Podcast Canon: Thirst Aid Kit went deep on female desire

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4 days ago

With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form.
This month, we're celebrating summertime at Podcast Canon by shaking things up and breaking one of our cardinal rules. For the first time, we're focusing on a show that could technically be considered a chatcast. It is, however, one of the most interesting and, dare I say, important to ever do it. What's more, it's a damn delight. The perfect blend of frothy fun, beach-read vibes with a serious heart and a cogent message to deliver. And, if you pay extra close attention, it'll become apparent just how focused, produced, well-edited, and artfully crafted it all is.
The show in question is Thirst Aid Kit, a singular work of pop cultural anthropology from hosts and producers Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, focused entirely on the complex and ever-shifting notions of female desire in the most gleefully unapologetic manner. Running for 90-plus episodes from 2017 to 2020, it was something unique in podcasting—a sort of audio reinterpretation of the mid-aughts' angst and lust-filled Tumblr fandoms. Every week, the hosts selected one or more men, usually actors, musicians, or adjacent creatives, and went deep on what made them a particularly worthy object of their attention. In a moment when discussions of the female gaze are once again stoking debates on social media, one need only dive back into the TAK archives for a masterclass in its demystification, deconstruction, and ultimate celebration.
Initially a production of BuzzFeed's vaunted PodSquad (Another Round, Internet Explorer, See Something Say Something, etc.), the show was unfortunately dropped in early 2019 when the media company chose to 'pivot to video,' laying off its entire audio unit. Thankfully, some months later, Thirst Aid Kit was rescued by Slate Podcasts, where it ran for another year before Adewunmi and Perkins closed the door on that chapter of its existence, swearing it was not the end of the road for good. The pair continued making audio, albeit separately, with Adewunmi working at This American Life, while Perkins hosted This Is Good For You. Thus far, apart from a one-off feature on Refinery 29, the pair has yet to release any new episodes.
Despite my earlier classification, and all outward appearances to the contrary, this is no ordinary chat show. There is a kind of brilliant simplicity to its construction. In an era when many of the biggest podcasts seem allergic to editing, Thirst Aid Kit was a subtle marvel at it. Episodes typically ranged from 40 to 60 minutes, maintaining a light and focused tone without sacrificing any depth or joy.
There was a clear progression of segments, opening with a cheekily redacted bit of harmless fan fiction, before spending the bulk of the episode enumerating the manifold handsome qualities of that week's 'thirst object,' the person whose person was lustily being pored over. In closing, the hosts would read original works of fanfic written about that week's subject in an attempt to see who could craft a more beautifully written and thrilling scenario. While the conversation feels free-flowing and organic, there's a fluid organization to the way it unspools, with minimal tangents or discursiveness. That focus, rather than stymying the vibe, makes for an incredibly enjoyable show. Adewunmi and Perkins, apart from being academically versed in thirst, are also extremely charming and funny.
What all these words fail to capture is the rich sensorial experience that accompanies both the show's recording and its listening. This is a house built with impishly knowing laughter, mouths filling idly with saliva, air sucked hard through clenched teeth, and the word 'bitch' harshly whispered out of passionate desperation. To be a 'Thirst Bucket,' as their fans are so lovingly known, is to be right there in the moment with the pair. Where other podcasts can be a passive hang, something about the conversations on TAK make you sit up and take notice. It's a quality that I credit to the audio-first nature of the show's production. Were it a video, the hosts would not need to work as hard to communicate the nuances of their obsession. Instead, a show about physical beauty bereft of any trace of the visual becomes reliant on its intermediaries to translate the strength and spirit of their feelings into words, phrases, and primal guttural exclamations. Adewunmi and Perkins prove more than adequate to the task, and their shared passions for the lingual arts (playwriting and poetry, respectively) help elevate the experience to that of the sublime. There has scarcely been a more kaleidoscopic compendium of the ways the male form can be appreciated, expending several thesauruses' worth of adjectives along the way.
Among the myriad details which might cause these exquisite wordsmiths to fall headlong for someone, we find a few recurring motifs—hair, eyes, voice, kindness, etc. But it is in their appreciation of a thirst object's more deliciously idiosyncratic qualities that the pair truly come alive, whether it's waxing eloquently about noble noses, strong bird chests, stop-motion Christmas puppet energy, the raw sexual energy of a henley, and the messy appetites of the fully adult bear Winnie-The-Pooh.
Importantly, for a show predicated on desire, it largely avoids being about sex. The pair, keenly aware that these are real people—and they might one day end up interviewing their subjects on the show or in some other capacity—use their personas as avatars to explore their own relationship with pleasure. And indeed, they did end up interviewing a good number of them as well, ranging from Chris Evans to Blair Underwood, Charlie Cox to Jacob Anderson, and Jake Johnson to Jason Mantzoukas.
The crowning achievement of the program, though, is its ending segment, Fanfic Wars. In each episode, Adewunmi and Perkins are challenged to write a short and steamy alternate universe scenario involving that thirst object. The aim at the time was to have listeners vote on Twitter to see whose drabble, as such short works are known in the community, had managed to make their hearts beat faster. As a result, the pair brings their absolute A-game to constructing fantasy scenarios that play up their economy of words for maximum impact. Nothing explicit is ever said, but listeners feel the effects all the same.
Their stories are chiefly interested in the oblique spaces immediately adjacent to the act, keeping things steamy without toppling over into sticky. Often their fantasizing focused on the early moments of an infatuation, the heady times just after its consummation, or simply enjoying the studied ease that comes from years of romantic partnership. And that's precisely what makes the series' evocations so stirring. They are these uniquely vulnerable glimpses into the hosts' most intimate dreams and romantic wishes, as well as a chance to revel in the Hemingway-esque prose, words surgically chosen to evoke maximum longing and elevated heart rates.
'What is fanfic,' Adewunmi muses in the show's third season, 'if not a way for us to meet our own selves at the point of our need.' The culture bears that out as well. We're living in a time when fanfiction has come out from the shadows in a big way. It's not new to say, but it bears repeating. Books and movies like the 50 Shades series and The Idea Of You, or the recent reveal that Daisy Ridley's husband, Tom Bateman, will star in an adaptation of a novel that evolved out of a Kylo Ren/Rey fanfic. As well, the fan fiction website Archive Of Our Own, or AO3 to its devotees, was honored in 2019 with a Hugo award for its contributions to genre fiction. The works by Adewunmi and Perkins stand toe to toe with some of the medium's best, and it's somewhat bewildering that all these years later, they haven't been collected into a printed anthology of their own.
One of the aspects most responsible for the show's indelibility is the degree of incisive cultural criticism and commentary the hosts bring to its otherwise effervescent discussion. As two Black women from rather different backgrounds—Adewunmi is Nigerian-British, and Perkins hails from Tennessee—they bring a bounty of lived experiences to the table. This is particularly instructive when confronting the ways pop culture has and has not made them feel seen and represented. This intersectional perspective helps ground the show, challenging the prevailing (read: white) orthodoxy surrounding beauty standards and sexiness in North America, as well as the way these ideas are reinforced by systems of power or the choices of projects these stars make. All of the humor and celebration serve as something of a Trojan horse for deeper, rewarding conversations.
An aside to say that, listening from a historical remove, I expected to find more episodes where the pair espoused their feelings for a celebrity who has sailed rougher waters in the time since. Thankfully, Adewunmi and Perkins' emotional compasses were pointing true north more often than not, as nearly every one of their thirst objects has remained unsullied over the intervening years. During the tumultuous times in which the show was originally released, there was a cultural reckoning with men in general. Debuting less than one month after The New York Times' bombshell reporting on Harvey Weinstein, the pair are quick to point out that they enjoy men in spite of themselves. Thirst is not an immutable property, and its rights and privileges can be revoked at a moment's notice.
In the end, beyond all of the how of the show, it's perhaps more important to focus on the what it accomplished as well. Giving voice to these feelings helped to legitimize for many listeners their own wants and desires, as well as broadening their palate and offering new ways to express what they fancy in others. It reclaimed and reframed the idea of want, empowering listeners to put their interests first and live their truth out loud. It opened a dialogue that went deeper than the show's remit might suggest, and one which continues to resonate to this day. And so, as a sweltering summer beats on into August, there's no better companion than Thirst Aid Kit to help listeners get better in touch with their truest self and most authentic desires.
Throughout its run, the show was produced and written by Adewunmi and Perkins, but it also had help from a vast roster of creatives, whose contributions we honor as well. They included Agerenesh Ashagre Palmer, Meg Cramer, Megan Detrie, Keisha 'TK' Dutes, Julia Furlan, Eleanor Kagan, Alex Sujong Laughlin, Neena Pathak, Camila Salazar, and Cher Vincent.
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