How Newtown native Alex Cooper used ‘Call Her Daddy’ to create a sex-positive podcasting empire

Bucks County native and podcaster Alex Cooper got Gwyneth Paltrow to reveal Ben Affleck was “technically excellent” in bed and Miley Cyrus to disclose she lied to Liam Hemsworth about losing her virginity. Cooper taught thousands of women how to tackle third base and Ishani Trivedi, a Drexel University senior, about the power of casual dating.

“I credit a lot to her. I was like, ‘Alex Cooper is so confident, why aren’t I?’” said Trivedi, 23. “The more I listened to her, the more confident I became in what I wanted and the more I was able to put myself out there.”

Cooper, 29, is the host of Call Her Daddy. She’s on a six-city tour that stops at the Met Philadelphia on Thursday and Friday to cement Call Her Daddy as something other than a sexcapade podcast.

Cooper started Call Her Daddy in 2018 with then-roommate Sofia Franklyn about the reality of dating — and having sex — in your 20s. Thanks to its raunchiness, the show would become a boon for Cooper, who secured an exclusive $60 million podcasting deal with Spotify after Franklyn left over compensation issues.

Call Her Daddy is now one of the platform’s most-listened-to shows (second only to The Joe Rogan Experience). An average of 5 million listeners tune in weekly; the podcast remains a rare place where women talk openly and unromantically about sex and relationships. On Call Her Daddy, dating is multifaceted: It’s a game that takes practice to get good at, but also a way for women to build confidence articulating their needs. Finding a life partner is secondary.

That’s a refreshing narrative even in 2023, when women still lack spaces to discuss sex without judgment or the expectation that it must lead to a husband or wife.

“We have all sorts of popular culture that tells women the cost of acting sexually,” said Sarah Banet-Weiser, a popular feminism scholar and the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Shows like Call Her Daddy can “be very useful for building solidarity among women and helping them understand what it means to be a sexual subject, not a sexual object.”

Still, critics argue that Cooper’s dating rules equate empowerment with toxicity, even as she and the show have pivoted to confessional discussions with celebrities about topics from mental health and burnout to reproductive rights.

Cooper grew up in Newtown with a psychologist mom and NHL producer dad. She attended the Pennington School near Trenton before playing Division 1 soccer and studying film production at Boston University. There, Cooper told Cosmopolitan, a traumatic experience with her coach and a relationship with an undisclosed Red Sox player 13 years her senior inspired the voice behind Call Her Daddy. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

“What I took was the motivation of feeling like no one will ever again take something away from me just because they’re title-wise above me,” Cooper told the New York Times in 2022. “I was trying to embody that in Call Her Daddy: Be confident in yourself, and you don’t need to be in a position where you feel uncomfortable.”

To Claire Ciccarone, 26, of South Philly, the podcast helped her do just that. Ciccarone started listening in 2020 and credits it with pushing her to exit an unhappy long-term relationship. The show felt like “girl talk” and was one of the first times Ciccarone realized she had power in relationships.

Her favorite piece of advice? “Why would you want to be in a relationship with someone who puts you down or doesn’t act like they like you?”

Before Cooper began hosting therapists and unpack celebrities’ childhood trauma, much of Call Her Daddy centered on mastering tit-for-tat flirtation.

When Cooper took the show to Spotify, she changed the format to wide-ranging one-on-one interviews that are as much about sex as they are what shapes the celebrities’ relationship to it, which often include power imbalances and mentions of abuse.

Longtime fans cling to Cooper’s old — and occasionally manipulative — advice, such as organizing the people you’re casually dating like a football roster or pretending to cheat if you worry your partner is losing interest.

Though Olivia Maguire, of West Chester, acknowledged that at the experienced age of 27, she wouldn’t necessarily listen to Cooper but that the podcaster did help set realistic dating expectations.

Cooper was “a realist” who gave women the tools to handle cheating, ghosting, and prolonged talking stages, said Maguire. “People take dating too seriously … There is nothing wrong with being toxic to someone who is being toxic to you.”

Devon Ikeler, 32, agreed. Call Her Daddy was the first podcast she listened to after breaking up with her boyfriend in 2018. Ikeler still listens, and said Cooper’s bluntness liberated her from the blame she felt for ending up with men who wouldn’t commit.

Banet-Weiser cautioned that as well-intentioned as Cooper may be, Call Her Daddy built its brand by masquerading manipulation and stereotypical gender roles as empowerment. In one 2018 episode, Cooper and Franklyn tell women who are aesthetically “fives and sixes” to compensate by having over-the-top sex, while other episodes focus on “how to trick men into thinking you are wifey material.”

Some of this rhetoric “reinforces bad social norms about gender, [such as that] women are just manipulators that use our bodies and sexuality to get what we want,” Banet-Weiser said.

Cooper has refused to apologize for the podcast’s early material, even though she has said it’s cringey enough for her to not relisten to older episodes.

Trivedi used to hide the fact she listened from friends who thought Cooper was “some toxic lady who just yelled about sex all the time.”

“It doesn’t have to be that, though. I just took the parts [of Cooper’s advice] that made me feel comfortable,” she said.

As of 2021, 90% of Call Her Daddy’s listeners were women, according to Nielsen. But men have still found value in the show’s entry-level sex positivity.

Adam Palucis, 21, started listening after he came out as gay in 2020. A self-described “prude” at the time, Palucis was unsure about how to navigate hookup culture, let alone how to find a boyfriend.

“I didn’t know how men are, so hearing [Cooper and Franklyn] talk about things they would do with men or things men did to them was eye-opening,” Palucis, of Huntingdon Valley, said.

Palucis said Cooper’s advice helped him meet his first boyfriend, with whom he has been exclusive for more than a year. Palucis said he used Cooper’s tactics to draw in his beau.

“If you were looking for something healthy, the advice used to be so bad,” Palucis said. “But, God, the toxicity was fun.”