happy in a way that's hard to describe. It's validating my transgenderness in a way that I never knew I needed. Weird to be crying so much because of a picture of someone's pants parts feeling very silly and wonderful. I am so sorry, but are we really going to keep acting like this is not a mental illness? He just called it someone's pants parts. If you cry when you see a photo of another man's junk because it makes you feel validated, then there is something deeply wrong with you. So who is Ethel Cain? Ethel Cain is the stage name, or I guess, artistic Persona, if you will, of Hayden Silas Anhedonia. He is an American singer, songwriter, a record producer, I think even sometimes a model. He was born in 1998 in Florida. So what does that make him? 28ish years old, like I said, known for that Southern gothic style music that includes some pretty dark themes like religious trauma and incest and abuse and substance abuse. He creates like immersive, narrative driven music, which is something I think someone like Taylor Swift does, actually. Maybe the two aren't overly comparable, but I do think the narrative driven style of music is where Swifties, which I'll kind of give some context, I'm not necessarily a Swiftie. I think it's honestly pretty impressive. The brand, the business that she has been able to build, she does have kind of like a cult like following, I think. Same thing with Ethel Cain. A lot of that is the lyrics that these artists are using. People, listeners feel like they can relate to that. For Taylor Swift, that has historically been for breakups, but for Ethel Caine, based on what I've been able to see and to listen to, it's kind of like the raw introspective style that really resonates, resonates with fans dealing with similar themes of identity or faith or Southern roots. I watched an interview of why Hayden is his real name again. Ethel Kane is the stage name. Why he goes by that name. He said Ethel is a womanly, matronly, old American name that feels prim, it feels proper, it evokes nostalgia, you know, small town Southern tradition, kind of like a faded old fashioned femininity. That's what he was going for by using the name. Ethel Cain, of course, comes straight from the Bible, the biblical story of Cain and Abel. This is the firstborn son of Adam and Eve who murders his brother and is marked by God to then wander the earth. It perfectly fits what he describes as his core themes, which is again, generational trauma, sin, family, betrayal, wandering and exile, violence and religious guilt. Hayden describes Ethel Cain, his alter ego, his stage name, as the darkness dark evil twin. So he could externalize these heavy personal material things that he's dealt with in his life without having to put it directly on himself. So I guess in short, like the name Ethel Cain is like this perfect microcosm of the whole project. So old school Southern colliding with biblical curses, violence and escape. His music and aesthetics have been compared to the likes of Lana Del Rey, which there was a big feud there. We're going to get into that in a minute folks. If you have been buried by private student loan debt, I really, really want you to hear this. 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So if student loan debt is weighing you down, if it's stressing you out, if it's holding you back from the goals, the things that you want to achieve, you don't have to keep living like that. There is a way forward. Go to why refi.com y r e f y.com and be sure to tell them that Riley Gaines sent you. But actually his debut album in 2022. The album titled Preacher's Daughter, it made the Billboard charts April of 2025. It debuted at number 10 on the US Billboard 200. Clearly an incredible achievement. This was driven by a vinyl release. It made Kane the first trans artist to secure a top 10 album on the Billboard 200. With the album also reaching number one on the top album sales chart. More in his family here. He grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist family. His dad was a deacon and a truck driver. Actually Kane, he sang in the church choir, I think in an inter. He said he left the church around age 16. So that's kind of the ecosystem that he has created and honestly been successful in which the success is unsurprising to me. I believe when you have someone who is transgender, a trans woman, really a man who identifies as a woman, speaking about the difficulty of growing up queer or gender non conforming in this strictly religious home, southern environment, you know, in the state of Florida, young people, I think people a part of the LGBTQ community, are drawn to that. I think they view his music as like a cathartic processing of the experiences that he has had, or maybe this fictional character of Ethel Cain or maybe that they are experiencing in their own lives. So the success isn't really surprising. Now, growing up in a conservative household is not looked upon very kindly by Hollywood, especially when some of those old posts and tweets, your old social media activity, is resurfaced online. That's exactly what happened last summer. Some old tweets from Cain's teenage years generated lots of controversies. Primarily these were from, I think 2017, 2018. He was about 19 or 20 years old at the time. I think they were posted initially to like Tumblr or Reddit, but they were amplified on X. Some of these posts showed what is described as edgelord behavior. It's kind of typical of certain online subcultures, especially at the time, that were dedicated to just receiving attention in whatever way you could receive attention, whether good, bad. That appears to be what this is. You have Cain, who had admitted to using the N word to racial slurs. He made one post mocking Hispanic individuals saying, build that wall. And owed to President Trump. He had made several rape jokes and fat shaming comments. Look at the screen here. If you're watching on YouTube.com you can see him wearing a T shirt that says legalize incest. He had made other pretty dismissive comments about pronouns, using pronouns, ridiculing people who use pronouns other than he or she. I think this is actually pretty disturbing. He used a real flyer of a real missing child, which he edited and adapted to promote his album and to sell his merch just feels kind of twisted. My gosh. And one more controversy I almost forgot to mention. Likely the most deranged, I think, of them all. I'm sure you guys remember Luigi Mangione and the healthcare CEO. The United Healthcare CEO that was shot and murdered in cold blood outside of that hotel in New York City. That's what kind of started, like the Luigi Mangione effect. Maybe not the start of it, but at least in modern times, like the romanticization of stone cold killers. Writing on the casings, the bullet casing, what did he write? He was, it was like depose, defend, deny something to that effect. We saw where Charlie Kirk's assassin also wrote on the bullets. And so besides the point, you guys, you know the situation I'm talking about. Well, following this, Ethel Cain wrote a statement saying that he found it funny that calling for the death and destruction of multi billionaire CEOs was being painted as a radical woke liberal position. He argued that actually it has nothing to do with left, right, blue, red conservative Democrat politics at all and compared it to nonpartisan issues like climate change. He pushed back on the idea that defending traditional values should include protecting corrupt lawmakers and old tycoons. He even went as far to say that, you know, people are wrong when they say violence is never the answer because sometimes violence is the answer. Hashtag killmore CEOs. Mind you, this was right after a real CEO had just been killed, murdered. This was a father, this was a husband who was prematurely taken from this earth. So to say, kill more CEOs. Of course it's irresponsible, it's dangerous, it's tone deaf and it's glorifying murder. All while I would bet if you asked, this person believes themselves to be morally superior to people like you and me. And are we really living in an influencer's cancel culture? If these outed posts aren't followed immediately with a lengthy apology, in his case, a 2000 word, an essay, a 2000 word apology. Forget this being white. In his apologies, he says, at the end of the day, I am white. So while I can take accountability for my actions, there's no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them. Let's watch this clip here. I was young and angry and lashing out of the world. It is deeply shameful and embarrassing to see that dredged back up. So that video we just watched was him sat down with the New York Times, who is the canceler of all cancelers, by the way. They, I guess, saw fit to excuse his racist rants. Why? Because he is trans. On the other hand, you have Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. Maybe had he declared himself a woman towards the end of his life prior to passing away earlier this year, his past comments would have been forgiven or excused as well by the New York Times. But no, of course not. He was a conservative and so this was the headline from the New York Times when he passed away. It says scott Adams, whose comic strip Dilbert was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast, has died at 68. So I guess accountability or forgiveness, it depends on who you are, not really what you did. And I know I've alluded to this controversy with Lana Del Rey, but I want to spend a second on it because I think it's interesting because I think it's telling of a true narcissist. Okay, Ethel Cain started as, or Hayden started as a fan of Lana Del Rey. If you don't know who Lana Del Rey is, there's very obvious, like, stylistic parallels between the two and their music. The melancholy and the kind of weird femininity. But it's like this, all Americana imagery and small town vibes and trauma. It's kind of dark. Right? Well, over time, people listeners began to draw constant comparisons between the two. And that made Ethel mad. Or Hayden Cain. Let's say Cain Cain started feeling overshadowed by Lana Del Rey. And so fans have now dug up old posts from Kane throwing shade at Lana Del Rey. Sly comments about, like pushing Lana Del Rey over when someone said Lana walked so Ethel could run, deleting, even going as far to delete or edit references on Wikipedia. Lana Del Rey's Wikipedia page. The just general irritation of being called the new Lana. He didn't like it. Well, this is funny and kind of shows true fan behavior because Lana Del Rey went on to say, I didn't even know who this person was. I didn't know who Ethel Kane was. When these comparisons were being drawn. She then went on Lana did, which this is such petty Internet drama. I know that. Okay, stay with me, I'm intrigued. She then went on to name drop him and lyrics of her song, a diss track, if you will, saying Ethel Kane hated my Instagram post, thinks it's cute reenacting my Chicago pose. This referred to a very specific photo that Lana had posted with musician Jack Donahue, which was her ex at one point outside of a Chicago jail, actually. Well, guess what? Ethel later posted a very similar styled outdoor photo with the same guy, which fans of course interpreted as copying or inserting himself. Then Ethel went on to mock Lana Del Rey's weight and her body and these fat shaming comments. He talked negatively behind her back to mutual friends that they shared. And Lana said that Ethel started like inserting himself into her personal life, which was incredibly disturbing to her. There's more, but honestly, it just boils down to this. Is like classic celebrity Internet beef. Like, pretty petty and pretty surface level. But I mentioned it for a couple reasons. Number one, I think it shows true narcissism on Ethel Kane's side, where he didn't like being compared to one of the greatest in this. This niche genre to ever do it. He didn't like that. Okay. And secondly, this is like a total hunch, and I don't like making hunches. I quite often make fun of people who say things based off of hunches or dreams or vibes or feelings or any of that stuff. Okay? So I'm not trying to do that. Lana's political affiliation, her beliefs aren't. I don't think they're widely known. But what we do know, actually, she's been known to support, like, BLM and women's marches in the past, but she just married someone not too, too long ago who is religious from what it appears to be pretty devout. And he is thought to be a Trump supporter. I think he's like a, like, alligator hunter, like, L.A. okay. She is now seen as someone who is leaning into, like, conservative trad wife aesthetics and possibly maybe even likes Trump, which is like no, A no go in Hollywood in the music world, and I think total hunch. But what could have underscored this feud between the two? Which all leads me back to the post that I saw on my Instagram feed, seeing Ethel Cain in all of his glory, or really lack thereof. Here's my thoughts on this. Here's my. My take. I think he put his fetish on full display for the world to see. I'm not going to act like I understand what is going on inside of his mind, because clearly I don't. I don't understand the trauma or the abuse. Quite frankly, I don't want to. I imagine it's pretty horrible for you to be in the position that he's in, for you to feel as if there's validation or there's a necessity to post your genitalia online. I don't want to be in headspace. Okay? So I'm not going to act like I fully understand what he's going through, what his intentions are. Just my take. Let's talk about today's sponsor. It is Cozy Earth. If you're watching on YouTube.com, which I hope you are, then you can see I'm sat here with my Cozy Earth classic cuddle blanket. I'm also going to put some B roll here of an Instagram video I posted the other day. You can see Louie, my fantastic husband, he is sleeping and snoring so soundly, so loudly. But you can see in this B roll that is our Cozy Earth comforter and sheets that we have on our bed. I guess I'm just showing that to make the point that this is not just another ad read. I truthfully love Cozy Earth products. Their loungewear, their sleepwear. Actually I have their socks on right now. Their sleepwear helps me sleep deeper. It helps me wake up feeling very recovered and refreshed in the mornings. It is designed with naturally breathable and temperature regulated materials that help your body settle so you sleep very calm and cool and gently supported throughout the entire night. 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Now you might be wondering why Riley, do you think this is a fetish as opposed to someone who really believes that they were born in the wrong body? The lie that young people, or adults for that matter are constantly and consistently by society and culture and people who call themselves health care professionals. Right? The lie that they were born in the wrong body. Why don't I think that's the case for Ethel Kane? Why do I think it's a fetish? I'm going to ask you, have you ever heard of autogynephilia? Agp. Let's call it agp. In this conversation. I had never heard of this prior to being immersed in the gender ideology movement. I have now grown to understand that autogynephilia or AGP is is the most likely driver for any man pretending to be a woman. Including, by the way, this isn't just, you know, crazy woke people on the left, even Kristi. Noem's husband, okay. I believe to be an autogynephiliac. Okay, so what is autogynephilia? It is a paraphilia, really. It's a male's propensity to be sexually aroused, either dressing as a woman, the thought or the image of himself as a female. Let's break the word down, auto, right? It's like Greek root. Otto means self, gyne means woman, Philia means love or attraction. So literally the word autogynephilia is love of oneself as a woman. So I guess in this case, like the primary erotic target, it's not another person. Again, it is one self transformed into a woman. It's men who are aroused, like sexually aroused, from either dressing as a woman, from acting or behaving in a feminine way, or I see this on Reddit, actually all the time. Men who are aroused from imagining female bodily functions like menstruation or pregnancy, oftentimes it's accompanied by a deep seated jealousy of women because they do things that men cannot do. And I think that explains a little bit of the feud between Lana Del Rey and Kane. They are the object of their own sexual attraction. They are fixated sexually on themselves, desolated as like a misogynistic. It is oftentimes misogynistic stereotype of a woman. The pigtails and the like, the schoolgirl outfits. It's erotic target fixation gone wrong. It is a paraphilia. There have been several videos online, even of like Planet Fitnesses or other community gems of men relieving themselves. If you're picking up what I'm putting down in women's bathrooms or locker rooms, that is an agp. I don't even like talking about this, okay? It's uncomfortable for me. Someone who is like grown married with a child. It is still even uncomfortable for me to talk about. But I think it's important to know and to recognize the pattern that we're seeing. And this is largely the problem with. Well, there's a lot of problems with the gender ideology movement. One of those being cutting off healthy body parts for profit. The lack of parental rights, the lack of safeguarding of children, of course, women's rights. But largely this, okay? It's happening. Men, opportunistic men, fetishistic men with impunity are getting access to all of our spaces, to our sports, to our locker rooms, to our bathrooms, to our prisons, to our domestic violence shelters. Okay, Are you picking up what I'm putting down? These are spaces that women have fought for decades to have as their Own free from men. Just like the one in the video that I just showed you. A man who I don't even think he believes himself to be trans. This is a man. Or maybe he believes it, but end of the day, this is a man with a fetish. Okay? That is my take on this issue. I encourage you to Google autogynephilia if you want to spend more time doing a really deep dive on it. I would encourage you to look up. He's a sexologist, a doctor, I guess he's from Canada. His name is Ray Blanchard. Okay. He was one of the ones to kind of create the core ideas or the framework behind AGP to first define it and recognize it. And one more point to make here. Women don't do this. Okay? Women and men are, of course, we're physically different. Anyone with eyeballs can see that. But we're genetically encoded to be different in our characteristics and the way that our brain works. Women on average, generally. Of course, there are exceptions, but generally women are more apologetic and emotionally driven and empathetic and compassionate. And guess what? These are good things. They really are in their true essence and the true connotation of these words. It is a good thing because it's what makes us good wives and good mothers and good nurturers. Men, on the other hand, on average, are typically more assertive. They are more dominant, they are more aggressive, which, that's also a good thing. That's what makes men the protectors and the providers. Again, what is genetically encoded in men? Well, guess what? Those same aggressive, assertive, dominant men who even if they begin to claim the identity of a woman, they're still the same aggressive, dominant, assertive man that they once were, okay? They're not acting in a ladylike manner when they insist their way into our spaces, when they demand the language by which we call them. We don't see this happening the other way. You don't see women who identify as men, okay, posting their genitals online because it's the same docile, submissive woman that it was previously, even with taking testosterone. Are you guys understanding what I'm saying? Is it making sense? I. I really hope it is. The in your faceness is kind of the entire point of this. It's very man centric. It's very male. That's the toxic kind of masculinity. If we're going to talk about toxic masculinity, it's that right there. Men who are posting their genitalia online wanting you to acknowledge that they have male genitalia all while wearing a corset and saying, you know, I'm the submissive one, you must accept it. And if you don't, then you're the bigot. Normalize my fetish or else that is what we call toxic masculinity. And I made the point in the intro that Instagram or Meta has allowed this to stay up despite the fact that it is pornography. Whether they want to say that it's artistic nudity, whatever. I non consensually saw genitals, male genitals on my screen. I attempted to report the post more so just to see what Instagram would do, what Meta would do. And I got a notification that says we did not remove Mother Cane's content. To keep our preview process as fair as possible, we use the same set of community standards to review all reports our routine. Our team reviewed the content. They found that it does not go against our community standards on nudity or sexual activity. Despite the fact that he was nude. I just don't understand it. Even more so I don't get it when they censor people like me, platforms like mine and companies like XXXY Athletics. Jinsay is the owner of the brand. The CEO, the former CEO or CMO of Levi's ended up getting let go, fired, resigned. One of those situations right from Levi's during COVID This is like a traditional San Francisco liberal lefty. I mean lifelong liberal, but really started to question things during COVID And when she did out loud to her company, guess what? She had the veil lifted when she was let go from her job. It was only a few weeks ago that I posted on X an animated image of me wearing an XXXY Athletics shirt. Elon Musk ended up, quote, tweeting this. We was going back and forth. Well, guess what? We got Mass reported XXXY Athletics did after Elon Musk drew attention to the brand. And the result of this was Meta shadow banning or censoring removing XXXY Athletics ads from Facebook and Instagram for a few days. And why did Meta do that? Because XXXY Athletics enforces the idea, the fact that there are only two sexes and that biological reality matters. It's real. It cannot be ignored, especially when we're talking about sports. And for that, Meta censored XXXY Athletics, but left up Ethel Cain's smushed and shriveled fruit cup. I don't know. Like, I, I'm. I'm at a loss for words. I really am. Anyways, what a doozy of an episode. I don't know if you guys enjoy things like this. I would be very curious to know if you did, just in general, what kind of content you guys want to see. Is it more of like the pop culture stuff? Is it more of the political takes? Is it more solo episodes like this? Is it interviewing political or, you know, pop culture figures? Is it the farm content? Is it motherhood? I want to hear from you guys. I want to make myself available and really lean in to this and to you all. So you guys have given me so much just by tuning in, by listening, by subscribing, by following us on our pages over on Instagram. You can follow the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts anywhere where you get your podcast. It means so much and I am so grateful for your support. So I want to be able to offer what you guys want to hear from the Riley Gaines Show. But in the meantime, refrain from posting your junk online. Please. For my sake, for humanity's sake. We'll see you guys again next week. Thank you guys for watching today's episode of the Riley Gaines Show. I hope you loved it. And if you did, make sure you subscribe. You can do that right here so you never miss an episode. We'll see you guys next week. Sweet.
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