commercial break

why I stepped back from media

This month I was invited on a couple of podcasts that had a sizeable audience. I moved away from podcasts for a while. I actually haven’t done much media for almost three years. Not since 2022. That was a conscious choice. I needed to come back to myself in some silence, because the amount of commercial work I was engaging in –and the systems and institutions that upheld it – were slowly corroding three things:

1) the quality of my critical thinking
2) my values and feminist practices
3) my prioritising everyday people (because that’s who this work is for)

Was the money and the output worth the impact on those three things? I don’t think so, but it was hard to recognise what was happening at the time.

There were a few checkpoints that helped me to these realisations. Some pleasantly clarifying, some benign and a couple painful. Maybe there’ll be a moment to talk about some of the worst ones publically, but that’s not now. The bottom line is, commercial interests were starting to compete with what I’d come to this work for and there were ripple affects. I’d built a platform from pretty difficult, meaningful work (that I now have a complex relationship with), and that platform became profitable – or, I guess, I became profitable – and though I was saying no to hundreds of thousands of pounds in commercial deals (and was criticised for that by people in the industry (once in a very uncomfortable meeting where a management company sat me down and showed me all the money I could have made before I told them I was leaving) resisting money wasn’t enough to resist the ripple effect it was having on my life. I was the very palatable, white woman being centred and praised for her work. I was often asked to consider projects or choices that, I felt, didn’t align with my integrity in varying ways. There was always this deep, sour feeling in my chest or stomach when I was asked. But sometimes I’d still make concessions and numb those instincts because I felt bad for saying no so much. The thing about numbing is, it’s a lack of feeling. You don’t notice you’ve done it until afterwards.

Financially, there were incentives to concede or numb myself; my partner and I we’re moving 16,000 KMs away which was costing a lot of fucking money. My visa process alone was over ten thousand pounds). Regardless, I needed to face into what was happening. And to do that I had to create distance. So eventually – maybe a little late – I started trying. It began with taking each Friday off jobs to study, journal, reflect and unpack in therapy, and eventually that merged into changing my career so that commercial interests didn’t have as much power over me.

Two years on, and media hasn’t really been a part of my personal projects because it hasn’t been a priority for me. I wanted to focus on community work as part of my reset, and in doing so, I’ve learnt how conversations have to happen IRL to be impactful. Big surprise coming, but it’s the back and forth that makes new ideas meaningful, understood and internalised. Community work made commercial media – where you talk about something in general terms at the listener or viewer – began to feel kind of fucking weird to me. I began to see how people in similar circles were doing a lot of talking about the public, communities or groups of people without working with them directly and regularly offline without an audience (which changes things whether we want to admit it or not).

Some people aren’t doing “people work” with people. They’re doing “people work” on a laptop and with a microphone.

Explorative or meaningful back and forth, challenging and exchange of thoughts or ideas, having to navigate another person’s feelings, thoughts and experiences is the lifeblood of this work, and experiencing that often means media started to feel less and less important – or quite honestly, real – to me.

Now I have distance, it makes sense to me that those talking these topics on podcasts and in media can easily become entrenched in an insulated version or view of the issue or a solution (regardless of if they’re workable, nuanced or not) because they aren’t consistently developing their abilities or understanding through interaction with others. They don’t have to orientate their language or approach in response to another person. They don’t need to do the dance of relationship. They can mute Dean who commented a genuine question that they think ignorant. You can’t do that as a facilitator. You shouldn’t. As a podcast or media personality in these topics, you can become separated and insulated from messy, human accountability and meaningful compassionate difference or discussion, and instead, just focus on what you want to say. Who cares what someone is saying back, right? It’s individualised. It is, in many ways, transactional. If I was speaking on gender and misogyny on a podcast or TikTok, or a talk show every week with a co-host, or guests – or especially if I was by myself –I am not committing to praxis. I am committing to discourse, which absolutely has its place, but after the previous year where I had to pause and look at myself, I just wanted more praxis.

I wanted space to mess up and learn in real ways.
I wanted to be in rooms with people who have never heard the word “patriarchy” before or ever thought about their place in society and are dubious about conversations on gender.
I wanted to look into the whites of their eyes and seek to understand why and how to help them understand a small part of it.
I wanted to work towards being skilled enough to invite the mainstream into the work.
I wanted to learn to communicate with anyone, not only those already interested, or who tuned in to listen, or those who could make me money while I am insulated from their thoughts or feelings.

This doesn’t mean I’m doing it perfectly, it doesn’t mean I’m incredible at it. It doesn’t mean I’m any better than a podcaster. It means I’m discovering a more authentic version of my work. One in which I’m no longer pedestalled or allowing the erosion of my values to take place if it means more money in my pocket and that matters to me.

So, let’s get back to where we started. This month I was invited on some podcasts. They were an opportunity to talk about binary gendered expectations, masculinities and sexual violence. While mainstream Australian media is trying to have conversations on these, it is – by my estimation – very colonial and behind the UK in terms of its collective mainstream understanding of these issues and how they’re interconnected (the UK is fucked too thought just FYI!).

I called a friend who does podcasts a lot, before I went in for one of them, and asked him how he approaches them. During our chat I realised I’d never actually been my full self in commercial or traditional media. I was either campaigning and playing a role because I was part of a political game of optics, or I was talking about my trauma which meant I was mostly emotional and disregulated.

I don’t really see any reflections of my full self in media. I don’t see the curiosity, thoughtfulness, humour, playfulness or sensitivity that makes me who I am. I see a careful campaigner or a victim survivor.

What would it feel like for me to be the facilitator, women, activist I am in media, now that I’ve re-aligned myself and am no longer swayed by commercial interests as much? What would it look like to not just code-switch to one part of myself in front of a camera? If I continue to study this work, learn from the ground and then say yes to opportunities that truly align, what could I offer to the movement? There’s a lot to think about.

I’ll never go back to doing just commercial work. But exploring how both the ground work and the media can work in tandem might be what we call balance.

G x