Are The Heterosexuals Okay?

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Tracy Clark-Flory.

Tracy is the feminist writer behind the newsletter TCF Emails and the author of Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire. She’s also the cohost of the new podcast Dire Straights where she and Amanda Montei unpack the many toxic aspects of heterosexual relationships and culture.

I brought Tracy on the podcast today to talk about my feet, but we get into so much more. We talk about porn, sexual identity, and the male gaze—and, of course, how all of this makes us feel in our bodies.

This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.

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Episode 202 Transcript

Virginia

I am so excited. We’ve been Internet friends for a long time, and it’s so nice to finally have a conversation. I’m very jazzed!

Tracy

Right? I feel like we’ve talked before, but we have not, which is such an odd sensation. We’ve emailed.

Virginia

We’ve emailed, we’ve DM-ed, we’ve commented on each other’s things. But we have not, with our faces and mouths, had a conversation. The Internet is so weird.

Well, the Internet being weird is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today. Because where I want to start today is feet.

Tracy

Why not?

Virginia

So I initially emailed you when I was working on my essay about my Wikifeet experience, because you have written so extensively about porn and the Internet’s treatment of women. And when I discovered my Wikifeet, one of my first thoughts was, “I need to talk to Tracy about this.” Tracy

That makes me so happy. I want to be the first person that everyone thinks of when they find themselves on Wikifeet.

Virginia

I was like, “I don’t know how she’ll feel…” so I’m glad you take that as a compliment.

I don’t even know where to start. Even though I wrote a whole essay about this, my brain is still, like, “record scratch moment” on the whole thing. Sojust talk to us a little bit where in your vast reporting on porn did you kind of become aware of fetish sites and what’s your read on them? What’s going on there?

Tracy

I think I first became aware of Wikifeet in 2008-ish when they launched, and that’s when I was a proper, full-time sex writer, on the sex beat, covering every weird niche Internet community. And then in the years since, I’ve unfortunately had many women colleagues—often feminist writers—who have ended up on the site. So unfortunately, you’re not the first person I know who’s ended up on there.

Virginia

It’s a weird thing that a certain type of woman writer is gonna end up on Wikifeet. Why?

Tracy

There are no shortage of women who are consensually volunteering photos of their feet online for people to consume in a sexualized way, right? So the fact is that this site is providing a venue for people to do it in a very nonconsensual way, where images are taken from other venues that are not sexualized. They’re stolen images, you know? Things that are screenshotted from Instagram stories, that kind of thing—and then put into this sexualized context. Not only that, but put into a sexualized context where there is a community around sexualizing and objectifying and even rating and evaluating body parts.

My take is that this violation is part of the point. Because there is having a foot fetish—great, have at it, enjoy. And then there’s consuming images that are nonconsensual. So I think that the violation is part of the point. And to the point of feminist writers, women writers online, ending up on it—I don’t think it’s an accident. Because I think that there is—perhaps for some, maybe not all—some pleasure taken in that aspect of trespass.

Virginia

Yes. My best friend is a food blogger, and I immediately searched for her because she’s way more famous than I am, and she’s not on there. And I’m glad, I don’t want her non-consensually on there! But I was like, oh, it’s interesting that I’m on there, lyz is on there. It is a certain type of woman that men are finding objectionable on the Internet. And putting us on WikiFeet is a retaliation or just a way of—I don’t know. It’s not a direct attack, because I didn’t even know about it for however long my feet have been up there. But it is a way for men to feel like they’re in control of us in some way, right?

Tracy

Oh, totally. And it’s because there is something interesting about taking a body part that is not broadly and generally sexualized, and sexualizing it. There is this feeling of a “gotcha!” in it.

There is something, too, about feet—I mean, I think this is part of what plays into foot fetish, often. There is this sense of dirtiness, potentially, but also the sense of often being hidden away. It’s secret, it’s private, it’s delicate, it’s tender. Feet are ticklish, there’s so much layered in there that I think can make it feel like this place of vulnerability.

I’ve written about upskirting. This was maybe like 15 years ago. But it’s these communities where men take upskirt videos and photos of women on the subway or wherever, and then they share them in online forums. And that’s very clearly a physical trespass. You’re seeing something that was not meant to be seen. So it’s quite different. But it’s feels like it exists on a spectrum of trespass and violation and taking sexualized enjoyment out of that.

Virginia

From someone who had no intention of you taking that enjoyment, who’s just trying to ride the train to work.

Tracy

Totally. And the foot thing, it just makes me think of all these different ways that women experience their bodies in the world. You can’t just be at ease in your body, because someone might think your feet are hot.

Virginia

It’s really interesting. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before: A little bit after I got divorced and I started having, weekends totally to myself in my house, it was the first time I’d been alone in my house in a long time. Obviously, usually my kids were there. My husband used to be there. And I had this strange sensation of being observed, even when I was completely alone in the house.

It’s just me and the dog. She’s asleep. I’m making dinner or watching TV or doing whatever I’m doing. And I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was watching myself, still thinking about what I was going to wear. It was so weird, and I realized it actually isn’t particularly a comment on my marriage. It’s more a comment on women are so trained to always feel observed. It’s really hard for us to actually access a space where we’re not going to be observed. It was wild.

Tracy

We adopt that perspective of the watcher, and we are the watched. We experience ourselves in that way, as opposed to being the watcher, the person who sees and consumes the world and experiences the world. It’s like we experience ourselves being experienced by someone else—an imagined man often.

Virginia

Yes, you’re always self-objectifying. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to please that gaze, whether you’re trying to protect yourself against that gaze. Whatever it is, we’re always aware of how we’ll be perceived in a way that I don’t think cis men ever have to consider. I don’t think that’s a part of their experience of the world in the same way.

Tracy

And how messed up is that tension between trying to please and trying to protect oneself? What an impossible tightrope walk to be constantly doing.

Virginia

Right, and to not even know which one you want sometimes. Like, which one you need, which one you want.

Tracy

Yeah, going back and forth between those extremes. You’re always kind of monitoring and on edge.

Virginia

And, it did shift. Now when I’m alone in my house, I don’t feel like I’m watching myself. Like, it did lessen. But it was this very stark moment of noticing that.

And I think the way our work is so online, we are so online, it doesn’t help. Because we also have all learned through the performance art of social media to constantly be documenting. And even if you’re by yourself, you might post something about it. There’s that need to narrate and document and then also objectify your experience.

Tracy

The sense of, like, if I don’t take a photo of it, it doesn’t exist. It didn’t happen. It’s not real. It must be consumed by other people. I mean, when you were talking earlier about that sense of being surveyed, I think that is a very just common experience for women, period. But then I think, for me, growing up with reality TV, the explosion of reality TV, like that added this like sense of a camera on one’s life.

And then I think, like, if you want to bring porn into it, too—Like, in the bedroom, that sense of the watcher, so you have this sense of being watched by men, but then you have the sense of kind of performing for an audience, because that’s so much of what I came up with culturally.

Virginia

I mean, the way we often conceive of our sexuality is through performance and how are you being perceived not how are you experiencing it yourself? I mean, you write about that so well, that tension.

Tracy

That was my whole thing. My sexual coming of age memoir is so much about what it meant to try to move out of that focus on how I’m being perceived by my partner and into a place of what am I experiencing? What do I even want beyond being wanted?

Virginia

Man, it’s amazing we’ve all survived and gotten where we are.

Another layer to this, that I thought about a lot as I was processing my Wikifeet, was how instantly I felt like I had to laugh it off. I really felt like I couldn’t access my true reaction to it. I just immediately sort of went into this Cool Girl, resigned, jaded, like “What do you expect from the Internet?” This is why I wanted to talk to you. Because I was like, oh, this feels very similar to stuff Tracy struggled with and wrote about in her memoir.

Tracy

Oh, totally. It makes total sense to me that you would go to that default place. It makes me think of how I, especially early in my career writing online as a feminist blogger, I would print out the very worst, most misogynistic hateful comments and post them on my fridge because I was willing myself to find them funny, to be able to laugh at them and just kind of distance myself from them and to feel untouched by them.

I think that Cool Girl stance is a way of putting on protective armor. So I think that makes sense as a woman writing online, but I also think it makes sense in the context of sex. So much of what I did—this performative sexuality, this kind of sense of being down for whatever in my 20s—was, subconsciously, a kind of defensive posture. Because I think I had this feeling that if I’m down for anything, then nothing can be done against my will, you know? And that was the mental gambit that I had to engage in, in order to feel safe enough to explore my sexuality freely. Granted, it wasn’t very freely, turns out.

But it makes total sense that you would want to default to the laughing at what is really a violation. Because I do think that there’s something protective about that. It’s like, “No, you’re not going to do this to me. You’re not going to make me feel a certain way about this.” But that only takes you so far.

Virginia

Well, because at the same time, it also is a way of communicating, “Don’t worry, I can take a joke. I’m not one of those feminists.” It also plays right into that. So it’s protective and you can’t rattle me. And, I’ll also minimize this just like you want me to minimize it. So I’m actually doing what you want. Then my brain breaks.

Tracy

Right? And then we’re back to that thing we were just talking about, the wanting to please, but then wanting to protect oneself, and the impossible balancing act of that.

Virginia

Like you were saying you’ve experienced these horrific misogynistic troll comments. I experienced them in the more fatphobic sense, but like a mix, misogyny and fatphobia, very good friends.

So I think when you’ve experienced more extreme things, you then do feel like you have to downplay some of the minor stuff. It feels scarier for men to say that my children should be taken away from me than it does for them to take pictures of my feet. I can hold that. And yet I’m still allowed to be upset about the foot thing. Just because some things are more awful, it doesn’t mean that we stop having a conversation about the more mundane forms of violation, because the more mundane forms of it are also what we’re all experiencing all the time.

Tracy

Right? Like the daily experience of it. I mean, unfortunately, there just is a full, rich spectrum of violation.

Virginia

So many choices, so many ways, so many body parts.

Tracy

I do think that the extreme examples do kind of serve to normalize the less extreme, you know? And what we sort of end up putting up with, you know?

Virginia

What would you say was a helpful turning point for you? What helped you start to step back from being in that cool girl mode? From being in that “I’m performing sex for other people” mode? What helped you access it for yourself?

Tracy

I mean, honestly? A piece of it was porn. It’s funny because I turned to porn as a teenager online in the 90s as a source of—I felt at the time—intel about what men wanted. Like, here’s how to be what men wanted. And I tried to perform that, you know? And there were downsides to that, of course. There are some downsides. But I would also say that like in the midst of plumbing the depths of 2000s-era, early 2000s-era tube sites to understand what men “wanted,” I also started to kind of explore what I wanted.

I wasn’t drawn to it from that place of self discovery, but I kind of accidentally stumbled into it because I was watching these videos. And then I was like, oh, wait, what about this thing? Like, that’s kind of interesting to me. And then, you start to kind of tumble down the rabbit hole accidentally. Women are socialized to not pursue that rabbit hole for themselves, right? So it was only in pursuing men’s desires that I felt like I was able to unlock this whole other world of fantasy and desire for myself that I wanted to explore and that I was able to get into some non-mainstream, queer indie porn that actually felt very radical and eye opening.

It was this circuitous route to myself. That was just a piece, I think, of opening up my mind to the world of fantasy, which felt very freeing. Then, getting into a relationship where with a partner who I could actually be vulnerable with, was a huge piece of it. To actually feel safe enough to explore and not be performing, and to have those moments of awkwardness and that you’re not just this expert performer all the time. Like, that doesn’t lead to good sex.

Virginia

No, definitely not.

There’s a part in the memoir with your then boyfriend, now husband, and you say that you wanted—you call it “a cozy life.” And I think you guys put that in your wedding vows. I think about that all the time. I think it’s so beautiful. Just like, oh right, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s not this other giant thing, the performing and the—I don’t know, there’s something about that really stuck with me

Tracy

That’s so interesting. I haven’t thought about that for a while. It’s really interesting, and it’s funny, because it was part of our wedding vows.

Virginia

Cozy means safety with another person, that felt safety with another person, right? And the way we are trained to think of sex and relationships really doesn’t prioritize women’s safety, kind of ever.

Tracy

I mean, yeah, it’s true. There is something very particular about that word cozy—it’s different from when people say, like, “I want a comfortable life.”

Virginia

Yeah, that’s bougie.

Tracy

Cozy is like, I want to be wrapped in a cozy blanket on the couch with you. And feel safe and intimate and vulnerable. So thank you for reminding me of that thing that I wrote.

Virginia

Well, It was really beautiful, and I think about it often, and it was kind of clarifying for me personally. And it’s not saying sex won’t be hot, you know? It’s just that you have that connection and foundation to build whatever you’re going to build.

Tracy

Right? And I think coziness kind of is a perfect starting point for being able to experience sexiness and hotness. I think we have this cultural idea that one must have this mystery and sense of otherness in order to be able to build that kind of spice and fire. And at least in my experience, that was not ever the case. I know that other people have that experience, but for me, I never had the experience of that sense of otherness and kind of fear even, and trepidation about this other person leading to a really exciting experience. It was more like being able to get to a place of trust and vulnerability that could get you there.

Virginia

And obviously, there are all different ways people enjoy and engage in sex. And I don’t think every sexual relationship has to be founded in any one thing, but I think when we’re talking about this transition that a lot of women go through, from participating in sex for his pleasure, for performance, for validation, to it being something you can do on your own terms, I think the coziness concept is really helpful. There’s something there.

All right, well, so now you are working on a new podcast with Amanda, as we mentioned, called Dire Straights. Tracy, I’m so excited, because Heterosexuals are not okay. We are not okay, as a population.

Tracy

Just like, literally, look at anywhere. Open up the front page of The New York Times. We’re not okay on so many levels.

Virginia

So tell us about the pod.

Tracy

So it’s a feminist podcast about heterosexual love, sex, politics and culture, and every episode, we basically pick apart a new element of straight culture. So examples would be couples therapy, dating apps, sex strikes, monogamy, the manosphere, pronatalism, the list goes on and on. Literally this podcast could just never end. There’s too much fodder. Unfortunately, I’d love for it to end for a lack of content, but that’s not going to happen.

So we look at both sex and dating alongside marriage and divorce, and the unequal realm of hetero parenting. We examine celebrities and politicians and consider them as case studies of dire heterosexuality. Tech bros, tradwives, terfs, all the whole cast of terrible hetero characters are up for examination, and our aim is to examine the worst of straight culture, but it’s also to step back and kind of try to imagine better possibilities.

It’s not fatalist, it’s not nihilistic. I think we both have this sense of wanting to engage in some kind of utopian dreaming one might say, while we’re also picking apart what is so awful and terrible about the current state of heterosexual culture.

So our first episode is about dark femininity influencers. I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered them online.

Virginia

Yes, but I hadn’t connected the dots. So I was like, oh, this is a thing.

Tracy

That’s that thing, yeah. That’s how I experienced it. It was, like, they just started showing up on my TikTok feed, these women who are usually white and wearing a bold red lip and smokey eyes, and they’re essentially promising to teach women how to use their sex appeal in order to manipulate straight men into better behavior. They’re selling this idea of seduction as liberation, and specifically liberation from the disappointments of the straight dating world. This idea is that by harnessing your seductive powers, you can be in control in this terrible, awful straight dating sphere.

Virginia

It’s like, if Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer wrote a dating book. I don’t know if that reference speaks to you or not.

Tracy

I’m a little rusty on my Buffy, I have to say.

Virginia

She’s like, pale skin, red lips, black hair, and tortures men. But yeah, it’s this idea that you harness all your like, seductive powers to torture men to get what you want, which is men. Which is a husband or a boyfriend or gifts or whatever. They’re shooting for a heterosexual relationship by exerting this power over men, and so the idea is it is somehow it’s giving them more power in a patriarchal dynamic. But it doesn’t really because they end up in the same place.

Tracy

It’s the same place, it’s the same exact place. It feels to me, in some ways, like a corrective against the cool girl stuff that we’re talking about that kind of emerged in the 2000s, where, you know, it’s this sort of like being down for whatever, that kind of thing. These women are kind of saying, you’re not going to sleep with him on the first date. You’re going to make him work for it, you know? And so there’s a sense of like, I’m in control, because I’m not giving it away for free. It plays into all these awful ideas about women and sex and power. But it is ultimately ending up in the same place, and it is just ultimately about getting a man, keeping a man. And so, you know, how different is it really? I don’t think it is.

Virginia

I mean, it’s not. It’s the same rules and conversations that Charlotte’s having in the first season of Sex in the City, which is ancient at this point. How are we still here? Are we still here?

Tracy

We’re just inventing new aesthetics to kind of repackage these very old, retro, sexist ideas, you know?

Virginia

I also think it’s really interesting and helpful that you are interrogating straight culture as someone inside a heterosexual marriage. I’ve written about my own divorce, my critiques of marriage, and it triggers great conversations, but it always triggers a very uncomfortable response from a lot of married women who don’t really want to go there, don’t really want to pick up the rocks and look underneath it because it’s too scary. It makes sense. And I’m wondering how you think about that piece, and how that’s working for you.

Tracy

I think it’s very destabilizing for a lot of women in straight marriages and just straight relationships, period, to consider these things. I think it was over a year ago now that I wrote this piece about trying to coin this term hetero-exceptionalism in response to the backlash that I was seeing to the divorce memoir boom, where women reviewers, but also just people on Twitter or wherever, were kind of pointing at these authors and being like, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with you because my marriage is great.

Virginia

The Emily Gould piece in New York.

Tracy

There’s this sense of like, oh, well, either I chose a good man or I know how to conduct a healthy relationship.

Virginia

I’m willing to put in the work.

Tracy

Gotta put in the work.

You will love our next episode about couples therapy, because we talk about this concept of putting in the work, and the idea that marriage is work, and that if you’re not doing the work you’re lazy. You’re failing, the whole project of it.

Virginia

Thank you for unpacking that incredibly toxic myth! It really keeps women trapped in “I just have to keep working harder.”

Tracy

Which I think totally relates to this, the response to the divorce memoirs we’re getting from people and the discomfort of when women raise these issues in hetero relationships that are not individual. Like, yes, we all feel that our relationship issues are special and unique. But they all relate to these broader systemic factors.

I think that is really, really, really uncomfortable to acknowledge. Because I think even if you’re reasonably happy in your hetero relationship, I think if you start to look at the way that your even more minor dissatisfactions connect to these bigger dissatisfactions that women are writing about that’s all part of this experience of love in patriarchy that it doesn’t feel good. That feels terrible. So I totally understand that.

In the same way that we’re sold this idea of trying to find the one and that whole romantic fantasy, I think we’re also sold this idea of trying to achieve romantically within these patriarchal constraints. So it’s like, well, I found the good one. I found the unicorn man who checks all the boxes and I did my work and so I’m in a happy marriage.

Virginia

“I’m allowed to be heterosexual because I’m doing it right.” That’s feeling uncomfortably familiar, to be honest. You think you’re going to pull the thread, and you realize you’ll rip it all out.

Tracy

The thing is that a lot of people should be pulling the thread, and a lot of lives should be unraveling, you know? I think that’s the uncomfortable truth, right? I totally get the resistance to it. But on the other side of it, I think there are obviously, clearly, a lot of women who are wanting to look at it, and who do want to have these conversations.

Virginia

It sounds like this is what you’re trying to chart. There has to be a middle path where it’s not this defensive stance of, oh, I found the one good one. And we’re equal partners. It’s okay, but a relationship where we can both look at this, we can both acknowledge the larger systemic issues and how they’re showing up here, and we can work through it and it’s not perfect, because it is love in patriarchy, but it can still be valuable. There has to be this third option, right? Please tell me you’re living the third option, Tracy.

Tracy

I mean, I do believe that I am but I also hesitate to put any man or any relationship on a pedestal. What I’ll say is that to me, it feels so utterly essential in my relationship to acknowledge the ways that our relationship is touched by patriarchy, because all relationships are touched by patriarchy, right? And to not fantasize about us somehow standing outside of it, but also to be having constant ongoing conversations within my relationship where we are mutually critiquing patriarchy and the way that it touches us and the way that it touches the relationships of people we know, you know?

I think that’s part of why I think I’m able to do this podcast critiquing heterosexuality from within heterosexuality is because my partner showed up to the relationship with his own prior political convictions and feminist awareness. I wasn’t having to be like, here’s what feminism is and, here’s what invisible labor is, and the mental load and all that stuff. He got it, and so we’re able to have a mutual shared critique, and that feels very important.

Virginia

That’s awesome to know exists, and that you’re able to figure that out without it being such hard work. But where does that leave women who are like, oh yeah, my partner doesn’t have that shared knowledge? Like, I would be starting the education process from zero and encountering many resistances to it. And therein is the discomfort, I think.

Tracy

I mean, and that is the discomfort of heterosexuality. It’s in this culture, because that is the reality is there are not a ton of men who have voluntarily taken women’s studies courses in college and have the basic background for this kind of stuff. It’s a really high bar and there is this feeling of what are you going to do? Are you going to hold out for the guy who did do that? Or are you going to try to work with him to get there? And I think that’s fine, but I think what’s essential is are you both working to get there, or are you pulling him along?

Virginia

Yeah, that’s the core of it.

I think just in general, reorienting our lives to where our romantic relationships are really important, but so are our friendships. So is our community. I think that’s something that a lot of us, especially us in the post-divorce club are looking at. I think one of the great failings of heterosexual marriage is how it silos women into these little pods of the nuclear family and keeps us from the larger community.

Tracy

Totally. I really do believe that the way that our lives are structured, this hetero monogamous, nuclear familydom, it works against these hetero unions so much. Which is so funny, because so much of this is constructed to try to protect them. But I actually think that it undermines them so deeply and drastically. And that we could have much richer and more vibrant, supportive, communal lives that made these romantic unions like less fragile and fraught.

Virginia

Because you aren’t needing one person to meet every single one of your needs, you aren’t needing this one thing to be your whole life.

Tracy

We put all of the pressure on the nuclear household for the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, all of that. That is an impossible setup. It is a setup for failure. There’s I wish I could quote the writer, but I love this quote about marriage and the nuclear family being capitalism’s pressure cooker. If you think about it in those terms, it’s like, this is absurd. Of course, so many people are struggling.

Virginia

It was never going to work. It was never going to work for women anyway, for sure.

Well, I’m so excited for folks to discover the new podcast. It’s amazing, and I’m just thrilled you guys are diving into all of this. It’s such an important space to be having these conversations. So thank you.

Tracy

Thank you! I’m very excited about it, and it does, unfortunately, feel very timely.

Butter

Tracy

I definitely do have Butter. And this is so on topic to what we’ve been discussing. This book of essays titled Love in Exile by Shon Faye. It is a brilliant collection of essays about love, where she really looks at the problem of love and the search for love as a collective instead of individual problem. It is so good. It’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last five years.

She basically argues that the heteronormative couple privatizes the love and care and intimacy that we all deserve. But that we’re deprived of in this late capitalist hellscape, and so she sees the love that so many of us are deprived of as not a personal failure, but a failure of capitalism and community and the growing cruelty of our world. It’s just such a tremendous shift of perspective, I think, when it comes to thinking about love and the search for love and that longing and lack of it that so many people experience.

Virginia

Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to read it. Adding to cart right now, that is a great Butter. Thank you.

Well, my Butter is, I don’t know if you can see what I’m wearing, Tracy, but it is the friendship bracelet you sent me when you sent me your copy of Want Me.

Tracy

Do you know that I literally just last night was like, oh, I’m going on the podcast tomorrow, I wonder if she still has that friendship bracelet.

Virginia

I’m wearing the one you sent me, which says Utopia IRL, which I love. And then I’m wearing one that says “Fuck the Patriarchy,” which was made by one of my 11 year old’s best friends for me. So the 10 year old girls are going to be all right, because they’re doing that.

Tracy

That’s amazing.

Virginia

I wear them frequently. They go with many outfits, so they’re just a real go-to accessory of mine. My seven year old the other day was reading them and was so delighted. And now, when she’s at her dad’s and we text, she’ll randomly text me, “fuck the patriarchy,” just as a little I love you text. And I’m like, alright, I’m doing okay here.

Tracy

You’re like, that’s my love language. Thank you.

Virginia

So anyway, really, my Butter is just for friendship bracelets and also mailing them to people, because that was so sweet that you did that.

Tracy

Can I mention though? Can I admit that I literally told you that I was going to send you that friendship bracelet, and I made it, I put in an envelope, and it literally sat by my front door for a full year.

Virginia

I think that makes me love it even more, because it was a year. If you had been able to get it out the door in a timely fashion, it would have made you less relatable to me.

That it took a full year that feels right. And I was just as delighted to receive it a year later.

Tracy

It was a surprise. I was like, you probably forgot that.

Virginia

I had.

Tracy

I emailed about it and that we had an inside joke about it, because it had been a year.

Virginia

I did, but then I was like, oh yeah!

Tracy

You know what? I think it’s a testament to you and how you come off that I like felt comfortable sending it a year later and just being like, fuck it, she’ll be fine with it.

Virginia

Yes, it was great. Anyway, my recommendation is send someone a friendship bracelet by which I mean put it in an envelope by your front door for the next year. Why not? It’s a great thing to do.

So yes, Tracy, this was so much fun. Thank you for being here. Tell folks where we can follow you support your work, all the things.

Tracy

You can find the Dire Straights podcast at direstraightspod.com. And you can find my weekly newsletter about sex, feminism, pop culture at Tracyclarkflory.substack.com and you can find me on Instagram at Tracy Clark-Flory.

Virginia

Amazing. We’ll link to all of that. Thank you for being here.

Tracy

Thanks so much for having me.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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