Purity & Danger

Epizode

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  The Dunhamesque 12.07.2026 2h 7min

  Purity & Danger join the long-awaited Lena Dunham renaissance. Impatient and afraid, hungry and heartbroken, Sylvie and Dora reflect upon her prodigious smash-hit Girls in the light of her recent tell-all memoir Famesick. The pitfalls of early fame, confessional writing, twee-on-twee crime and the hipster are all pieces of the puzzle that is the Dunhamesque.
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  The Scapegoat Summit w/ Fiona Duncan 21.06.2026 1h 21min

  This week we bring you a special guest episode… our first. Fiona (Alison) Duncan, celebrated writer and founder of literary social practice Hard to Read, joins us for The Scapegoat Summit: an in-depth exploration of René Girard’s thoughts on mimetic violence, imitative desire and their conservative appeal. Compulsory heterosexuality, Lena Dunham, woke 2.0 and the secret angels of the world cut through anecdotes and reminiscences as we three try to understand how Girard morphed from a prophet of deviated transcendence to the Godfather of the like.
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  Sylvie & Dora 31.05.2026 1h 52min

  What’s in a name? Sylvie and (Isa)dora tell you. Sylvie watches “Sylvie”, a 1973 German TV film about a doomed romance between a cab-driver-cum-sailor and a model, and Dora watches “Isadora, The Biggest Dancer in the World”, Ken Russell’s tribute to the Mother of Modern Dance. Following in the footsteps of their namesakes, Sylvie and Dora skip, twirl and leap through rival manifestos by German filmmakers, a Nietzschean theory of dance, an ashram brought down by a beautiful secretary, and the unjust treatment of aging female eccentrics.P.s. Sorry from the bottom of our hearts for the intermittent mic interference. We still don’t fully understand how to use the mics.
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  X-Rated and Illustrated 04.05.2026 1h 59min

  A lanky provocateur, a pencil, and an Amazonian objet d'art who might snap her creator in half like one. A winning formula unites Robert Crumb’s incendiary cartoons and Namio Harukawa’s monomaniacal smut. Lost in the badlands of X-rated illustration, Sylvie and Dora argue about who is more callipygian, historicise erotica and battle the beautiful fighting girl, denizen of the girlish abyss.
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  Confidential 08.03.2026 1h 58min

  This episode is strictly confidential. Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book meets Peter Thiel’s 2004 essay ‘The Straussian Moment’ at an undisclosed location. Sylvie and Dora pick over a heap of discarded documents. Among the detritus they find the scapegoat, the Antichrist and the Man from O.R.G.Y. All will be revealed in this, our 19th episode.
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  Epiphany 11.01.2026 2h 1min

  Sylvie and Dora confront Epiphany’s Janus face. The festive agitator Lord of Misrule parleys with William Holman Hunt’s sanctimonious painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’. Episode 17 is awash with mock legislature, fallen women and cosmological contrariety.
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  Sixteen 07.12.2025 2h 2min

  A female monarch, a boy writer, a podcast, numerologically united. In Purity & Danger’s sixteenth episode, Thomas Baty, alias Irene Clyde, dares to dream of gender utopia in Beatrice the Sixteenth’s desert dynasty, and a sixteen-year-old John Kennedy Toole begins The Neon Bible, his first work of fiction. Four to the power of two equals Tavi Gevinson’s internet juvenilia, teen pregnancy, an aristocratic third gender and the picaresque year of 2016.
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  Sleep 09.11.2025 2h 3min

  Sylvie and Dora take to bed. They curl up in the sticky embrace of the Great Bed of Ware, a 16th century bedstead from an oversexed Hertfordshire town, and are rudely awakened by the Russian Sleep Experiment, a creepypasta about chemically-induced insomnia in the Soviet Union. Rolling around on the kingsize mattress of sleep history, Sylvie and Dora lie with the biphasic medieval period, 20th century amphetamine-fuelled warfare, and millennial internet folklore.
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  Rodeo Romeo 12.10.2025 2h 2min

  Sylvie and Dora saddle up and take the Purity & Danger outfit West. They journey from Texas, site of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 frontier epic Lonesome Dove, to Hollywood, where the streets are paved with rhinestones and the spangled Nudie Suit was first donned. On the way, they shoot the breeze about all manner of cowboy: homesteading and homosexual, roughhousing and robotic.
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  Birthday Post 10.09.2025 2h 3min

  Sylvie and Dora start a Facebook group, turn up the volume and wait for the guests to arrive. On the eve of Sylvie’s birthday, the girls dig into the birthday cake, symbol of childhood nostalgia, and wash down its bittersweet taste with the adolescent hedonism of Project X, the 2012 mock cinema verité film that prompted a spate of teen hooliganism and generational Pavlovian response to Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness.
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  Anomalistics 10.08.2025 2h 2min

  Sylvie and Dora watch pensively as the study of the damned and the study of the doomed fight for the crumbs of scientific merit. A bridled nail-tail wallaby, the last of its kind, chews on a flake of a substance that looks like beef which fell from the sky moments prior. What, if anything, does the anomalous disclose?
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  Full Metal Hymen 13.07.2025 2h 1min

  Purity & Danger loses its virginity and finds it again. Sylvie and Dora, made to live as hermits in the desert, atone and are permitted to part the thighs of chastity. They are greeted by two glistening objects: the chastity belt, fetishist’s plaything moonlighting as moral insurance for medieval husbands, and the ring, seal of wifehood and girlfriendom.
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  The Twins 15.06.2025 2h 1min

  Twin sets of twins wash up on the shores of Purity & Danger. Sylvie and Dora see quadruple as they introduce the silent June-Alison and Jennifer Gibbons, prodigious child authors unjustly imprisoned at Broadmoor, to the deafening Dora and Leonora Hazard, cockney chorus-girls born from the imagination of 1970s fairytale-spinner Angela Carter. Special thanks go to June-Alison Gibbons, who kindly contributed her own words for this episode’s visualisation.
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  Hollywood Babylon 18.05.2025 1h 57min

  A scandal breaks as two Hollywood veterans are scooped up from the cutting room floor. Sylvie and Dora clutch their pearls at Kenneth Anger’s spurious history of cinema’s Golden Age and Anita Loos’ blonde-bashing memoir of industrious coquettedom, stopping along the way to discuss the loveable scamp, the tactical bob and the ethics of excess.
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  The Giant 20.04.2025 2h 2min

  Donald Barthelme’s incontinent colossal father and Giulio Romano’s tempestuous sons of Gaia both crash to earth in narratives of giant vanquishing. Sylvie and Dora explore giants in their various guises — the bellicose, the libidinous, the grotesque, the innocent and the divine — and defend the honour of each.
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  Intensive Driving Course 16.03.2025 2h 2min

  Slavic Art Deco superstar Tamara de Lempicka and her pioneering automobile-self-portrait collides with Crash, J. G. Ballard’s lurid tale of symphorophiliac entanglement. Sylvie and Dora travel through the crepuscular netherworld of pornography, down the straight line that is the badge of man, towards the future.
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  The Living Doll 23.02.2025 2h 23min

  Oskar Kokoschka’s swan-skin effigy of Austria’s most assiduous heartthrob, Alma Mahler, meets hoity toity foil, Cynthia, a mannequin-socialite brought to life by window-dresser Lester Gaba.
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  The Feral Child 02.02.2025 2h 11min

  Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli suckles at the Capitoline Wolf’s imperial teat. Sylvie and Dora discuss feral children and their symbolic environs.
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  The Forbidden Experiment 19.01.2025 2h 8min

  Nuremberg’s non-verbal wunderkind meets Paul Auster’s monomaniacal sleuth in a warm embrace of developmental abnormality. Sylvie and Dora ask, is language innate?
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  Sloane Danger 31.12.2024 1h 53min

  A style war has broken out in the imaginary sex county! Jilly Cooper’s 'Rutshire Chronicles' and Peter York and Ann Barr’s 'Sloane Ranger Handbook' undress the stylistic arsenal of the British class system.