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Among My Best Podcasts Of 2021 So Far: My Lawyer Cousin’s 'The Wolf Who Cried Women'

It's best described as a sex-positive coming of age documentary, with plenty of laughs along the way.

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I am a podcast junkie. I fill just about every otherwise silent moment with a podcast. Politics, science, occasionally informative humor — my tastes are pretty eclectic as long as I’m entertained and feel like I’m learning at least a little something. You might even find me catching up on some great law-themed podcasts hosted by a few of your favorite Above the Law personalities on a slow Friday afternoon.

Yet, I was skeptical when my cousin Evan Wolf told me he was going to launch a podcast. It certainly wasn’t a problem with the medium, or any trepidation over his storytelling chops. The topic just struck me as potentially gross and dangerous.

As he is a bit older than me, I’ve known Evan my whole life. And let’s just say he’s always been a, well, “romantic” isn’t the right word, but “Lothario” isn’t quite it either. Dude’s had a lot of romantic partners in his day. And he’s not ever been too shy about discussing it, which was more or less what I gathered his podcast would be about from the minimal amount I heard in advance.

I’ve interviewed enough in-house counsel folks to know by now that you don’t want to be labeled as the department of “no.” But hell, I’m a litigator, so my first thought upon hearing this idea was, “Dear God, no.” Not that I’d ever known my cousin to do anything especially troubling. The sanctity of consent to him is about as close as he seems to get to having a religion. Still, a man talking openly about his sexual exploits in the era of #MeToo struck me as begging for a cancellation.

Of course, I had no choice but to trust his judgment (since he wasn’t going to listen to me anyway), and it turns out he actually had some pretty good instincts on this one. I listened to the first episode a few days ago. It’s sort of great, actually.

The podcast is called “The Wolf Who Cried Women,” and it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I won’t expend a whole lot of words describing something you can just go listen to and judge for yourself. Suffice it to say, it was not at all what I feared, and quite a bit more than I expected.

For one thing, it’s not just my cousin rambling off his own stories where he’s the unfailing hero protagonist (he’s self-aware enough to note that the best stories are self-deprecating early in the content). No, this podcast has an ensemble cast, and it’s really the interactions between Evan, Will, Willie, Arianna, and Gordon that give it the spark of life. Willie, a booming-voiced socialist, is technically the host, though each member of the crew chimes in frequently with useful tidbits and interesting stories of their own.

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Though each episode is premised on delving into a specific sexual experience from Evan’s past, it really gets beyond that potentially problematic starting point into something perhaps best described as a sex-positive coming of age documentary, with plenty of laughs along the way. Picture the Netflix show Big Mouth, but I guess as a podcast dealing with real-life events and set in the ’90s, and you’re in the neighborhood.

I sat through the first 30 minutes all prepared to cringe. The moment just never came. They’ll explain why they think there’s space for such a show better than I’m going to. It’s along the lines of countering some of the currently prevailing views out there these days on heterosexual male-female relationships as expressed through the avatar of Ben Shapiro, who they trash repeatedly.

Anyway, if you’re bored, give The Wolf Who Cried Women a listen. I’ll give you the disclaimer that even though my cousin is a trained (albeit nonpracticing) lawyer, it has nothing to do with that, so don’t go there looking for a legal thriller. You also probably want to stay away from this podcast completely if you’re at all offended by sex jokes, sex stories, or anything about sex at all, really. But if you’re up for a weird, quirky, well-produced, and undeniably unique audio journey, buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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