"What grown up wants to live with someone who's mentally a child just because they're hot?"

It’s officially the holiday season— and the end of our official season! Look out for updates from us in the new year, including a request for your suggestions for more bonus episodes. In the meantime, you can subscribe now to listen to the full season, including episodes on the Wicked press tour, parental (but really maternal) burnout, what happens women women write earnestly about male loneliness, and what we discovered about the gender divide when it comes to marital sex.

We’d love to hang out in your ear as you escape from the holiday chaos.

This week we’re doing a deep dive into one the many so-called “horny” romantic comedies we’ve been gifted this month, Netflix’s Hot Frosty, which is about a snowman who comes to life— with abs. It took us about ten minutes to get through the introduction to this episode because the title made us laugh so hard.

But we edited most of that out and in this episode, we discuss in depth how chaste this film really is, the strange mother-son relationship that develops between a widow and a snow-man-turned-man-child, and why we love bad movies like this anyway.

We also dig into how this movie—like others before it—taps into what women want, or what people think women want, post-election.

And we ask all the burning questions that this movie alone could raise, such as:

Are snowmen really genderless? Why is Lacey Chabert so cold? Is a woman paying for things and a man being nice but dumb really feminist progress? Do women just want a man who isn’t socialized as a man— but also, then, is kind of a baby—or is this actually a dark conservative view of female desire?

Or has this strange (kinda hot but definitely not horny?) movie given us yet another narrative that demonstrates how heterosexual romantic love is built on the idea that women are expected to put themselves second and raise boys into men?

You will never look at a snowman the same again. Happy holidays! ⛄

Subscribe to Reading the Comments 👀 now to listen to the full episode.

Is this really the female gaze? Hmmmm. Let’s discuss.

Show notes:

• “Hot Frosty’s Portrait of a Perfect Man,” Rebecca Onion, Slate

• “Horny for the holidays (and the nuclear family),”

  Tracy Clark-Flory

• “Just How Formulaic Are Hallmark and Lifetime Holiday Movies? We (Over)analyzed 424 of Them,” Alicia Parlapiano. New York Times.

Please share your favorite holiday rom-coms with us! Feel free to share, too, how you are overanalyzing them and/or why you choose not to think too hard about them and just voraciously consume them!