Culture Study Podcast - August 03, 2026


BONUS EPISODEļ¼š The Hair (and Women) of The Odyssey [preview]

Topics
hair of the Odyssey hair of the dog
The Case For Quitting The Women's Fitness Industrial Complex

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

171.07

Word count

684

Sentence count

57

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.360 Hi, everyone. This is a bonus episode of the Culture Study podcast that we have thrown together very, very quickly.
00:00:07.280 And I'm going to introduce myself. I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And with me today is Sarah Mesley. Hi, Sarah.
00:00:14.200 Hi, Anne. So glad to be here.
00:00:15.960 Okay, so I wanted you to come on the show to talk about the Odyssey, but specifically the hair of the Odyssey.
00:00:22.300 Oh, my gosh.
00:00:23.100 But then also all sorts of other things.
00:00:25.120 Can you give just a little bit of your qualifications as a hair scholar and also as someone with a PhD in English?
00:00:32.340 Right. Yes. So I have a PhD in English. I focus on the long history of American women's popular media.
00:00:39.940 So going back to the 1830s, at which point hair was already really important to the stories we tell about women and which women matter.
00:00:50.000 So I am very interested in the long history of that.
00:00:52.100 I will also say that I do have a book coming out at the end of this month called Tangled that is about the recent history of white women's hair and particularly how white women do race with their hair.
00:01:04.320 But, Annie, I think what got me interested in this topic, besides being a lady, is the question of how mainstream media uses hair to put forth an idea of what is real for women, what makes women seem real.
00:01:20.340 And in that question, the myth of Odyssey, the Odyssey is very, very fascinating to me.
00:01:25.160 So I should say that for our bonus episodes, we are very casual.
00:01:31.600 We obviously don't have reader questions or listener questions that we're using.
00:01:35.420 We make melody work less.
00:01:37.780 So there is less editing.
00:01:40.400 So and then also we just kind of riff a little bit more.
00:01:43.320 So just for listeners who want to be situated in that way.
00:01:46.500 Our run of show, as dictated by our back and forth emails, is we're going to talk about everyone's hair.
00:01:54.540 We're going to talk about Emily Wilson's hair.
00:01:57.640 Emily Wilson is the famous translator of the Odyssey, upon which this version of the Odyssey is largely drawing from.
00:02:09.200 Yep.
00:02:09.880 He did cite her first line.
00:02:13.720 Yes.
00:02:14.260 In interviews.
00:02:14.860 An uncomplicated man and also has become sort of like the primary instigator in conversations about this adaptation online.
00:02:26.200 We are also going to talk about whether Christopher Nolan can write women characters at all.
00:02:34.540 That'll be a short question or short conversation.
00:02:37.640 No.
00:02:37.800 The answer is no.
00:02:38.440 Moving on.
00:02:38.860 um and uh a little bit about the circe of it all and you wanted to talk about dogs
00:02:47.740 yeah the whole time i was watching i was kind of fantasizing of writing a think piece called
00:02:53.220 hair of the dog um that i couldn't quite put it all together so this is better i went in wanting
00:03:00.240 to know about hair but um and what it had to say about women but in turn the movie is really
00:03:05.800 interested in dogs and what they say about men. Yes, 100%. So there's like a switch there.
00:03:11.560 It's like almost a little bit more interested in what the dogs say about men than what the 0.94
00:03:16.100 women say about men, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Which is also driven 0.99
00:03:21.200 home that even he can't even really care about dogs because as my friend Claire Jairus pointed
00:03:25.380 out to me, he actually somehow kind of switches the species of the dog between the puppy.
00:03:29.580 He just, it's like he's interested in men who have to have all of their feelings exported to another object, whether it is a woman or a dog.
00:03:38.880 But because they're always instrumental, they're never substantive in themselves.
00:03:43.860 Okay, we're going to pause here.
00:03:45.240 If you want to hear the rest of this bonus episode, go to patreon.com slash culture study to become a paid subscriber.
00:03:51.940 Super easy.
00:03:52.880 You can do it for the month.
00:03:53.740 You can do it for the year.
00:03:54.700 You can add on to your newsletter subscription.
00:03:56.420 just do it and you can hear this whole fantastic conversation