By: Maria Williams
Meet the Sisters Rethinking All Our Favorites
Ghostbusters taught us that regulation is the enemy.
Clue helped us understand that success doesn’t have a timeline.
A Christmas Story made it clear that our world is awash with advertisements.
And Labyrinth gave us the language for dealing with an abuser.
If that’s not what you remember about these films, then welcome to Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t–the weekly podcast that takes a closer look at the pop culture that lives rent-free in all our heads.
Hosted by sisters Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, collectively known as the Guy Girls, Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t invites you to think, rethink, and overthink all the beloved, revered, and reviled media that helped shape Gen X and Millennial minds.
These two former English majors analyze the “stupid sh*t” many people dismiss as “just pop culture.” Their humorous conversations about beloved films and TV are carried by the genuine warmth of their sibling relationship and the depth of their shared capacity to overthink.
By day, Emily is a finance writer and coach, but when she lets her hair down, she geeks out. She has special interests in decolonizing literature, defending fictional characters from authorial abuse, finding pop-culture-based metaphors for understanding mental health, and identifying the casual misogyny that is so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible. She’s drawn to horror, mystery, science fiction, and combinations thereof.
Tracie, the older sister, splits her professional hours between copywriting for nonprofits and helping individuals combat and dismantle racism and antisemitism. Though her hair is too short to let down, she thinks it’s fun to deconstruct religious imagery in unexpected places, follow rabbit holes of interpretations of Gen X iconography, and admire the elegance of a finely crafted story. She loves animation, the Muppets, space epics, and pretty much anything with dramatic irony.
Besides genetics, these two have a few things in common: a desire to see more and better representation of identities often ignored, diminished, or belittled by the so-called canon; a tendency to be over-literal that leads to hilarious (and sometimes suggestive) consequences; an affinity for handsome men in eyeliner; and a deep commitment to the idea that we can and must take pop culture seriously, but we should never take ourselves that way.
The sisters take turns (and occasionally invite guests in) bringing their deep thoughts about specific pieces of pop culture and investigating the lessons hiding behind Hollywood’s dimpled smiles and expected (or surprising!) plot points. Highlights include the catch-22 of Twilight’s chastity parable (wait for an Edward, girls, but you’re on your own when you encounter men who are not him!); the essentialist classism baked into Beauty and the Beast (the servants are literal objects owned by the prince!) and the strategic feminism hiding in Dirty Dancing (the abortion subplot was intentionally integral to the romance so it couldn’t be browbeaten out!).
Deep Thoughts about Stupid Sh*t drops new episodes every Tuesday. You can learn more and listen at https://www.guygirlsmedia.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/guygirlsmedia, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/guygirlsmedia/, or wherever you get your pods.
Published By: Aize Perez
