she is talking about. She won’t confirm or
deny but says anyone is free to google who he
is; it’s all part of the game.) Slim was the rich
boyfriend who’d become the catalyst for
Cooper’s podcast after that relationship failed.
Within weeks of them meeting, Cooper was
being flown around the country on private
jets. On finishing college, she moved into his
New York penthouse. Their relationship was
showy and tempestuous. He cheated, she left,
met Franklyn, started Call Her Daddy. They
briefly rekindled things while the show was
on air, before breaking up again, definitively.
If the relationship was painful, it provided a
great deal of content and supercharged the
early days of Call Her Daddy, gilding it with
drama, celebrity and celebrity sex.
Is she still in touch with Slim Shady?
“Oh no, oh no.”
Does Cooper know how he feels about her
discussing their relationship publicly?
“When we got back together, it was him
constantly being terrified, like, ‘Are you going
to talk about me on your show?’ But it was
also a really big awakening for me when he
made multiple comments that showed how
insecure he was, threatened by my new-found
success. When we were [originally] dating,
he had the upper hand, but just because of
money. Now that I had my own, it made him
feel emasculated. I will never forget him
saying, ‘I just don’t get how [American football
player] Tom Brady is married to [supermodel]
Gisele.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ and he’s like,
‘Because Gisele makes more money than him.’
I was like, ‘I gotta go. Goodbye.’ ”
Then what?
“I’ve never told the full story of the day
I showed up to my apartment and my life was
in garbage bags, which will be coming in an
episode soon. It was the worst day of my life,
yet now I look back, had that break-up not
happened, the show wouldn’t have started.
I wouldn’t have gotten, basically, a break
free from him and been forced to start my
own life. Yes, I moved from a penthouse to
a tiny little apartment in Manhattan, but it
was worth it.”
Which brings us neatly to the bigger
issue of how and if Call Her Daddy is a
feminist proposition.
Plenty of people think it isn’t. The internet
is filled with blog posts called things such
as “A Strain of Feminism Palatable to the
Common Misogynist” (“Call Her Daddy
co-opts feminism by reinforcing outdated
ideas that ultimately keep straight, cisgendered
men at the top of the social hierarchy”)
and “Call Her Daddy Isn’t the Feminist Talk
Show You Think It Is” (“Call Her Daddy needs
to stop talking about women the way men
think they can talk about women”). I have
no doubt that, as Call Her Daddy permeates
the British cultural consciousness, Cooperwill provoke equivalent indignation and
moral panic here too. It’s what we do,
though you can see why.
Since #MeToo, the conversation
about women, girls and sex has been an
increasingly bleak one. Street harassment,
Everyday Sexism, desperate confusion over
consent. Sex in the past four years has
become about danger. Women have been
increasingly cast as sex’s victims, not its
willing participants. Then here’s Cooper,
talking like sex is fun, like knowing how
to give brilliant oral sex is a core skill. How
could she? How dare she?
Cooper absolutely argues that Call Her
Daddy is feminist, although she prefers the
hackneyed language of “empowerment”. The
title of the podcast alone is a subversion of
female sexual submission, you see, of the idea
your male sexual partner is your “daddy”.
Cooper has taken that theme and run with it.She refers to herself as the podcast’s founding
father, Father Cooper.
When I tell her about my young male
friend’s belief that Call Her Daddy has a
negative impact on the behaviour of single
women, Cooper says, “I was sitting at dinner
and a woman came up to me and said, ‘I have
to just quickly tell you this...’ At a party one
night, her boyfriend’s friend came up to her,
knowing she liked Call Her Daddy. And the
guy was like, ‘Oh, I hate Alex Cooper and
I hate Call Her Daddy,’ and the girl asked,
‘Why?’ And the guy verbatim said, ‘Because
Alex Cooper has made women so confident.’ ”
As for Gluck Gluck 9000 and all implied
emphasis on male pleasure: “I am so proud
of that. I think it’s empowering to be able to
say that, yes, I created this technique in the
bedroom that went viral. A lot of women, still
to this day, come up to me and they’re like,
‘You changed my frickin’ life! Thank you for
the Gluck Gluck.’ It is empowering. If you
don’t feel confident in the bedroom, here, take
my entire skill that I’m going to give to you.”
And so on.
Which might sound a bit convenient,
a bit self-serving for a person who’s hitched
her fame wagon to that clickbaitiest of
subjects, sex. But here’s the thing: having
listened to a handful of episodes of Call HerDaddy, having talked to its creator, I find I
agree with Cooper. More than that. I realise
I have always agreed with Cooper.
Young women – make that any women- who feel sexually confident, who understand
instinctively that sex is about their pleasure
(for all the Gluck Gluck 9000 content, Call
Her Daddy places great and constant emphasis
on female pleasure), who do not associate
sex with shame or darkness, but rather with
silliness and fun, are going to have a lighter,
more comfortable, jollier relationship with it
than those who fear sex, find it riddled and
fraught with complex gender politics, have not
acquired the language, the will or the social
context to discuss and dissect it freely. And
yes, it’s contradictory, and yes, it’s flawed, and
sure, Cooper messes up, ambles blithely into
territory a lot of contemporary feminists will
consider problematic, but largely I think she’s
doing a good thing.
“The number of women that tell me,
‘Thank you for making sex sexy again,’ ” she
says. “There are so many serious topics that
can be discussed, but this is a comedy podcast.
I’m trying to make people feel good about
themselves, confident about themselves,
excited about sex.”
I ask her for her very best sex tip (“I would
say the confidence you have in the bedroom
should be the same confidence you find
within yourself when you’re masturbating”).
I listen to more episodes of Call Her
Daddy. I dot about, from the outré early
days through the shaky aftermath of the
end of her professional relationship with
Franklyn, a fraught interlude, the two still
aren’t speaking. (“I was frustrated with how
the media portrayed that. Had it been two
men, those headlines would have never been
‘The Call Her Daddy girls aren’t speaking to
each other and things are getting bitchy’.
No, no, no. These were two women who
had a different opinion on an IP [intellectual
property] worth millions of dollars. It wasn’t
a fight over boyfriends or bags.”)
I hear her attempt to date men who
have heard the podcast and fetishise Cooper
for the person they believe her to be (“a
beautiful disaster, really incredible content”)
and I hear her venture into the early stages
of a relationship with Mr Sexy Zoom Man,
who, like Slim Shady before him, is never
identified, with whom she is now happily,
committedly involved. I hear her change,
grow up, fall apart, rebuild and I hear her
talk about sex – salaciously, but not without
wisdom, not without great practical
application. I end up feeling like I’ve had
a conversation with the podcasting love
child of Paris Hilton and Esther Perel, the
bestselling relationships expert – and that
is not a bad thing. Not at all. Hell, I even
picked up a tip or two. n
‘Women say, “Thank
you for making sex
sexy again.” I’m
trying to make people
excited about sex’
HAIR: RICKY MOTA AT MANE ADDICTS. MAKE-UP: JENNA KRISTINA AT THE WALL GROUP. ALEX COOPER WEARS SUIT, MUGLER, AND DRESS, DUNDASWORLD.COM. SOFITEL LOS ANGELES, THE
LUXURY LA HOTEL AND NONPROFIT ORGANISATION, IS PARTNERING WITH PEOPLEASSISTING THE HOMELESS (PATH) FOR A THANKSGIVING BASKET DONATION DRIVE UNTIL NOVEMBER 26, AND A TOY DRIVE, DECEMBER 3-17The Times Magazine 39