Know Your Enemy: Boys and Girls in America

Know Your Enemy: Boys and Girls in America

Matt and Sam talk to screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry about families, gender, and the 2024 election.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

This conversation is a little different. We thought that exploring the life of, say, Russell Kirk might not be the best way to spend the weeks before such a consequential election, so this is the first of a few episodes that won’t be about a text or a life, but about the 2024 elections—hopefully digging a little deeper than most, and with a special concern for the themes and topics of Know Your Enemy. To help us get started, we had on a great friend of the podcast, playwright and screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry, to talk about a presidential campaign that “smacks of gender”—from declining sperm counts to abortion to the lives of moms, dads, and children today. In short, it’s an unguarded discussion of how we can better care for each other in a world that’s making it harder and harder to do just that.

Further Reading:

Dorothy Fortenberry, “Full Family Kit”, Slate (2024)

— “One of Those Serious Women”: Andrea Dworkin’s Radical Feminism, Commonweal (2019)

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, When Abortion Isn’t Abortion, Commonweal (2022)

Listen again:

Suburban Woman (2019)

Living at the End of Our World with Daniel Sherrell (2021)

“Succession,” “Extrapolations,” & TV Writing Today with Will Arbery (2023)