Hairy Butthole

(CW: SA) This week, Youngmi speaks with Yurie Collins (actor, filmmaker, TikTok personality) about her life as a hostess in a Japanese hostess club. Yurie discusses a sad story about how a male patron assaulted her during a drunken bout and how the transactional nature of sex work-adjacent work is directly tied to deep self-hatred of men who believe they cannot be loved. They also touch on the ubi...

This week Youngmi Mayer discusses returning home for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. She talks about the ways in which therapy has completely changed her brain and her outlook on life. She talks about noticing how her mind has moved away from a heightened trauma state and how that transformation took her by surprise. She talks about continuing her relationship with her family despite c...

This week Youngmi Mayer talks to Roberto Santos (Chair of Pride Marianas). Roberto is Chamorro, Carolinian and white and recently moved back to the island of Saipan in the Marianas. He discusses what it feels like to be from a remote part of the world that people typically do not know anything about. He talks about the reasons he moved back on island and how “pride” for him encompasses the intense...

This week, Youngmi talks to her father, Roger Mayer. Roger talks about the lives of his mother and father who were both first-generation Americans from European immigrant families. He discusses how the world wars affected his family directly, causing his German-born family members to move back to Germany in support of the Nazi party. He also talks about how even as a child it disturbed him that th...

This week I talked to my mom, Ippun Mayer (AKA the person who said "If you laugh while crying hair grows out of your butthole). She talked about my great-grandmother getting kidnapped, my grandmother being forced to marry a poor guy, my uncle being murdered by Japanese soldiers, and the suicides of my other uncle and grandfather. She also talked about why it's important to her that Koreans do not...

This week I talked to the amazing comedian Jenny Arimoto about the death of her grandmother a decade after being diagnosed with dementia. Jenny talks about the cruelty of prolonging life in someone who no longer has the capacity to consent and talks about the infinite layers of emotions that surround death and illness. We talked about how death is perceived differently in Asian vs. American famili...

This week I talk to Vanessa Lavorato ( Bong Appétit , Owner of Marigold Sweets) about the restaurant industry. Vanessa and I met while living in San Francisco in the late aughts. We talk about how we were both drawn to this work because of our traumatic childhoods and how so many people with similar backgrounds find comfort in the abusive familiarity of restaurant service. We also discuss the cult...

This week I talk to comedian Kelly Bachman ( Hysterical on FX, Rape Victims Are Horny Too ). Kelly blew up on the internet after confronting Harvey Weinstein at a comedy show back in 2019. She joins Hairy Butthole to talk about how she started doing stand-up specifically to joke about rape after an assault left her searching for material from the survivor's perspective. She discusses how the MeToo...

I chat with Lucie Pohl (standup comedian) about the two times of her life when she was sexually assaulted, once as an 11-year-old child and then recently by a fellow standup comedian. She talks about the recent assault and how it triggered a rush of memories she had repressed from the childhood attack. She discusses talking to her parents about it for the first time, and how she felt as a child af...

In this episode, I am solo and I discuss my abortion and the events leading up to it. I also talk about how I don't think my abortion is sad and how we should normalize all reactions to abortion because the singular narrative about women being sad about abortion is damaging to the core message because abortion is not a death of a child, it's a medical procedure that for a lot of people is void of...

In this episode, I talk to my friend Alex Pemoulie (Restaurant Worker's Community Foundation) about her infant son going through open heart surgery after finding out he was at high risk of losing his life to a heart defect. She discusses postpartum depression and how it manifested in her being obsessed with the death of her children and the irony of her child being found out later to have a possib...

In this episode, I talk to Dylan Adler (comedian, TikTok star) about his grandmother's death and how he couldn't cry about it. We discuss the “social requirements” for grief and how not fulfilling them (i.e. crying at the funeral) adds pressure and the guilt of not showing grief in the way society finds acceptable. Dylan does end up crying at the end because he remembers something funny that his g...

This week I talk about my personal history with plastic surgery in full detail. I talk about why it took me so long to openly discuss this in public, because I have never struggled to share any aspect of my life publicly, no matter how humiliating. I talk about the narrative surrounding plastic surgery in South Korea, and how it's an extremely nuanced and complicated subject that's been reduced to...

On this episode I sit with Helen Cho, a well known Producer/Director most recently of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman and Takeout With Lisa Ling . She is most well known for producing No Reservations with the late Anthony Bourdain and in this episode of the podcast she discusses his death for the first time ever in public. She was his "only friend" as described by his acqu...