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“Therapists can only go as deep with their clients as they’ve gone with themselves.” — Diana Fox TilsonWhy does therapy so often replicate and intensify the harm people experience in their exploitative relationships? Therapy, in theory, is a powerful tool for healing and personal change. But like any medical intervention, it poses risks and side effects.  Therapy definitionally occurs behind closed doors, which raises the specter of exploitation and harm, even among therapists who truly do mean well. In most therapy sessions, only two people get to evaluate how things went—one of whom can be heavily influenced by the therapist, and the other of whom has a strong interest in viewing their own work favorably.  In this podcast episode, I talk to therapist Diana Fox Tilson about why therapy so often causes harm, what we can do to find better therapy, and how to know if your therapy sessions are actually working. Some of the topics we cover include:  Why therapy often goes so wrong, and how people who are genuinely good people can still do harm. Zawn’s experience with a bad therapist.  The lack of accountability in private practice, especially with the most vulnerable clients.  Defensiveness among therapists.  The normalization of oppressive scripts in therapy.  The unique dangers of couples counseling.  Differences in how men and women are treated in therapy, and how therapy can subtly reinforce gender norms.  The professional and financial incentives for therapists to not challenge their clients.  How to tell if therapy is working.  How therapists can end up exploiting their clients, whether or not they intend to.  Red flags in therapy.  Why good therapists admit to mistakes.  About Diana Fox TilsonDiana Fox Tilson, LICSW, is a psychotherapist in private practice and writes Other Interests on Substack.

The witch trials did not target women—at least not explicitly. Yet somehow it was almost all women being executed and abused. This includes little girls. The witch trials are a case study in how the law can be gender-neutral, while still being highly gendered.  In this podcast episode, I speak with Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, creators of the Witches of Scotland podcast, about their new book, How to Kill a Witch. The book draws parallels between the witch trials and today, offering lessons that have resonated for hundreds of years. More than being a lesson in history, though, this book shows us that the people executed were actual human beings whose lives and suffering mattered. In this episode we discuss a range of topics, including:  How authorities justified the witch trials, and what they reveal about collective thinking, gender bias, and what we are willing to do to people we dehumanize.  The parallels between the witch trials and how we treat women today.  Whether something similar to the witch trials could happen again.  The endless horror of interacting with men in public.  Parallels between the witch trials and the public depiction of Lindsay Clancy. How being “crazy” is the new witch allegation against women.  The dynamics of victim blaming. False confessions, and why they continue to happen today. It’s crucial for us to acknowledge that this kind of frenzy isn’t just for bad or crazy people. It’s something we can all get swept up in—and on a smaller scale, most of us have been swept up in harmful groupthink, dehumanization, and vilification.  It’s easy for us to view abusers as certain kinds of people, or abusive behavior stemming only from certain ideologies. But the truth is that abuse only ever comes from the idea that certain behaviors can justify abusive treatment. And perhaps the crucial lesson of the witch trials is this: as soon as you are willing to justify abuse of even one person, it’s much easier to convince you to abuse just about anyone.  About Claire Mitchell and Zoe VenditozziZoe Venditozzi grew up in North East Fife in Scotland and attended the University of Glasgow to study English. Following stints as letters editor at The People's Friend and selling answer phones at BT, Zoe qualified as an English teacher in New Zealand in 1999.  Shortly after she moved back to Scotland where she started a family, worked in various schools and gained a Masters in Writing from the University of Dundee. After publishing her debut novel, "Anywhere's Better Than Here", Zoe kept teaching (in lots of settings including schools, universities, museums, libraries, children's homes and on the HMS Unicorn) and also became a writer in residence at Roxburgh House in Aberdeen and Reader in Residence for Dundee Libraries.  Zoe joined Claire Mitchell KC on the Witches of Scotland campaign in 2020 and has co hosted 70+ podcasts episodes of the same name. Since then, Claire and Zoe have worked hard to redress the historical wrong of thousands of people being accused and many executed, for being witches. Claire and Zoe's book, "How to Kill a Witch - a Guide for the Patriarchy" will be published in May 2025. Zoe still writes fiction and is particulary interested in death, psychic phenomena and the horrors of womanhood. Claire Mitchell has an honours degree in law from the University of Glasgow. She was a solicitor in private practice from 1996 and was called at the Bar in 2003. She became a Queen’s Counsel (QC, now KC) in 2019. She was President of the Scottish Criminal Bar Association from 2016 to 2018. Mitchell leads the ‘Witches of Scotland’ campaign with Zoe Venditozzi to seek posthumous justice for women historically convicted and executed as witches in Scotland. The campaign used social media to reach the public and a petition to the Scottish Parliament as a way to influence policy makers. The campaign has three goals: a pardon for those convicted, a formal apology from the Scottish government, and a national memorial. Mitchell hopes that laws used to dispense historic pardons can be used in these cases, as they have been done for the people in Salem, Massachusetts.  Zoe and Claire are the authors of How to Kill a Witch. They also host the popular Witches of Scotland podcast.  Zoe and Claire’s book, as well as all books I talk about on the podcast, are available at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. The LM Bookshop also offers a vast range of book recommendations in numerous categories.

Right wing opponents of women’s rights and bodily autonomy cannot win on the facts, so they’ve decided to create a fact-free world. And sadly, they’re winning the battle. Even media coverage of abortion often contains errors, and many of us have mistaken beliefs and ideas about pregnancy termination, even if we identify as pro-choice.  Ushma Upadhyay, an abortion researcher, joined the podcast to discuss common misconceptions about abortion, as well as what the research actually reveals. Some of the topics we cover include:  Research on the benefits of access to abortion, and common misconceptions about abortion.  The increasingly important role of telehealth abortion, particularly as anti-choice terrorists become more aggressive and dangerous. The far-reaching effects of abortion stigma, and the notion of abortion as something other people (not people like you) do.  The Turnaway Study, which compares what happens to women denied abortions to women who go through with their abortions.  Advancing New Standards of Reproductive Health, the organization with which Dr. Upadhyay works, publishes a voluminous quantity of data on abortion and reproductive health. Find direct links to some of Dr. Upadhyay’s work here.  For almost a decade, I wrote a weekly column on abortion and reproductive justice. Most weeks, the column focused on new scientific research. It’s still a treasure trove of useful data and analysis. Find it here.  About Ushma Upadhyay Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH is a public health scientist trained in epidemiology and demography. She is in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences and is also core faculty of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). Dr. Upadhyay was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. As a person of South Asian descent, primarily raised by her mother who immigrated to the U.S. from Tanzania, she is drawn to reproductive health from a social justice perspective. Dr. Upadhyay has expertise in abortion safety, abortion access in the U.S., medication abortion, and state-level abortion restrictions. She was Principal Investigator of the landmark California Home Abortion by Telehealth study (CHAT), which examined the safety, effectiveness, and acceptability of telehealth for abortion. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the REACH study, which aims to understand the intersections of preferences and access in abortion care. She is also leading a study on interest in a late period pill. Gender and health justice have also been a central focus of Dr. Upadhyay's work. She has developed and validated the Reproductive Autonomy Scale and the Sexual and Reproductive Empowerment Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults, both of which researchers can use to quantitatively measure people’s power in matters related to contraceptive use, pregnancy, and abortion. She earned a BA in Public Communication and International Studies from American University, her MPH from Columbia University, and her PhD from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Why is having a child so increasingly out of reach, economically, socially, and emotionally? And for those who choose to have children, why does the burden feel so massive?  Political realities influence our most intimate of choices, whether we want them to or not. Journalist Anna Louie Sussman is interested in how, when, and why people become parents, and in the political decisions that affect our experiences of parenthood.  In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, she traces the factors that make parenthood so difficult through the stories of several people weighing the choice to become a parent.  We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including: How economic uncertainty puts parenthood out of reach for so many. This is a political choice, not an inevitability. So why is it the one we make?  Whether parenting really is harder now than it was a generation or two ago.  The shame of struggling in a culture that makes parenting feel impossible.  Anti-child bias, its role in cultural life, and how child-free spaces exclude mothers and therefore women.  How motherhood as an identity so often undermines everything else women do.  The sickness of busyness: both the display and performance of busyness as a status symbol, and also “greedy jobs” that force us to be busy just to remain afloat.  How the pressure to earn money turns our closest relationships into financial commodities, and forces us to put a dollar value on everything we do. As always, you can find Anna’s book, and all books I recommend on the podcast, in the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.  About Anna Louie Sussman Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. She is the author of the book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty,” which looks at the challenges people face in starting and growing their families. It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, “The End of Babies,” and was published in September 2026 by Dey Street Books. Her first story, an engrossing account of the hunt for the perfect prom dress, appeared in Teen Vogue circa 1999. A decade later, she was reporting from the Middle East on women’s lives, and in 2011, became the senior writer and editor of Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation. Since then, she has reported extensively on finance and the economy, covering the shipping and energy industries for Reuters, and economics and the labor market for The Wall Street Journal. She researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” a book on how to advance women and girls in the global economy, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton. She has interviewed Thomas Piketty about income inequality, heard a Yemeni imam justify contraceptive use with Quranic citations, and gotten Jeff Koons to explain why artists should embrace the market. She has reported on Polish women who can’t access their own frozen embryos, how abortion politics and the gruesome history of medical experimentation conspired to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials, and the brutal economics of egg freezing. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Kavli Science Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroot Foundation, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence in the fall of 2024. She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America. She lived and worked for five years in the Middle East, spending time in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, and Sana’a. She was born and raised in New York, enjoys reading and sewing, and was the parent of one outrageously wonderful dog, Stewie. She lives with her daughter in New York.

For centuries, our ethics—and especially our bioethics—have left out the most marginalized, treating white men and other powerful groups as the default and the norm.  Wylin Wilson, a chaplain, former death doula, and ethics professor at Duke, seeks to change this. She writes about how we must center the powerless in our bioethics, and what we must do to ensure that systems of care serve them. Because when we build systems that better serve the oppressed, we build systems that better serve us all.  When I began planning my interview with Wylin, I anticipated talking mostly about our crumbling health system, and how we build something better from the ashes. We did into this quite a bit.  But early in our interview, I realized Wylin had deep wisdom on another subject of great importance: how we can actually live our values as feminists, activists, anti-racist advocates, and people aspiring to do better.  I have often remarked that it’s very easy to be a good person until you encounter other people. And then, you have to deal with the mess of other humans. Grappling with the imperfections, annoyances, and outright cruelty of others enables us to flex our own decency muscles. It tests our values.  This test of values is, I think, where many of us falter. We lash out at people for disagreeing with us. We slot people into “good” and “bad,” and justify abuse of the bad. We replicate the very norms supremacy culture has taught us—and we label that replication feminism or activism. I fight these own tendencies in myself, and have often struggled with how to work through impulsive harmful acts.  Wylin has much to say about the emotions, the unconscious biases, the lifetime of lessons that cause us to make these harmful decisions. Her work on love as a practice, as a skill, is revelatory to me. We can get, do, and be better, but first we must acknowledge where we are getting things wrong, then flex our muscles of decency and love.  We dig deeply into how we can be the people we aspire to be, but also so much more. In this podcast, we talk about a wide range of topics, including: How we can learn to better navigate difficult interactions and treat all people in a way that reflects our aspirational values.  Love as a skill, and kindness to others as a practice we can get better at.  Racism in medicine and healthcare.  Why it is so difficult to acknowledge your own biases, and how we can push through our resistance to examining our own shortcomings.  Why healthcare providers are often resistant to acknowledging the shortcomings of the medical system, and what needs to happen for that to change.  Grief as a gift that connects us to something deeper, and to our shared humanity.  Wylin’s “ministry of presence”—the importance of being fully present with another human being.  As always, you can find Wylin’s work, as well as the work of everyone featured on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.  About Wylin Wilson Wylin D. Wilson is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School where she teaches Womanist Bioethics within the Theology Medicine and Culture program. She is author of Economic Ethics and the Black Church and Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health. Learn more about Wylin at her website.

When women are overloaded with the endless burdens of household labor, we tell them to go on strike or lower their expectations. But this advice pretends that women are arbitrarily creating work for ourselves, and that if we just hung fewer wreaths or stopped making cookie dough from scratch, everything would be better.  This trivializes women’s labor, and ignores the reality: Women have become the social safety net, doing without pay and without acknowledgment all of the tasks our communities refuse to acknowledge and our governments refuse to fund.  It’s not an accident that women are overwhelmed. In the absence of a real social safety net, the obligations don’t disappear. Kids still need support and advocacy; families still require work. And that work falls almost entirely to women.  In this episode, sociologist Jess Calarco and I talk about:  How we have transformed political obligations into individual ones, and why we pretend political failings are individual shortcomings.  How we transformed women into an individual and undervalued social safety net.  Why the caregiving never really ends, and how it extends well beyond child care.  The interventions that might finally fix this.  I absolutely love Jess, and I hope you’ll buy her book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. You can find her book, all books recommended on the podcast, and an assortment of reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page.  About Jess Calarco Dr. Jessica Calarco is a professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of four books, including Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.Calarco’s latest book, Holding It Together (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024), reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine. The book combines historical and policy analyses with original survey data and vivid portraits drawn from more than 400 hours of interviews with families from a wide range of backgrounds. Calarco’s first book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford, 2018), received the Pierre Bourdieu Award for best book in the Sociology of Education. Her book Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (University of California, 2022) is coauthored with Sociologist Mario Luis Small, and won the Outstanding Publication Award for best book in Methodology. Calarco is also the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum. As an active public scholar and the recipient of numerous early career and teaching awards, Calarco strives to make sociological insights accessible and relevant to broad audiences. She not only publishes in leading sociology and interdisciplinary journals but also writes for high-profile media outlets—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, CNN, and NBC News—and offers workshops related to her research and teaching, including workshops aimed at promoting equity and empathy in college and graduate education. Calarco received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Sociology and Education from Brown University.

Welcome to season four of the Liberating Motherhood podcast! You can expect to see an episode every Wednesday, except for periodic days off. This first episode is with one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Gemma Hartley, who came on last year to discuss emotional labor and household inequity. Whether or not you are Christian, or were raised in an evangelical Christian family, right-wing evangelical Christianity affects your life, your relationships, and the political world around you.  Highly organized Christian fascists, driven in large part by misogyny, have a plan for the future of the United States that involves the total subjugation of women. They hope to achieve this by getting into the minds of children early. This means that, while many people have left behind these churches, their thinking continues to hold sway. And even if you’ve never set foot in a church, Christian evangelical churches hope to control your life.  Gemma Hartley is back on the podcast to discuss her evangelical upbringing, the process of deconstruction, the meaning of Christo-fascism, and the tight alliance between right wing politics and Christian churches. We cover a ton of ground in this podcast, including:  How early evangelical socialization can nurture anxiety and depression.  Purity culture, including how it affects our brains even when we try to leave it behind.  The normalization of rape and child abuse in right wing Christian churches.  How evangelical churches weaponize fear and community to gain control.  Importantly, this is an episode about right wing Christofascist churches—not all churches, and not all Christian churches. These churches are politically powerful, led by men, and predominantly white. And now they have a tight grip on the reins of political power. It is crucial to understand them. Gemma’s new book comes out September 22, and you can preorder it now. I hope you’ll consider doing so, since preorders are hugely supportive to feminist authors, and encourage publishers to publish more feminist work! About Gemma HartleyGemma Hartley is a freelance journalist and author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. Her new book, No One Loves an Angry Woman, will be released September 22. Her amazing Substack, of the same name, highlights the toll emotional, cognitive, and physical labor exact on women’s lives. She has a second Substack, Creative Commitment, to support current and aspiring writers.  She received her BA in English Writing from The University of Nevada, Reno where she is recognized as a distinguished alumnus. Her work has been featured in outlets including Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, Glamour, The Washington Post, CNBC, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Teen Vogue, and The Huffington Post. She lives with her husband and three young children in Reno, Nevada.

Supremacy culture wants to convince us all that it is inevitable. If oppression is natural, it’s hardly worth fighting, after all. Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have always weaponized science—and too many scientists have allowed themselves to be mouthpieces for oppressive ideologies.  Angela Saini has written about the use and abuse of science to uphold oppression for years. Her books investigate the origins of misogyny, analyze how science is weaponized in service of oppression, and debunk common sexist and racist myths about human biology.  In this episode, we talk about a range of topics, including:  The origins of patriarchy, and why patriarchy is social and not biological.  The relative recency of patriarchy, and why patriarchy has not always been a part of human history.  How biology is misused to uphold systems of oppression.  How marriage became an arm of the state, and how marriage and family enabled women’s oppression. Patriarchy as an accident, not an inevitability, and the role patrilocality played in its creation.  How myths about gender and biology, gender roles, and gender as natural or inevitable uphold patriarchy.  How scientific racism continues to influence medicine and politics. You can find the study I reference in the podcast here.  How racialized medicine can worsen outcomes in marginalized communities.  As always, if you like this podcast, please help support it by heart-reacting it, leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform, or sharing it with your friends. About Angela SainiAngela Saini is an award-winning journalist and Assistant Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She presents radio, podcasts, and television shows for the BBC among others, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in the Financial Times, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Wired. Angela’s 2023 book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Nonfiction and a Waterstones politics book of the year. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017 and named the Physics World book of the Year. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2020 Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers. Angela started her career with the British broadcaster ITN on its news trainee scheme, before joining the BBC as a reporter, where her six-month investigation into bogus universities featured on the flagship national News at Ten and won a Prix Circom European television news award. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Between 2012 and 2013 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a 2022 Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as a resident scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. She has given distinguished and keynote lectures at universities across the world, including the 2022 Simonyi Lecture at Oxford, the Yale Poynter Fellowship lecture in 2022, and the Wollstonecraft Lecture at the London School of Economics in 2023. She was made an honorary fellow of her alma mater Keble College, Oxford in 2023. You can find Angela’s books, all books recommended on the podcast, and numerous reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page.  Angela’s latest book will be out in January of 2027, and you can preorder it now.

No matter how much we try to relegate sexuality to the most private corner of our lives, it inevitably escapes. Sex is not really a private act. It’s a political one, which both influences and is influenced by our culture, politics, history, and more.  Angela Jones’s new book, Sex in Public, names sex as a public act, and talks about what it means for our sexuality to be politically and socially constructed and reconstructed. She has so much wisdom on so many topics, and I was thrilled to get to talk to her.  Some of the subjects we cover include:  Angela’s incredible new book, Sex in Public, which everyone should go out and buy immediately.  What truly comprehensive sex education actually looks like, and how parents can get better at talking to their kids about sex and sexuality. Teaching bodily autonomy and consent, and how we are teaching kids sexual ethics well before we talk to them about sex. How teaching kids consent can be an act of challenging authority, and why this is often difficult for parents.  Why sexuality cannot exist independence of politics and culture, and how this makes sex a political act.  Desirability politics, and how systems of power shape who and what we are attracted to. Sexuality as something that is constantly in flux—not a fixed identity. The hollowness of the notion of sexual empowerment, and how sex positivity has been reduced to the freedom to have sex.  About Angela Jones Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Jones’s research interests include sexualities; sex work; Black feminist theory and methods; trans studies; and African American political thought and protest. They are an award-winning teacher and writer, as well as a winner of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Jones’s newest trade book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, will be published with Seal Press/Hachette in May 2026. Jones is also the author of the award-winning book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Bloomsbury, 2011). They are a co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (2025, Bloomsbury) and co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2024). Jones is the editor of the award-winning reference book, African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jones is also a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012) and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013). They are also the author of scholarly articles, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Black Scholar; Social Problems; Gender & Society; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Sexualities; Disability Studies Quarterly; Porn Studies; International Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Law; Culture, Health, and Sexuality; Sociology Compass; Fat Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society; Sexuality and Culture; Sociological Focus; The Journal of Historical Sociology;and Interalia: a Journal of Queer Studies. You can learn more about Angela and her work on her website.

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. Do I hate men? Should you? Yes. No. Maybe. Misogynist men love to weaponize false claims of misandry against women. In fact, one of the clearest signs that a man is a misogynist is that he thinks misandry is real, common, and a threat.  Jeff and I have wanted to talk about bogus claims of misandry for a long time. Here’s the result.  Some of the many topics we talk about in this podcast include:  Why we need to stop saying “sexual coercion” or “obligatory sex” and start calling it rape.  The history of the term “misandrist,” and why it’s always been a part of bad faith arguments against women’s rights.  Does Zawn hate men? (Jeff’s answers: “No. Yes. Not all men.”) Why so many men see movements for women’s rights as a threat.  Why men who actually like women are unthreatened by feminism.  Men’s frustration at having to actually work for things.  Jeff on the most pathetic kind of sex anyone can have.  Why misandry can never be analogous to misogyny. The disparity between Zawn and Jeff’s experiences complaining about poor medical care.  Why men are so committed to wasting so much of women’s time.  We end with our new feature, the Liberating Motherhood Complaint Box. This is where we address the whining, bloviating nonsense your husbands tell you about my podcast specifically, or feminism more generally. It culminates in Zawn referring to a man as a “loser bitch.” Make your partner’s ignorance famous, and subject him to my judgment! You can submit your own complaint for next month’s complaint box here. Please only use this form to submit complaints from men specifically about feminism or my podcast—not general complaints, not general questions, not general messages for me. If you need to contact me for something else, you can find forms for just about everything on the Liberating Motherhood website. We have new kittens, and they currently live in my office, which they are destroying. They are aspiring misandrists, and were quite interested in the podcast. For this reason, you’ll hear some background noises. Just remember that these minor annoyances come from these adorable angels: If you’d like to contribute a story for the podcast, you can submit it here.

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Justine van der Leun about criminalized survival, and why women so often end up in prison for “crimes” of self-defense. The truth is that women often end up in prison for behaviors that aren’t criminal at all—not just for self-defense or for killing. Today we are talking about the widespread victimization of women at the hands of the legal system.  Patriarchy specifically targets mothers, and women from oppressed groups, then weaponizes our identities. Sometimes it uses these identities to prosecute and incarcerate us. Attorney and activist Valena Beety has worked to overturn wrongful convictions, taught other lawyers about the injustices in the criminal justice system, and is now a powerful advocate for systemic change. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. The ways our criminal justice system (and associated systems, like CPS) silence and control women.  How motherhood creates unique vulnerabilities within the criminal justice system. How women can end up in jail or prison even when they are innocent, and even when there was no crime at all.  The criminalization of tragedies: stillbirth, infant and child deaths, and miscarriages.  Prosecutions of abortions and miscarriages.  How our fear promotes victim-blaming, and how victim-blaming revictimizes women who survive trauma.  Criminalized victimization, and how the legal system weaponizes women’s trauma against them.  Bias in prosecution, and how prosecutors get tunnel vision and decide a woman deserves punishment no matter what.  The ways in which we criminalize and punish disabled mothers.  How a coercive system weaponizes women’s trauma, and can easily induce false confessions.  Pink Crime is an incredible book. Read it. Buy it. Give it to your friends. Pre-orders matter greatly for the success of a book, and they show publishers the importance of feminist work. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it. Valena has graciously offered a coupon code for my readers, that you can use to buy her book here. Simply enter code  I’ve listed all of Valena’s books, as well as all of the books I mention on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.  The excellent paper by Valena that I reference in the podcast is here.  About Valena Beety A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions. Her latest book, Pink Crime, examines the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity She lives in Indiana with her wife, daughter, and tripod dog.

In patriarchy, there is no sure escape from violent relationships. The courts and police may not help. Friends and family may turn their backs. And even when a woman’s life is in danger, she does not have the same right to self-defense as a man.  Journalist Justine van der Leun began researching this phenomenon when she learned about Nikki Addimando, a woman who killed her abusive partner in self-defense. Thanks to a grassroots campaign and some great lawyers, Nikki has now been freed, but just a few years ago, Nikki was sentenced to 19 years to life.  Justine wondered how many other Nikkis were out there. Experts told her that jails and prisons are full of women just like Nikki. Her new book, Unreasonable Women, is about what we do to women who kill in self-defense, as well as the patriarchal norms that reinforce men’s right to violence—and women’s right only to die from men’s violence.  In this conversation, we confront the reality of criminalized survival, and patriarchy’s unquenchable desire to punish abuse victims. Some of the topics we cover include:  Criminalized survival, and why our legal system ignores women’s right to self-defense.  Why being in an abusive relationship is a risk factor for ending up in prison.  The crime of surviving as an abuse victim.  The common theme that government will spend few or no resources to help impoverished kids, abused kids, or battered women, but will quickly and competently put those same people in prison, expending massive resources to do so.  The expectation that women being attacked by men will apply a perfect legal standard of self-defense, exert more self-control than we expect from trained police officers, and behave like perfect victims at all times.  The concept of violence against women as regulated rather than illegal.  Stories of three women who killed in self-defense, and how all three ended up incarcerated.  Unreasonable Women is out now. I hope you’ll buy it, since doing so supports feminist scholarship and shows publishers that we want more feminist work. You can find Justine’s book, as well as all books I mention on the podcast, along with several reading lists, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. About Justine van der Leun Justine van der Leun is a journalist, author, and creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Believe Her. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, and more. Justine brings both deep investigative reporting and a thoughtful, engaging interview presence to conversations about violence, justice, and survival.

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. In the meantime, I’ve made no secret that this one of my all-time favorite episodes, and that interviewing Loretta Ross is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. I hope you love this episode; it’s so important for us to cultivate the skills Loretta teaches. Today we are going to be learning from the legendary reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross. Loretta is my feminist hero and role model, and I feel so lucky that she was willing to share some time with me.  How is it that a human rights movement rooted in the shared value and worth of every human being so often devolves into a toxic stew of abuse and hurt feelings? Anyone who participates in leftist political movements has seen small disagreements spiral into mutual attacks, psychological brutality, and worst of all, fractured and less powerful movements.  Lasting change requires us to build solidarity across difference. At the very least, we must be able to resolve small disagreements. Ideally, though, we have to bring more people into the fold—including people we really don’t like, including people with whom we have very significant moral disagreements.  I’ve often noted that the anti-choice movement succeeded by standing in lockstep with one another, no matter how much they hated each other. They built a movement for 50 years, and they succeeded. We can learn a lot from them. But leftist coalitions are diverse and highly principled. These are good things, but they can make it challenging to work together.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do this. And then I found Loretta Ross’s book, Calling In. It has helped me to consider my own role in toxic call-out culture, and to seize opportunities to build consensus and coalitions rather than elevating myself and my ego. This, I think, is the only way we move forward.  There’s lots of advice about how to be a better activist, what this moment means, and how to deal with people who disagree with us. I think the most useful advice comes from people who have actually succeeded at sustaining a lifetime of activism. Loretta has changed hearts and minds over and over, working with people many of us would never even want to talk to. She has done the work that progress demands, and now she’s here to teach us how to do it, too.  You’ll recognize some of what we discuss from my earlier episode about sustaining hope as an activist. I cannot over-emphasize how much Loretta’s work has shifted my consciousness and influenced my own work, and I hope you find her wisdom as valuable as I do.  Some of the topics we cover in this conversation include:  Toxic call-out culture, and how it is destroying individual well-being as well as activist movements.  How childhood wounds create toxic shame that we then foist onto our activist colleagues.  How we build resilience and capacity to work across difference.  Calling out vs. calling in, and how we know when to do each.  Loretta’s experiences working with rapists and deprogramming white supremacist.  How our egos can undermine our activism, and how we resist that temptation.  The components of an effective call-in, and how to know when a call-in is likely to work.  “When you ask people to give up hate, you must be prepared to be there for them when they do.”  The concept of the victimized violator—the person who feels entitled to violate others because of their own victimization.  How to respond to a call-out or call-in.  Can we use calling in with ICE officers?  How we can acknowledge the humanity of those doing harm without losing sight of their victims.  How we sustain hope and avoid despair.  About Loretta Ross  Loretta J. Ross is a Professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture. She has taught at Hampshire College and Arizona State University. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree awarded in 2003 from Arcadia University and a second honorary doctorate degree awarded from Smith College in 2013. She also has credits towards a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Emory University. She serves as a consultant for Smith College, collecting oral histories of feminists of color for the Sophia Smith Collection, which also contains her personal archives. Loretta also is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellow, Class of 2022, for her work as an advocate of Reproductive Justice and Human Rights, and an inductee into the 2024 National Women’s Hall of Fame. Loretta’s activism began when she was tear-gassed at a demonstration as a first-year student at Howard University in 1970. As a teenager, she was involved in anti-apartheid and anti-gentrification activism in Washington, DC as a founding member of the DC Study Group. As part of a 50-year history in social justice activism until her retirement from community organizing in 2012, she was the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005-2012 and co-created the theory of Reproductive Justice in 1994. Loretta was National Co-Director of April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., the largest protest march in U.S. history at that time with 1.15 million participants. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE) in Atlanta, Georgia from 1996-2004. She launched the Women of Color Program for the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the 1980s and was the national program director of the National Black Women’s Health Project. Loretta was one of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center in the 1970s, launching her career by pioneering work on violence against women, as the third Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. She is a member of the Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices. Watch Makers: Women Who Make America video. Loretta has co-written three books on reproductive justice: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice in 2004; Reproductive Justice: An Introduction in March 2017; and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique in October 2017. Her newest book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel is available now! Loretta is a rape survivor, forced to raise a child born of incest, and also a survivor of sterilization abuse at age 23. She is a model of how to survive and thrive despite the traumas that disproportionately affect low-income women of color. Loretta is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. You can find all of Loretta’s books, as well as all books recommended on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page.

“There is always a reason for people to hate on women.” — Elizabeth DalgarnoWhy is it so hard for victims of coercive control, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse to be believed? This is the subject Elizabeth Dalgarno has devoted much of her work to. A leading researcher on coercive control, Dr. Dalgarno has written extensively on abusive relationships, including on how they affect children and why family court norms are so harmful for victims.  No matter where you live, the court system was never set up to protect women and children. So what do we do? How can we survive? Survival begins with understanding the severity of the problem.  In this podcast episode, Dr. Dalgarno and I talk about abuse as the normal state of heterosexual relationships, and how family court systems reinforce the abuse. Some of the topics we cover include:  The myth of high-conflict divorce, and the reality of victims and perpetrators. How family courts victimize women, and why so many women enter family court systems totally unprepared.  How patriarchy has weaponized the notion of false memories. For decades, therapists of dubious skill and integrity induced false memories in their clients. This caused real harm that has continued for decades. But real abusers have weaponized the notion of false memories to silence people with very real, very true memories. This has even occurred in documented, proven cases of abuse, such as with Jeffrey Epstein.  The false notion of parental alienation syndrome. The creator of this concept asserted that children “seduce” their fathers, and implied that pedophilia is “natural.”  How trauma undermines the believeability of victim-survivors, and why victims rarely act the way we expect them to. How gender norms create impossible mothering standards that then harm victims in family court.  Why sexual abuse of children is so common.  Why outcomes in family court are not women’s faults, and why the bad outcomes are the system working as intended.  Strategies that may help in family court.  A quick note: Dr. Dalgarno’s discussion of the family court system addresses norms that pervade across legal systems, but the specific family court system she speaks about is the British system. Not all countries have private and public courts, but the general principles Dr. Dalgarno speaks to will apply everywhere.  About Elizabeth Dalgarno Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno is a world-leading coercive control researcher and advocate. She is the Director and Founder of SHERA Research Group, a global collective researching the harms to health and human rights violations against women and children in the family courts and other institutions. She is also a Lecturer at the University of Manchester, England. Elizabeth has worked in public and private health and social care for over 20 years specialising in challenging violence against women and children and systemic inequalities for all people in law, health and social care. You can read her incredible Substack here.

Exciting news: I’m writing a book. Less exciting news: This means I have a little less time right now. It’s also summer break, which means things are in a chronic state of chaos. Lots of podcasts take breaks over the summer, but I didn’t want to do that, especially since I have SO MANY amazing guests lined up for the summer. So instead, I’ll be mixing in some rerun podcasts this summer, to give myself a little more editing time and breathing room. You can expect a new podcast episode at least every other week, with reruns sprinkled in between. This chat with Kate Manne was one of my favorites, and I hope you love it too. Misogyny isn’t really about hating women. After all, if pure hate explained everything, wouldn’t that mean that only mean men abuse women, and that misogynists never seek relationships with women? Men are able to mistreat women they claim to love because of the internal logic of misogyny. They’re not irrational or unhinged; they’re following a set of rules rooted in entitlement. Kate Manne is a philosopher who focuses on understanding what’s behind the misogynistic behavior patriarchy creates and enables. She envisions misogyny as a sort of disciplinary tool for reinforcing gendered norms, and preserving men’s access to resources—especially the highly valuable resource of women’s labor. We cover a lot of ground in this podcast, including: * The reflexive denial in the media of misogyny. * Misogyny as a system for enforcing men’s entitlement to women’s labor. * Why misogyny is not random and not mental illness, but instead a set of corrupt moral values that reflect the values of the wider culture. * Misogyny as more than mere hatred of women, and why certain women may be more impacted by misogyny than others. * How not to hate your husband after children…or maybe you should just hate him. * The normalization of all forms of violence. * The parallels between misogyny and fascism. * Fatphobia as an inevitable byproduct of misogyny. About Kate Manne Kate Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of philosophy at Cornell University. She specializes in moral, social, and feminist philosophy, and has written three books: DOWN GIRL: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018), ENTITLED: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020) and UNSHRINKING: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown, 2024), a National Book Award finalist in non-fiction. In addition to academic work, she regularly writes opinion pieces and essays for a wider audience, including in outlets such as The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and Time. She writes a substack newsletter, More to Hate, exploring misogyny, fatphobia, and their intersection. If you like this podcast or find my work valuable, I hope you’ll consider supporting it! Your paid support ensures I never have to take advertiser dollars, and am beholden only to my readership. You’ll also get access to one more podcast episode each month, eight additional pieces of written work, and membership in the Liberating Motherhood Community.You can also support this podcast for free! Heart-reacting makes a huge difference, as does commenting and sharing on social media. If you listen to this podcast on a podcast platform, please leave a positive review; it makes a huge difference. Oh, and tell the people you love about this podcast too!