As I started the recently released Hulu two-part documentary, Call Her Alex, about the outlandishly successful host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, I knew only a handful of facts about Alex Cooper: She's very popular with young women, she’s beautiful in a way I strongly associate with posting Instagram stories from a yacht, and she talks about sex a lot. At the same time, I knew hundreds of facts about the world as it has existed for the past few decades. What this documentary hopes for is that I would be willing to set those aside.
"Part One" opens in 2023, as Cooper is preparing to embark on her first live tour. She’s excited but nervous about delivering a great show for her legions of devoted fans. It’s immediately clear that her success is the result not just of personal charisma, which she undoubtedly has, but a shrewd sense of what her audience wants, and the drive to make it happen. While she’s surrounded by a team, including husband and business partner Matt Kaplan, Cooper is very much in charge of the empire she’s created over the last six years.
How did she get here? It all started, we are told, in the basement of her family home. Here we get a story you may have heard before: The gorgeous and successful person you know now was once an awkward and bullied child. In Cooper’s case, this was due to her having red hair. She recounts how being subject to the cruelty of adolescent boys caused her to focus on things outside of young romance. She directed and edited videos shot in the basement with her friends, and she played soccer. It was here, among other girls, that Cooper felt safe to express herself and develop her talents.
These talents lead her to Boston University to play on their Division I team. The red hair is now blonde, she very quickly makes close friends, and it is at least hinted that her desire for the male attention denied to her as a teen is now being met. This is also where she encounters coach Nancy Feldman, who Cooper says subjected her to years of sexual harassment. Another former player has since come forward with similar allegations. Eventually Cooper and her parents file a complaint against Feldman, but the school isn’t interested in investigating. (Boston University has yet to comment on the allegations, but the school did tell NBC News that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.”) The school let her quit the team, but keep her scholarship.
This part of Call Her Alex is genuinely harrowing. Cooper decries a system that enabled this abuse. Her former roommate and friend, whom Cooper claims Feldman kicked off the team in order to further isolate and control her, speaks about how the experience stripped her of her identity as an athlete. Cooper is open about how painful and confusing it was when Feldman fixated on her physical appearance and sex life over her athletic ability. "Part One" closes with Cooper leaving college to embark on a new phase of her life, having resolved to never be silenced again.
Six minutes into "Part Two," we see Dave Portnoy talking about why he hired Cooper and her former co-host and roommate, Sofia Franklyn, at Barstool Sports. He is invited to share some anodyne praise of Cooper’s vision, and speak to how the podcast’s remarkable and almost instantaneous success was a boon for his media company. Neither Portnoy nor Cooper discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct against him that came out shortly after she left Barstool, his penchant for calling female reporters “sluts” and “cunts,” his rape jokes, or how he gleefully sends his infantry of Zyn-fueled chronic masturbators after women who criticize him. If the Cooper of "Part One" felt most comfortable around women, by "Part Two" she's just one of the boys.
And yet, we are told that this is all part of her legacy of lifting up women. Talking head Jessica Giles, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, explicitly links “this show about female sexual agency” to the MeToo movement (yes, really), which dominated headlines in the year before Call Her Daddy. It’s in this new landscape, according to Giles, where we are “finally starting to have a more nuanced cultural conversation about consent, and about the power dynamics of sex” that Cooper can break new ground in female empowerment.
Cooper’s much-publicized falling-out with Franklyn is glossed over as the predictable outcome of two women who didn’t know each other well deciding to work together and failing; from here, it is a straightforward story of triumph. Cooper signs a three-year, $60 million deal with Spotify, then a $125 million contract with SiriusXM. Through her production company, Unwell Productions, which is also behind the documentary, Cooper is invested in “lifting up young creators.” Her mission these days is about “trying to make women feel liberated,” to make them “feel seen and respected and heard.” She begins to drift away from blowjob advice and "Degrade me" hoodies, and embraces being vulnerable and talking about going to therapy. She decides it’s time to get political and does an episode about the fall of Roe v. Wade. It’s about human rights, Cooper says.
Call Her Alex closes with Cooper interviewing presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a sign of how far she’s come. We see lots of screenshots from media outlets touting the interview, and nothing about what happened to Harris after that. It’s fitting, I think, to end on such a note. This is less of a documentary than a two-part ad for the idea that Alex Cooper isn’t afraid to talk about anything, which is accomplished by way of her pretending a whole bunch of stuff never happened.
Much like the "Gluck Gluck 9000," Cooper’s patented blowjob technique that she introduced in an early episode of Call Her Daddy, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking here. This kind of soft-sheen profile is a dime a dozen in the streaming era. Cooper is banking on her audience being too young to remember the “female chauvinist pigs” of the early 2000s, let alone know about the consciousness-raising circles of second-wave feminism, where women were urged to look at their vaginas in the mirror long before Cooper suggested it. But it’s one thing to claim that she alone was transgressing what we are told was a strong taboo against women talking openly about sex in the dark ages of 2018. It is another entirely to claim the mantle of a woman who refuses to be silent because of her own personal history of sexual harassment, right before having Portnoy, one of media’s most notable misogynists, sing her praises. I’ll give Alex Cooper this much: She’s got a lot of balls.
