We recently recorded our episode on Glennon Doyle’s bestselling memoir, Untamed. She calls all women to shed the conditioning that teaches us to please others, to make ourselves smaller, to suppress our desires, and instead, she wants us to get untamed.
The first time I read the book, my reaction was, “this is how I live my life and no one likes me.” Ok, that might be a) slight exaggeration and/or b) my own fault, unrelated to my untamed nature.
On my second reading I found the undeniable value in Glennon’s work. Asking women to be untamed, showing them how to untame themselves with the four keys and highlighting reactions that come from our conditioning is important. The goal of becoming untamed is aspirational.
And then I thought about the work we do here at Pop Fiction Women. At the end of every episode we encourage women to Stay Complicated! Maybe being complicated is a way to bridge the gap from here to untamed?
Writer and director Leslye Headland has expressed her theory of why sometimes studio executives or audiences don’t “get” some of her characters, which I’m adapting to explain the reason this podcast is so important: we as a society lack the training to tolerate complicated women.
We have trouble tolerating them because we don’t understand them. We don’t know them intimately. We hold them at arms’ length, out of fear that their complicated nature is contagious or maybe because we think holding them away will keep us safe, that it won’t ignite the feelings we know we have bubbling right beneath the surface. But that’s the work we do here.
We discuss different types of women, with different damage, different struggles, different backgrounds, different attitudes, and different stages of their growth. We dig into them without fear. We bring our judgments because we are human, but we also bring our curiosity and intelligence and empathy and Kate and I each bring a different point of view.
We do this in service of one singular goal: that all women feel free. Free from judgment, preconceived notions, shoulds and supposed tos. Free from the constraints of our culture, our families, men, other women, even — or maybe especially, free from our own beliefs that keep us caged and small.
This podcast’s primary focus on fiction allows people — men and women alike — to take a step back and say, look at these characters that we’re talking about, let’s analyze them, let’s look at what they’re doing and why? What is working for them? What isn’t? We unpack all of the preconceived notions that we bring to the table, and we dig into the women creators behind the scenes because that’s what they’re doing too. Embracing their complications. This analysis puts a step between you, the listener and the doer.
You don’t have to be Fleabag. In fact Phoebe Waller-Bridge said she wrote Fleabag because she didn’t want to become Fleabag. She created her and then we talk about her. Through this exercise, maybe other people can understand these complicated women a little bit better. And then by understanding them, we aren’t as afraid. We aren’t as judgmental. We’re willing to just let people live and do whatever they need to do, and we can also be free for ourselves. We are bridging the gap from caged to complicated to untamed.
This is a big job, but we can handle it.
Stay complicated with us.