Unscrewing Love: Recent Episodes
Jaclyn Friedman
Unscrewed is a podcast about the politics and culture of sex, but you’ll find very little sex in this playlist. That’s because one of the things that needs unscrewing is the myth most important love is sexual. Each of these shows has something fresh to say about the myriad ways love changes and connects us to each other and the world around us, no hanky panky required.
The entire project of this show — reading the Harry Potter books as though they are a sacred text — is an ode to how deeply we can love art, and how it can love us back. But this episode has a lot more to say about many kinds of love. (It’s also here because I love Dobby so.)
This case features two dudes trying to work out the bounds of their platonic love for each other. And obscure board games.
My friends Deanna and Alice have the most delightful show about mental illness/mental health that you ever did hear. And this is the episode in which Alice breaks my heart open with her bravery in service of self-love.
In which one woman is helped through the worst day of her life by the love of strangers in a supermarket. Have tissues at the ready.
Both Another Round and Call Your Girlfriend have loving ladyfriendships at their center. This episode brings the two duos together for a fulsome foursome.
I would have found an excuse to include my interview with Orphan Black’s Emmy-winning star Tatiana Maslany regardless, but luckily our conversation covered the power of loving your fear, the revolutionary love of a good queer dance party, and my favorite part of the whole interview, in which Maslany reveals how she learned to love femininity.
The whole show is a valentine to the English language, but this particular episode explores all the ways words can make strangers in a strange land feel either loved or loathed.
What if a celeb you love was seen holding a book you wrote, which hardly anyone loved? (Also, Mystery Show, come back, I love you!)
OK, fine, this one is about sexual love. But it’s also about falling in love with making podcasts, and with your own boundaries and instincts, and the women of The Heart just make the loveliest audio I couldn’t leave it out.