Cum Town Magnifiques

The gender polarization of pop culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s seems unthinkable in the current climate of unisex subversion where men are women and women are men. An atmosphere of masculine pranks and tomfoolery, exemplified by Blink 182, Eminem, and Jackass, coexisted peacefully with the plastic, pornographic femininity of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Pamela Anderson. The boys were as nude as the girls, but under the guise of comedy—something that hasn’t changed in the intervening years, as the heterosexual majority simply can’t take natural male nudity as anything but ridiculous no matter how forcefully it’s marketed to them as gender equality—and this created a free zone of homoerotic exploration that allowed me to have a poster of Blink 182 in underwear above my bed and it not be considered gay.

Cum Town, which harkens back to this era, is a comedy podcast that essentially works like a middle school male friend simulator for lonely millennial guys of the 2010s, a time when male camaraderie is stigmatized as potentially murderous and there are no legally existing spaces for boys to be boys without female monitoring and participation. The tossed off pop culture references—Pure Moods, Austin Powers, Titanic, Maddox, Sega Dreamcast—hit hardest those born between 1987 and 1990. Though there are three hosts, it is a showcase for the unwieldy improvisational genius of Nick Mullen, an Alt-Right-adjacent, seemingly apolitical comedian who exists in the Dirtbag Left New York scene of sister podcasts Chapo Trap House and Red Scare, a milieu that adopts and dilutes the language and symbology of the online far-right while eschewing its reactionary politics beyond the level of “political correctness has gone too far.” Before Cum Town, Nick posted masterful trolling articles on Thought Catalog under the name Nicole Mullen (byline: “Just a fun mom at a retarded school”) alongside pieces by cancelled reactionaries Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes.  When I stumbled on Nicole Mullen, I thought for a whole afternoon that there existed a female troll to beat them all, but was delighted to find that Nicole was Nick, and that Nick was stunningly handsome, with big, sad brown eyes, like a Romantic poet from the Victorian era of whom only one photograph exists. He made several appearances on a Fox News panel show called Red Eye, which aired at something like 2AM, and existed mostly through Twitter, Facebook, and the now-deceased Vine. I wondered how and where such a creature could channel his uncategorizable talents into a work of more sustained effort, and it turned out to be through an uncategorizable podcast which now makes nearly $50K a month on Patreon.

Cum Town is a chatty, low-effort enterprise with little to no form, and episodes have no topics except those that arise organically. The content consists mostly of racist jokes, song lyrics replaced with references to gay sex, and elaborate, extended, satirical Sadean fantasies of celebrities having gay sex with each other, which return and regenerate throughout the episode or the whole series. Batman characters with names like “The Niggler” and “Cumeatsioner Gordon,” who drinks Big Gulp cups of cum, will cross the sky like shooting stars in rapid fire. There is, as the title suggests, a neurotic preoccupation with semen and explicit locker room descriptions of gay sex, which strike heterosexuals as gross-out comedy and homosexuals like myself as murkily erotic. Nightmarish mutations of diverse gender-swapped Hollywood reboots will occur, such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with both parents and all the children played by towering negress Leslie Jones, shrunken down and exploring plus-size comedienne Melissa McCarthy’s ass.

A recurring theme is the relentless, cruel mockery of Jewish cohost Adam Friedland, Red Scare host Dasha Nekrasova’s fiancé, mocked variously as “a bug who eats dust” and a shekel-counting cheapskate and placed in numerous Norman Bates scenarios of wearing his mother’s clothes, being cucked by black men who live in trash cans, and having a dick so small that helicopter search lights and megaphones are necessary to find it. The bullying of sweet, mild Adam bleeds surreally into IRL on occasion, such as when Chelsea Clinton put him on blast for an untagged tweet mocking her appearance with what she described as “anti-Semitic tropes.”

Stavros Halkias, the third host, is the most knee-jerkedly liberal of the bunch and frequently drops his dumb sidekick persona to stridently express discomfort when Nick’s jokes or cultural observations have gone too far for the Patreon terms of service. His memorable contributions to the show are mostly in the form of his cacophonous laughter and farting on mic, which scares and repulses new listeners away, and the recurring theme of his chronic overeating and overall bodily decay, which dovetails nicely with Nick’s escalating depression and mental instability.

The early episodes, which begin with unlicensed use of the Home Improvement theme song, are the strongest. Nick has not exhausted his biographical pool of pathetic stories of life as a middling standup comedian in Austin, LA, and New York, living in Chinatown squalor and working at GameStop and cell phone kiosks in malls. In summer 2018, Nick’s mental health deteriorated to the point that he sought therapy and medication and tragically left social media, but not before releasing a series of emotional, vulnerable episodes where his honesty about glimpsing the void after too much cocaine at “Skankfest” is moving and admirable.

Cum Town fans are evenly split between those who like Million Dollar Extreme (right-wing) and those who like Chapo Trap House (left-wing). Both sides argue incessantly about the possible political underpinnings of the show, with the left believing that racist humor and a fascination with The N Word are deployed as nihilist irony and the right believing that the hosts exhibit straightforward awareness of suppressed and forbidden racial truths. Nick hates when his obsessed and frequently unhinged listeners attempt to ascribe meaning to his hundreds of hours of absurdist content, but there are remarkable, melancholic artistic depths lurking beneath the vulgar exterior of this show, which uniquely resonates with alienated young men across the world like myself who view Nick as our generation’s Travis Bickle.

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The Ladies Make a Podcast

      It may seem surprising that the most genuinely transgressive of the triumvirate of “Irony Left” New York podcasts is the one hosted by two uniquely beautiful, model-esque women, one blonde and one brunette, who lampoon body positivity and satirically allude to their anorexia as a running gag, but Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan make trenchant, occasionally cruel observations about gender, sexuality, politics, and pop culture that would result in the permanent cancellation of the bravest man. While they identify as Bernie-supporting socialists, the underlying theme of their show is a reactionary yearning for traditional gender roles. Dasha expresses how she wants to be treated like a baby, has never had to learn how to torrent because she has always had a boyfriend, and holds a bemused admiration for hentai, little girl roleplay, and the kind of starved, sub-legal female sexuality that Calvin Klein and Kate Moss transmogrified into corporate capitalist art of the highest degree, while Anna muses on the forgotten allure of a man fighting for a woman’s affections, the libidinal death involved in urban millennial relationships which invariably turn with time into “emotionally codependent sibling-roommates,” and the dystopian medical horror of condoms and birth control.

       The show began when an InfoWars video of indie actress Dasha, endearingly dressed as a sort of anime sailor with beret, went viral. In it she is quizzed about the impracticality of socialism by a blonde reporter, who is clearly trying to make her look stupid but comes off as the less interesting and likable party. Dasha sips on her iced coffee and sardonically eyes the camera, in a moment that defies audience expectations of bias confirmation and political party lines. I was confused and intrigued by it, initially assuming her to be an average DSA hipster. How wrong I was.

      Both women are the children of Russian immigrants and are blessed with an unflappable Slavic stoicism in the face of their numerous haters, who not inaccurately label them dangerous crypto-fascists and react with transparent sour grapes jealousy that such women can “have it all,” that these extremely online art hoes rose above the herd to craft a cogent artistic and political statement for which there is no correlate in the barren, neoliberal-dominated cultural landscape of the 2010s. Witness how Dasha and Anna deflect the middling complaints of the bluepilled, bluechecked masses on their Twitter and Instagram accounts, which as with all media today form part of the extended universe of the show, with a few well-chosen bon mots, never letting on that anything upsets them while projecting fully fleshed and vulnerable characters nonetheless. The audio is only one facet of the show, and the ladies’ keen aesthetic eye is demonstrated by their choice of theme music—Russian girl group t.A.T.u.’s lipstick lesbian pop hit “All the Things She Said”—and visual excursions like their Valentine’s Day live show, with Loveline Q&A delivered through a Million Dollar Extreme-esque Chaturbate interface with scrolling comments about Russian collusion and paypigs.

       Neoliberal moral panic looms in the background of the show, and part of its subversiveness is just how casually the ladies toss off forbidden, self-evident truths: that Russian collusion was a scam concocted by the Democrat Party and the fake news media to salve the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss to Donald Trump; that #MeToo is and was always a dangerous, large-scale, masturbatory exercise in Hollywood millionaire self-absorption and virtue-signaling; that no insipid “separate the art from the artist” argument is necessary to consume and enjoy the work of dubiously cancelled men like Woody Allen and Louis C.K. They have devoted entire episodes to intricate defenses of Woody Allen, calling Mia Farrow a power-mad, vengeful shrew as though blithely unaware of the last twenty years of escalating feminist rules of propriety. A frequent theme is the lack of inspiring public figures and intriguing aesthetics on the Left, while the Right is overrun with them: Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and of course Daddy, @RealDonaldTrump, the first meme-savvy and truly hilarious American President, whose sardonic dismissals of haters and losers and brazen, crude masculinity make him a singular countercultural icon for those who have personally felt the iron fist of neoliberal puritanism. Anna is the first person to share my opinion of Lena Dunham, whose misunderstood work occupies a similar space to Red Scare—that her intelligent and truthful vision was compromised by her catering to the relentless affirmative action demands of intellectually limited liberal critics.

       As Cum Town flirts obsessively with homosexuality and “The N Word,” Red Scare flirts obsessively with the “Deplorable Alt-Right” that Hillary Clinton warned voters of on the campaign trail. In “The Climate is Cancelled,” with cancelled guest Deanna Havas, climate change hysteria is frankly discussed as a major tenet of bourgeois neoliberal religion. The sublime and melancholy “Post-Horny” with Angela Nagle paints a deeply disturbing overview of the death of sexuality as the result of sexual liberation, dating apps, dissolved gender roles, and overall erotic desensitization. In “Cinema: Dead and Loving It” with Nick Pinkerton, the hyper-politicized woke bleakness of modern Hollywood cinema is lambasted, where so-called “diverse” reboots of foolproof, regurgitated intellectual properties are rewired as mutant neolib propaganda marketed with a cynical moral imperative to pay for the product as vengeance against an alleged army of right-wing troll saboteurs. In “Bots will be Bots” with Heidi Matthews, Dasha delivers a sultry, autoerotic monologue like something from Truth or Dare-era Madonna in defense of groypers, the post-Pepe right-wing frog avatars with curled eyelashes and long rubbery arms, as delectable agents of chaos who represent the uncontainable id of the Internet.

       Dasha and Anna are both fans of French nationalist treasure Michel Houellebecq and the original galaxy brain post-feminist lady academic, Camille Paglia, which is what initially drew me to the show. Frankly, they are the first women under the age of 70 whose ideas have piqued my interest after the escalating, all-encompassing anti-male, anti-white social justice movement of the 2010s which culminated in the friendship-destroying hysteria of the 2016 election. Hearing a maligned female trait like vocal fry, so long the harbinger of political conflict and passive-aggressive female bureaucratic domination, transformed into a warm, enveloping, almost maternal presence, was a profoundly moving experience which penetrated the scar tissue of bitterness and misogyny I’d developed. I became deeply emotional about all the female friends I lost or could no longer be honest with due to the brutal changing of political tides. If podcasts are friend surrogates, Red Scare fills a unique place in the male heart where feminine charm and humor used to be.

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