Science evolves, often through fits and starts. Yet for most of medical history, there’s been one consistent theme: most science has been conducted on male bodies. And this has created a range of problems for women.
Thankfully, says Cat Bohannon, that’s changing. As more women and BIPOC are entering the STEM fields, we’re undergoing a renaissance in our understanding of a more inclusive and expansive science. On today’s episode, the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution tells Derek how much science has gotten wrong by focusing exclusively on male bodies—and what we’re now doing right.
Show Notes
Cat Bohannon
Epidemic Podcast | Tony Fauci: from one pandemic to another
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We used to lay eggs into, you know, like a nest and let them hatch there.
And that remains, by many measures, a much better idea than what we mammals do, which is to effectively turn our whole body into some kind of like H.R.
Giger fever dream of eggshell slash burrow slash meat factory.
Like, we're doing all of this inside our bodies in ways that actually, in evolutionary time,
we had the good sense not to do.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad
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As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
Females drive evolution with Kat Bahanon.
Science evolves, often through fits and starts.
Yet for most of medical history, there's been one consistent theme.
Most science has been conducted on male bodies.
And this has created a range of problems for women.
Thankfully, says Kat Behan, and that's changing.
As more women and BIPOC are entering the STEM fields, we're undergoing a renaissance in our understanding of a more inclusive and expansive science.
On today's episode, the author of Eve, how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution,
tells Derek how much science has gotten wrong by focusing exclusively on male bodies and what we're now doing right.
Derek, I really enjoyed the interview.
I think our listeners will too.
I've not yet read the book myself, I must admit, but from listening and then reading some of the long and thoughtful reviews, it seems like one of the things Kat has done very well is to combine her really strong and qualified scientific lens With cultural criticism regarding how women have been seen as an afterthought or an anomaly, a deviation from the male norm in terms of science and medicine.
And then she's also engaging in some evolutionary speculation as part of the storytelling.
That seems like a really great combination for a popular science book.
Is that about right?
I think so.
And in the early stages of our interview, we're going to discuss what her PhD is in evolution and cognition, or cognition and narrative.
And she is an excellent writer, first and foremost, I'll say that.
And when you're dealing with evolutionary biology, Really, it's all speculation in some regard.
I studied anthropology in college, besides my religion degree, and you're piecing together things based on current knowledge and what you can tell about the past.
And it really does require a thoughtful storyteller to make it pop.
So I really appreciated the fact that she gets deep into science in this book, but every page you're just enjoying the actual reading experience as well.
Yeah, in terms of science communication, this kind of combination seems crucial, I think, in terms of reaching popular audiences, but also creating a context that is rich in ideas and meaning.
And yeah, you know, there's there's speculation, but then there's also speculation that's well informed.
You're taking educated guesses based on scientifically, you know, reasonable sort of ideas or premises.
In the interview, I also found it really refreshing that Kat is able to so frankly And directly speak about the evolutionary and biological differences between male and female bodies, and how crucial it is that science and medicine study female bodies more, but then also speak in the next breath to issues of gender identity and sexual orientation in a very contemporary and, I thought, inclusive way.
What was your biggest takeaway from reading the book?
Well, I agree with all of what you just said.
We're going to get into that in the interview, both about the idea that, for example, the livers don't have a pronoun and then later on you find out that Kat was helping AIDS patients in the 90s as a queer woman and what it was like growing up in Indiana, having moved from New York City there and coming out during the 90s.
So she's had a really, really Powerful life.
She's such a fascinating person.
My biggest takeaway, though, is as someone who loves studying biology and evolution as a lay reader and as a journalist, I never realized my own bias towards how much science was conducted on male bodies.
I think reading Roy Porter's book about the history of medicine a couple years ago, started to help me understand that and understanding the
scientific process and how it mostly has been done on men.
But there's a real renaissance, as you said.
We have Dr. Jen Gunter.
I just started her new book last night talking about the history of menstruation.
And then here you have Kat talking about the fact that we have an entire half of the population
that has not been represented well in clinical trials, which has skewed medicine towards
male bodies in so many different ways.
And if science is about assessing the truth, we really are at an inflection point where all scientists have to start to pull back and think about how they're conducting their research.
And I think that's really healthy.
Obviously, we're dealing with a very reactionary right culture here in America that won't entertain
any ideas of DEI or critical race theory, but that diversity, equity, and inclusion
very much speaks to the topics that Kat writes about.
So I am a little concerned that as books like this come out, there's going to be more and
more pushback.
But in my regard, truth is on the side because the science is showing what's true for these
bodies as Kat points out.
And I think that's really beneficial if science really is about understanding what's true
for the most number of people.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, it's wonderful, the moments that she has pointing out that in certain ways, female bodies are inherently superior and are stronger and are tougher and are more resilient.
And, you know, it's an amazing irony that just struck me, right, that we've had this sort of cultural Tendency to see the male body as the norm and the female body, I think in one quote, she says, like they've had uteruses and breasts bolted onto an otherwise male body.
When actually the scientific truth of it is, is that we all start out female in the womb.
And then depending on what happens with the hormonal process over time, some of us turn into males.
It's kind of wild.
And I'll just point out that what really struck me, and it's something I've thought about before and it affects the three of us here on the podcast, it affects every human.
Kat points out that during our conversation, the two of us are getting things wrong right now.
We're getting them wrong because we don't have the foresight of having lived in the future because there are things we still don't know.
And that has always been something that I grapple with because sometimes we look at what's happened 300 years ago and we look at these historical figures and we say, oh, we can't listen to them at all.
But we don't understand the context of where they were at the time.
And so she does this really fine job, I think, of having the humility to understand that we are getting things wrong.
And at the same time, understanding that we're also getting a lot right right now.
We're taking more people into consideration than ever before, and I think that's really healthy.
Derek, I loved listening to this interview, and I've got to read the book, of course, but I just felt that it put me into this very helpful space that we don't often talk about explicitly on this show, which is the space of demystification.
I think we're often demystifying jargon, beliefs, charisma.
We don't often say why, and so I have a couple of thoughts about that and why it's crucial, especially when we're talking about sex and gender on a show about spirituality and conspiracy theories in an age of neo-fascism.
And then on this broader level, what Bohannon brings with this book, I think, is really important in that it helps deconstruct the scientific version of the male gaze.
But, you know, one thing before I go there that I want to make sure listeners stay around for is what you referred to already, Derek, is part of this origin story for her work.
And about three quarters of the way through, we'll hear her describe how she honors trans identities and medical considerations because she spills the beans on her activism as a queer person in the late 90s.
And for her, caring for people controlled by sex and marginalized by orientation and identity was really about mutual survival because the state wasn't going to do anything for them.
We often talk about science as not being a political project, ideally, and the context for that is like we're often defending people like Paul Offit against the lies of RFK Jr.
But the liability of going too hard on that theme can be to de-emphasize how much science emerges through activism or changes via activism.
And I think her references to the AIDS crisis is really on point.
And I just want to add that it was gay activists like Larry Kramer who wound up changing the course of scientific research through ACT UP.
Didn't just rally people and stage sit-ins and die-ins.
Some of those folks were also non-scientists who started biology study groups in their apartments so that they could have credibility.
They knew the language when walking into Fauci's office to demand attention and suggest research pathways.
Matthew, like what you're saying I think is so important and such a beautiful clarification of something that I think we've gone back and forth on, right?
You're talking about how the direction of science can be Sort of rounded out and some of its bias can be exposed and it can be pushed in the direction that maybe it hasn't been going into for political reasons.
And then on the other side of that, what turns out to be true is true.
Based on evidence regardless of the politics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whatever emerges as the truth of a particular proposition or scenario comes to light within a political context.
It comes to the stage because of the politics of people involved.
So I don't really see how those two functions are separable.
Well it might be a sliding scale, right?
Like there are some topics that are not as politicized than others that are, or politicized is maybe the wrong term.
There are some that have more political valence than others, right?
Yeah.
So on demystification, I think we can agree that there's nothing the influencer crowd that we study likes or needs more than symbolic abstractions.
Whether they're idealizing, on one hand, like the divine feminine, or demonizing, on the other hand, like the purple-haired, queer, fat, social justice warrior.
And on a broader scale, abstraction and reductionism are, I think, at the heart of conspirituality, because this is an entire landscape that unfolds in a purely symbolic order.
Just a cheesy tapestry of memes, shitposts, hot takes, and these are all themes that can
be communicated in images and aphorisms.
You know, purity, fitness, bio-morality, divine feminine, to a lesser extent divine masculine,
but that's still there as well.
So when Bahanan really gets going on things like maternal infant resource competition, or how a body that is hosting a baby has to convince itself that it doesn't have a tumor or a parasite, I think the would-be tradwives out there, but more importantly, the men who think being a tradwife is a real thing instead of a caricature, Listening to her talk about just how poorly adapted live mammalian birth is to survival, I think, should be a reality check on how limiting birth control or not standing up for reproductive rights is actually deadly.
I mean, we know that anyway.
But to hear that, you know, it's not just a matter of civil rights, it's also a biological fact that that you should have more control over how you reproduce
and you will increase your chances of survival.
And none of that will be mitigated by free birthing in bathtubs.
So, when she alludes to the relationship between the medical minimization of women's pain,
I think this is a crucial part of her subject too.
She describes how that's led to underprescription of pain meds for women for like 40 years.
And then she really talks a lot about how the whole noble sacrifice of pain is so damaging.
And I think in light of that underprescription, it takes on new meaning because The virtues of natural childbirth with no epidurals and so on become inseparable from this culture-wide minimization of pain for women.
And I can tell you from personal and relational experience how harmful that is for women who internalize that idea.
So, just a note to cis men with regard to how birth goes, you just don't have an opinion Yeah, I think that's very strong, Matthew.
Yeah, and I think that there's something that's worth mentioning here too, which is that the whole article of faith that runs through a lot of the wellness community, which is that Doing an epidural or taking any kind of pain meds during birth is going to have such a harmful effect on the baby that as a good, spiritual, natural mother, you must endure that level of pain and noble sacrifice for the health of your baby, which completely throws out the window that, you know, a mother who survives birth and who is not, you know,
As much as possible, you know, has the best chance medical science can provide of doing well after birth is much better for the mother than a mother who's wrecked herself.
It's a strange inversion of the pro-life argument, isn't it?
Right?
Where the value is placed entirely upon the baby's life and there's no consideration whatsoever given to like, oh, well, how is it going to survive?
Or what are the circumstances going to be?
It's not actually supported by the evidence.
The evidence is that it has no ill effects on the baby, but somehow it just doesn't seem natural.
The last thing I'll mention is that I don't think I'm alone in this, in having lived a majority of the 52 years of my life as a cis man, holding a fantastical or objectified or idealized, but also just a generally symbolic relationship to women.
I don't know how much of it is reflective of my Catholic childhood or the media that I consumed in the 80s, but I have been exposed to decades of the commodification of women's bodies.
I went to an all-boys school in which women were like an alien species.
I read all of the great misogynist literature of the modernist age, even when I thought I was getting smarter as a young writer.
And when I heard Leonard Cohen sing about a woman he's ogling through a window, climb on your tears and be silent like a rose on its ladder of thorns.
I just thought it was beautiful.
I missed all of the objectification, his whole virgin whore framework, all of the evidence that women were just sort of, you know, symbols to him.
And I just want to say that it is such a relief when all of that shit falls away.
And I think it can happen in a lot of different ways.
It can happen when you start reading queer theory.
It can start when you start watching Drag Race.
You can learn about the strange realities of female biology from someone like Kat.
Or you can witness a partner go through a life-threatening birth.
And so then the real gift, I think, beyond becoming less of an asshole around these things, is that the more defamiliarized these stereotypes become, especially for men, I'm saying, the stranger you become to yourself, the more you can connect with your own vulnerability.
And I think that's really the inner core of empathy and solidarity.
So I'm really glad that you found Kat's work, Derek, because You know, I just think we need each other because nature is
metal, bodies are strange, and we're just all weird.
A few months ago, my wife and I were walking through Powell's bookstore when I saw Eve
sitting on the featured shelf.
And when I looked up Cat on my phone right there, it turned out that she had spoken earlier that day here in Portland during the annual book festival.
I was totally bummed to have missed her, but I'm really glad that she agreed to talk as this was my favorite book of 2023.
And I really hope everyone interested in medicine and science and The human body reads it.
So, Kappa Hannon's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science, and Lapham's Quarterly, great magazine if you don't know it, among others.
She completed her PhD in the Evolution of Narrative and Cognition in 2022 at Columbia University, and if you're wondering what that discipline entails, well, that's where we begin our conversation.
I want to actually talk about Columbia first, because you got your PhD in the evolution of narrative and cognition.
So can you explain what you were studying?
Like, what does that entail?
That was the best way I had of describing it.
I was doing a very interdisciplinary project.
My committee was split between literature and psychology and I was writing computer programs to dissect thousands and thousands of long-form narratives because I had cognitive questions.
I grew up in a cog psych lab.
My dad was a cognitive psychologist.
It was about 50-50 am I going to apply into psych or into lit.
I actually only applied into lit because I knew what my experiments were going to be so I wanted to know more about my Yes, sensible subject.
But also because I knew that the grant cycles are what they are.
And I had was doing this really weird interdisciplinary thing where I was using text as a subject pool, basically.
And I knew that if I wasn't tied to a specific lab sets of grants, And I could do whatever I wanted because my money would come from like Central Columbia pool instead of like specific, you know, NSF grants or what have you.
So it was like kind of a strategic thing, but it also made it even weirder for people to be like, Oh, I've only ever presented at cog psych conferences.
I've literally done almost nothing in the humanities.
Even though I started out as a poet back in the early aughts and had an MFA in poetry and was teaching poetry for University of Arizona and Johns Hopkins before I went into the PhD.
I'm a freak ball is what I'm trying to tell you.
I've done like a lot of different stuff, but you know, my dad was a cognitive psychologist.
My mom was a pianist.
Had a lot of therapy, I'm fine now.
But it was always split, you know what I mean?
In my brain, it was always both of those things.
I said I wanted to state why I wanted you on here and it's because in one level, most of the closest people in my life are women.
My wife, my sister, throughout my family.
And I see them go through health problems on one side or just regular health issues or actual problems that they have.
And then, on the other side, I work in journalism, podcasting, and there's this whole bro-science podcast world that, coming from the fitness industry where I taught group fitness for a long time, I was around that a lot, so much of it was just on this bunk science around men, but then you have this very limited range that only male bodies are being considered.
And so, Eve is a corrective to that.
When were the seeds planted to write this book?
I've always known that women are understudied and undercared for.
I just didn't know the extent until I was in the PhD.
I mean, I knew, for example, as you've probably heard from all of the cis women in your life, that, you know, when you go into a clinical space and talk about your body, your pain is taken less seriously.
Your ability to understand what's happening to you tends to be taken less seriously.
not in the kind of like self-diagnostic thing where you spend, you know, an anxious night on the internet
and have decided you have six different cancers, but just even just talking about like,
I feel this thing happening in my body and I'm pretty sure it's X and not Y.
There are some things that are fundamentally broken, frankly, about how American women exist in clinical spaces
and how we take care of our bodies and how we go and seek care
when we need medical interventions on stuff.
Women don't trust their doctors, doctors don't trust their patients enough.
Actually, both of those things need to be fixed fundamentally
and it absolutely has roots in sexism, but it doesn't only, it turns out.
So, okay, at Columbia, I was drinking one night because obviously I make good health choices all the time.
So I'm out with this group of neuroscience postdocs and we're talking about our day,
as you do with any friends, right?
This one guy, he was a postdoc in a Nobel Laureates lab, and I can't say which one for obvious reasons.
And so he had this thing that day where he needed to talk about his work.
You know, they have regular updates, like, here's how it's going with my experiments.
Here's my fancy results.
Please don't fire me.
He had been studying rodents, I think it was rat, and the original scientific question they were looking into wasn't really panning out.
He and his boss, his PI, principal investigator, the Nobel laureate, you know, the intimidating guy, it wasn't really panning out.
However, because he was collaborating with a lab that had a large number of both males and females available for this research, he ended up having a pretty solid representation of both sexes in said rodent.
And he was like, and the sex differences for this question were huge.
You know, here are my big sexy graphs.
Look at that effect.
You know, it's amazing.
And the margins of error are nicely small.
Look at here.
Look at this thing.
This is what we should be doing.
This is the question to chase down.
And his PI kind of leaned back in his chair again, the Nobel Laureate guy.
And he's like, you know, I think it was an artifact.
No.
So in statistical terms, what that means is like something about how you did your experiment was wrong, or how you interpreted your data was wrong, or your math is sloppy, go back and do it again.
And my friend passing around this bottle, because we're not fancy, we weren't even using glasses, you know, where he was I was like, and I had done it.
I had replicated my own stuff because I anticipated and look at my big sexy graphs.
Come on now.
This is the question.
And this, you know, this guy, he didn't want to do it.
He was like, you know, I think we should go back to our original question.
This sex differences thing is, I just think it's a boogeyman.
I don't, I don't believe you basically.
And so of course now my friend is drinking probably a little too heavily and I worry for his liver at that moment because Because that means that this thing that he thinks is the most exciting science to be doing is going to have to be a side gig.
And that's how it went down.
I mean, he was able to, in collaboration, do a little more in that space, but he wanted to give it his all and he wasn't able to.
And why is that?
It's because Well, it's because of a lot of things.
This older guy who had all of his laurels, very successful scientist, the head of this lab, and it's a lot to change your mind.
It's a lot to be told maybe you've been getting something wrong for decades by not properly studying females.
And this is a problem throughout biology because there's the male norm.
So you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about.
Your listeners maybe haven't.
That in biology, we've been primarily studying males in nearly every model species for like half a century.
And that's only just now starting to change.
Essentially, almost everything we know then, until recently, about how bodies worked, unless you were like specifically asking something about ovaries, or the uterus, or breastfeeding, you know, unless you specifically wanted to know things about female sex organs or female reproduction, females simply weren't in your experiments.
At all!
That was just how it was done.
That's how the science was done to avoid the messiness of female hormones, which frankly are more variable than male hormones in every mammal.
That's a thing.
So I went home and sobered up.
Which, as I remember, did take until the next day.
There was some some hard sleeping involved, probably some loud snoring.
I pity my roommates.
And, you know, the next day I was like, oh, man, how big is this problem?
And I dug into it.
And it's just everywhere.
It's just everywhere in biology and biomedical sciences.
This is what's up.
It is starting to change.
There is good news.
Don't completely freak out, you listener who's never heard about this before.
It's the Wild West right now and trying to figure out how female bodies As I reached out to you initially, I told you that 75% of our audience is female.
We come from the wellness industry, which is a predominantly female vocation in so many ways, in America at least.
So, I want to go through some of the sections and just kind of hear your thoughts on what you wrote with the caveat that every listener should buy your book to read all of it.
Let's go from metabolizing alcohol to metabolizing drugs because that's a huge one.
Women metabolize differently than men.
This often happens in pain medication where women aren't as believed and so they don't get enough pain medication.
They're telling their doctor, hey, you know, we might need a little more.
The doctor's like, no, you have enough.
Talk about that research because that one jumped out to me more than most.
Absolutely.
So there are huge numbers of drugs on the market right now that are thoroughly and officially FDA approved that have never been properly studied in female bodies, whether we're talking about the rodents leading up to the clinical trials or the actual clinical trials.
Now some of that is because of regulations in the middle of the last century.
There were a number of birth defects because people were in clinical trials and would get pregnant and then they hadn't anticipated that this drug would do a thing.
And so then there were rules for a while there about not including any bodies that could become pregnant just to make sure we don't screw up any babies.
That's a good idea.
However, what it meant is that from the late 70s until the mid-90s, there were just no women in clinical trials.
Because, of course, reproductive age is age 11 or so into 50-something, so that's most of our lives.
Right.
So that was a major, major problem, which means that you have these drugs that have been on the market for a long time.
And frankly, how we understand how they work is based entirely on male bodies.
It is starting to change.
But again, there are big gaps to fill.
So one of the most common prescription classes of drug for pain medication when you need more than just a Tylenol are opioid drugs.
So this is your OxyContin.
You've probably heard of the opioid crisis because they're actually very addictive drugs in many cases.
So, it turns out female patients metabolize opioid drugs differently than male patients.
And it's not just about our bodies being a little bit smaller or maybe having more body fat or any of that kind of stuff.
No, it's literally our livers, it turns out.
So, not all drugs are primarily metabolized through the liver.
You might have heard, for example, that Tylenol goes through your liver and Ibuprofen goes through your kidneys.
That's one of the reasons you can take them at the same time.
You're not overloading either set of How your body's doing a thing.
However, the female liver is actually dramatically female.
Like your liver does not have a pronoun, okay?
That's something your brain's doing and that's awesome and complicated, but fine.
But your liver does have a sex.
Thousands of genes are differently expressed in your liver cells, your hepatocytes, if you're female versus if you're male.
And so, opioid drugs, when they get metabolized through that sexed liver, if it's a female patient, well, they tend to need a little bit more of it to achieve the same subjective level of pain relief.
And how the effects leave the body, how that liver is processing it out, adding it to and then clearing the bloodstream, that process is also a little bit of a different slope, a little bit different.
And of course, what that means is that female patients who take opioid drugs are uniquely vulnerable to a certain kind of addiction path, right?
Because if you have a certain prescription, but you need a little bit more of it to achieve the same level of pain relief, then maybe you go a little bit off the prescription.
We do it with lots of drugs, don't we?
Oh, I need a little bit more.
Okay, fine.
You know, maybe there's a six hour window and I'm taking it at hour four.
Maybe I'm taking two instead of one, but not all the time, but sometimes, you know, like you're trying as a person to take care of your body, but you're also in pain and you being in pain does matter.
That's not a small thing.
Enduring pain is not a virtue.
I know, especially in wellness space, this gets confused, but no, no, no.
How good a person you are is completely unattached to whether or not you endure pain, people.
So here you are, you're trying to take care of yourself and you have a prescription, but the prescription isn't tailored to you if you're female in ways that possibly it should be.
This should have been built into the clinical trials, man.
This should have been built into the basic science that led up to the clinical trials.
Because, of course, how do you find a drug candidate?
Well, you do terrible things to mice, usually.
That's how you find a drug candidate, for the most part.
And then you start a clinical trial later.
Physical health is often almost treated or actually treated as a moral failing in a lot of wellness spaces.
And that's a real problem itself.
You write a bit about the microbiome and gut science.
I've been researching this more and working on it because this is, to me, a new frontier in science.
I've been reading about the enteric nervous system for 20 years.
Oh, yeah.
Gut nerves are amazing.
It's fascinating.
It also seems to be at this place where it's starting to promote eating disorders.
Because I suffered from orthorexia for 15 years, and I'm seeing all the markers on gut health being like, pure foods, clean foods, you can only eat this, this, and I'm seeing the same process happen.
But dieting in general is a huge issue in this community.
And you're right.
Forget about the paleo diet.
Modern homeosapiens have already adapted to urbanization and the bacterial challenges that come with it.
Now, I think a lot about romanticizing the past.
You see this in all wellness spaces about this diet, our ancestors 10,000 years ago ate this.
What does it say that in these spaces, we can't understand that the modern conveniences that allow us to live longer and generally better lives are because of a lot of the science that has come along in better understanding our biology.
How do you treat nutrition misinformation and microbiome misinformation?
It's a really tricky space.
It's often a very gendered space.
There's definitely sexism on board.
There's a lot of femme stuff going on.
Because of course, as you say, so much of wellness is very often women.
And there are long standing industries that are not simply there to tell women what to do with their bodies, but just to Just tell women what to do.
There's just, you can make a lot of money off telling women what to do.
And in fact, when I originally, you know, when my book went up for auction a decade ago, because it took me a decade to write it, there were definitely people who wanted to buy it who were like, so we're going to make this like, you know, actionable, right?
We're going to make this like telling a reader how, which choices to make with their body.
And I'm like, well, that just seems irresponsible.
Like we all want our takeaways, but actually there's a, there's a worry about overly profiting on the takeaways.
So the thing about the microbiome that people should know is that increasingly in every lab that's studying this stuff, we know it's really important, but also know that we don't know what the hell's going on.
Just take away the knowledge that yes, your bacteria are so important and we're increasingly knowing that that's a thing.
But we don't yet have good advice.
No one does.
For what to do about it, except for like, wash your hands in certain scenarios and don't eat stuff off the floor.
Like, that's the level of advice that's actually supported by the science right now.
And the rest of it is just all over the place.
And usually, if anyone's trying to tell you like, eat this pill because it's good for your microbiome, Understand that that person may or may not have your best interests at heart, okay?
And the supplements industry is not regulated and that is actually a problem!
Which is to say, it's great that you want to take care of your body because you should honor the life that you live in that body and it is finite.
And your suffering matters and your pain matters and your health absolutely matters.
But the snake oil thing is also a problem.
And being told that, you know, eating one thing or another is going to be, you know, and you hear a buzzword like microbiome or, you know, probiotics or what have you, understand that we don't know yet.
And by we, I mean literally the global scientific community.
It is really, really interesting.
I can tell you, and this is gross, but it's worth saying.
So there's such a thing as FMT, fecal material transfer.
In other words, putting someone else's poop up your butt, basically.
Or in a worryingly brown slurry in a tube that goes down through your throat.
Okay, do not do this at home.
Please do not put anything up your butt unless you know exactly what you're doing.
And most of the time outside of sexual scenarios, do not.
Just don't.
And that's because it's been proven in hospital settings to be useful for a very specific infection which is C. difficile which is like one of these intractable antibiotic resistant horrible things that happens to people who've been hospitalized a long time and then they get horrible diarrhea and they can indeed die from it.
So it's amazing that you can just like rejigger that person's intestinal flora, that person's internal microbiome with just someone else's poop.
That's amazing!
That's actually a huge win.
Everything is being studied right now by excellent scientists and labs across the world, trying to figure out, like, can we use this for other reasons?
Like, they're looking into obesity, they're looking into anxiety and depression, because actually, as you now know, there seems to be a deep connection between your gut and your mood.
That's a thing!
You know, like, there's a tight connection, in other words, between your enteric nervous system and the immune system that's on board in there as well, and your central nervous system, which is to say your brain.
Like, this is all a looping function.
No part of your body is separate from another.
But we don't yet know if perturbing the microbiome in one way or another down there is going to produce the results you're after.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't eat generally healthy.
In ways that actually most of the common sense advice makes sense, like eat more plants, eat less fried food, and less processed meats.
Like in general, in other words, most of the broad advice, I feel like Michael Pollan did a good job here, eat more plants, don't eat more food than your body is telling you it needs, like be sensitive to the signals you're getting from your own body and honor those, and don't stress about this stuff.
But you can't make a lot of money with that advice!
You can't make money with washing your hands, and it should be noted that Semmelweis died in an insane asylum because he told other doctors to wash their hands, and went insane because they pushed back, and it was only after he died that people were like, oh yeah, maybe this makes sense.
Yes, that did happen.
I don't think in that case it was about people trying to make money.
Oh, no.
But you're absolutely right.
In that case, it was simply that, like, we had a major paradigm shift.
We shifted from an old understanding of how the body worked and then started to understand that, like, Germs cause disease, which we literally did not understand before.
So the idea that doctors should wash their hands between patients relied on the idea that, like, you could infect someone.
We didn't understand how infection worked.
That was a major change in science.
Yeah, which I don't know how much you pay attention to the anti-vax wellness space, but there are people who are promoting terrain theory and saying that Pasteur got it wrong.
That's still a thing.
People actually believe that germs don't cause disease.
It's the environment only.
Much like I have some amount of sympathy for flat earthers, I have some sympathy for these folk, too.
I know it's hard because it sounds silly and we want to make fun of them.
And frankly, some of them deserve it.
But then a whole bunch of them, like they're making observations about the world and don't have training in science and are saying, I can't see these things that you say are causing this thing.
And so they're just revising it.
Like for a very long time, you know, we thought that human milk Like breastfeeding, like milk, was actually menstrual fluid that transferred via a kind of holy tube from the uterus to your nipple.
Like they thought there was a vein, it was called the vasa menstrualis, I talk about in the book, you know, and they thought even Leonardo da Vinci drew this into his drawings because it would break their brains to understand that that's not how milk works.
It's not just that you stop having periods and you start making milk and vice versa.
There's actually this complicated thing where if you're breastfeeding, it's an ovulation suppressant.
In other words, you're less likely to get your period.
It's not perfect.
You can still get your period while you're breastfeeding, but you're less likely to, right?
It's not literally a fluid is transforming through some kind of God tube from your uterus.
To your nipple, but we had to like totally understand glands and like hormones and just all kinds of stuff about how bodies work in order to get away from milk is the holy version of evil menstrual blood.
Because we ran with that idea for 2,000 years.
I mean, all of Europe, that was the model for what milk was.
So I'm glad we've gotten better, but that's a paradigm shift.
What drives me nuts is that we inevitably are always embedded.
In these ideas about how our bodies work and how the world works, and these are both social and cultural ideas and also scientific ideas, science is made of people.
A paradigm shift is actually a major thing.
By definition, it's like this, it's a way of understanding how the world works.
You know, it's a way of modeling reality and ourselves in it in a way that once you get that, you can't go back to thinking the way you did before.
Once we understood that bacteria cause disease, we just couldn't think that plague was caused by an evil fog that drifted in from a war zone in Asia.
And that was like the miasma thing.
That was like a dominant idea for how plague worked.
The thing that drives me nuts is that I know, because this is how human thought works, this is the history of ideas, you know, I know that you and I right now are getting something fundamentally wrong.
About reality.
It's like the Emperor's New Clothes.
Like, we're seeing things and not understanding what we're seeing in deep, deep ways.
And we'll only understand how wrong we were later.
That doesn't mean the ideas we have now are fundamentally garbage.
That isn't a reason to just not trust anything, you know, in conspiracy space.
Like, it's not, that's not the point.
It's not tinfoil hat moment.
It's useful to remember that we're probably getting something wrong.
And like I did in the book, like one of the most useful spaces when you think about that, what seems more based on like cultural ideas that we have say about the body, and may not actually be supported by the actual data, by the actual science, by the actual medical research going on.
So for example, a big thing that happens in the natural birth movement, Now, there are pluses and minuses to the natural birth movement.
I love people reclaiming their bodies and valuing women's experience.
That's like, I am on board with that in any given room.
But a big thing that gets cited is that having an epidural might lengthen your labor and then make you more prone to complications.
In other words, that maybe it's the epidural's fault that you had a c-section that you didn't want to have.
That thing.
Which then, of course, is modeled as some kind of moral failing for the person who had the epidural.
It's a whole thing.
Again, remember, enduring pain doesn't mean you're a good person.
Let's just establish that as a truth, right?
If we can say that women's experience is valuable, let's also say that women not experiencing pain is valuable, right?
So, it turns out, if you actually look at the studies where this comes from, having an epidural might increase the average length of a birthing person's labor by A few minutes.
It's like 10 to 14 minutes, something like that.
That's the length of time, people.
That's the average big ass boost that people are saying is like, I'm going to be in labor forever if I have an epidural and I won't know what's going on and I won't know when to push and blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
OBGYN space is great.
Yes, we can demedicalize some of this stuff, but epidurals are a freaking miracle, people.
It's amazing that you can turn down the hideous amount of pain that is inherently built into how homo sapiens give birth.
And it's not gonna increase your labor to a degree is gonna mean that you have a c-section.
That's not, that's not what's up.
You're not messing yourself up, messing up your birth, or messing up your kid by having pain relief.
One thing we're working on is there's this whole fertility coaching industry that's popping up right now.
Interesting.
These are not trained professionals.
You write, women's bodies are particularly adapted to the rigors of pregnancy, not simply so we can get pregnant, but so we can survive.
I'll talk a little bit about the pregnancy chapter because I think that there is a disparity between some of what I'm seeing presented as this natural birthing process, which I'm sure works for some people, but then also the actual rigors of how the female human body is constructed.
So the womb chapter is all about how eutherian wombs, which is like ours in other words, mammals like us who give birth to live offspring, evolved in the first place, which actually is from an adorable weasel-like chick that lived a very long time ago, Protangulatum daenae.
I nicknamed her Donna because that's a whole lot to say.
And the reason it matters to look at the evolution of these things is that it's useful to remember that not everything evolution produces is necessarily a great idea.
We used to lay eggs into, you know, like a nest and let them hatch there.
And that remains, by many measures, a much better idea.
Then what we mammals do, which is to effectively turn our whole body into some kind of like H.R.
Giger fever dream of eggshell slash burrow slash meat factory.
Like we're doing all of this inside our bodies in ways that actually in evolutionary time We had the good sense not to do.
Like, I am down with Holy Mary sitting on her clutch of eggs instead of that Bethlehem crash scene.
Like, this is, what we do is crazy, okay?
And we don't talk about that enough, frankly, when we talk about women's bodies.
In part because, well, there is the very natural and beautiful urge to honor the strength that the female body has, which is often denigrated.
We get put down for the very fact of our bodies.
We're supposed to be weaker.
We're supposed to be smaller.
So there's this beautiful reclaiming thing that happens when we're like, actually I give birth, mofo, and it's hard and it's amazing that I can literally make life in my body.
And yes, yes it is.
That doesn't mean it's not terrible.
We can talk about both things.
We can talk about how awful this is and talk about how it evolved in ways that are patently awful and still say it's amazing that we're able to do this.
We can admit that this is terrible and still say cool that we're able to do it and and and honor the people who do.
You know, we talk about the womb as this, you know, beautiful cushion, wonderful, holy space.
I don't know.
We use all kinds of crazy words, right?
And that our fertility is this natural culmination of our being, which kind of sucks for all people with infertility, but okay.
And we're like, ah, but actually the uterus is an environment.
And actually there's such a thing as maternal fetal competition, which is to say, The fetus in all mammals because again we're not laying it externally we're having to do all of this internally with an umbilical cord and everything and a placenta which is just a shit show.
We are long evolved at when we're an embryo to get as many resources as we can through that umbilical cord through that placenta docking onto the mother's body just Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.
It's really hard to build bone.
This takes a lot of energy and a lot of materials.
On the flip side, the mother's body has long evolved to survive.
Okay?
Which means, inherently, those two bodies are in conflict.
Actually, for resources.
They are literally competing for resources in the localized environment of the uterus.
And the placenta is actually made of both.
The top plate of the placenta is made of embryonic material.
Same stuff that makes the amniotic sac.
Same thing that ends up, you know, making the embryo, right?
And the bottom plate, the basal plate, is made of the mother's body.
And where the two in the human animal intersect, those two picture two pancakes stacked on top of each other, actually is a deep interweaving of blood vessels.
And we're unusual because we have really penetrative placentas.
That top plate is penetrating all the way down into the mother's bloodstream.
And that's where actually a lot of our birth complications come from.
Because it has knock-on effects in our immune system.
Because the embryo has to be like, please don't attack me even though I'm behaving a lot like a tumor.
Frankly.
I'm gonna have to trick you into thinking I'm not a tumor even though normally, literally everything I'm doing with all this tissue and penetrating your bloodstream, angiogenesis, etc, etc, and the fact that you recognize me as not containing your identical genetic material, every single one of these cells, don't attack me anyway.
So that takes a lot of work.
So that means the maternal immune system to survive that Has to the rest of the time run a little bit hot because of course the placenta evolves to down regulate to turn down the heat on the mother's immune system so it won't attack it like a tumor which all makes sense.
However in all of that space where it makes sense the rest of that maternal life when she ain't pregnant is gonna have to kind of probably run a little bit hot like as a baseline and you get a lot of autoimmunity.
Possibly because of that.
It's one of the models right now for why female humans get more autoimmune problems.
That we just have a different base setting for how we regulate inflammation, for how we deal with infection.
It does mean that males unfortunately, very sorry for your whole life, get more infections throughout your life.
Just like from when you're born turns out boy babies, by boy babies I mean biologically male, You get infected more your whole damn lives and actually when you get infected you you have a worse prognosis almost universally.
Kind of sucks to be male actually in terms of like your general infection path over your life.
You also get more cancer.
Some of that's your immune system some of that's you don't have an X chromosome to pair with your other one.
There are complex reasons I mean.
Male bodies are less good at staying alive because in part of this like wonky immune system problem.
On the other hand, we have to endure way more pregnancy complications and we're much more likely to die when we're pregnant, right?
So we don't talk about that in wellness space, do we?
We don't talk about like this idea that the fact of pregnancy and how we make babies is actually patently terrible and also isn't just about when we're pregnant.
It's our whole damn lives because we are evolved bodies.
You keep referencing biologically female, biologically male.
I really liked your footnotes because we cover a lot of the anti-trans panic that's happening in America right now.
And we know that, A, it's scientific illiteracy to think that there's only two genders.
And we also know that it's a tool that a certain part of the population is using to scare everyone right now, and it really sucks.
And part of this occurs in sports.
And what I absolutely loved when you write about, yes, biological males are stronger and faster for a certain amount of time, but actually women endure.
Like once you get to ultramarathons, women tend to win those.
Yes, very much so.
And outpaced, importantly.
Yes.
I kind of think of it as a metaphor for I'm wondering when you started thinking about transgender people and why you made that such a prominent aspect of your book.
Oh, well, that's because I came out as a bisexual woman.
In the 1990s, when I basically when I was entering puberty, I was like, oh, also this other thing, you know, and I was sort of foolish.
And so I just wasn't in the closet very long.
I just came.
Some of my friends were like, you came out with trumpets out of the closet.
You were just like you had a band be like, I'm queer, you know, and that was just what it was.
But of course, for me, my dad at that point had his lab in Indianapolis, Indiana.
So I was living in Indiana and coming out In 1994, in Indiana, was not at all the same as coming out in New York, where I had moved from.
Okay, so there was a very coastal thing about me that, you know, am I a member of the coastal elite?
Yeah, probably.
But I've also lived in the south and the midwest.
But for us, those queer kids in that high school, it was, oh man, there was no government support.
There was no nothing.
There was no Indiana, all right?
You know, Hoosiers!
We learned real fast that we had to keep each other alive because no grown-up was gonna do it.
So I was a member of a group called IYG, innocuously named the Indianapolis Youth Group, and we had a secret safe house basically on the east side of town, and we knew perfectly well not to tell anybody who wasn't part of the group where it was.
And we had our weekly meetings and we managed to kind of work the system a little bit like we we applied for a grant from like an anti-kid smoking campaign from the Indiana government you know and that meant like the desk at the front where you came in this like safe house had a big sign that said don't smoke that money paid for all the condoms in the drawer because back then HIV I mean there was no cure like I I knew people who died dude like I there was no prophylactic There was no cocktail that could maintain.
There was no magic Johnson living forever by shoving money at medicine slash the miracle of his own body.
So for me, the idea of, you know, LGBTQ wasn't like a like a trendy thing.
It was like a saving each other's lives thing.
You know, we ran the first LGBTQ national crisis hotline out of that safe house in Indiana, and we saved a lot of suicidal kids' lives.
And we were often the first person that anyone who called in had ever talked to about this stuff had ever come out.
And we did our best to then connect them.
You know, with care.
We had some adults, some social workers, you know, on staff.
And so we learned how to do that.
So we weren't just winging it.
That was a big part of what we did.
We did a lot of rehoming because it was kind of a whisper network.
Like, a lot of kids in that group were kicked out of their homes because their parents found out they were gay or lesbian or bi or trans.
And gender and sexuality, it was all just a big swirl of like, our priority is freaking keeping people alive.
Like, I remember using my sweatshirt to, like—oh, no, no.
It wasn't a sweatshirt.
It was a flannel.
Let me clarify, because you want to be accurate.
Because flannels were a thing with grunge style at the time.
So, 1994, right?
So, I had a flannel that I wore, like many young butch bi women, and I had to use the sleeve of my flannel to, like, wipe blood off my friend's face because she got jumped at school.
Because that was just normal.
For us being queer kids, you know?
And so the reason I'm telling you all this isn't just like my bona fides or whatever.
It's like to say the idea that I would talk about the reality of people who are trans in my book wasn't like a trendy thing.
It was just foundational for how I became an adult, how I found my way into my womanhood.
Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah.
You write that the most important human invention is gynecology.
Yeah.
Later in the book, you also write that you think of sexism and gynecology as two sides of the same coin.
Can you unpack that a little bit?
I can.
That'd be some controversial stuff, but it's very, very important in my book.
We already talked about, although not extensively, how difficult human reproduction is.
Our reproductive rates, our fertility rates, are actually pretty low.
So anyone who's experiencing infertility, I'm sorry, you're just homosapien.
That's just a thing we got going on.
We're just not hyperfertile bodies.
That's just a thing.
Maybe in part that is tied to the simple fact that our pregnancies and births and postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous and crippling and sometimes deadly complications than they are for Most other primates, most other mammals, we actually suck at making babies.
Again, all celebration for all the people who, you know, went through it and they were like, this was great, you know, I empower you.
But like, you know, the rest of us are kind of like, when's she gonna stop telling us her super positive birth story?
Because it's literally people who have zero pain.
Probably have a pain disorder.
So if we accept that actually the way our species does it is just inherently kind of problematic, kind of bad.
And think of us in our ancient state where we don't have anything like an awesome prenatal care.
Okay, we don't even have language yet and we're still covered in fur and we had this problem already.
Think like a biologist.
That's the most important problem you have to solve.
Like in evolutionary biology, You can have a weird claw, okay?
You can limp around on one foot, you can see out of one eye, but if you have trouble making babies, that's not a predictor of great evolutionary success.
That's certainly not going to get you to 8 billion.
That's a massive number.
There are many things that led to that but one of the most fundamental things that led to it is that we invented gynecology probably like 3.2 million years ago.
Lucy the Australopithecine had a freaking midwife because she too had difficulty giving birth and the bigger our brains got which seems to be tied potentially to how invasive our placentas are because actually your brain is really expensive to build.
You need a lot of material and a lot of energy to make that stupid thing up there.
In your head?
Well, then that also increases birth complications and on and on we go, right?
So, if she invented midwifery or someone just before or after somewhere in there and that is how we managed to collaboratively, co-supportively Overcome our most basic problem, which is that we suck at making babies.
If you think about that and you say, oh, that's the human success story, that really changes how you think about gynecology in general.
But it being a flip side is this.
So if gynecology is a behavioral workaround, which it is, again, thinking like a scientist, right?
This is stuff you're doing to overcome a basic problem that you have in your body plan.
And you're doing it socially, you're doing it collaboratively.
This is behavior.
Well, there are other things you can do to intervene on a female's fertility, too, that regulate when and how and in what circumstances she becomes pregnant or has sex with others.
And one of the things that I noticed in nearly every human culture we know of is that we tend to create really strong sex rules.
We regulate access to female bodies.
How much of her body can be seen?
And where?
And by whom?
And in what context?
Where can she go in a given day?
Can she interact with males?
You know, when to, and by the time you arrive at sex, oh my goodness, we have very strict rules about when and how and where and with whom you get to have sex.
Right?
Every human culture creates sex rules.
The rules are different culture to culture.
Okay?
And so it's not the case that there's one set of sex rules that should be thought of as the ancestral model.
Like, this is the basic thing that humans do.
The basic thing we do is we create sex rules.
And I think a lot of what we call sexism is driven by this.
This basic thing, which is a cultural workaround to regulate female fertility.
Sometimes having females have more babies, sometimes having them have less.
Right?
But when you think like a biologist, as soon as you're intervening on when and how a female has sex, And makes babies and gets pregnant and raises them, then you are absolutely intervening on the whole species fertility patterns.
So that's why I think of the two as, you know, flip sides of the coin.
Like for a long time, all of the things that we did in advancing gynecology and obstetrics to help more mothers survive and thrive and help more babies survive and thrive, this inherently dangerous process, which is how we make babies.
We also were inherently generating human cultures of all kinds.
We are culture makers.
We are super social primates, right?
And in some environments where those cultures take hold, certain fertility patterns are going to help those females survive and thrive better than others.
And in different environments, a different thing might be more beneficial.
Maybe you want to have a whole bunch of babies up at the start of your reproductive life, like in your 20s.
In your teens, it's actually a really bad idea.
Your body's not done growing.
That was true historically, too.
Most hunter-gatherer societies don't even start ovulating until 18, people.
16 to 18.
This whole idea of teen pregnancy is really weird.
So like if the flip side of the coin of saving female lives with gynecology is also regulating her social life to control when and how she has sex, they're both towards the same goal.
The only thing is is now gynecology is so amazing that it does a much better job at it than nearly any of our social sex rules.
That actually now sexism at large is massively reducing female health, is massively reducing the likelihood that a woman's going to survive pregnancy, is massively reducing the health of little girls too.
Like everywhere in the whole planet and nearly every culture these sex rules are just not as good at saving lives as gynecology.
And so what I thought was really cool, and this is more towards the conclusion of the book, well now we get to choose.
Maybe only just now, man.
Maybe only just now at this point in the entire history of our species do we get to get our heads above water and choose what rules we're going to keep and what rules we're going to get rid of now that we understand what the central goal actually was, which is actually helping females and their offspring survive and thrive.
You said earlier that, you know, you didn't want to write a prescriptive book.
Well, at least when we were talking about nutrition.
And I understand that with our book, you know, the publisher's always like, Give people a takeaway and you're like, well, maybe.
Well, Danoff didn't, and that was great.
Yeah.
You write there are two fundamental things standing in the way of what you just expressed, which are asteroids and assholes.
Yes.
You also write that it is a hopeful time, and I agree with that.
More women are entering the STEM fields, more BIPOC are entering the STEM fields, and that is going to change our understanding.
Oh, yeah.
Can we educate assholes?
Oh, that's a question I haven't been asked.
That's interesting.
Well, you certainly can't educate an asteroid.
I'm going to tell your listeners really quick what I meant by that, just really quickly.
Yes, I think we're moving inexorably forward, inevitably, powerfully forward towards sex egalitarianism.
I mean, if you pull the camera back and you look at the last 400 years, that's certainly true.
Actually, if you pull the camera back and you look at the last 3 million in the fossil record, there's all kinds of evidence, both biological and then once you're in human, anthropological evidence that we are moving, as a species, towards sex egalitarianism, to more evenness in social power.
Between the sexes.
And that is a really useful thing to remember in times of despair, which is, I don't know, this election year, how about right now is a time when a lot of people with ovaries are not feeling great.
No matter where we are in the political spectrum, actually, we're not feeling awesome about this moment in our lives and in history.
But if you're able to pull the camera back, you can see we're still on the path.
They're always in social change and this kind of thing.
There are always eddies and fallbacks and yes, violent pushback and terrible losses, okay?
And obviously the loss of protection for female reproductive choice in this country is a terrible loss.
No matter how you feel about abortion, it's terrible that the decision isn't left up to the woman and her doctor anymore.
However, there are things that stand in the way, like you say, that you can't really prepare for and you can't really predict.
You can't prepare for asteroids.
The dinosaurs were not prepared.
The only thing left of the dinosaurs are, well, birds.
And they're still kind of pissed about the whole situation.
You can't prep for major world-changing events like, I don't know, plagues.
Hi, we just went through a really terrible thing as a human species.
It was called COVID-19.
Still kind of going through it, yo.
Just not as drastically, but still kind of.
Don't think if you forgot.
You know, there are certain things you can prepare for in terms of pandemics and certain things you can't.
You can't prepare for an asteroid is what I'm saying.
You can do your best with public health whatever's but yeah.
And of course those things can massively set back equality between genders.
You know that sets back gender rights like whoa.
And then there are the assholes.
Then there are people who are just Just more sexist than others.
And you just don't know what to do there.
You just, you're like, how did you arrive?
But there's degrees, there's degrees of assholery.
There are minor assholes who just think that like when women choose to use formula, they're just like somehow abdicating their deep responsibility as milk makers.
Ah, and guess what?
Women do that too.
Women judge on one another for using formula and you gotta stop.
Moving on.
And then those are real easy to educate.
You can't always change them.
You can't deeply change people, you know what I mean?
But you can give perspective.
You can offer like, like the breastfeeding thing.
You can offer like, yeah, there are a lot of advantages for breastfeeding, but actually the scientific, by most measures, it's in the early weeks.
The early weeks, it's definitely beneficial in the long term for years and years.
But like in terms of like the most important, it's that early immunological stuff in the first few weeks.
And all of those other things are really small effect sizes and profoundly confounded in sorry, in science confounds.
I don't know if your listeners know it means like a complication.
It means you can't really say what you're saying about your data because of this other thing you're not taking account into account.
So almost all of the breastfeeding research didn't control for social class.
It's simply the case in the last few decades that the people who are breastfeeding tend to be wealthy people with a lot of resources living in all of the awesome for your health and children's education environments which is to say many of the effects that we've seen in doing breastfeeding for longer that we say are so awesome for kids Go away if you control for how rich mom is.
Which we already know is a factor so that's what we call a confound.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't breastfeed and god it's so hard I want to support you if that's a goal of yours.
I just mean to say that like really it's the early weeks and stop punishing yourselves for later sleep.
You can do that education, right?
That's an education in a minor asshole space.
Like, they don't know that they're being assholes because they've heard stuff, and there's some sexism in there for sure, but it's like not all of it.
Then there are major assholes, and those are harder.
And I don't know what to tell you.
It's just like, wow, did you really say that just now?
And you know, and you throw, and you throw as much science at them as you can, and you try and be loving and welcoming and use a lot of we language and I feel language instead of you, like a therapist will tell you, but like, Gotta do what you can and then rely on the wonders of human institutions to make laws and vote accordingly.
And then, of course, you have things that move beyond major assholery into the demagogues, the monsters.
And there are monsters that inevitably hold women's rights back.
And they do it brutally and violently and horrifically.
And it's up to the global community to make sure that those people don't get too much power.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us next week on the main feed when Teller Lorenz joins us to discuss her recent book, Extremely Online.
