(00:00:09):
We live in a world that focuses more on the aftermath of abuse than the abuse itself.

(00:00:13):
And I am over it.

(00:00:16):
After escaping my physically abusive,

(00:00:17):
narcissistic ex-husband,

(00:00:19):
I was thrust into the murky,

(00:00:20):
exhausting battle of both the family court and criminal justice systems.

(00:00:25):
While my custody fight isn't over, I can at least say the rest of the legal chaos is.

(00:00:30):
But here's the thing.

(00:00:32):
My biggest resentment isn't even toward my ex, who I now see for what he is, a pitiful incel.

(00:00:37):
Instead,

(00:00:38):
it's directed at the people in power who enabled him,

(00:00:41):
the professionals who were too lazy,

(00:00:42):
too indifferent,

(00:00:43):
or simply underpaid to care.

(00:00:46):
I'm a 33-year-old single mother who left my ex after he violently strangled me in

(00:00:50):
front of our two-year-old daughter.

(00:00:52):
And yet,

(00:00:53):
I had to spend years proving that I wasn't just a bitter baby mama or a difficult

(00:00:57):
parent.

(00:00:58):
I had to fight over and over to be heard, to be believed, and to be seen.

(00:01:03):
As a former pediatric behavioral health nurse, I did everything right.

(00:01:07):
I worked from home to provide for my daughter.

(00:01:09):
I went back to school to build a better future.

(00:01:11):
I started a side hustle to gain financial independence.

(00:01:15):
Meanwhile,

(00:01:15):
my ex,

(00:01:17):
a 46-year-old man with a DUI,

(00:01:18):
a 302 hold,

(00:01:20):
a lawsuit from his own brother over a drunk driving accident and multiple stents in

(00:01:24):
rehab,

(00:01:25):
was given the benefit at every turn.

(00:01:28):
Therapist lied.

(00:01:29):
Visitation supervisors painted him as father of the year while my three-year-old

(00:01:33):
exhibited severe anxiety and panic attacks after visits.

(00:01:36):
I was bribed to drop charges, threatened in silence by the district attorney's office.

(00:01:42):
Even my victim impact statement was cut short.

(00:01:45):
This experience has changed me to my core,

(00:01:47):
but I now see that as a blessing because here's what I know.

(00:01:50):
I am free.

(00:01:51):
I am divorced.

(00:01:53):
And with the way this country is failing women, that is a gift.

(00:01:57):
Toxic masculinity is destroying the world, but I have hope.

(00:02:01):
I see a generation of mothers who are exhausted from carrying the weight of both

(00:02:04):
parents,

(00:02:05):
raising daughters who won't tolerate weaponized incompetence,

(00:02:08):
and sons who will grow up emotionally intelligent.

(00:02:10):
Change is coming.

(00:02:13):
Hi, I'm Zan Balines, and this is the Liberating Motherhood Podcast.

(00:02:18):
As always,

(00:02:18):
I'd like to ask you to help support this podcast by sharing it on social media,

(00:02:23):
by leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform,

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by heart reacting and on Substack, and by leaving comments or otherwise engaging.

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As many of you know,

(00:02:31):
social media algorithms are trying to drive away feminist and leftist creators.

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The most effective way to push back is to give the algorithm what it wants, engagement.

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You can also sign up to become a paid subscriber and get at least one bonus podcast

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These actions to promote the podcast really do help,

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and your support and promotion helps me keep doing it.

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I will never accept advertiser money or allow this work to be censored,

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so I'm dependent solely on you,

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my listeners.

(00:03:01):
Thanks for being here.

(00:03:04):
Our opening vignette emphasizes how patriarchy always focuses on the aftermath of

(00:03:09):
abuse rather than the abuse itself.

(00:03:11):
And that's exactly what this podcast today is about.

(00:03:15):
Women's anger,

(00:03:16):
women's resilience,

(00:03:17):
how patriarchy weaponizes both,

(00:03:19):
but how we can turn the tables.

(00:03:21):
My guest today is Soraya Shinali.

(00:03:24):
She is an award-winning author and activist who writes on topics related to gender

(00:03:28):
norms,

(00:03:29):
inclusivity,

(00:03:30):
social justice,

(00:03:30):
free speech,

(00:03:31):
sexualized violence,

(00:03:32):
and technology.

(00:03:34):
She is the director and co-founder of Women's Media Center Speech Project.

(00:03:38):
She is also the author of Rage Becomes Her,

(00:03:40):
The Power of Women's Anger,

(00:03:42):
The Resilience Myth,

(00:03:43):
and the forthcoming All We Want is Everything,

(00:03:45):
available November 11th.

(00:03:47):
You can find her articles in numerous publications and anthologies,

(00:03:51):
in talks and media appearances,

(00:03:53):
and just about anywhere

(00:03:54):
anyone is discussing gender.

(00:03:56):
Saraya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

(00:03:59):
Oh, my pleasure.

(00:04:00):
Thank you so much for inviting me.

(00:04:02):
I'm thrilled to have you here.

(00:04:03):
I feel like you have guided my consciousness in so many ways for so many years that

(00:04:11):
it's just lovely to finally talk to you.

(00:04:13):
Well, thank you.

(00:04:15):
That's an honor.

(00:04:18):
So I want to get started by talking about women's anger because

(00:04:24):
I'm an angry person.

(00:04:26):
And I think women are often reluctant to say that because we tend to confuse being

(00:04:31):
angry with being like unhappy or mean or bad.

(00:04:37):
But I really endorse this old liberation theology quote,

(00:04:40):
which tells us that hope has two beautiful daughters.

(00:04:43):
Their names are anger and courage,

(00:04:46):
anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

(00:04:50):
And to me, that really sums up a lot of your work.

(00:04:54):
I first encountered you, I think, as a lot of people did through Rage Becomes Her.

(00:04:58):
which was a revelation to me.

(00:05:00):
I was reading a lot about women's anger at the time.

(00:05:04):
And most of what I read was saying,

(00:05:07):
well,

(00:05:07):
women aren't really that angry or let's stop calling women angry.

(00:05:11):
That's mean and sexist.

(00:05:14):
But you were willing to claim it and allow women to own our anger.

(00:05:18):
So can you talk to me about how that book came to be?

(00:05:22):
Sure.

(00:05:24):
I came up with the idea of the book

(00:05:28):
right after the 2016 election,

(00:05:31):
because it was really notable to me the role that anger played in that election,

(00:05:37):
whose anger had political legitimacy,

(00:05:40):
whose anger was trivialized.

(00:05:44):
Even in our candidates, you could really see Bernie Sanders and

(00:05:48):
Donald Trump leverage populist anger to their benefit.

(00:05:52):
They could appear anger.

(00:05:53):
They could look red in the face.

(00:05:56):
They could express themselves with a wide range of kind of variations on the theme

(00:06:04):
of people's outrage and anger.

(00:06:06):
But

(00:06:07):
Hillary Clinton couldn't do that.

(00:06:09):
And some of that was just because she,

(00:06:14):
I think,

(00:06:16):
was probably aware as all women are of what a fine line you walk on when you

(00:06:22):
express anger as a woman.

(00:06:25):
If you're a white woman, you're much more likely to be called crazy, unhinged.

(00:06:31):
If you're a black woman,

(00:06:32):
you're just sort of angry by default,

(00:06:34):
hostile and possibly threatening and criminalized.

(00:06:37):
If you're an Asian woman, your anger is kind of.

(00:06:41):
supposed to be more passive and you're thought of as sad.

(00:06:46):
If you're Hispanic or sort of another brown woman, you're more likely to be sexualized.

(00:06:52):
But regardless, the point is that your anger is just not taken seriously.

(00:06:57):
And so I thought,

(00:06:58):
well,

(00:07:00):
what if I used anger to look at the position of women in society and the way that

(00:07:06):
gender works from the personal,

(00:07:10):
interpersonal,

(00:07:11):
professional to political?

(00:07:12):
And that's sort of the format of the book.

(00:07:17):
Well, it's amazing.

(00:07:18):
And I love it.

(00:07:19):
One thing that I think your book helped me notice a lot more is that

(00:07:24):
When a man is angry, we assume not only that he has a reason, but that he has a good reason.

(00:07:29):
And I feel like we often see this in violence against women,

(00:07:35):
where it's like,

(00:07:36):
well,

(00:07:36):
if he hit you,

(00:07:37):
what did you do to push him to that breaking point?

(00:07:41):
And then if she is angry about what he's done to her,

(00:07:44):
that must be evidence that,

(00:07:45):
well,

(00:07:45):
she must have been angry at him and she was so mean and abusive.

(00:07:50):
I guess...

(00:07:52):
It's so weird to me that we see women as like angry and unhinged and their anger as

(00:07:57):
unjustified when men are inflicting so much on women.

(00:08:03):
How is patriarchy playing this trick?

(00:08:06):
Like, why is that still so effective?

(00:08:07):
Well,

(00:08:09):
I mean,

(00:08:09):
I think that anger is a good example of the way we gender emotion and we dole it

(00:08:17):
out in childhood socialization.

(00:08:22):
femininity becomes associated with,

(00:08:27):
you know,

(00:08:27):
the soft emotions,

(00:08:29):
the empathy,

(00:08:30):
the fear,

(00:08:31):
anxiety,

(00:08:33):
care for others.

(00:08:35):
And masculinity is associated pretty quickly in children with anger,

(00:08:41):
first and foremost,

(00:08:42):
with dominant speech,

(00:08:44):
with the rejection of those feminine emotions and qualities,

(00:08:49):
empathy,

(00:08:50):
anxiety, fear, you know, that we just separate those.

(00:08:54):
And it really doesn't serve anybody well because we all have these emotions.

(00:08:59):
And yet,

(00:09:01):
because we learn to associate anger with men as a masculine,

(00:09:07):
not just a masculine trait,

(00:09:10):
but a masculine virtue,

(00:09:11):
it then becomes tied to male leadership,

(00:09:15):
male authority,

(00:09:16):
male head of household status.

(00:09:18):
And when women express anger,

(00:09:22):
it's either minimized or rejected because it feels so transgressive in terms of

(00:09:27):
gender and also in terms of race,

(00:09:30):
right?

(00:09:31):
It compounds for women who are not white in various ways.

(00:09:36):
And so I think we can't overstate the degree to which cultural socialization

(00:09:44):
really imprints us with these ideas and how long the tale of these ideas are.

(00:09:48):
I mean,

(00:09:49):
I think one of the most interesting studies I saw was it sort of took the research

(00:09:55):
that really shows how early children have these associations.

(00:10:00):
And it looked at adults and how stubborn the associations might be.

(00:10:06):
And they didn't even use episodes involving anger.

(00:10:10):
They asked men and women to throw a ball

(00:10:14):
and to throw the ball with certain emotions in mind.

(00:10:20):
It was really interestingly constructed.

(00:10:22):
And what they found was that even in adulthood,

(00:10:27):
people would look at an angry man and say,

(00:10:29):
yes,

(00:10:29):
he's angry,

(00:10:30):
but they would look at an angry woman and they'd say,

(00:10:33):
she's sad.

(00:10:35):
And in this experiment,

(00:10:36):
even though women were also throwing the ball in an angry manner,

(00:10:41):
thought they were expressing anger,

(00:10:42):
all of these things,

(00:10:45):
the observers just couldn't put the words angry and women together with the same

(00:10:53):
confidence and regularity.

(00:10:55):
That's wild.

(00:10:56):
It's like anger is anathema to femininity.

(00:11:01):
It reminds me of a study that the

(00:11:04):
researcher Rosalind Barnett has written a lot about where they take boy infants and

(00:11:10):
girl infants and they wrap them up in a gender typical color um they're either blue

(00:11:17):
or pink and then they ask people you know how is the baby feeling and if the baby

(00:11:24):
is expressing fear they can recognize it when they think the baby is a girl but

(00:11:27):
when it's a boy they say that the baby is angry and the baby's aggressive and the

(00:11:31):
baby's tough and it takes them much longer to say oh like

(00:11:35):
someone should do something to help that baby.

(00:11:37):
So it, it just begins, you know, I mean, really before birth.

(00:11:44):
It does begin before birth.

(00:11:45):
I mean,

(00:11:46):
this is the thing about like gender reveal parties,

(00:11:48):
you know,

(00:11:49):
you,

(00:11:50):
I see those and all I see is,

(00:11:52):
is harm.

(00:11:55):
Yes.

(00:11:57):
Children.

(00:11:57):
Right.

(00:11:58):
And I know it's, it's lots of fun for people and it's a cultural habit, but,

(00:12:05):
lots of things fall into that category that we've stopped doing.

(00:12:09):
But yeah, that study, I think it's a good study and it's repeated over and over and over again.

(00:12:15):
By the time children are like eight years old,

(00:12:19):
girls are already being told to put their anger aside,

(00:12:23):
that it's shameful,

(00:12:24):
that it's harmful,

(00:12:25):
that it'll break their relationships,

(00:12:26):
that they should use their nice voices,

(00:12:28):
that they should put others first.

(00:12:29):
I mean, there are all of these expectations that come with femininity.

(00:12:32):
And

(00:12:34):
One of the first questions that I ask in that book is what happens when you sever

(00:12:39):
this critical emotion?

(00:12:40):
It's the emotion of warning.

(00:12:42):
It's the emotion of signal.

(00:12:43):
It's the emotion that tells you something's wrong and that you need to

(00:12:46):
to change things or seek help, we sever it from femininity, right?

(00:12:50):
We actually take away the emotion of justice and we say, it's really not for you.

(00:12:57):
And then we over-index for boys while simultaneously stripping them of their very

(00:13:05):
human needs to be vulnerable,

(00:13:08):
to be soft,

(00:13:09):
to feel fear,

(00:13:11):
to express their anxiety.

(00:13:12):
You know, boys learn very early to just shut that down.

(00:13:15):
Yeah.

(00:13:16):
Yeah.

(00:13:16):
And well,

(00:13:17):
it's funny that you mentioned that because literally the next question on my list

(00:13:20):
is about what happens to women and girls when they can't express anger.

(00:13:24):
The thing that I see a lot in my work and that I'm sure you see even exponentially

(00:13:29):
more in yours is men and some women coming along and saying,

(00:13:33):
well,

(00:13:33):
you sure sound angry.

(00:13:34):
You sure sound bitter.

(00:13:36):
Yeah.

(00:13:36):
And it's a form of shaming that's designed to silence women.

(00:13:41):
But I think it's really effective because what I see a lot of women saying in

(00:13:44):
response to that is,

(00:13:45):
oh,

(00:13:45):
no,

(00:13:45):
no,

(00:13:46):
no,

(00:13:46):
I'm not angry.

(00:13:46):
Right.

(00:13:48):
Yeah, we do that and we learn to minimize.

(00:13:53):
It's not that bad.

(00:13:54):
I'm just a little frustrated.

(00:13:57):
It's nothing.

(00:14:00):
We have all kinds of words that replace the word angry.

(00:14:03):
And I've just met so many women for whom saying I'm really angry is

(00:14:10):
is very difficult so that when they can say it,

(00:14:13):
it's really an accomplishment,

(00:14:14):
which is remarkable,

(00:14:15):
right?

(00:14:16):
Like we go through our lives trying not to say this very important thing.

(00:14:21):
And I think,

(00:14:23):
you know,

(00:14:23):
and I go into this in a great deal of depth because it's very relevant to

(00:14:27):
heterosexual relationships,

(00:14:30):
which are still the majority of family relationships.

(00:14:35):
Structures right,

(00:14:37):
but men and heterosexual relationships don't like women who are angry they don't

(00:14:42):
like anger in their spouses they think it's selfish and.

(00:14:47):
That's really terrible because,

(00:14:49):
in fact,

(00:14:50):
when someone is angry and they trust another person to say,

(00:14:53):
I'm angry,

(00:14:55):
it's because they have the expectation of care or reciprocity that the person will

(00:14:59):
maybe listen and do something to help.

(00:15:03):
And I think for a lot of women,

(00:15:05):
particularly straight women in relationships,

(00:15:08):
they come to the awareness that

(00:15:12):
the care they provide is not being reciprocated and that it will be withheld.

(00:15:16):
And that might be in their natal families or in their families that they've formed themselves.

(00:15:23):
But, you know, it's a big risk.

(00:15:25):
What happens if I learn this person doesn't care about me, then what do I do?

(00:15:31):
Yeah.

(00:15:31):
So it's,

(00:15:32):
it's funny that you mentioned that because I bring my husband on my podcast a lot

(00:15:37):
because he's like

(00:15:38):
actually a feminist man and like a decent partner.

(00:15:41):
And I think there's value in women seeing that.

(00:15:43):
And there was a podcast episode recently.

(00:15:45):
I can't even remember what we were talking about, something that had happened, not between us.

(00:15:51):
And I said something like, yeah, I was just, I was so angry about that.

(00:15:56):
And he was like, yeah, you really were.

(00:15:57):
And, you know, then we flitted onto the next thing.

(00:16:01):
And then when I started getting comments, I got multiple comments from listeners who,

(00:16:07):
who said, oh, when you said I was so angry, I just held my breath and waited for him.

(00:16:11):
That's what he would say.

(00:16:13):
Yeah, waited for him to get upset.

(00:16:15):
And it was especially interesting because,

(00:16:18):
like,

(00:16:18):
these are listeners who have been listening to me for years and who have listened

(00:16:21):
to my husband and who know that he's not that kind of person.

(00:16:25):
But even so,

(00:16:26):
they were expecting that my anger would be so unpalatable that I guess he would

(00:16:30):
just fly off the handle immediately and,

(00:16:32):
like,

(00:16:33):
storm off the podcast.

(00:16:34):
Mm-hmm.

(00:16:36):
I think that's very common.

(00:16:37):
You know, I think that's why intergenerationally women teach girls

(00:16:43):
how to work around their anger.

(00:16:45):
And, you know, we have this dominant notion of people either having anger in or putting it out.

(00:16:52):
And that putting it out is often depicted and perceived as a kind of explosive rage.

(00:17:00):
So if you,

(00:17:01):
when I was writing this book,

(00:17:02):
if you Googled anger management,

(00:17:04):
you just got pictures of white guys screaming at computers or punching walls.

(00:17:08):
That was the majority of images of anger management.

(00:17:12):
And yet what girls and women are taught is anger management that is diffuse in all

(00:17:19):
of their expressions,

(00:17:20):
their bodies,

(00:17:21):
their speech,

(00:17:22):
their way of managing relations.

(00:17:24):
They're totally always managing anger.

(00:17:26):
And it's not that image of breaking things.

(00:17:29):
And so

(00:17:30):
men actually do express,

(00:17:32):
they either hold their anger in or they express it,

(00:17:35):
they get it out in a variety of ways.

(00:17:38):
But what women do is different because what women do is they find ways to express

(00:17:44):
their anger outside of their key relationships.

(00:17:48):
So it doesn't affect those key relationships.

(00:17:51):
But then at the same time,

(00:17:53):
it's also affecting them negatively because they're not getting what they need out

(00:17:57):
of those relationships.

(00:17:59):
Yeah, yeah.

(00:18:01):
All right.

(00:18:01):
So speaking of anger,

(00:18:03):
one of the things that has just really pissed me off 24-7 since I became a mother

(00:18:09):
is this like credibility gap that you talk about.

(00:18:13):
Right.

(00:18:14):
I've written about this a lot.

(00:18:15):
And every time I do, I just spend like a week really in a rage about it.

(00:18:19):
You know, I wrote recently about how we pretend that mothers don't work.

(00:18:23):
Like when we work for pay,

(00:18:24):
patriarchy pretends that either those jobs don't exist or that they're not

(00:18:27):
important.

(00:18:29):
when we don't work for pay and we're full-time mothers and that's not work either.

(00:18:32):
So like, no matter what we do, it's framed as this like valueless leisure.

(00:18:37):
You know,

(00:18:38):
we also see this thing where mothers are framed as sort of incompetent buffoons and

(00:18:44):
the very nature of a mother wanting something for her child means it's probably

(00:18:48):
bad.

(00:18:49):
And I think for a while,

(00:18:51):
because the experience of motherhood and a patriarchy is just so jarring,

(00:18:56):
I attributed this to viewing mothers as incompetent.

(00:19:01):
But I've come to believe it's really just another way of viewing women as incompetent.

(00:19:05):
And of course, patriarchy like weaponizes whatever it can.

(00:19:09):
So talk to me about this credibility gap.

(00:19:12):
Like what research are you seeing on it?

(00:19:15):
How does it work?

(00:19:16):
And is there anything we can do about it aside from just like burning everything to the ground?

(00:19:22):
You know, I think that

(00:19:24):
regardless of the context,

(00:19:26):
regardless if it's mothers asking for something or women talking about rape or a

(00:19:31):
woman fighting for custody in a court,

(00:19:35):
I think it's really important to note that the consistent principle has nothing to

(00:19:40):
do with the substance of what is being said,

(00:19:42):
but with the status of the person saying it.

(00:19:46):
And because men have more status in society, they are considered more credible, particularly

(00:19:53):
when issues are complex,

(00:19:56):
when they're technical,

(00:19:58):
or when they are really central to the structure of patriarchy and white supremacy

(00:20:06):
themselves.

(00:20:07):
So if you go back, for example, to a courtroom with child custody cases, right?

(00:20:17):
Women who make claims of any kind of abuse

(00:20:20):
are more likely not to be believed than to be believed.

(00:20:23):
So less than half of mothers,

(00:20:25):
for example,

(00:20:26):
who claim abuse are less likely to be believed in a courtroom.

(00:20:32):
If they additionally claim child abuse, it's even more likely that they're disbelieved.

(00:20:40):
And so roughly,

(00:20:42):
I think the research shows that when that is the case,

(00:20:46):
when there is a claim of physical abuse,

(00:20:49):
and child abuse on top of it,

(00:20:52):
the people listening are only going to accept those claims roughly 15% of the time.

(00:20:59):
So when a woman reports a father's abuse and thinks that he shouldn't have custody,

(00:21:06):
even if the child abuse is proven,

(00:21:09):
the abuser 20% of the time still gets

(00:21:13):
access to the child and gets custody.

(00:21:15):
And the reason I use these examples is because of something that I just wrote about

(00:21:21):
in Substack,

(00:21:22):
which was a law called in Great Britain,

(00:21:25):
it was a law,

(00:21:26):
a crime that was known as petty treason.

(00:21:28):
And petty treason was a crime committed by subordinates against their superiors.

(00:21:34):
And so you might think rightfully that that included an enslaved person who killed a slaver.

(00:21:41):
But in fact,

(00:21:42):
it was primarily used against women who killed husbands,

(00:21:47):
even when it was clearly in self-defense.

(00:21:49):
And the reason it was considered more serious than murder and a form of treason is

(00:21:55):
because a woman killing a man in a family,

(00:21:59):
A man she was supposed to love was seen as not just committing a crime,

(00:22:04):
but also treason against divine,

(00:22:06):
the divine order of things.

(00:22:09):
That was eventually eliminated,

(00:22:11):
but you still see the legacy of those ideas that love should transcend everything,

(00:22:16):
that the loyalty should be to the family unit and to the man in the way that

(00:22:23):
punishment is doled out.

(00:22:25):
So a man who kills a partner,

(00:22:28):
for example,

(00:22:30):
he's much more likely to use a crime of passion defense,

(00:22:33):
which then turns the crime into manslaughter instead of murder,

(00:22:39):
and is even by some people considered chivalrous because his honor was offended,

(00:22:44):
whereas women can't use crime of passion defense as often,

(00:22:48):
are more likely to be charged with murder and are also denied the right to stand your ground.

(00:22:53):
And so what ends up happening is they're charged with more serious crimes and then

(00:22:58):
they end up with sentences that are on average three times longer than a man's

(00:23:02):
sentence.

(00:23:03):
So even though we don't call it petty treason in the law,

(00:23:06):
there are all of these cultural norms and biases and beliefs that contribute to

(00:23:11):
similar outcomes.

(00:23:13):
And a lot of that comes down to

(00:23:15):
Not just the bias, but the credibility issues.

(00:23:18):
Who's going to be believed?

(00:23:20):
And unfortunately, it's just a function of powerlessness that we're believed less.

(00:23:27):
So this petty treason thing has me thinking about something.

(00:23:31):
So my husband is a civil rights litigator,

(00:23:34):
so he spends a lot of time researching historical laws because that's kind of like

(00:23:38):
how you litigate those cases.

(00:23:41):
And he recently told me of the most horrific discovery he made,

(00:23:45):
which is that in Georgia,

(00:23:47):
where we live for something like 40 years in the 20th century,

(00:23:52):
If you caught your wife,

(00:23:54):
only your wife,

(00:23:56):
cheating,

(00:23:56):
it was legal to kill the person that she was cheating with in defense of the

(00:24:03):
marriage.

(00:24:03):
And the thing that ultimately caused this law to be overturned was someone argued,

(00:24:09):
well,

(00:24:10):
I should also be able to kill my wife.

(00:24:13):
And the court said, well, if you're killing her, that's not in defense of the marriage.

(00:24:18):
And I just, like...

(00:24:20):
That seems very related,

(00:24:22):
this idea of upholding the family at all costs,

(00:24:25):
even to the point where you were allowed to murder someone.

(00:24:28):
I mean, I think, too, the thing I think, I think a lot of Americans don't appreciate how...

(00:24:38):
relatively recent coverture in the United States was that I write the idea that the

(00:24:43):
wife essentially the property of the husband and had no legal rights of her own and

(00:24:48):
that he was her legal representative which unfortunately is you know kind of

(00:24:54):
We're surging in the news right now because people are coming to understand that

(00:24:59):
there are active political agitators calling for women not to have the vote and for

(00:25:06):
men to have the right to vote on their behalf as heads of households.

(00:25:11):
And these are all related, right?

(00:25:12):
It's a history that's not that far in the past and that is being clung to by white

(00:25:19):
supremacist patriarchs.

(00:25:21):
Yeah, yeah, it's just wild.

(00:25:24):
I want to emphasize something you said a few paragraphs or so ago.

(00:25:29):
You were talking about how when we disbelieve women,

(00:25:33):
it's not about the substance of what they're saying.

(00:25:36):
And I just feel like that needs to be highlighted and put in bold and put on billboards.

(00:25:41):
Because what I see so often,

(00:25:44):
and what I see especially when women seek professional help for the problems in

(00:25:48):
their relationships,

(00:25:50):
is they're told to just communicate more,

(00:25:52):
better,

(00:25:52):
and differently.

(00:25:53):
Yeah.

(00:25:54):
you know, to try harder, to have more sex with him.

(00:25:57):
You know, it's like we tell women, well, have you tried trying?

(00:26:00):
Because we all know that women just don't try very hard.

(00:26:03):
And,

(00:26:04):
you know,

(00:26:04):
then they'll eventually find my work and they'll say,

(00:26:06):
but,

(00:26:07):
you know,

(00:26:07):
maybe I do need to try harder.

(00:26:10):
And it's,

(00:26:11):
there's no amount of trying that's going to fix it because it's a political

(00:26:15):
problem,

(00:26:15):
not an individual failing.

(00:26:17):
Mm-hmm.

(00:26:19):
Yeah,

(00:26:20):
I mean,

(00:26:20):
I think,

(00:26:21):
you know,

(00:26:21):
there are certain instances where women might be believed more,

(00:26:27):
right?

(00:26:29):
But overwhelmingly studies show that even if people say they will believe women,

(00:26:37):
They don't.

(00:26:39):
They doubt.

(00:26:40):
They back away in the face of a man saying something differently.

(00:26:46):
And the credibility gap is also ultimately an authority gap.

(00:26:51):
Who do we trust to have the expertise and the knowledge?

(00:26:55):
And frankly,

(00:26:56):
and I've just written a lot about this in my upcoming book,

(00:26:59):
which is about male supremacy.

(00:27:02):
What nobody really wants to say is that a lot of people,

(00:27:07):
And apparently most men really just think they're smarter.

(00:27:12):
Men are just smarter, you know, and nobody likes hearing it that way.

(00:27:17):
But that is what it means when parents,

(00:27:20):
as they do,

(00:27:21):
overwhelmingly associate the idea of intelligence,

(00:27:24):
genius and brilliance with boys,

(00:27:27):
with their own boys and then with boys and men more broadly.

(00:27:30):
Right.

(00:27:31):
And we see it in the way they talk to children and the way they establish

(00:27:36):
priorities and what they teach them.

(00:27:38):
And girls and boys learn from that.

(00:27:41):
So that by the age of six,

(00:27:43):
I've heard the statistic used all the time,

(00:27:45):
but by the age of six,

(00:27:46):
children,

(00:27:47):
but mostly girls,

(00:27:49):
no longer associate the capacity for genius with femininity or women.

(00:27:54):
And then that filters through to inform things like credibility and authority.

(00:27:59):
Yeah.

(00:28:00):
Yeah.

(00:28:00):
I mean, I definitely see it as a parent of kids, how

(00:28:04):
All of boys' behavior that is in any way inconvenient is framed as a sign of their

(00:28:10):
greatness and genius.

(00:28:12):
And all of girls' inconvenient behavior as well.

(00:28:14):
She needs to learn to control her emotions and we need her to not be so annoying, essentially.

(00:28:20):
And I think then we grew up as women feeling like, well, we're just annoying.

(00:28:25):
Yeah.

(00:28:25):
Yeah.

(00:28:26):
Well, I mean, I think it's funny that you say that.

(00:28:31):
I hate to keep referring to this, but I did just write about this.

(00:28:35):
I wrote an argument in favor of pettiness.

(00:28:37):
And pettiness is really just mainly associated with the annoying behaviors of women

(00:28:43):
who are demanding something.

(00:28:46):
And so calling a woman petty is

(00:28:50):
is another way to minimize her justifiable anger or her justifiable concerns about

(00:28:56):
fairness or her exhaustion or whatever it may be that she's trying to raise

(00:29:02):
awareness about.

(00:29:05):
It's just one of those words that gets used to minimize.

(00:29:11):
Yeah, so I actually read that piece like right before I got on our meeting.

(00:29:16):
And it was it was fresh in my mind and I was sort of like cheering as I read it and

(00:29:22):
very quickly trying to incorporate elements of it into my notes.

(00:29:26):
And I think it was so helpful to me personally because.

(00:29:32):
You know,

(00:29:32):
kind of like all of us,

(00:29:34):
my work is about a lot of things,

(00:29:36):
but also like most of us,

(00:29:38):
it gets framed as kind of being about one thing.

(00:29:40):
Right.

(00:29:42):
And people frame my work as being about household labor inequality, which is like fine.

(00:29:46):
That's a huge issue because it's stealing women's lives and futures and jobs and all of that.

(00:29:50):
Right.

(00:29:52):
But so people will frame my work that way.

(00:29:55):
And then they will go one step further and say,

(00:29:57):
well,

(00:29:57):
you know,

(00:29:57):
this is really just an issue for,

(00:29:58):
you know,

(00:29:59):
privileged women who don't have to worry about anything else.

(00:30:01):
It's just a petty concern.

(00:30:03):
You know, it's the butt of jokes and comics.

(00:30:05):
And it's like,

(00:30:06):
wait,

(00:30:07):
but if we take seriously the notion that women are actual humans who have actual

(00:30:12):
time that matters,

(00:30:14):
then stealing their time is stealing their lives.

(00:30:17):
And those lives matter.

(00:30:18):
This is not a petty thing.

(00:30:21):
Right.

(00:30:22):
I mean, it's not.

(00:30:22):
And I think that,

(00:30:23):
again,

(00:30:24):
it's this association of femininity and feminine expression with smallness,

(00:30:32):
with relative weakness,

(00:30:34):
with,

(00:30:35):
in the most material sense,

(00:30:37):
lack of status.

(00:30:39):
Yeah.

(00:30:40):
And I,

(00:30:41):
you know,

(00:30:42):
right around the 2024 election in the United States,

(00:30:47):
I started to get messages almost exclusively from men.

(00:30:51):
that were like,

(00:30:52):
we really need you to use your platform to focus on things that really matter for

(00:30:56):
the next couple of months.

(00:30:58):
Can you please talk about this thing or that thing?

(00:31:01):
Just cool it on the women misogyny thing.

(00:31:04):
And it's like, well, but we're half the population.

(00:31:07):
How is that a small thing?

(00:31:09):
Yeah, this is a big deal.

(00:31:11):
I mean,

(00:31:11):
I've been seeing so many conversations about why center men,

(00:31:14):
why center men,

(00:31:16):
you know,

(00:31:16):
let's talk about it.

(00:31:17):
Because

(00:31:18):
I think the urge is,

(00:31:20):
as you just described,

(00:31:22):
to pretend the inequality isn't relevant and that,

(00:31:26):
you know,

(00:31:27):
people's feelings should take precedence over the political realities that the

(00:31:33):
feelings are based on.

(00:31:36):
Yes.

(00:31:37):
Yes.

(00:31:38):
And that's really like what it is, is it's centering men's feelings over.

(00:31:42):
Right.

(00:31:43):
The political,

(00:31:44):
and it's pretending that political issues are really just like personal individual

(00:31:48):
weaknesses or failings or communication issues or whatever.

(00:31:52):
Yeah, I'm really interested too in this.

(00:31:58):
I did a lot of, I sort of did a deep dive into this issue of Gen Z dating.

(00:32:05):
And it's really interesting to me.

(00:32:09):
So there's a huge...

(00:32:12):
about male loneliness and the dating crisis and marriage declining and not enough babies.

(00:32:18):
All of these to me are dimensions of the same problem, which ultimately I think

(00:32:24):
can usually be tied to a societal and particularly men's discomfort with gender

(00:32:31):
equality,

(00:32:31):
right?

(00:32:32):
And women are just not having it anymore.

(00:32:35):
And they have just enough money and independence to say,

(00:32:38):
no,

(00:32:39):
I don't want to do it this way anymore.

(00:32:41):
And that's just throwing people into disarray.

(00:32:44):
But I read a lot of reasons why, you know, men are sort of disoriented and not dating.

(00:32:53):
And one of the

(00:32:56):
very common complaints is this idea that,

(00:32:59):
well,

(00:33:00):
my parents did it,

(00:33:01):
they had political differences,

(00:33:03):
and my mother was always more liberal,

(00:33:05):
my father more conservative,

(00:33:07):
and we shouldn't let politics enter our private lives.

(00:33:11):
And they have no awareness of the fact that that was a political decision.

(00:33:19):
right?

(00:33:20):
That even that political mismatch, maybe it wasn't that it was being ignored.

(00:33:27):
Maybe it was that those women didn't have the wherewithal to express themselves or

(00:33:33):
to say,

(00:33:34):
I don't want to live this way and get into bed with this person,

(00:33:38):
which is what younger women today can do.

(00:33:41):
I think that's really interesting, especially because I see a lot of women who are

(00:33:48):
So I'm a millennial who are my generation and maybe one generation older,

(00:33:53):
perhaps a half generation older,

(00:33:55):
who have had a great awakening and they've become activists and they're so

(00:34:00):
thoughtful and so brilliant.

(00:34:03):
And then they have these worthless right wing husbands.

(00:34:06):
And I see a lot of shaming of these women for being with these men by people who

(00:34:11):
don't really understand the reality of what it's like to leave such a man.

(00:34:14):
Right.

(00:34:17):
Yeah.

(00:34:17):
I mean, it's hard.

(00:34:18):
That's the thing.

(00:34:19):
And what's happening now is young women are saying,

(00:34:21):
I'm not even going to start a life with this person.

(00:34:23):
I've seen what actually happened to my mother.

(00:34:27):
Yeah.

(00:34:27):
And that's so important because like, why, why would you want to start a life with that?

(00:34:31):
You know,

(00:34:31):
someone who politically believes that you're not a person is certainly not going to

(00:34:34):
treat you as a person personally.

(00:34:37):
yeah it's very interesting it's very interesting to me that that's so hard so hard

(00:34:41):
you know and if regardless of the issue you look at it you know there's this real

(00:34:47):
political divide in in gen z millennials too but more in gen z and the

(00:34:52):
anti-feminism in

(00:34:55):
Gen Z and Gen Alpha is really very pronounced and very rapid.

(00:35:01):
And we can understand why that might be, but it is really kind of sad.

(00:35:09):
Yeah, it's really scary.

(00:35:11):
The backlash with these coming generations is alarming,

(00:35:14):
but I try to view backlash as a sign that the bad guys are scared.

(00:35:21):
Yes, I agree.

(00:35:23):
I agree with you.

(00:35:24):
Like the more intense the backlash, the more powerful I think we have the possibility to become.

(00:35:30):
So I want to talk to you a little bit about the younger generations,

(00:35:34):
because the resilience myth changed a lot for me about how I think about young

(00:35:41):
people,

(00:35:41):
how I think about parenting,

(00:35:43):
how I think about trauma.

(00:35:45):
So

(00:35:46):
Thank you for that.

(00:35:46):
Thank you for reading it.

(00:35:49):
And I would kind of,

(00:35:50):
and you can jump in and correct me,

(00:35:52):
but how I sort of received the message was that we need to reframe resilience as

(00:35:59):
the ability to learn from experience rather than the ability to behave in a very

(00:36:04):
specific stereotyped way.

(00:36:06):
I have...

(00:36:08):
I've kind of become an anti resilience zealot in the last couple of years because

(00:36:14):
I've noticed this trend in parenting where we,

(00:36:18):
we talk about resilience and what we really mean is just teaching kids to tolerate

(00:36:23):
whatever terrible things our culture does to them.

(00:36:27):
And then if they react in the predictable way,

(00:36:30):
we stigmatize them and we frame them as not resilient enough.

(00:36:33):
You know, they're too sensitive and they have to learn to deal with

(00:36:36):
trauma and pain and suffering.

(00:36:38):
And it's like,

(00:36:39):
well,

(00:36:39):
where's the part where we talk about creating a world where they don't have to

(00:36:43):
suffer?

(00:36:44):
I feel like this resilience thing is really just like,

(00:36:47):
well,

(00:36:48):
you know,

(00:36:48):
they're just going to be miserable and they're going to have to learn to deal with

(00:36:50):
it.

(00:36:50):
Yeah.

(00:36:51):
Suck it up.

(00:36:52):
Yeah.

(00:36:53):
You know,

(00:36:54):
I especially loved you were talking about kids who had been exposed to school

(00:36:57):
shootings and how the children who get up and go to school the next day and who are

(00:37:02):
brave and,

(00:37:03):
you know,

(00:37:03):
put on a happy face are

(00:37:05):
lionized and the kids who are scared and who don't want to go to school or who show

(00:37:11):
visible signs of being afraid are framed as not resilient,

(00:37:15):
but in fact,

(00:37:16):
they've learned from what's happened to them.

(00:37:18):
Well, and it's much harder to buck the tide of what everyone is telling you to do, right?

(00:37:25):
It's not that they aren't strong.

(00:37:26):
It's a lot harder to say no to all of the adults in your life.

(00:37:31):
Right.

(00:37:32):
you know, just say, uh, people did not protect me.

(00:37:36):
The armed guards did not protect me.

(00:37:39):
The teachers could not protect me.

(00:37:41):
You could not protect me.

(00:37:43):
And I want to know what's different.

(00:37:44):
I mean, that is, that takes a lot of courage, right?

(00:37:48):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:37:50):
And so I also think, you know, what I write about in the book is that

(00:37:54):
We have this very sort of Western enlightenment subjectivity,

(00:37:59):
the selfhood that's all wrapped up in our skin and all these qualities are supposed

(00:38:04):
to be internalized.

(00:38:05):
And first of all, it's killing the planet to think that way, right?

(00:38:10):
Because it ignores our interpersonhood,

(00:38:14):
our relationship with everything in the environment around us.

(00:38:18):
Our relationship with each other, our adaptability is based on all of that, right?

(00:38:24):
Our success as a species is not actually based on competition,

(00:38:29):
war,

(00:38:29):
deprivation,

(00:38:30):
famine,

(00:38:31):
and like building death worlds.

(00:38:34):
It's actually based on our ability to cooperate for collective good.

(00:38:39):
And yet we seem to have forgotten that as a culture.

(00:38:42):
Yeah.

(00:38:43):
and are doing everything to undo that advantage.

(00:38:47):
And we use resilience as a cudgel to make people conform to that.

(00:38:53):
We sort of say, it's all on you.

(00:38:55):
You know, you have to be mentally tough.

(00:38:57):
The other thing about it too, I think about words, you know, we are all writing all the time.

(00:39:02):
And if you think about mental toughness on the surface,

(00:39:06):
it means what it sounds like,

(00:39:08):
like you should be thinking and

(00:39:10):
have the right mindset and just, you know, refuse to say no.

(00:39:14):
But if you invert mental toughness, what you end up with is physical frailty.

(00:39:19):
Right.

(00:39:20):
And it's a disdain of physical frailty simultaneously,

(00:39:24):
because in developing mental toughness,

(00:39:28):
you're supposed to ignore arms and pains to the body.

(00:39:32):
And I would include in that emotions that come with having a body, right?

(00:39:37):
And not only are you supposed to ignore it in yourself,

(00:39:41):
but that whole approach of individualized,

(00:39:44):
internalized mental toughness as resilience makes it easier for the society to

(00:39:50):
impose harms on other bodies,

(00:39:52):
to brutalize bodies of people who don't have mental toughness,

(00:39:56):
who aren't demonstrating what it takes.

(00:40:00):
And so it's pretty corrosive.

(00:40:02):
Obviously,

(00:40:02):
I wrote this book about this idea,

(00:40:04):
but very corrosive in its application as it currently is currently existing.

(00:40:12):
It seems to me that it's kind of another instance of us localizing a problem in the

(00:40:18):
individual and saying this person has failed to be resilient rather than saying

(00:40:23):
this is the predictable reaction to the environment.

(00:40:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think we see that.

(00:40:30):
I mean,

(00:40:31):
if you look at the state of the world,

(00:40:32):
if you look at climate change,

(00:40:34):
if you look at environmental toxicity,

(00:40:36):
if you look at war,

(00:40:37):
if you look at just societal unfairness,

(00:40:41):
it should provoke anxiety and despair.

(00:40:44):
It's horrible, right?

(00:40:46):
And yet when adolescents who are getting the world through a fire hose,

(00:40:50):
you know,

(00:40:51):
just in a flood of images that are emotionally draining and they get more

(00:40:56):
information in a day than most of their parents got in decades,

(00:41:01):
we're surprised that they feel these ways.

(00:41:04):
If they didn't feel these ways, I'd be more worried.

(00:41:08):
right all right so this is sort of popped into my head while you were talking so

(00:41:13):
hopefully i'll i'll be able to to get it out in a way that makes sense and if you

(00:41:18):
don't have a good answer you can just tell me that um i have so i am as a parent

(00:41:25):
probably a pretty anxious parent because like behold everything around us um

(00:41:32):
And, you know, we're we're cautious people.

(00:41:35):
And one thing that I have noticed as a cautious person is that there tends to be a

(00:41:41):
point of pride,

(00:41:42):
especially among like upper middle class white parents in encouraging risk taking

(00:41:48):
among children and especially physical risk taking.

(00:41:51):
You know, they want their kids to go hiking.

(00:41:53):
They want them to go camping.

(00:41:54):
They don't want to be the parent that's like standing over their kids while they're swimming.

(00:41:57):
They don't want to be too, you know, too intense about the car seat.

(00:42:03):
And that to me seems to be related to this in some way, in a way that I can't quite articulate.

(00:42:09):
So I'm wondering if you might be able to articulate that for me.

(00:42:13):
Yeah,

(00:42:13):
I mean,

(00:42:13):
I think what you're talking about is this notion that kids don't have free range

(00:42:17):
anymore,

(00:42:18):
right?

(00:42:18):
That they're not tough, that they don't know how to, they're too dependent.

(00:42:22):
I mean, I think I'm older than you are and my kids are in their 20s.

(00:42:27):
And I think of a lot of what we're talking about and certainly the expectations on

(00:42:34):
me as a mother as a post 9-11 panic.

(00:42:38):
Because right after 9-11,

(00:42:41):
Several things happened simultaneously,

(00:42:43):
but one of them in terms of parenting was an extreme hypervigilance about the

(00:42:48):
safety of children.

(00:42:49):
Yeah.

(00:42:50):
That was true in homes.

(00:42:52):
It was true on sidewalks.

(00:42:53):
It was true in schools.

(00:42:54):
It was true in sports.

(00:42:56):
And I mean,

(00:42:57):
I remember the first five,

(00:42:59):
six,

(00:42:59):
seven years of my children going to school because they all started school in

(00:43:04):
roughly 2001.

(00:43:06):
one, two, three.

(00:43:08):
There were, and in DC, not only did we have 9-11 happen, but also the anthrax

(00:43:16):
crisis and also the sniper in, there was a sniper in DC just shooting people.

(00:43:21):
And so we couldn't let the kids out of the house.

(00:43:23):
We couldn't, schools did not have field trips.

(00:43:27):
You didn't go to parks.

(00:43:30):
You had to hide the mail when it came in, the slot from kids.

(00:43:34):
Like I can't describe,

(00:43:36):
COVID was next level in many other ways,

(00:43:38):
but the post 9-11 panic imposed on parents,

(00:43:42):
but particularly mothers,

(00:43:44):
a level of threat and hypervigilance that was then diffuse in all of our parental interactions.

(00:43:53):
And so out of that, I think, came, no surprise, a lot of helicopter parenting.

(00:43:59):
How do you let go of that?

(00:44:00):
When do you know?

(00:44:01):
You're just kind of going about your business in your day,

(00:44:04):
trying to make sure everybody's okay,

(00:44:06):
and that you have duct tape for your windows in case of biological warfare.

(00:44:11):
This is crazy.

(00:44:12):
Yeah.

(00:44:12):
Right.

(00:44:13):
Like the day that I remember being in the car and NPR said,

(00:44:17):
well,

(00:44:18):
our evacuation,

(00:44:19):
the city's announced its evacuation plan for D.C.

(00:44:22):
And it's actually that we can't evacuate because there's no there's just not enough exit.

(00:44:28):
You know, there are not enough ways to exit.

(00:44:30):
So D.C.

(00:44:31):
's evacuation plan is not to evacuate.

(00:44:33):
It's to shelter in place.

(00:44:35):
And no joke, duct tape your windows shut in case there are biological agents used.

(00:44:41):
And I was like, what?

(00:44:46):
And so at that point, I personally was like, I am not living this way.

(00:44:51):
I'm not going to buy duct tape.

(00:44:53):
I'm not going to hoard cans of food.

(00:44:55):
I am like going to go to a paint store and buy some paint and paint with my kids

(00:45:02):
after work or whatever.

(00:45:03):
I just can't.

(00:45:05):
But it's not that it was insensible.

(00:45:07):
It's that it had a historical moment.

(00:45:09):
And I think kids who grew up with that

(00:45:13):
then also became the first test studies for phones and apps and parents surveilling their kids.

(00:45:21):
Mm hmm.

(00:45:22):
Right.

(00:45:22):
Like these are all things that then happened.

(00:45:25):
And so I think parents today who are living in a different environment with

(00:45:31):
different constraints,

(00:45:32):
maybe don't understand what that meant and will deal with other problems.

(00:45:37):
But they're feeling a liberalization that a lot of people never felt.

(00:45:42):
Right.

(00:45:42):
Can I let my kid go out?

(00:45:44):
Like, should I let them climb the trees when I'm not there?

(00:45:48):
Like all these things that

(00:45:51):
you just can maybe could have taken for granted and then could, couldn't anymore.

(00:45:55):
You could, then you couldn't, then you could.

(00:45:58):
So I think that's, that's what I'm seeing.

(00:45:59):
And a lot of the, I think what you're saying too, is this idea that kids have to be tougher.

(00:46:04):
And I do write about that in the book with the imposition of what I call the explorer criteria.

(00:46:10):
Everybody's on Shackleton,

(00:46:12):
like men who take their kids on dangerous trips to toughen them up and,

(00:46:17):
starve them for five days and drag them up an icy plateau and are disappointed when

(00:46:23):
the kids don't want to do it and force them to do it.

(00:46:25):
And it's just not healthy either.

(00:46:28):
And kids can get plenty tough without learning that they have to adhere to a patriarchal leader

(00:46:36):
who isn't listening to them,

(00:46:38):
who doesn't care how they feel,

(00:46:40):
who's making them undergo a grueling physical task for no sensible reason.

(00:46:45):
There's a lot of things that go into that model of toughening kids up that we don't talk about.

(00:46:51):
It doesn't mean that the ones who are interested shouldn't do it, but it does mean that

(00:46:58):
it's maybe not the best way to prepare children for the future.

(00:47:02):
Right.

(00:47:03):
Well,

(00:47:03):
it's interesting to me that you mentioned the DC sniper too,

(00:47:07):
because I went to college in DC.

(00:47:10):
And I started college my freshman year, the year that the sniper was on the loose.

(00:47:14):
Oh, so you know what it was like in DC.

(00:47:17):
I remember very well.

(00:47:18):
If I remember correctly,

(00:47:19):
I think the sniper started very shortly after I started college,

(00:47:23):
like a couple of weeks.

(00:47:25):
Oh, it was the fall for sure.

(00:47:26):
And that was when the anthrax thing was ongoing.

(00:47:29):
Oh my God.

(00:47:30):
It was, it was intense.

(00:47:32):
And so what happened was it's like right around the time where you start to settle

(00:47:36):
into the college routine and

(00:47:38):
there's some dude out shooting people.

(00:47:40):
And I have this very vivid memory of my parents coming up for parents weekend.

(00:47:46):
And I was just a nervous wreck.

(00:47:48):
I didn't want to go anywhere.

(00:47:49):
You know, I remember telling my dad, I need to come home.

(00:47:53):
Like I'm unfit for college.

(00:47:55):
I cannot do this.

(00:47:57):
And I remember him taking me out into like the field at my university and telling

(00:48:04):
me to just practice running in a zigzag pattern and

(00:48:07):
Yes, everybody was teaching their children how to do this.

(00:48:11):
It was wild.

(00:48:13):
And my mother, who was a therapist, finally pulled him aside.

(00:48:17):
And she said, I think this is why she's anxious.

(00:48:21):
I think this zigzag pattern running is perhaps not helping.

(00:48:25):
Yes.

(00:48:26):
Thank goodness she said that, right?

(00:48:28):
Because I mean, really and truly, there was 9-11.

(00:48:31):
And then there were two months of anthrax panic.

(00:48:34):
And when the anthrax panic stopped,

(00:48:37):
it wasn't it didn't actually stop because the mail stopped because nobody knew when

(00:48:41):
it would start up again.

(00:48:42):
Right.

(00:48:43):
So it had this it just kept going.

(00:48:46):
You just like nobody knew if it stopped or not.

(00:48:49):
And just as you started to relax, then the sniper started.

(00:48:52):
Yeah.

(00:48:53):
So there were two years there where if you were a parent or a young person like you

(00:49:00):
just described,

(00:49:02):
there was just this.

(00:49:04):
complete physical exposure, threat, insecurity, consciousness all the time.

(00:49:11):
And I would say for women in particular, that's a baseline vigilance.

(00:49:16):
We have a baseline hypervigilance, right?

(00:49:19):
We're constantly scanning perimeters.

(00:49:21):
We understand situational awareness.

(00:49:23):
We have to, by virtue of being women,

(00:49:27):
We have to be aware of those things in ways that men generally don't and aren't.

(00:49:34):
But you add to that mothering or parenting,

(00:49:37):
and schools,

(00:49:39):
even to this day,

(00:49:40):
they still tap moms much more than they tap dads with communications,

(00:49:45):
with allergies,

(00:49:47):
with whatever the needs are.

(00:49:49):
But at that point,

(00:49:51):
I don't think there was a week that went by when schools weren't communicating

(00:49:55):
properly

(00:49:56):
the fact that if they had to evacuate they had this super secret location where

(00:50:00):
they would take your kids right and they would be off-site and you wouldn't have

(00:50:05):
access to them for x amount of time because there would be a communication shutdown

(00:50:09):
and you know we sort of forgot it all but helicopter parenting i think really came

(00:50:16):
out of that yeah

(00:50:18):
Well,

(00:50:18):
and it's,

(00:50:19):
you know,

(00:50:19):
my mom's admonition that,

(00:50:21):
you know,

(00:50:21):
maybe the zigzag pattern is the problem.

(00:50:24):
And maybe that's when she's anxious,

(00:50:26):
has sort of become this parenting mantra for me of like,

(00:50:29):
maybe my kids aren't being not resilient,

(00:50:32):
or maybe this generation isn't being not resilient.

(00:50:34):
Maybe it's all the stuff they're having to deal with.

(00:50:36):
And I constantly remind myself like, oh, feelings don't just come out of nowhere.

(00:50:41):
And the zigzag pattern is kind of the abbreviation for that.

(00:50:45):
well and the zigzag pattern i think is a pretty good symbol for the fact that we

(00:50:49):
would rather fortress schools and ban books than stop guns yeah right that's just a

(00:50:58):
fact yeah and children are supposed to understand that fact which is a ridiculous

(00:51:07):
one that makes no sense yeah we went to um

(00:51:11):
We went to a birthday party this weekend at one of those horrible trampoline parks

(00:51:15):
where children are just,

(00:51:16):
you know,

(00:51:16):
crushing each other's skulls.

(00:51:18):
And we went inside and we like opened the door and two police officers greeted us

(00:51:27):
like they worked there,

(00:51:28):
like they were customer service agents.

(00:51:30):
And what I realized is that they were the armed guards that they had hired to guard

(00:51:35):
this place over the weekend.

(00:51:38):
And it was just

(00:51:40):
it was so horrific on so many levels.

(00:51:42):
One that, you know, people would feel safer with them there.

(00:51:45):
And two, that it could actually really be necessary.

(00:51:47):
Yeah.

(00:51:50):
Yeah.

(00:51:51):
I, yeah, I, I, I don't know.

(00:51:55):
The, the whole gun thing,

(00:51:57):
That's for a whole other long conversation about all the things we're talking about.

(00:52:02):
But yeah, I mean, I think children are pretty sensible.

(00:52:04):
Yeah.

(00:52:06):
And what's not sensible is the adaptations that they're supposed to make to conform

(00:52:11):
to what adults in society thinks should be normal.

(00:52:16):
Exactly.

(00:52:17):
All right.

(00:52:17):
I want to talk to you briefly about your upcoming book.

(00:52:21):
All We Want Is Everything.

(00:52:22):
I love the title.

(00:52:24):
I'm super excited about it.

(00:52:26):
I saw the cover on Amazon and it just gave me this feeling of like vastness and hope.

(00:52:32):
I'm so glad.

(00:52:33):
So tell me what we can expect from this book.

(00:52:35):
So I wanted to just before this election,

(00:52:39):
clearly elections sit on my mind a lot before this election in the November

(00:52:44):
election.

(00:52:46):
I really thought after what was clearly just many,

(00:52:50):
many years of growing backlash against women,

(00:52:55):
against diversity,

(00:52:56):
against progressive change,

(00:52:59):
and I covered reproductive rights and sexual violence for a long time.

(00:53:05):
So I'd just sort of been immersed in some of the worst of the worst in terms of

(00:53:11):
what was happening in state legislatures or colleges or

(00:53:14):
war or wherever.

(00:53:16):
And so when this election was happening,

(00:53:19):
I thought,

(00:53:19):
well,

(00:53:19):
no matter who wins,

(00:53:21):
no matter who wins,

(00:53:22):
there will be a profound backlash and it will be targeted in ways that will grossly

(00:53:30):
disproportionately affect women.

(00:53:32):
And that is regardless of women status, relative status to one another.

(00:53:40):
It will end up

(00:53:42):
accruing mainly to women as immigrants, as black women, as gay people.

(00:53:50):
It didn't really matter.

(00:53:51):
It was just not going to be good.

(00:53:52):
And so I thought no matter what,

(00:53:57):
I think it's important to highlight the role of male supremacy across all forms of

(00:54:03):
oppression and authoritarianism,

(00:54:05):
because studies really show that most people don't see sexism,

(00:54:10):
misogyny,

(00:54:11):
and I'm using the words male supremacy with deliberation that I explained in the

(00:54:16):
intro,

(00:54:17):
but they just don't see them because they're so baked into our culture,

(00:54:21):
our norms,

(00:54:22):
our institutions,

(00:54:23):
right?

(00:54:23):
Yeah.

(00:54:24):
And so...

(00:54:26):
explaining male supremacy is necessary in this moment.

(00:54:30):
I think it's insufficient because it's complex, right?

(00:54:35):
And it's tied up in the construction and reconstruction and upholding of other supremacist

(00:54:45):
institutions and structures of thought.

(00:54:47):
But if we ignore male supremacy,

(00:54:49):
we will not be able to address the political moment,

(00:54:52):
which is so clearly male supremacist.

(00:54:56):
To some of us, it's clear, right?

(00:54:57):
But when you have an administration that looks the way this administration looks,

(00:55:01):
when you have rising authoritarianism globally,

(00:55:04):
that is anti-feminist,

(00:55:06):
misogynistic,

(00:55:07):
xenophobic,

(00:55:09):
obsessed with almost uniformly controlling bodies and reproduction,

(00:55:15):
then I don't know how you talk about it without acknowledging the centrality

(00:55:20):
globally of male supremacist ideology.

(00:55:24):
So the book is about that,

(00:55:26):
but it is,

(00:55:27):
as you say,

(00:55:28):
also hopeful because what I'm really saying is it's a function of male supremacy

(00:55:33):
that we only recognize revolution and resistance in the ways that men traditionally

(00:55:39):
express resistance and revolution.

(00:55:43):
But the liberation of women has radically altered society.

(00:55:48):
It's part of the reason why we're in backlash.

(00:55:51):
And yet we don't think of what women have done in terms of revolution,

(00:55:57):
in terms of massive political movement.

(00:56:01):
Because again, to go full circle, what women do, particularly in intimate private

(00:56:10):
parts of life is minimized,

(00:56:13):
you know,

(00:56:14):
and technology in particular,

(00:56:17):
I really love tech and I've spent a lot of time writing about tech,

(00:56:20):
but what technology has done that might be more disruptive than anything else is

(00:56:28):
dissolve the public private divide that kept women in their place,

(00:56:32):
that kept male power at its core,

(00:56:36):
invisible and,

(00:56:38):
and protect it.

(00:56:41):
So I'm really talking about how we are actively dismantling male supremacy,

(00:56:45):
even if mainstream culture doesn't want to acknowledge what that looks like.

(00:56:51):
Yeah.

(00:56:51):
Yeah.

(00:56:52):
I mean, I think that kind of speaks to a lot that we've talked about here today.

(00:56:56):
So I'm super excited to read it.

(00:56:59):
It's out November 11th, right?

(00:57:01):
Yes, it is.

(00:57:02):
And it's in pre-order now.

(00:57:03):
People can go ahead and order it.

(00:57:05):
Yes,

(00:57:05):
it's in pre-order and you can get it at your local bookstore or IndieBound or if

(00:57:10):
Amazon is your thing,

(00:57:11):
Amazon.

(00:57:12):
Wonderful.

(00:57:13):
Is there a way or a place to buy it that benefits you more in some way or just

(00:57:19):
wherever people can find it?

(00:57:21):
wherever they can find it honestly whatever's easy and you know i always like

(00:57:25):
supporting local bookstores whenever possible so i would encourage people to do

(00:57:30):
that if they can and what i like about this book i really wanted this book not to

(00:57:34):
be very expensive and not to be very big um and so it's smaller and it's i think i

(00:57:41):
think it's for 22 instead of

(00:57:44):
which is amazing to me, a hardback that's like 28, 30, $32.

(00:57:46):
So that's like what hardbacks were when I was a kid.

(00:57:51):
Yeah.

(00:57:52):
So we tried to keep it,

(00:57:54):
you know,

(00:57:55):
in a format and a price point that was better for people because I just,

(00:58:01):
every time I pick up a hardback,

(00:58:02):
I'm like,

(00:58:02):
seriously?

(00:58:03):
Yeah.

(00:58:04):
It's, it's wild what we are paying for now.

(00:58:09):
Well, Soraya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

(00:58:13):
I love your work.

(00:58:14):
You've contributed so much.

(00:58:15):
Thank you for your work and for having me on today.

(00:58:18):
It's been delightful talking to you.

(00:58:21):
Well, it's been having, I have had interviewing you truly on my bucket list.

(00:58:26):
So I'm thrilled that I finally got to have you.

(00:58:29):
I'm really thrilled.

(00:58:30):
So I'm very happy we had this conversation.

(00:58:32):
Awesome.

(00:58:34):
So I will put all of Soraya's information in the show notes.

(00:58:38):
I urge everyone to pre-order her book to devour all of her amazing writing.

(00:58:44):
And I will be back with the podcast in two weeks.