Patriarchy destroys relationships, and it has turned dating into a nightmare. Jennie Young is fighting back with her Burned Haystack method, and now the method is a book. Through her work, Jennie endeavors to teach women to detect red flags before they become obvious, and to thwart abuse before it happens. Dating is the most dangerous thing most of us do, and I have no doubt that Jennie is saving lives.

In this podcast episode, Jennie and I discuss:

• Why dating is so awful, and why men seem like they’re getting worse.

• What the Burned Haystack method is, and how it can reduce the stress and misery of dating.

• Specific rhetorical and behavioral patterns to look out for in early dating.

• Why dating advice really is a matter of life and death.

• And much more!

The first date video I mentioned early in the podcast is here. Jeff and I discuss the Application to be Zawn’s Boyfriend here.

Jennie Young’s book will be out April 7th. If you want publishers to take on more feminist authors, please consider pre-ordering. Pre-orders are a huge determinant of a book’s success, and you can create a more thriving marketplace for all feminist authors by buying Jennie’s book.

About Jennie Young

Jennie Young is a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, specializing in applied rhetoric, humor, and feminism. She holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric and discourse studies from Case Western Reserve University and a satire writing certificate from Second City Chicago. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Ms. Magazine, HuffPost, and others and covered by major media outlets such as The New York Times, RollingStone, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal.

Visit Jennie at her website here, and be sure to check out her Substack. You can join her man-free support group on Facebook.

You can preorder her book, Burn the Haystack, here.

Find all books referenced on the podcast, as well as additional book recommendations, here.

Why is misogyny so widespread, even when men claim to love and care about women, even among those who believe they are feminists? Male supremacy helps explain this phenomenon.

The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism defines male supremacy as follows:

[A] cultural, political, economic, and social system, in which cisgender men disproportionately control status, power, and resources, and women, trans men, and non-binary people are subordinated. Such systems are underpinned by an ideology of male supremacism, the belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate and control others. While male supremacism also intersects with other axes of oppression, such as racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and heterosexism, it motivates and undergirds the types of events described above. Male supremacism manifests in various ways, including physical and sexual violence, militarism, and exertion of control over women’s, trans men’s, and non-binary people’s bodies.

These norms pervade everything we do, even if we rarely or never speak about them out loud.

Soraya Chemaly has been writing about, and fighting, male supremacy for decades. Her new book, “All We Want is Everything,” analyzes male supremacy, cogently demonstrates its existence, and offers insight on how we build a better world. I truly loved this book. It’s so tightly argued, chock full of accessible statistics. It might be the book to give to the man in your life, if only to see that his beliefs do not change in response to new information.

This is Soraya’s second appearance on the podcast, and I’m so lucky we got to talk again. In this episode, we discuss a wide range of topics, such as:

• What male supremacy is, and how it interlocks with other systems of oppression.

• Why and how male supremacy conceals its own existence.

• The myth of a boy crisis in education, and the social purposes it serves.

• The norm of affirmative action for men in colleges and elsewhere.

• How schools reinforce gendered labor in parenting and marriage.

• Men’s refusal to accept anything women do as work.

• The weaponization of women’s fatigue, and why depriving women of rest plays such an important role in their oppression.

• The nature of activism as a group struggle across generations, and how we sustain activism when we become demoralized.

You can find “All We Want is Everything,” all of Soraya’s books, and all of the books I mention on the podcast at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.

About Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning author and activist, who writes son topics related to gender norms, inclusivity, social justice, free speech, sexualized violence, and technology. She is the director and co-founder of Women’s Media Center Speech Project. She is also the author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, The Resilience Myth, and the newly released All We Want is Everything.

You can find her articles in numerous publications and anthologies, in talks and media appearances, and just about everywhere anyone is discussing gender.

I wrote recently about how men are using AI to prop up their belief in their own superiority. This propaganda is nothing new. Men have, for thousands of years, used every tool at their disposal to spread false ideas about women’s inferiority and demonic nature.

Sarah Ruden is a translator, a classicist, and the author of Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women. She came on the podcast to discuss her new book, which outlines how popular literature and culture have long normalized women’s subjugation by spreading lies about women.

We ended up having a sprawling conversation during which we talked not just about this book, but about her translations work, Biblical views of womanhood, and so much more. It was such a treat to get to pick such a brilliant mind. No matter what you’re interested in, I think you’ll find something compelling in this episode.

A few of the topics we discuss include:

• The long history of constraining women’s reproductive rights in service of men, including anti-abortion poems by the poet Ovid.

• The alliance between anti-abortion ideology and authoritarianism.

• Why history is more than a set of facts, and why it matters who tells stories from the past.

• What Sarah has learned as a translator of the Biblical Gospels, and why good translations are so crucial to our understanding of the world. Sarah talks specifically about how the canonical translations of the Gospels suppress women’s point of view and demean women.

• Why our beliefs do not spring up out of nowhere. Not only is propaganda everywhere, but it has always been everywhere.

• The similarities between red pill bros and the men who have translated sacred texts and beloved secular literature.

• The line from Roman anti-abortion rhetoric to the rhetoric of today’s far right, including a focus on genocide.

• The role of anti-abortion politics in imperialism.

• Why the anti-abortion movement has co-opted the Holocaust to justify extreme violence.

• The Catholic church’s shift toward more flexibility on everything except for abortion.

About Sarah Ruden

Sarah Ruden is a leading translator of the ancient literature of the West. In a career spanning both essential Greek and Roman Classics and sacred literature, she has set new standards for accuracy, stylistic integrity, and accessibility. Her work, including cultural and human-rights journalism, is deeply concerned with questions of power and truth, in accordance with her Quaker faith. She has won Guggenheim, Whiting, and Silvers grants, and numerous other awards.She has a PhD in classical philology from Harvard University.

Her latest book, Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women, came out March 3rd. You can find this wonderful book, as well as several of Sarah’s other books, in the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.

I’m on vacation this month, so am re-releasing this excellent episode with Dr. Emma Katz.

Content warning: This podcast extensively discusses all forms of intimate partner violence, some child abuse, and briefly discusses the death of a child, but not in graphic detail.

Intimate partner violence is much more than physical violence. Every physically violent perpetrator was, for a time, not physically violent. The emotionally abusive, degrading, and controlling environment these perpetrators create is ultimately what enables the physical violence.

Our society recognizes only a very limited number of behaviors as abusive, which is why so many women feel shocked and stunned when their partners finally become violent. When you understand coercive control, though, it becomes clear that the violence is part of a controlling strategy.

Coercive control is the environment abusers create, and it’s much more—and much worse—than just violence. While it is deeply isolating, it follows very predictable patterns. In this podcast, we talk about topics such as:

• What coercive control is, and why it is the norm in heterosexual relationships.

• Why a relationship can be abusive even if there is no physical violence.

• How to tell if your relationship is abusive.

• Why abusers abuse their partners.

• The most common strategies abusers use.

• Why abusers cannot be good fathers.
  
  

• Helping a child recover from exposure to domestic violence.

• How gender socialization renders women more vulnerable to abuse.

• Risk factors for the father weaponizing the child against the mother.

Emma Katz, a world-renowned expert on coercive control, focuses her research and writing on the effects of coercive control on children. She dispels the notion that a man can abuse the mother but still be a “good dad,” and talks extensively about how courts often replicate abusive norms.

These coercively controlling men might seem cunning, but they’re largely following the same playbook. Understanding that playbook empowers women to recognize abuse earlier, to identify when it is happening, and potentially, to leave.

I highly recommend Dr. Katz’s Substack. Find that here. Read more about her on her website, or buy her incredible book here.

This is the first podcast episode I’ve done by myself, because I wanted to speak directly to all of you. If you like it, I may do more.

On a recent AMA, someone asked me how I sustain hope when I’m surrounded by horror and despair. Here’s what I told her:

I know that the only thing that makes things actually hopeless is giving up hope. If my foremothers could fight through coverture, through legal rape, through legal violence, if other women could continue to fight through slavery, through a Holocaust, through witch burnings, through endless war, then surely I can honor them by continuing to fight. I will not allow despair to cause me to drop my link in the chain that extends to my ancestors and toward freedom.

I decided to record this podcast episode because so many of you have contacted me wondering how we can possibly keep going with things as terrifying as they are.

I’ve been an activist for a long time, and I’ve been lucky enough to learn from many elders (several of whom will be on this podcast in the next few weeks). I hope that I can offer you some strategies for thriving. I also know there’s value in hearing another human voice—hopefully someone you trust—reassuring you.

So I decided to record this, off the cuff, by myself. I could have edited. I could have gone back and added more, and I probably should have taken a decent photo rather than a frazzled selfie. I think, though, there’s sometimes value in showing up as we are, and in hearing someone else free-associate. I wanted to deliver this message as quickly as possible, rather than as perfectly as possible, so I hope it still has value.

In this episode, I talk about how I sustain hope, why I think you need to sustain hope, and how to build effective activist networks.

If you’re out there doing the work, I love you for that. Let’s join hands together and get as much done as we can. I hope you like this episode. I hope it helps you.

“Black men have been held accountable for things they didn’t do for so long, that we have forgotten how to hold them accountable for the things they do.” — Kiki Bryant

Men are stealing women’s lives by stealing their time. So why is it that we have widespread notions of women as spoiled, entitled gold diggers? The words we use matter. They focus our attention and make it easier (or harder) to speak about a topic.

This is a sweeping conversation that covers a lot of ground. Some of what we talk about:

• How social media is using bans without any due process to suppress the voices of minority creators. Kiki lost her Facebook account, and we talk extensively about how many other writers this has happened to, drawing on research Kiki conducted. Social media has the power not just to silence people, but to remove everything they’ve ever previously said.

• The importance of memory in constructing philosophical beliefs, and how social media bans undermine collective memory.

• Kiki’s framework of labor diggers.
  
  

• The economic impact of being the default parent.

• Labor digging begins in childhood, and how gendered childhood norms set people up for miserable heterosexual relationships.

• The effects of mass incarceration on Black relationships specifically, and how this ongoing trauma contributes both to lower Black marriage rates and to misogynoir.

• The commonalities between Black manhood and white womanhood.

• The unique challenges facing Black women leaving abusive Black men.

• The pick-me feminist: the feminist who wants to talk about how she’s not like all the other feminists.

• Competitive parenting, breastfeeding while Black, and the use of parenting culture to reinforce hierarchy.

About Kiki Bryant

Kiki Bryant, known online as the Uppity Negress, is a mother, writer, and sociopolitical critic located in Chicago, IL.

Follow her on Facebook here.

Check out her amazing Substack here.

Follow her on threads here.

Buy her books on her website, which also has other merch and a ton of great information.

If you like this episode or this podcast, please consider heart-reacting, sharing, commenting, or leaving a positive online review. It helps the podcast continue to attract great guests!

Motherhood is a cultural, political experience. But in many places, especially the United States, we pretend culture doesn’t exist, and that everything about motherhood is both inevitable and an individual problem.

Abigail Leonard is an American journalist who, inspired by her own experiences living abroad in Tokyo, set out to explore how different cultures support (or don’t support) mothers, and how this influences outcomes for everyone.

Abigail’s book highlights how cultural norms determine the bounds within which we mother. And while the social networks and community support women can access vary greatly from nation to nation, the profound impacts of patriarchy persist across cultures, making motherhood much harder than it needs to be.

In this podcast, we talk about:

• Similarities and differences between motherhood experiences in Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the United States.

• The social structures that can make motherhood easier or more difficult.

• How men’s refusal to participate equitably in parenting negatively affects women across cultures—and how social safety nets can either intensify or offset these negative effects.

• The political role of motherhood, and how a culture of mother blame can destroy an entire society.

• The rampant violence of life in the United States.

• The long-term effects of parental leave on parent-child relationships.

You can find Abigail’s book, a reading list, and all books I recommend on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.

About Abigail Leonard

Abigail Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and the author of Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries. It follows women in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US during their first year as mothers, and was named an Amazon “Best nonfiction book of the year so far”, and a Sunday Times “Book of the week”. Abigail was previously based in Tokyo, where she was a frequent contributor to NPR and New York Times video... and where she had her own three children.

Visit her website here, or find her on Instagram @AbigailLeonardAuthor.