Madonna, Migraines & A Dog On A Bus [Episode 21]

This week, Grab Her By The Mic has left the studio and relocated to a bed at the beautiful Ardour Lilianfels in the Blue Mountains, where the microphones, cameras and lighting equipment have made our hotel room look considerably more like the set of a low-budget porno than a podcast. We recap a girls’ weekend involving massages, crosswords, room service, and a couple of emergency calls home before the discovery that apparently mothers can leave for two nights without society completely collapsing. Then it is time for The Weekly Spiral. An influencer brings an actual ring light to a concert, scientists create mice with an alarming amount of human brains, and a band releases a song lasting less than one second. Philsy takes over the The HyperFix with plastic surgery, beauty standards and the increasingly blurry line between ageing well and apparently not being allowed to age at all. We get into Madonna, the cosmetic procedures we would and absolutely would not consider, overseas surgery, the makeovers we grew up watching and whether our idea of “looking good” was decided for us years ago. Then Hannah tests Philsy with Song or Bullshit for The SideQuest, to see if she can tell the difference between a real-life song or something Han pulled from her arse. Plus: our Obsessions of the Week, a hair tool from Philsy and then there’s… Hotel Hannah; and a Weekly Manifest dedicated to becoming temporarily unavailable.

Have celebrities become too accessible? This week, Han and Philsy investigate what happened between the era of untouchable celebrities... and whatever we’re doing now, where we know an influencer’s coffee order, boyfriend history, dog’s name and family drama before breakfast. The HyperFix takes us through the evolution of celebrity culture, reality TV, influencers, parasocial relationships and the rise of what can only be described as professionally produced authenticity. Then The Weekly Spiral brings us: a mother fighting off a coyote with a thong, America spending more than a year engineering a 131-metre Slim Jim, and scientists burying underwear, investigating cockroach milk and repeatedly stepping on venomous snakes in the name of research. Naturally, this leads directly into a SideQuest called Peer Reviewed or Pulled From My Arse, where Philsy has to decide whether scientists genuinely gave Viagra to jet-lagged hamsters. For Obsession of the Week, Philsy has found a pregnancy-friendly body-care range and Han has inhaled Netflix’s Earle Meets World, thereby personally contributing to the exact influencer-access phenomenon she just spent twenty minutes analysing. Honestly, an educational program. Sort of.

Apparently, using Find My Friends to locate your heavily intoxicated, unreachable husband face-down under a tree now makes you an abuser. At least, according to TikTok. This week, we revisit the Episode 33 clip that somehow escaped containment, racked up hundreds of thousands of views and led the internet to diagnose Philsy with coercive control, while simultaneously calling her husband a red flag and telling her to go back to eating KFC. Naturally, we investigate. What actually is coercive control? When does location sharing cross the line from safety into surveillance? Does gender change how people read the exact same behaviour? And can we please stop turning serious psychological and legal terminology into internet shorthand for “I didn’t like that”? Elsewhere, the Weekly Spiral takes us to Chester Zoo, where Jodie Foster, a 50kg reticulated python, has beaten cancer using a treatment normally used on humans. Then we head to Beijing, where humanoid robots are simultaneously learning to outrun Usain Bolt and absolutely failing to learn how to stop. Very reassuring. Philsy discovers that incognito mode is not, in fact, the dark web. We attempt a viral rhyming game with deeply questionable results. Han accidentally launches an investigation into historical nipple rouge. Philsy recommends her current MCoBeauty obsession, and Han recommends Bron Lewis’s brutally funny book I’m Not Mad (Anymore). Plus, Chaos Correctional returns to answer the important questions we left hanging, including how old Jodie Foster actually is in snake years, whether sex workers really rouged their nipples, and the crucial scientific distinction between melanin and melatonin. Another educational service from Grab Her By The Mic. You’re welcome.

We all yelled FREE BRITNEY. So… what happens when freedom still doesn’t look okay? This week, Han and Philsy fall headfirst into the Britney Spears internet rabbit hole: the dancing videos, the conspiracy theories, the concern, the rubbernecking and the uncomfortable question of whether we’re actually any better than the tabloids we love to hate. But before that, naturally, there’s an academic conference dedicated to excessive farting, Donald Trump making a very specific claim about transgender executives and computer chips, and a viral rumour that Earth is going to lose gravity for seven seconds. We also discover what Han would do during a gravity blackout, debate whether Britney’s mysterious vacuuming man is hot, revisit some truly cooked tabloid headlines and read one of our favourite YouTube insults to date: “two cows but with one hoof.” Plus: questionable science, scalp scrubs, Bat Boy, Britney clones and an alarming amount of discussion about bodily functions. Just another normal week at Grab Her By The Mic.

This week on Grab Her By The Mic, Han takes us through the birthday dinner that started it all, a $2,000 degustation at Three Blue Ducks Burradoo that somehow left the table hungrier than when they arrived, headlined by a single eighth of an unpickled radish presented like a $500 oyster. There's a warm welcome that tasted vaguely off, a dessert that Philsy insists Han said smelled like Ambi Pur, and a very confident tip from Han's dad, who clearly has spent too much time in a country with a tipping culture. In The Weekly Spiral, the girls cover a 96 year old TikTok star who tore up her retirement village's warning letter on camera, a man who allegedly used a stolen kitten as bait during a failed bank robbery, and a mime who terrorised a Massachusetts walking trail for two months before things took a genuinely bizarre turn involving cooking oil. The Hyperfix goes deep on surveillance culture, why she's been tracking her entire family for years, Philsy’s pine tree incident that started it all, and the very real research on what constant location checking does to trust. Then it's The SideQuest with Philsy's Red Flag Or Soulmate game, obsessions of the week (a $38.74 smart ring that might catch fire, and a maternity clothes haul that didn't break the bank), and a Weekly Manifest built entirely around a radish based revenge plot. Explicit, feral, occasionally educational and accidentally therapeutic. See you next Tuesday. 💋