Meghan McCain Helpfully Explains Feminism On Her Dumb New Talk Show

By Erin Gloria Ryan | September 9, 2013 | 4:00pm

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Meghan McCain has a talk show now. But before you dismiss the notion of a daughter of extreme privilege who lacks both originality and the self-awareness necessary to recognize her own lack of originality having a platform from which to spout beige banality under the guise of EDGINESS, listen up! According to Raising McCain’s promos, Meghan McCain’s new talk show isn’t like other, lame talk shows. It’s a cool talk show for the Thought Catalog set on a TV channel designed especially for millennials. It’s different! How different? After watching some clips, I’m not so sure.

The first episode of McCain’s show won’t air until next Sunday on Pivot TV, a channel “for millennials” that no cable providers carry (so I guess when I say the show “airs,” I mean it’s “shot out into the indifferent ether to be intercepted as incoherent radio signals to an alien race light-years away”), but previews are available on the channel’s website. And they’re… bad.

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To be fair, the show’s premiere episode where McCain investigates privacy issues isn’t that awful, if you can get past clips of McCain saying things like,

What can the average fucking American do to help everyone?

and

This is how a LOT of America decorates their living room. (straightens iRoNiC taxidermied deer head on wall)

and

Are we just, like, fucked as a culture?

But, from the look and sound of it, we really get cooking with gas during the show’s second episode, which is about, like, feminism. Unfortunately, not much more than this clip, which is edited to look like (to paraphrase Dodai) “two white ladies telling a black lady what feminism is” is available online yet, but the incomparable Emily Nussbaum has seen the entire thing. In her review of Pivot the channel for The New Yorker, she describes Raising McCain in a way that makes it sound like a parody of fifth wave window dressing feminist platitudes that serve more to indulge McCain’s almost Jenna Maroney-esque self-serving narcissism than to critically examine a social movement. Nussbaum writes,

…the episode spirals into anxious segments about whether you can be a “sexy feminist.” “Who doesn’t like getting attention from the opposite sex?” McCain asks, in voice-over. […]

Out of the blue, a banner unfurls bearing the cover of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean In,” accompanied by another earnest McCain voice-over: “I want a brand of feminism that speaks to the challenges women face at work now.” Statistics appear, “Pop Up Video” style. There’s a random interview with the New York City Council member Inez Dickens, who reassures McCain that she’s a role model for young women. […] The episode concludes with McCain giving a speech to teen-agers; paranoically, she accuses a boy in the audience of looking bored. “I’m gonna fuckin’ call myself a feminist in the same way I’m gonna fuckin’ call myself a Republican,” she announces…

She’s gonna call herself a feminist in the same way she’s gonna fuckin’ call herself a Republican? So, then, with very little understanding of what the word means in 2013?

Unfortunately for people who love watching awful stuff, the episode in all its glory won’t air in its entirety until September 21st. I’m laundering my special hatewatching beanie in anticipation.

[Pivot]