In Bed With The Right

Episode 113: The 2025 Daytime Cursties (with Michael Hobbes)

It's cold outside, the Holidays are here, and you know what that means: It's Cursed-Discourse Awards-Season, motherf@ckers! Not-even-close-to-live from a theatre miles away from the Dolby Theater, it's the Third Annual Cursties!!! For the third year in a row, Moira, Adrian and special guest Michael Hobbes give out awards for the most cursed discourses around sex and gender for 2025. Problem is: we've dealt with so many cursed discourses around sex and gender in 2025, and pretty much all cursed discourses seem to have with gender panic these days. And In Bed with the Right has covered so so so so many of them! So we decided to narrow our noms to one particular genre of cursedness this year, and to present awards for ... drumroll ... achievements in anti-wokeness.! From queer tieflings to kids getting coddled in the 4th dimension, from socialist mayors (and not the one you're thinking of!) to French people teaching Americans how to islamophobia, to the world's creepiest Blue Man Group, this one has something for everybody! Some links to articles we mention: -- Matt Bernstein's in-depth episode on the long dark road of Debra Messing can be found here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_YMlTus7tg] -- Adrian's New Republic article about a row over "islamogauchisme" in France can be found here [https://newrepublic.com/article/194678/grenoble-france-university-islamophobia-controversy-wokeism] -- Michele Goodwin's interview with Jess Michaels as part of her series Surviving Epstein can be found here [https://msmagazine.com/podcast/on-surviving-epstein-part-i-with-jess-michaels/]

Episode 112 -- The Natural Childbirth Movement

Moira walks Adrian through the strange, diagonalist history of the idea of "natural birth" -- from 1930s eugenicists to hippie communes, from radical feminist spaces to MAHA and the "wild birth [https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation]"-movement. This episode comes with a bunch of trigger warnings -- please make sure you're in the right headspace before diving in! Some of the texts we refer to in the episode: Grantly Dick-Read, Natural Childbirth [https://archive.org/details/naturalchildbirt0000gran] (1933) Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born [https://archive.org/details/ofwomanbornmothe0000adri] (1977) Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives and Nurses [https://archive.org/details/witchesmidwivesn0000ehre] (1972) Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery [https://archive.org/details/spiritualmidwife0000unse] (1975)

Episode 110 -- Project 1933, Part IX: November 1 - November 30

For this episode of In Bed with the Right, Adrian and Moira return to the year 1933. They continue the story of how Hitler seized power, what it did to society, what it felt like to live through it, and -- as always -- what role gender and sexuality played in events. Reminder: We're going month by month for these episodes. This ninth installment covers November 1 to November 30, 1933. It's about democracy after democracy. On November 12, the Nazis held an election, the second after Hitler had become chancellor, but the first since the Enabling Laws had fully established a dictatorship. This episode is about this bizarre exercise, about how average Germans experienced it, and about how émigrés reacted to a country that was fusing more and more with its ruling regime. One quick content note: Adrian moved a little quickly through the election results about 25 minutes in. The first set of numbers he's talking about are the ones for the parliamentary election (where basically only Nazis could be voted for, but some non-Nazis were on the ballot). The second set of numbers are about the referendum about leaving the league of nations. Our apologies if this didn't become clear!

Episode 108 -- Live from San Francisco, It's Moral Panic Bingo Night!

To celebrate our 100th episode (belatedly), your intrepid hosts recently took to the stage of San Francisco's Swedish-American Hall for a special live Moral Panic Bingo Night. Moira and Adrian were joined by the amazing Sarah Marshall (of You're Wrong About) and Matt Bernstein (of A Bit Fruity) to talk about moral panics big and small, and how they continue to fuck up our lives. Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics is linked here [https://archive.org/details/folkdevilsmoralp0000cohe_x6y2], sans awesome original cover. Sarah Marshall's 8-part CBC series The Devil You Know can be found here [https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/2054-the-devil-you-know-with-sarah-marshall].

Episode 107 -- Did Women Ruin Everything?

In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through "The Great Feminization" -- a recent talk/essay that took the right wing by storm, and that subsequently got its author invited to discuss women ruining things in the New York Times. The essay posited that women's entry into the American workforce is to blame for ... wokeness? General societal disorder? The Decline of the West (TM)? Among the topics this episode touches on: the reasons why ideas like these are catching on at this particular moment; the reconceptualization of class distinction through (supposed) gender markers; the history of the "Great Feminization" thesis, and its relationship to "anti-liberal" and other "anti-woke" thinking on the Right. A few links: -- Helen Andrews, "The Great Feminization [https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/]" -- "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/opinion/women-workplace-feminism-conservative.html]", Helen Andrews in Conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant and Ross Douthat -- Becca Rothfeld's review of Leah Libresco Sargeant's The Dignity of Dependence, which Moira mentioned in the episode, can be found here [https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/11/13/dignity-dependence-leah-libresco-sargeant-review/].