In a podcast landscape dominated by the manosphere, one of the biggest podcasts targeted to women sounds like it could be a children’s television show.

Giggly Squad is hosted by two best friends, fashion influencer Paige DeSorbo and comedian Hannah Berner, who first rose to fame via the Bravo reality show Summer House. In 2020, the pair began doing weekly Instagram Lives and eventually launched the podcast.

Since then, Giggly Squad has become one of the top-ranking shows on Apple Podcasts, with 44 million downloads last year. DeSorbo and Berner just wrapped up a sold-out national tour and are now releasing their first book How to Giggle: A Guide to Taking Life Less Seriously; promotion for the book recently included a guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

In several ways, Giggly Squad feels like an obvious daughter of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. The show largely appeals to Gen Z white women. (Their fan base calls themselves the “Gigglers.”) It also has a similar conceit to the first iteration of Cooper’s pod: Two girlfriends having honest, sometimes frivolous, conversations about dating, sex, mental health, and other aspects of their lives.

It resembles a casual text chain between two best friends. In a recent episode, DeSorbo updated listeners about her UTI while Berner joked about an intense bout of PMS. “I like to let the Gigglers know where we are in our cycles,” Berner said.

Intimacy and kinship between hosts has become an expected feature of women-led podcasting nowadays, the best friend chat its own genre. It makes the audience, too, feel like one of the gang.

“It really just feels like you’re FaceTiming your best friends,” says Alexa Toback, a self-proclaimed Giggler. “You get a relationship that’s so close to them. It’s like a conversation you’re having with your friends every week.”

The affinity fans feel speaks not only to the increasingly parasocial role that podcasts have taken in our lives post-pandemic, but the way female friendship has become a commercial enterprise.

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