I can’t stop falling in love with my favorite podcasters
Mama, it might just be time to "seek treatment."
During my junior year of college one of my friends confided in me that she had never had a “full-blown orgasm.” As a person who experienced puberty with a penis, this was entirely unfathomable to me. Making myself cum was just about the only thing I felt I truly excelled at. I was baffled by her ability to put off her own pleasure, why wait nearly 20 years to finish? Surely there was time between near-endless episodes of Grey’s Anatomy to inspect one’s own anatomy. How had this not been a top priority sooner? We needed our best men on the case ASAP.
A few weeks later, that same friend came to me in a glow, and I knew at once she had “found her orgasm.” (I’m addicted to this antiquated phrase, I feel like it makes me sound like a character in a Nancy Meyers film. And oh, how it makes me long for Merino wool and palatial kitchens.) Apparently, her elusive nut was hidden in the newly burgeoning world of audio-erotica. Guided by a man with a Chardonnay voice, my friend found her own release in the story of a girl who was taken by her piano teacher and his “throbbing tumescent member.” She had me listen to a section of the story, and I’m sorry to say— it did not work for me. I came of age in the heyday of smutty fanfiction, so I was well acquainted with the tropes of this media, but there was something especially cringe in the vocal performance of these audio-eroticas. The voice acting was stilted and artificial, the whole thing struck me as exceedingly clumsy and deeply unsexual. I left our listening party wondering again who exactly this kind of thing was for, and what type of person actually got off to audio porn.
The unfortunate and embarrassing truth is, I find myself even more emotionally and sexually invested in the podcasters I subscribe to than my friend ever was with her own auditory trists, suggesting that: The fastest way to someone’s heart might just be through their ears.
I take the phrase “friend of the Pod” extremely — devastatingly serious. This week I have seen my closest friends for a combined 6 hours, in that same week I have consumed over 12 episodes of my favorite podcasts in addition to countless hours of YouTube podcast videos. What can I say, I’m a sucker for good set design. I may not have been a maths major (or even someone who knows what the hell a graphing calculator is for) but I clearly spend more time with my imaginary friends than I do with my real ones.
Boy math is spending twice as many hours weekly with the voices in your head than you do with the people who ought to mean the most in your life.
The vast majority of this content is exactly that — content. Just something to have on idly while commuting or washing the dishes. Something to fill the vacuous space in my head so as to not leave me unattended with my own thoughts for too long. However, much of that listening time is something else, something which I recognize as altogether parasocial.
Though I realize the pernicious nature of this media consumption, it does still act as an important socialization exercise and at times — an escapist fantasy. (Sometimes I feel a bit like a toddler or a new puppy who is still working on being potty trained, and my caretaker keeps saying something like, “This will be good for his development.”)
I found that my podcast… habit really took off during the extreme isolation of Covid where my silly little walks were the only thing keeping me from absolutely losing my damn mind. It is a well-known fact that placing the phrase “silly little” before anything makes it inherently less serious and not at all concerning. Listening to “Las Culturistas” or “Seek Treatment” was the only time I could hear from the outside world while in my small hometown where I was isolating. My silly little podcasts kept me from taking my silly little life. Through these episodes not only was I able to indulge in wish-fulfillment fantasies of “getting out,” but they were also one of the few places I could hear from other gay people. I clung to them like a life raft.
The people in my headphones defined my taste, honed my sense of humor, introduced me to new ideas and concepts — and helped me not to feel so utterly alone.
Now that I can go to a Trader Joe’s or get coffee from a bisexual barista (also known more commonly as just: a barista) whenever I want, my podcast listening feels a bit less life or death. In other words, community is much more abundant now that I’m not eating an entire bag of sweet chili Doritos daily trapped in my bed while questioning my will to live. Now I only need to do that on the rare occasion.
Still, Podcasts have a death grip on me. And more precisely their gay comedy podcast boys (also known as GCPB). These parasocial bonds run deep, and after hearing about (and being deeply affected by) Matteo Lane’s breakup with a Barcelona hottie, or going on an Instagram deep-dive into Bowen Yang’s pre-SNL years, I guess you could say I’ve gotten a bit invested in the lives of my best friends. The intense access afforded in the format of a weekly podcast episode has accelerated my one-sided bonds with these individuals, and with so many working in the world of film, comedy, and music, they have become my favorite celebrities to watch, and on occasion — fuck.
Anytime I see one of my podcasters on the apps, which is shockingly often, I jump at the opportunity to shoot my shot. Who could blame a girl for trying? However, confession hour… I almost always pretend not to know these men. It’s my most “Not Like Other Girls” trait, and I might as well bring a book to a Harry Styles concert or get a purple streak in my hair. I assuage my guilt by asserting that they likely want to be treated like anyone else looking on the apps.
But I’m in too deep, and I know better. (In too deep? Hello.) I’ve heard enough of these podcasters discuss the discomfort they feel when a fan comes up to them knowing entirely too many personal details. It is an inherent power inequity, where one party knows everything and the other is still a stranger. I never want to seem like one of those fans, so I lie. It’s a real Catch-22, I have to pretend to know nothing as to not seem weird, but it’s also very weird — I am aware — to pretend to know nothing about someone you’ve logged 10,000 hours with. It’s like if your therapist were to ask who you were after your 100th session.
This has backfired on me more than once. After hooking up with a C-tier Headgum personality, one who I really only listened to on occasion anyways, I heard him discuss sex with me in an episode. Though I suppose I can never verify that it was me, and doubtless I’d want to after his not-so-stellar review, the experience was just jarring enough to cause me to press pause on sleeping with the on-air talent — for a while at least.
But what is the allure? After all, my friend’s audio-erotica certainly had very little rousing effect on me sexually. Surely the sheer magnitude of time spent “with” these podcasters plays a not-so-insignificant role in my attachment. But perhaps attachment styles are precisely the problem for my fixation. For an anxious-avoidant type like me, there’s no greater lover than a man who can never leave me or let me down. Best of all, as much as he lets me in, I am never expected (and in fact can never) let him in, in the same way. This is the ultimate version of keeping a lover at arm’s distance. In this way, I can form the safest form of connection — one that simply does not exist.
Is that what that Dreamlover song by Mariah Carey is about?
Naturally, I have the very cute, and all-too-common, illness of choosing men who don’t really care if I live or die. One thing about me? I’m going to go ahead and go after boys who never really liked me in the first place. The goal, it seems, is to be with a man who not only thinks very little of me, but also who thinks of me very little. And how is a man supposed to think of me at all if he doesn’t even know me? In this way I can know everything about someone’s life, and at the same time, to them, I do not even exist. I think that’s why this fantasy is destroyed the instant I meet one of these podcasters, once I am real to him he is forced to become real to me, and thus the spell is broken.
I also recognize, that if these imaginary relationships were to become in anyway tangible, I would be an exceedingly shit lover. I don’t imagine very many real men would allow me to change their talking speed to 1.75x or feel too good about being seen as background noise.
So often a parasocial bond can be used to dehumanize the consumer. It is a great marketing tool, one that takes the trust and imagined relationship of the consumer for granted. In this way, the consumer is seen as little more than a mindless follower — one who gobbles up everything delivered to them. The common conception is that they are powerless in this system, simply a cog in the machine. However, dehumanization is a two-way street. Too often we forget the humanity of these “celebrities” chalking up their experiences and discomforts as less serious than our own because they have a Helix mattress promo code. To carry out an emotional affair with someone who only exists in a digital medium, confines an entire personhood to sine waves — little more than a tingle in your ear.
Like everyone else clogging up your Instagram stories with screenshots of their Spotify Wrapped, I too believe that my personal listening metrics are of utmost social import. The numbers don’t lie, and after cross-referencing my least favorite song from my least favorite musical, it became clear that the minutes of my year spent consuming podcasts were something to be slightly embarrassed by. This served a bit as a tangible reminder and wake-up call. Such a vast majority of my time and life were spent in a fugue state absolutely sucking down podcast episodes like those CGI dudes from Wall-E, and that is something that I hope to change.
Will I continue to form unhealthily dependent parasocial bonds with the podcasters I listen to regularly, yeah probably. But we all gotta have our thing, and I’m not sure mine’s any worse than anyone else’s. I mean, at the end of the day I could be into steampunk after all.