Sometimes the moment to make something isn’t just when the mood is right but also when the creators are finally ready.
Over a cuppa at the London Tea Room, Michelle Dougherty and Emily Trista Lane, the hosts of Cliterally Speaking the Podcast ("The Podcast" is important to the title; someone else online owns the moniker “Cliterally Speaking,” they point out), reflect on its origin story. Each Friday, the two have an honest, authentic conversation with a woman—local, but sometimes not—from Shock City Studios. Their pilot episode saw the two talking with Mich Hancock, CEO of 100th Monkey Media and co-founder of TEDxGatewayArch, about friendships and her experience adopting a child with sociopathy. Season 1, episode 24, they talked to Amy Rivera, who has lymphedema. Rivera’s right leg was 200 percent larger than her left, and she had just gone through surgeries to reduce the size of her leg.
Or Heidi Harris—Season 1, episode 20—the associate concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony, talking about first loves on Valentine’s Day. Harris incorporates yoga to help younger musicians with anxiety.
Or photographer Caren Libby—Season 2, episode 26—about Oscar-winning doc Period. End of Sentence and the Pad Project, which helps connect women in developing countries with a machine that makes menstrual pads. Tune in to that one for a fun reminiscence about the now-amusing horror of being in middle school and trying to change your pad in between classes.
The first episode posted in October 2018, and the pair are already working on their second season; the first season had 25. The start: a glass of wine at Frazer's. “The conversation was just all over the place,” Dougherty says. “Insightful, and honest…”
Lane jumps in. “Almost painfully so because there were just tears of laughter. We were talking about what it’s like to be women in their 40s and 50s.”
Dougherty continues: “Dating in St. Louis, getting divorced, kids, body changes. And I said, ‘This stuff needs to be a podcast.’”
And the name? It had been in the back of Dougherty’s mind since 2005. A few other staples began to take shape, such as drinking a wine during the taping. Dougherty and Lane post the bottle they’ll be enjoying before the episode drops so listeners can pick it up. (If they go to the Wine Merchant and mention Cliterally Speaking the Podcast, they’ll get 15 percent off.) They also record a Facebook Live once a month, and on April 6, are hosting a Season 1 wrap party at The Vino Gallery, where guests and listeners can meet one another and talk irl.
But back to the original question: Was Cliterally Speaking the Podcast borne of a certain movement?
“Do we think that this is the time for it?” Dougherty starts. “Well, it's the time for us in our lives to do it, because 10 years ago, I had three kids at home.”
Lane agrees. “Ten years ago, I was struggling to find my voice. I was a company woman. I was traveling all the time. I made a lot of changes in the last 10 years of my life. It was all about bringing my inner self back into living.
“We were still afraid to have those tough conversations,” Dougherty says. “We didn’t even have the vocabulary until #MeToo came along.”
Take, for example, Lane’s birthday episode—number 8 from Season 1—when the pair dive into consent. “There's the obvious ‘No means no,’ but then there's all these other times when maybe you've been pressured into having sex, and somehow that’s considered OK? We really dive into all of those layers. That's a conversation that I think needs to be happening more. … That one was just a conversation between the two of us, but I found it to be powerful. And it's one that I actually want to revisit on an ongoing basis, because this isn't a one time conversation.”
Listen to an ep, and it’s clear that these are honest, authentic, unqualified discussions, by design. The conversations are fresh, the topics timely. The two shirk away from the label “interview.” “We want to have conversations with interesting people, whether or not it's about their life or something else,” Dougherty says. “I like to describe our show as a combination of Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Amy Schumer.” (See their episode titled “Bumping Barbies” with sociocultural anthropologist Dr. Donna Marshaye White.)
It’s this universality that's attracting listeners not only all over the country but internationally as well. Again we return to the question of why now. “I think that it’s always important for women to support each other and lift each other,” Lane says. “It took me a long time to find my tribe. Now that I have this close community of women friends that we really do honor each other and support each other and fan each other’s flames—the power that exists within us because we’re supporting each other is incredible. That’s part of the mission of what we’re doing is providing a safe space for women to be open and honest with one another, without judgment, with nothing but love.”
