The Times Magazine 37is there no space for women to discuss these
topics that are totally fine for men to discuss,
but the minute a woman tries to navigate the
conversation, it’s considered taboo and we get
slut-shamed? Et cetera.”
She had not intended to start a podcast.
Indeed, she had “never listened to a podcast
before I recorded Call Her Daddy”. Cooper
was 24 years old and had just broken up
with a rich boyfriend who’d funded her post-
college New York lifestyle up to that point.
Heartbroken and suddenly broke, she was
filled with a desire to create. But what?
“I remember when someone first brought
up the podcast idea to me and I was like,
that sounds like something my dad does. He
listens to podcasts,” she says. But then, she
reasoned, “Wait. Why am I so not interested
in podcasts? Probably because I feel like
they’re slow, they’re boring, they’re wrong.
And I was like, OK, well then how would
I want to consume a podcast? I would want
it to be so entertaining, you can’t fast-forward
through it, superfast and saturated.” And
that’s what she decided to make, initially
independently, with her new flatmate, Sofia
Franklyn, then with funding from media
company Barstool.
When did Cooper realise she had a hit on
her hands?
“Episode one. I was sitting in the room
recording it and there were about four men
in the room, doing audio and the video, and
they were cracking up. That was the moment
I realised we’ve got something here, because
everyone in this room is cracking up.”
Cooper speaks expressively. She’s self-
aware, bright, although often underestimated
on that account. (“You’re never going to be
taken seriously because of the way you look,”
a professor at Boston University, where she
studied film and television, told her.) If she’s
a product of her age, as used to broadcasting
her ideas, feelings, experiences and moods to
strangers over social media platforms as she is
communicating them one on one to her best
friends and her shrink, she’s also good at it, a
natural performer who picked up a thing or
two about the creative process and, crucially,
how to edit it, at college.
Call Her Daddy might sound like an
unfiltered, hungover, over-sharey gossip,
but you only need to speak to Cooper for five
minutes to realise it is a meticulously planned,
rigorously structured endeavour. These days,
she thinks of Call Her Daddy as a “brand, a
lifestyle” and a “huge empowering movement”.
We’ll get to that. First, what kind of woman
does what Cooper does? Rehashes in lurid
detail her most intimate moments for the
delectation of millions of listeners? Does
she not feel horribly exposed? Judged?
Compromised? What do her former partners
think? What do her parents think?While Cooper insists Call Her Daddy has
moved on from just being a podcast about
sex – in advance of our interview, I’m sent
some material by Her People, which, I’m
interested to note, doesn’t mention the
word “sex” once – it certainly leant on sex
heavily in the early days and, if the episode
I just listened to (I Got Ghosted, Now What?)
is any indication, definitely still goes there. So,
seriously, who does that?
Alexandra Cooper was born in 1994 and
raised in Pennsylvania by a psychologist
mother and a TV sports producer father. She
has two elder siblings, a brother and a sister.
“You’ve seen the movie Mean Girls, right?”
she asks. I have, I say. “So, like, my parents,
growing up, were not the Mean Girls mum,
where they’re like, ‘Here we go, sweetie.
Here are the condoms,’ but they were always
encouraging me [towards] self-expression,
using my voice.” She was, she claims, not
pretty as a young teenager, “bullied about
my weight, my skin, my hair, ugly duckling
and all my friends were cute. As I got older,
I’d see some of the men I knew in middle
school, who treated me like shit. All of a
sudden I get highlights, my braces off, some
Accutane [used to treat severe acne] and now
they’re so nice to me. Nothing changed about
my personality, just my looks.”
That, she thinks, was informative. “Helpful”,
she says. It means, she thinks, she can talk
easily to women and girls less beautiful thanshe is because she has been them. It also
makes her pragmatic about her beauty. “It’s
been exciting to weaponise my looks because,
to me, they don’t mean much.”
Cooper was a natural athlete, intensely
competitive. She tried many sports as a child
and settled on football, which (of course)
she calls “soccer”. It was the culture around
women’s football, the context of it, where
she finessed the voice on which Call Her
Daddy depends, her open, anatomically vivid
lexicon. It was here she realised there was an
appetite for it.
“I played Division One [the highest level
of college sport in the US] soccer and in this
locker room of highly competitive women,
there was always this divide of my friends
that were like, ‘Let’s talk about what he did
last night. Let’s talk about our exes.’ Then
there were other women that didn’t feel as
comfortable, but then, behind closed doors,
they would pull me aside and want to talk.
I realised that those women who weren’t
as open to talking about it publicly, it’s not
that they didn’t want to, it was just they
didn’t know how to. That was probably the
beginning of the genesis of the idea, of there
needs to be a conversation.”
While at college, Cooper began serially,
consciously, dating professional athletes.
“I was raised with my father working for the
NHL, the National Hockey League, and I was
raised on, Christmas, we’re going to my dad’s
work party. A lot of people would go to an
office; my dad’s was on an ice-skating rink.
I’m skating around with professional athletes.
That was just the person I was attracted to.
My dad was a Division One athlete. I was
a Division One athlete. Naturally, that was
going to be my type.”
One of these relationships contributed
enormously to Cooper’s, and Call Her Daddy’s,
origin story. Cooper met an athlete she’s never
named, referring to him only as Slim Shady.
(The internet is confident it knows whomBeing interviewed at the
Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit in
Detroit in October this yearGETTY IMAGES
Her ex was terrified
she would talk about
him on the show. ‘My
success made him
feel emasculated’