Charlize Theron, Call Her Daddy, And The Death Of Decorum

I blame this on social media, of course, and the “normalize X” culture. It’s always “normalize this,” “normalize that.” How about you try being normal? Now that I’ve gotten that joke out of the way, you can shift back into a serious narration voice as you read this, because I’ve never been more seriously concerned about anything than I am the social contagion of debasing yourself for public consumption. 

Charlize Theron recently went on the incredibly successful podcast Call Her Daddy, much like all the modern celebrities have, and the ones trying to signal that they “get” modern pop culture. Call Her Daddy is the modern woman’s Joe Rogan: a podcast apparently appealing to their interests of anecdotes and advice on sex and dating but also pop culture, celebrities, mental health, and other women’s issues. 

The podcast first debuted on Barstool and in keeping with that influence, was incredibly raunchy and brazen in its sexually explicit content. In TikTok soundbite terms, it was not very demure and not very mindful. But since Cooper landed a deal with Spotify, the content and direction of the podcast has shifted away from “how to give the gluck gluck 9000” to some random guy at a party, and started being taken seriously when she pivoted to celebrity interviews with mega stars. She started tackling serious, prescient issues—hosting guests like Amanda Knox, Jane Goodall, Monica Lewinsky, and clinical psychologists and psychotherapists who talk about their credentialed experience or first-hand experience with serious issues related to criminal justice, mental health, fame, feminism, and science.

That being said, the female sexuality as empowerment angle has never been ousted from its ethos—only dialed down to a less in your face bravado. Now, Call Her Daddy is the second most popular podcast in the world and the most listened to podcast among women. Cooper lands interesting and famous guests, where she asks the questions everyone wants the answer to, often unlocking impressive admissions from the usually guarded guests that few interviewers before her have managed to do. 

It’s no wonder its host, Alex Cooper, gets compared to Joe Rogan for her podcast’s mass appeal and highly regarded guests or to Howard Stern for the way she’s able to coax out of them a vulnerable side that’s rarely expressed. Whether it’s Megan Fox giving a detailed breakdown of all of her plastic surgery procedures or Hailey Bieber breaking her silence on Jelena, or famous women who have been publicly embarrassed by infidelity scandals expressing their most vulnerable emotional confessions, it’s clear that the era of celebrity mystique is over—complete transparency has become the ultimate social currency. 

Hyper-transparency has become its own endgame, mutating into a kind of cosmic horror rather than the sincere pursuit of honesty it claims to be.

Celebrities used to have mystique. An otherworldly je ne sais quoi. This was, in large part, a fabrication that ran on a protective machine: PR training, gatekeeping, controlled exposure through magazines, interviews, footage of red carpets or glimpses into Hollywood parties and awards shows. Their lives and thoughts were entirely inaccessible to us, creating an illusion of sophistication and high class. Scarcity creates value. We could project onto them all of our wildest fantasies. Without any direct communication channels with their audiences or the general public, you could only imagine what they were up to, who they hung out with, what their life of luxury entailed, or how they truly felt. 

In some ways, social media has humanized them, made them more relatable, but much like video killed the radio star, social media killed the movie star. The mask has dropped and we can now see celebrities for who they really are: just ordinary people with the same tendencies and fallibility as the rest of us. And now that social media has evened the playing field for fame and attention seekers, the 2020s might as well be hailed as the Era of the Influencer that rendered the celebrity obsolete. 

In this new attention economy, celebs have had to pivot to a new media landscape with an entirely different PR strategy. No longer can celebrities remain apolitical, unopinionated, or too media trained if they want to win the attention, investment, and loyalty of modern audiences. There are a handful of legacy stars (A-list household names) who can ride their legacy into the sun, but that’s rare. So rare that Tom Cruise has been branded the “last real movie star.” As for up and coming talent, agencies reportedly aren’t interested in scouting you unless you already have a sizable online following—something apparently affecting even the nepo baby class. Long gone are the days when you’re plucked from obscurity at the local mall.

So, what do people do in the modern attention economy to earn interest and recognition? They overshare, try to feign relatability through forced instances of vulnerability, embarrassment, or advertise their social and political opinions to curry favor with impassioned activists. In other words, everything is performative and tryhard. But it’s not just celebrities or influencers with massive platforms, it’s regular people, too. How often do you see viral tweets about bizarre anecdotes that inspire waves of witnesses to quip “you couldn’t waterboard this out of me”? 

Hyper-transparency has become its own endgame, mutating into a kind of cosmic horror rather than the sincere pursuit of honesty it claims to be. Women find themselves compulsively word vomiting their worst dating encounters, recounting past sexual misadventures, airing conflicts with their husbands (conflicts only made harder to resolve by their public airing). They post about insecurities, gleefully out themselves for editing photos, confess what they "really" look like without angles or filters, proudly showcasing rolls and cellulite in a bid to earn brownie points (no pun intended) from other women. This all becomes a communal humiliation ritual, where self-flogging is reframed as “stunning and brave,” and vulnerability is harvested for public consumption.

The boundaries between private and public selves have fully collapsed.

This begs the question, what do they gain from it? They gain visibility, engagement, and cheap social capital in a digital economy that rewards shock value over dignity. In this new value system, traditional shame, like embarrassment over fat rolls, cystic acne, or stretch marks, is rebranded as "bravery," and privacy becomes collateral damage for the grander vision of algorithmic relevance. The boundaries between private and public selves have fully collapsed. Instead of cultivating mystery or inner richness, everything becomes fodder for the feed. If you don't capture it, did it even happen? If you don't post your best friend on your Instagram story on her birthday, are you even friends?

Freya India has diagnosed this problem as downstream from a culture that externalizes self-worth and conditions women to perform for an invisible, omnipresent audience. From a young age, they learn to mine every facet of their lives for content, so even painful, uncomfortable experiences become "worth it" for the attention they receive. Marriage falling apart? At least the internet knows you "did nothing wrong" from your one-sided accounts of conflict. Family member dying? Post a photo in the hospital bed for a flood of sympathy from strangers. But just as the vulnerability is performative, so is the intimacy they get in return. It's an ouroboros of chasing relevance, feeling validated, and then running out of that attention gold, only to start the cycle all over again.

In her Substack article, "The Dark Psychology of Body Positivity," Megha Lillywhite observes the bizarre inversion of women’s historical source of societal power through their beauty, now purposefully posting unflattering pictures of themselves, only to be riddled with compliments from other women; claiming the objective is to “normalize healthy bodies” or some similar vacuous platitude. In investigating the deeper psychological motivation, she observes, "Women who do not have healthy relationships in the real world, become increasingly enmeshed in the parasocial ones online and this is what leads to them blurring the boundaries of public and private."

That’s what gets us A-List actresses like Charlize Theron: an Oscar winner, a woman with ethereal one in a million beauty, and a genuinely interesting life filled with struggles, tragedies, successes, compelling stories, reducing herself to the humiliation ritual of oversharing crude, graphic details about her personal life. Details that only serve to make her sound crass, boundaryless, and desperate. While the words that come out of her mouth may be ones that feign haughty pride, I hear a cry of desperation in them: help me, I need attention and primacy to youth. The tacky, vulgar boasting about sexual escapades with a 26-year old as a 50-year old woman is supposed to be some kind of flex through its imitation of men’s locker room talk. 

It’s not cool when men do it, and it certainly doesn’t transmute itself into being magically cool when women do it, either. This is one of those social pathologies where women think they can gain social status by being poor imitations of men, but it only makes them look like a desperate, vulgar try-hard who’s overcompensating. In her interview with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy, they speak about Theron’s life growing up in South Africa, what it was like overcoming the trauma of her mother shooting her alcoholic father to protect her when she was 15-years old, how she moved to the United States with nothing but a dream and an unwillingness to go back to South Africa, no money to her name. 

And yet, she became one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood, has led a fascinating life, and discusses what it’s been like to raise her two adopted children entirely on her own. Unfortunately, all of these compelling anecdotes were overshadowed by the cheap shockjockeyism of vulgarity for its own sake. I can only theorize that this sort of demeanor is brought out of people by virtue of the podcast's reputation as performatively lewd and promiscuous. Perhaps the suggestibility of the guests (particularly actresses used to inhabiting different personalities) combined with the pressure of the environment creates a toxic concoction that possesses the guest in question, putting them in a fugue state of debauchery. 

YouTuber Kelly Stamps offered another compelling theory behind the oversharing phenomenon—why people volunteer 'too much information' even when it denigrates their social status and dignity. She thinks people subconsciously ruin things for themselves because they can't get a grip on their own insecurities. Why volunteer information I didn't need to know? Why didn't you just let me find out on my own? “People won't let people find out things anymore,” Stamps says. 

In a world hooked on oversharing as a cheap currency, decorum is the ultimate flex.

“You feel like you have to get ahead; let me get them before they get me.” But when you try to out yourself to get ahead of the potential embarrassment of being ‘found out’ “you're revealing that you're insecure,” Stamps warns, and worse, that "you can't regulate your emotions." Everyone these days wants to be seen, heard, and validated. And therein lies the problem: needing others to validate you. When you let go of this need for external validation, you stop oozing the desperation to be seen and heard at any cost.

It reminds me what a lost art it is to have decorum. Tact. Grace. The dignified, quiet confidence of restraint. Women who exude this energy, to me, are Emma Watson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Monica Bellucci, Natalie Portman, and Dakota Johnson. Never doing or saying, or posting too much. That’s something we could all learn from. You may have had or are currently going through a messy phase. It would behoove you to reclaim some mystery, hold some things back, cultivate restraint. In a world hooked on oversharing as a cheap currency, decorum is the ultimate flex.