Imagine opening up the Podcast app on your iPhone while preparing for your morning commute, expecting to find your regularly scheduled Ben Shapiro Show or Barstool News program. Instead, you find a show with cover art boasting two scantily clad twenty-something women. Curiosity getting the better of your judgment, you tap the phone to investigate what possible topic such a provocative image could be advertising, only to be greeted with the auto-tuned voice of two women asking “Do you call him daddy? Do I call her daddy? Call her Daddy,” in as seductive a way as possible.
Disconcerted, but with your intellectual curiosity piqued, you keep listening. To your horror, it soon becomes clear that the show is a weekly synopsis of its two female hosts’ lives of blackout drinking, smoking copious amounts of weed, and dozens of drunken hookups. Now, keep in mind: last semester, “Call Her Daddy” was the second most popular podcast on Apple Podcasts in the U.S. Adults everywhere seem to crave each week’s episodes on increasingly riskier topics, each with evermore explicit personal detail provided by the hosts. With titles like “SEXT ME SO I KNOW IT’S REAL,” “Sliding into the DMs – It’s Time to Get Laid Boys,” and “If you’re a 5 or 6, Die for that Dick,” the hosts leave no topic off limits. This is not simply a Cosmopolitan write-in Q & A session. No, these topics come from the women’s personal lives and their first-hand encounters on the streets of New York City.
When I first listened to the podcast, I was very much taken aback (as were the men in the recording studio, as noted by the hosts in their first episode). Aspects of our culture like this one speak to the dangers of the changes our society has undergone over the last fifty years. In light of recent events on the Hill last semester, I find such a podcast even more troubling. Imagine if two football players from one of the big-ten schools started a podcast where they talked about all the sexual conquests, substance abuse, and wild behavior they partook in over the previous week. There would be such an outcry of public protest that the noise would be deafening. Herein lies the fundamental issue with our society: a false sense of equality. Surely we can all agree that the behavior of the stereotypical jock who sleeps with countless partners on a weekly, or even nightly, basis is one we need to banish from our culture. As a society and campus community, we should despise such behavior and work to end the veneration of “studs” or “Brads and Chads.” One just needs to read the ever-growing number of stories shared on the “Sexual Assault on the Hill” Instagram to realize the profound effect this athlete hookup culture has on the women who bravely share their experiences and understand its insidious threat to our campus community.
There seems to be a double standard for men and women in the post-sexual liberation era. While we condemn men who constantly hook up and brag to their friends, we encourage women to be sexually active and oversexualize every aspect of their being. Media platforms such as “Call Her Daddy” are proof enough. Those two women reveal their sexual conquests in extremely detailed accounts as they participate in a standing competition of who can sleep with more men each week. It all happens on the everlasting medium of the Internet, over and over, for the entertainment of the masses. Yet in this #MeToo Era, if the genders were reversed, the actions of the hosts would be seen as appalling - if not criminal.
The problem at its root is the definition our society uses for equality. We use people’s past actions to judge our standard of equality today instead of striving for a better, equitable world. Men have, historically, been able to act promiscuously and treat women in whatever way they please. So women, starting in the 1960s, wanted the same freedom and liberation to act just as men did - to, in their mind, act “equally.” Yet this is not true equality, for equality is inherently good and of a lofty nature aimed at bettering the world. If women felt they were unequally treated and wanted a better, fairer, more equal society, then how could repeating the actions they themselves termed unseemly give anyone a sense of equality? Look to post-Civil War America for an example. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois did not argue that blacks would achieve equality by being given the legal right to own whites. Such an idea would be ludicrous! Instead, they encouraged people to strive to sculpt a better, more just, more moral, more equal society. By leaving the evil in the past and encouraging all people, oppressor and oppressed, to use methods that help cultivate a sense of humanity, equality, and shared relationships, they sought to craft a truly equal society. Years later, we have ignored that formula by encouraging people to instead use each other as mere sexual instruments.
The modern culture we have created regarding sexuality is not equal, nor is it fair, nor does it advance a better community now or for future generations. If we want to create a truly just, fair, and equal world, one free from sexual abuses and the degradation and belittlement of the human person, we must work to check inappropriate sexual behavior for everyone. For oppression is regression, and the consequences of the sexual liberation movement have oppressed the growth of the human person and his dignity in society. We have been enslaved by our vices instead of liberated. We need to create a society more focused on caring for and uplifting the dignity of the human person in all aspects of daily life. Then, and only then, will we enjoy true equality.