Following an acrimonious business split
from Franklyn in April 2020, in June 2021
Cooper signed with online streaming service
Spotify, relaunching Call Her Daddy as a
one-woman show in a deal reportedly worth
$60 million (£45 million). (Cooper has never
confirmed this figure.) As a consequence of
all this, she is now routinely referred to as
the most successful female podcaster in the
world after Michelle Obama. (“I mean, get me
behind. Every time I see my name in the same
article as that incredible woman...”)
Was this the intention, I ask, one Monday
afternoon at 5pm London time. Was this level
of success and exposure always Cooper’s end
game? She’s zooming me from her home in
Los Angeles. She is extremely blonde, and
wearing a dark polo neck, which may or may
not be designed as a visual counter to any
assumptions I may make about her sexual
excesses, although maybe she’s just cold.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t exactly know what
I was doing in the beginning. I had just got
out of college, there were a lot of themes in
my life that made me feel like, why do, one,
my friends always gravitate towards me?
Probably because I’m saying what they’re all
thinking. And then, two, why, in the media,The Times Magazine 35lex Cooper is undoubtedly the
most famous woman you have
never heard of. She is the perfectly
pretty, perpetually selfie-ready
27-year-old American behind the
outrageous, outrageously successful
sex and relationships podcast Call
Her Daddy. And if you haven’t
heard of that either, never mind.
It’s just that you’re too old.
How to describe Call Her Daddy? Cooper
calls it “a woman’s locker-room conversation”.
I’d call it the lewdest, most graphic, hilarious/
ghastly examination of complicated sexual
misdemeanours and triumphs I’ve ever heard.
(NB, I’m definitely too old.) Don’t believe
me? It’s incredibly difficult to relay so much
as two minutes of Call Her Daddy content in
print without busting publishing regs, never
mind all sense of propriety. But as a taster,
episode titles include You’re Just a Hole, Gluck
Gluck 9000 (Gluck Gluck is Cooper’s patented
oral sex technique) and How I Glucked My
Way to the Top.
It is genuinely shocking, shameless or
shame-free, depending on your perspective,
so dense with millennial/Generation Z-isms
you’ll need an urban dictionary to follow it
and it would probably qualify as out-and-out
revolting/terrifying condemnation of the
young – all they are and all they represent- if it didn’t routinely throw up the kind of
gems of wisdom so perceptive and practical
you’d pay a therapist hundreds for them.
Call Her Daddy is also, at times,
genuinely moving in its rawness, touchingly
compassionate in its dealings with its devoted
fans (the Daddy Gang, with whom Cooper
conducts a constant conversation, often
via the direct messages they send on social
media) and useful in its sex advice. One friend
(young, hetero, male, single), however, claims
it is at least partly responsible for making the
women with whom he interacts romantically
behave badly. “You know if they’ve listened to
Call Her Daddy,” he says darkly. “You can tell.”
“Tell your friend, thank you for the
hype-up,” says Cooper when I pass this on.
She beams, genuinely delighted.
Cooper has every right to be delighted. She
launched Call Her Daddy in 2018 as a weekly
two-hander with another young woman, her
former flatmate Sofia Franklyn. The pair
postured as long-term friends, but hadn’t
known each other terribly long before the
show launched. She notched up some two
million downloads by the end of the first two
months alone, having ensured the show’s
vernacular (“Daddy Gang”, “Gluck Gluck”)
entered a wider public consciousness. She
has inspired hashtags, which have ended up
emblazoned on the front of cropped hoodies,
and become an Instagram sensation (Cooper
now has more than 2.3 million followers).
A
‘Why is there no space
for women to discuss
these topics that are
totally fine for men
to talk about?’
Cooper with her Call Her Daddy co-founder, Sofia FranklynGETTY IMAGES
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