ILL REPUTE! with Sovereign Syre

It's the end of Season Two! We did it! This week we conclude our series on Ada Lovelace.  In September 1843, Ada Lovelace published her paper on the Analytical Engine in Scientific Memoirs under the title "Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator.". Ada was 27 years old, an aristocratic, married mother of three children at the time. Her final published paper included seven i...

 "Plot: A young wife is suddenly widowed. Left with four children. She is totally unskilled for the labor market, and deeply in debt. Her home and all she has are repossessed. However… she has one choice. She is the sole heir to a tremendous fortune. If she can deceive her dying father, and never let him know she is the mother of four children whom he would despise. "Four children are imprisoned i...

In today's episode, we discuss VC Andrews, a writer who created her own genre of fiction and scandalized a generation of young female readers. We cover Virginia's early life, her emergence as a writer, and the real life inspiration for her most famous novel, Flowers In The Attic.  Contact Us:  illreputepod@gmail.com Follow Us:  ILL REPUTE! links: http://linktr.ee/illreputepod Sovereing Syre's link...

When one of the smartest women in England, Anne Isabella Milbanke, fell in love with the most scandalous, and handsome, creative genius of his time, Lord Byron, the fallout was nothing less than a national scandal. Their young daughter, Ada, was caught in the crossfire. Ada spent her early childhood being used as a bargaining chip in her parents divorce, and a bitter reminder to Anne Milbanke, of...

In the conclusion of our series on Misery Lit and Literary Fraud, we discuss two more famous cases of fabricated memoir and what our conspicuous consumption of trauma porn tells us about ourselves and the cultural narratives around female suffering.  Contact Us:  illreputepod@gmail.com Follow Us:  ILL REPUTE! links: http://linktr.ee/illreputepod Sovereing Syre's links: http://linktr.ee/sovereignsy...

On a very special episode of ILL REPUTE! we interview Ret. Constable Tom Wood of Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1983, Constable Wood was called to investigate the murder of Sheila Anderson, a local sex worker. During his investigation, he came to understand that the sex industry had changed, and so did the way they needed to police it.  Tom tells us how he came to see the problem as one of public safety...

Misery Literature is a genre of memoir that details the real-life struggles and adversities of individuals, focusing particularly on themes of abuse, poverty, addiction, and survival against the odds. They are usually harrowing stories of the author's survival through complex trauma, usually told from the first person perspective, which generally end in, if not a happy conclusion, at least a ray o...

The plague led to a drastic reduction in population, labor shortages, and social upheaval. Entire villages and towns were depopulated, and some regions saw a collapse of agricultural and economic systems. People in the 14th century had little understanding of the causes of the plague, and various responses were attempted, including quarantine measures, flagellant movements, and persecution of mino...

The European Witch Craze, also known as the Witch Hunts or the Witch Trials, was a period of intense persecution of individuals accused of witchcraft in Europe from the late 15th century to the 18th century. Thousands of people, primarily women, were accused, arrested, tried, and often executed as witches during this time.  The witch hunts were rooted in the belief that certain individuals, known...

This week on ILL REPUTE! Sovereign Syre and Ela Darling welcome their very first guest! Dr. Kim Tallbear is a Native scholar who literally wrote the book on Native American DNA, and has become the defacto expert on self-indigenization, more commonly known as race shifting, ethnic fraud, or pretendianism. We talk with Dr. Tallbear about what indigenous ethnic fraud is, why it's perpetrated so easil...

In 2022, PBS released the documentary "Carry It On" about Buffy Sainte Marie's life. A Native journalist sat down to watch it, and found herself uneasy as the documentary progressed. Something about Buffy's adoption story didn't add up; Buffy had never found her real parents. So she started digging and found what she considered damning evidence that Buffy Sainte-Marie had fabricated her identity f...

Buffy Sainte-Marie burst onto the folk music scene in the early sixties, playing in the coffee houses of Manhattan and Toronto with the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. She quickly caught the attention of music critics with her warbling delivery, and her unapologetically political songs about Native American issues. Playing the guitar, piano, and mouth bow, her tale...

In this episode of gender bias in medical diagnosis, Ela Darling and Sovereign Syre tackle ADHD. What is it? Why are so many women denied a diagnosis despite suffering from the same symptoms as their male cohorts?  Support Us:  http://patreon.com/illrepute Contact Us:  illreputepod@gmail.com Follow Us:  ILL REPUTE! links: http://linktr.ee/illreputepod Sovereing Syre's links: http://linktr.ee/sover...

This week on the podcast Sovereign Syre and Ela Darling examine three different iconic depictions of female suicide and talk about their impact on the culture, and what they can teach us about how we view female suffering. They analyze the painting "Ophelia" by John Everett Millais and the later suicide of the woman who posed for it, Elizabeth Siddal,  Art's first supermodel. Then they look at the...

This week, Sovereign Syre and Ela Darling conclude their series on Phyllis Diller.  "As a child I had very strong passions and aspirations, and I've lived to realize them all. I've had a family, I've known great romance, clothes are coming out of my ears, God only knows the friends I have, and although I didn't foresee all the travel, it has been just incredible. I was the kid who never had a room...

This week on the pod, Sovereign Syre tells Ela Darling about Phyllis Diller's whirlwind rise to fame, making her the first female stand up comedian to become a household name. While her star was on the rise however, her turbulent homelife was about to implode. Phyllis found herself in new territory, navigating the Hollywood system, being cast over and over again as the "ugly woman," an image she h...

This week on the podcast Sovereign Syre tells Ela Darling about Phyllis Diller. During her career she became the first female stand up to become a household name, but Phyllis Diller started at the very bottom, a mother of five children married to charismatic loser that was at turns dismissive and abusive. In the 1950s. In her late thirties. Welcome to the first part in our series on one of the mos...

Greetings and welcome to SEASON TWO of ILL REPUTE! In 1984, an ambitious photojournalist snuck into Afghanistan to document the refugee crisis there. When he came across a beautiful young Afghan girl with blazing green eyes, he knew he had to get a photo of her...and seventeen years later, would go on a highly publicized search to locate the girl, now a grown woman.  This week Sovereign Syre tells...

SOV ACCIDENTALLY UPLOADED THE WRONG FILE! It's fixed now, but if you started playing and it was episdoe four, it's the correct file now, so just redownload.   In the conclusion of our series on Calamity Jane, Sovereign Syre teaches Ela Darling about modernity and how it failed the frontier, or something like that. Enjoy the final installment in our series on Calamity Jane, and get ready for Season...

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Or if you don't believe, Happy Monday! In part four of our series on Calamity Jane, we follow the Dime Store Novel Heroine as she navigates motherhood and celelebrity with all the drinking and fu*king she's used too. Enjoy!    Watch:  http://youtube.com/@ill_repute Sources:  Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird http://legendsofthewest.com htt...

In the third installment in our series on Calamity Jane, Sovereign Syre tells Ela Darling about the birth of Deadwood. Initially a settlement of a few storefronts and tents, in a period of a few months the town nestled in the Black Hills attracted close to ten thousand citizens. Far from a bustling metropolis, the town was full of outlaws with murders happening in the streets daily. Leaving town w...

(No. It's not.) It's 1983 and our heroine, an ophthalmologist, is treating a patient with a condition called blepharospasm, a painful neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle spasms and contractions of the eyelid. After administering a neuromodulator to the affected muscles, a procedure she had performed with her patient many times before, her patient was unhappy. Angry, in fact: the d...

In her lifetime Calamity Jane was the most famous woman in the world, and her name still evokes the spirit of the WIld West. She has been a character in countless dime novels, television shows, and feature films, and yet all of them were largely fabricated bearing no resemblence to her actual life. In this series on Calamity Jane, we hope to rectify that. In the following episodes we will profile...

In her lifetime Calamity Jane was the most famous woman in the world, and her name still evokes the spirit of the WIld West. She has been a character in countless dime novels, television shows, and feature films, and yet all of them were largely fabricated bearing no resemblence to her actual life. In this series on Calamity Jane, we hope to rectify that. In the following episodes we will profile...

In the final installment in our series on Hedy Lamarr, Sovereign Syre and Ela Darling discuss Hedy Lamarr's most famous invention, frequency hopping, and how the US government f*cked her in the deal to the tune of 30 billion dollars. How is it possible that the inventor that brought us WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth never saw a dime? Because she happened to be a dime herself, of course.  Sources:  Beauti...