People are fighting against the misogynoir of men with podcasts who share their unfiltered views on women and relationships by parodying the content of these “alpha males” in a viral TikTok trend.
“As males grow older, their natural hairline recedes and they lose their value,” creator Lilly Brown says in a TikTok posted on Jan. 24 mimicking the dude-bro podcast style.
“If you start balding after we get married, which happens all too often, if you’re going to let that happen, I don’t know if I’m going to stay around,” her “podcast cohost” Kimber Springs replies.
“It’s just a preference,” Springs says in the video with over 4 million views.
Springs and Brown have posted close to a dozen videos of their satire podcast show Fresh New Tits, named in honor of the Fresh and Fit podcast, which bills itself as the “The No. 1 Men’s Podcast in the World.” On Tuesday, TikTok announced that misogyny — as well as deadnaming, misgendering, and support for conversion therapy — would now be explicitly banned on the platform. But that doesn’t end the need for Springs and Brown’s comedic work.
“Kimber just called me one morning and was like, ‘Hey, I have this idea to make a fake podcast where women talk about men the way those men talk about women,’ and I was like, ‘Great, come over,’” Brown told BuzzFeed News. “I thought it would be funny to just completely switch it,” Springs said.
Kimber had first been inspired to make content mocking podcast bros after seeing a trend sparked by creator Elsa Lakew, where women use the “Bearded Cutie” filter to appear more masculine. “Someone said if you don’t like the male version of yourself, you should really humble yourself,” Lakew begins in the TikTok she posted on Jan 20. As she glimpses her AI beard and septum ring, an epiphany dawns. “If I look like this, I would start a podcast,” she says, leaning into a microphone. “You know what women don’t be doing…” she says, mimicking the clichéd way of speaking often heard on podcasts by men that have garnered huge audiences online.
Lakew’s original TikTok now has over a million likes, and hashtags like #AlphaMalePodcast and #MenWith Podcasts are used by thousands of TikTokers donning the filter and joking about what women are bringing to the table. “Since we couldn’t fight logic with illogical takes, parodying them was the next best thing,” Lakew said in an interview with NBC News.
Springs and Brown took the trend to the next level. The pair, who are also musicians, already had microphones, so all they needed to get their TikTok podcast off the ground was to set up a space and make a sign. It took all of 30 minutes.
“A funny element about this too is that we’re masculine queer people, almost going undercover as straight women,” Springs said. “We don’t even date men.”
Brown adds that the fact that they dress similarly to the men who host alpha male podcasts makes it even more effective. “Masculine women and nonbinary people are read differently, with a masculine energy, and masculine energy is taken more seriously,” she said.
The duo’s TikToks have millions of views and likes where they discuss things like “Are males too emotional?” and “Do males owe women emotional intimacy?” On the latter, Springs opens with a classic controversial podcaster line, “I’m probably going to piss some people off when I say this…”
Their most popular video is one about male baldness. Brown says the idea for the video was to make a comparison to the things podcasters have said about women’s bodies that are simply just normal or genetic. “I’ve had a lot of men comment on the video and say, ‘Well we can’t help that, it’s a natural part of aging’ and ‘Wow you’re really shallow for dismissing us for physical change,’ and I think that’s the whole point,” said Springs.
A few people don’t understand that their content is satire, asking for them to be compassionate when talking about sensitive topics such as balding and erectile dysfunction, but the pair believe it should go both ways.
“If you can see what is wrong about what we’re saying, you should be able to see what is wrong about what men are saying,” Springs said. “Now you get a taste of what women have been dealing with for so many years,” Brown added.
The responses haven’t been all negative. The TikTok comments are full of people “commenting to stay on alpha female tiktok,” and requests for multiple parts and more content on different subjects.
“It was never my intention to create a career on shitting on men,” Springs said. “The most rewarding thing in all of this is seeing people, especially men, that comment on our videos saying, ‘This put so much in perspective for me. This changed how I see things.’”