Perceiving Women

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It’s one of the iconic film scenes of the 21st century. In The Devil Wears Prada, high-powered fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, and Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, are in the backseat of a car on the way to an event during Paris Fashion Week.

“I see a great deal of myself in you,” Priestly says to her protégé, who can’t stomach the comparison.

“I mean, what if I don’t want to live the way you live?” Sachs rebuts.

And then that zinger: “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.”

This is just one of many cultural touch points that serve as conversation starters for Susie Banikarim ’97 and co-host Jessica Bennett’s podcast, In Retrospect. Each week, the two co-hosts revisit a famous pop culture moment between the 1980s and the early 2000s and take a close look at how it helped shape our perception of womanhood.

In the Devil Wears Prada episode, the focus is on how we perceive female ambition. In “The Marriage Myth,” it’s about how a Newsweek story came to convince society, falsely, that single women over 40 were “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to get married. And in “The Vilification of Robin Givens,” it’s about how a revealing interview between journalist Barbara Walters and married couple Robin Givens and Mike Tyson turned Givens into the “most hated woman in America.”

In looking back at these media moments through the lens of today, Banikarim was eager to understand how they came to define us.

“What did it do to us as women and girls to watch those stories play out, and how did seeing those stories inform our own view about how we were allowed to operate in the world?” Banikarim asks.

Throughout the series, Banikarim and Bennett bring in guests to help connect the dots, including those who shaped the stories and those who lived through them. For example, for an episode about the firestorm surrounding boundary-pushing radio host Don Imus’s racial slur aimed at the 2007 Rutgers women’s basketball team, they invited former Rutgers captain and WNBA star Essence Carson and journalist Jemele Hill to join.

Creating and hosting a podcast is a new experience for the Barnard alumna but a fitting one for the sorts of conversations she and Bennett wanted to have. It also presented a professional challenge for Banikarim, whose career has primarily orbited around TV and digital newsrooms. “It offered a new way for me to do creative work,” she says. The two-time Emmy Award winner has previously held production and leadership roles at ABC News, Gizmodo Media Group, VICE, and other media companies.

There’s no release date yet for the third season, but in the meantime, there are plenty of episodes for listeners to delve into. Two 20-episode seasons are available on multiple platforms.

Why look back when you can look forward, listeners may wonder. Banikarim’s reasoning is simple: It’s all about producing and consuming media more thoughtfully. “The stories we tell each other matter, and the way we tell them matter.”