Once upon a time, there was a place you could go on the internet to buy all the strangest fruits that fashion’s best and brightest had to offer. Now, you’re more likely to hit it when you decide to become the billionth person in the world to own a pair of sambas. That place is SSENSE - the luxury e-commerce mega retailer based out of Montreal, which houses every fashion brand from Canada Goose to Issey Miyake, and employs just about the entire 20-something anglo population of Montreal. SSENSE...

When “selfie” was deemed the word of the year in 2013, people freaked it. How had society become so vapid? Were we all narcissists? Did this mean young people would spend all the precious time they COULD be building a Forbes empire… taking pictures of themselves? But did selfies really make Narcissuses of us all, or have human beings always been fascinated by their own self-image? The selfie as we know it today may have been invented by a clumsy Australian man. But from its origins in the...

If you’ve ever vacantly nodded along while someone rants to you about NFTs, then this finale episode is for you. Welcome to Blockchain for Bimbos. From a genuine effort to put agency over the sale of their work back into the hands of artists was born a Frankenstein’s monster: the NFT. It’s the internet version of owning a star… if you could resell that star for millions of dollars to a crypto millionaire. Even stranger, the successful marriage of NFTs and legacy art institutions made strange...

Considering every broad and her mother owns a pair of ballet flats these days, it’s safe to say ballet has successfully re-infiltrated popular culture. But that might not be a good thing. In this episode, Hannah and Maia, along with movement artist Susanna Haight, trace the evolution of dance in the Western zeitgeist - from the days of George Balanchine, to the introduction of camera phones into the training space. If we’re living in a time of girlhood, and girlhood is all about ballet, and...

If you're enjoying the Parker Posey-aissance, then Party Girl is the film for you. This little freak of a movie, about a Manhattan club-goer who experiences an existential crisis after reading the Myth of Sisyphus (yes, that's the plot) was, believe it or not, the first feature film to premiere both in theatres and online. And thus it occupies a very odd space in popular culture. Predicting many things to come: the streaming era, Brat, downtown edgelords. And remaining an artifact of a time...

Hamilton: the musical that launched a thousand lip-biting memes. Almost a decade ago, Lin Manuel Miranda’s race-bending rap-sical took broadway by storm and rose to unprecedented levels of success, amassing a dedicated, almost fanatical global fanbase. Yet with ticket prices starting at $400 a pop, the vast majority of these fans had never actually seen the show. Even stranger, in 2016 you could throw a rock and hit about three Hamilton fans, but today it seems like a title no one wants to...

When The Beatles came out with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it seemed like music had changed forever. Out with the days of 78s and random singles compiled into LPs. Now the act of listening to music was an art in itself! Until it wasn’t. In this episode, Hannah and Maia look past their musical differences to take you on a journey through music history as it collides with technology. As major innovations in music - disco, punk, MTV, pirating, the predetermination of music...

It’s hard to tell what killed photography… whether it was the advent of the camera phone, the “pocket gallery” that is social media, or the thousands of men taking softcore images of hot women in lingerie and calling it art. These horsemen of the photography apocalypse were all put to trial when Emily Ratajkowski went up against acclaimed artist and professional troll, Richard Prince, after he featured one of her Instagram photos in an art exhibition in New York. An image she went on to...

Wattpad: a literary oasis of the Web 2.0, or a cash cow monopolizing on the infernal musings of a thousand Club Chalamets? In this episode, Hannah and Maia are joined by Youtube superstar Princess Weekes, to ponder the eponymous literary platform; from its gaming origins, to its heyday as a fertile space for burgeoning writers, to what it is now which is… bizarre. Is Wattpad f-cking up our relationship to literature, or should we just be happy that we’re literate at all? How do we critique an...

Oscar Wilde once said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” But if that's the case, how do we explain Rupi Kaur? Ever since she came on the scene a decade ago, Rupi has seen equal measures of praise and scrutiny. And, youth and gender considered, it’s hard not to feel that the backlash to her work is yet another instance of people hating anything that’s popular. However, in this episode, Hannah and Maia are...

Nobody wants to be a stick waving old man, but what happens when it’s that stick waving old man who’s telling young people to loosen up? After a series of studies from 2021 reported that teenagers are having less sex than the generations before them, a strange phenomenon has unfolded on the internet. Younger people are being morally conservative, older people are responding by calling younger people “puriteens” (puritanical teens), and then other older people are calling those older people...

Full episode available on Patreon: Kristen and Bethany Baird make Christian life advice content on Youtube for their modest audience of 100k followers. But when Cody Ko reacted to one of their videos on his channel, spawning an entire industry of Girl Defined commentary, they became overnight sensations… for all the wrong reasons. Girl Defined certainly spreads harmful fundamentalist views to impressionable young women but, in this bonus episode, Hannah and Maia question whether Kristen and...

If you thought women’s beauty standards were unrealistic before, just wait until you find out about AI porn. Not only do these girlies have cartoonish curves, the faces of young teens, and impossibly long hair… they also have eight fingers on each hand! In this finale episode, Hannah and Maia discuss AI porn, the ways it infringes on bodily autonomy, and its commitment to rendering women’s oldest profession obsolete. You’d think we’d have flying cars by this point, but instead we’re jerking...

…We’re about to go off. Since what feels like the beginning of time (the 60s) dating companies have promised us that our soulmates are out there waiting for us, and they know just who it is. But in this current late stage hellscape, it’s safe to say these companies aren’t as altruistic as they seem. Yes, in this episode, Hannah and Maia talk about everyone’s least favourite drug: dating apps. It comes down to one question: if dating apps could really find us our soulmate, why is it that we’re...

What do Uber and OnlyFans have in common? Did  camgirilng really originate from a 24 hour live stream of a Trojan coffee pot? And fellas, is it cheating to have an OnlyFans subscription AND a wife? These burning questions (and more) will be answered in this episode, where Hannah and Maia discuss the multivalent world of OnlyFans and the ways it transformed sex work, for better or for worse. It may have been a saving grace for out-of-work people during the pandemic, but is OF a hero of the gig...

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many annoying people on Twitter, you’ve got Tumblr to thank for that. Tumblr, the microblogging site that reigned supreme in the 2010s, was like Facebook’s cool cousin who has blue hair and goes to art school. It was the cradle of identity formation for lonely teens and adults, and it was also a happy home to lots and lots of porn. Tumblr’s NSFW content made it a search-engine-friendly way to consume porn without your mom finding out. But its...

Why is it that whenever someone “thinks of the children”, a sex worker is harmed in the process? In this episode, Hannah and Maia tell the story of Backpage - the classifieds website that came crashing down when instances of child sex trafficking was discovered in its seedy underbelly. But while the crusade against the site and its free-wheeling founders seemed well intentioned, the act that was used to take them down (FOSTA-SESTA) has had massive consequences for the freedom of the web, and...

Sure, the computer gave us war. But sex gave us the iCloud email alert. Ever since Marilyn Monroe was on the cover of Playboy, men have been profiting off of women’s bodies without their consent. Yet if revenge porn has been around since God was a small child, why did it seem to peak in the 2010s? In this episode, Hannah and Maia go back to a time when Hunter Moore, the Gavin McInnes of cybersex terrorism, reigned supreme on the internet with his wildly popular revenge porn website, Is Anyone...

Before “co-authored, interactive erotica” (otherwise known as sexting), we had chatrooms. Virtual spaces where anyone of any race, gender, class, or creed could come together to fornicate with their words. The MUD and MOO chatrooms of yore belonged to a time when Dungeons and Dragons nerds governed the internet - a utopia of beautiful, unadulterated cybersex. But one fateful day in 1993, this would all change. In this episode, Hannah and Maia discuss the origins of online chatrooms, their...

If you were a teenage boy in 2008 and you didn’t have a “God Bless Sasha Grey t-shirt”, did you even exist? Ever since indie sleaze darling, Sasha Grey, burst onto the porn scene in the mid aughts, its become a bit cooler to say hey, “I watch this.” But while Sasha represented a feminist shift in the industry, her fringe sexuality may have played into a dangerous trend in internet porn. In this episode, Hannah and Maia ask the important question: should Sasha be The Pied Piper of Porn™, or...

Before Paris or Kim, there was Pamela. Original martyrs of the sex tape leak, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee are only now receiving their apology (via Hulu miniseries). But who knew that this “voyeuristic dive into the guileless intimacy of two tabloid darlings” would change the way we consume p*rn forever? In this episode, Hannah and Maia track the decline of p*rn, from its high culture “p*rno chic” days, to its low culture era on VHS, and the way Pamela’s sex tape kicked off two decades of...

When Vine died, the angels cried. No but seriously, in this era of late-stage internet, when it feels like politics, groupthink, and all around bad vibes are all exploding at once, it makes sense that we’re yearning for a simpler time. Who wouldn’t miss the innocence of silly, 6 second videos made for no reason other than to make us laugh? But was Vine as awesome as we remember, or are our memories a bit rose-tinted? In this season 3 finale, Hannah and Maia are joined by Izzy from Be Kind...

When you think of “hard news”, a company that once published an article called “13 Potatoes That Look Like Channing Tatum” probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yes, in this episode Hannah and Maia are tackling Buzzfeed - the millennial fluff aggregator that managed to be on the cutting edge of digital journalism for a bit there. And in the process, changed the way we consume news, and maybe even the societal flow of information altogether. Journalism is in crisis… and is...

For one brief, beautiful moment in history, the social media sleuths were right. When Britney Spears’ fans began to decode strange messaging in her quirky Instagram posts, it became clear that the formerly maligned popstar was living under the control of her abusive father by way of a particularly oppressive conservatorship. This resulted in a nation-wide movement to liberate Britney from her family and, by extension, the predatory industry that has exploited her for over two decades. But,...