S3 Ep15: Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno: Surviving Family Court and the Normalization of Abuse

S3 Ep15: Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno: Surviving Family Court and the Normalization of Abuse

“There is always a reason for people to hate on women.” — Elizabeth Dalgarno Why 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 [https://www.drdalgarno.com/] is a world-leading coercive control researcher and advocate. She is the Director and Founder of SHERA Research Group [https://www.shera-research.com/team/dr-elizabeth-dalgarno], 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.  [https://substack.com/@drdalgarno]

S3 Ep14: Rerun: Kate Manne: Understanding the Logic of Misogyny

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 [https://zawn.substack.com/p/my-parents-make-fatphobic-comments] 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 [https://academic.oup.com/book/27451] (Oxford University Press, 2018), ENTITLED: How Male Privilege Hurts Women [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608442/entitled-by-kate-manne/] (Crown, 2020) and UNSHRINKING: How to Face Fatphobia [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722318/unshrinking-by-kate-manne/] (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 [https://katemanne.substack.com/], 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 [https://www.liberatingmotherhood.org/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!

S3 Ep13: Inimai Chettiar: Fighting for Women's Legal Rights

I’ve often said that there’s a concerted effort to get people to hate lawyers, and it’s because when people hate lawyers, they won’t assert or even learn about their own rights. Lawyers have helped lead every movement for social justice, and in the United States, are behind every imaginable civil rights gain.  Inimai Chettiar, an American attorney and President of A Better Balance, has used the legal system to fight for a more just world for two decades. She began her career working to end mass incarceration, and is now fighting for the rights of working mothers.  This diversity of experience lends her unique insight into the American legal system. In our conversation, we cover a wide range of topics, including:  * How to make the legal system work for women, instead of always against us.  * Inimai’s work at A Better Balance, including a lawsuit against Amazon for abuse of pregnant workers.  * The fight for paid leave at work, and the role it plays in the broader fight for women’s equality.  * How mass incarceration affects women.  * What people get wrong about the legal system, and how it affects their ability to fight for their own rights.  * IVF and its shortcomings. Inimai has had two children via IVF, and has researched and written extensively about IVF, infertility and older women, and the specific issues women of color undergoing fertility treatments face. This is a must listen if you struggle with infertility or hope to have children in your forties.  About Inimai Chettiar Inimai Chettiar is President of A Better Balance. She leads the organization’s pioneering efforts to advance fair and supportive work-family policies like paid family and medical leave, paid sick time, and fair and flexible scheduling, and to combat discrimination against pregnant people and family caregivers in the workplace. She is a leading civil rights attorney and justice advocate with more than two decades of experience leveraging the law to advance transformative reforms. With deep experience in litigation, advocacy, coalition building, and communications, Chettiar’s approach to serving as A Better Balance’s President is framed around the intersectionality between social justice, racial justice, and workplace policies that advance meaningful change for women and families. Her personal experiences also drive her passion for A Better Balance’s mission to build a future where all workers can care for themselves and their loved ones, without risking their economic security. Chettier was appointed as President of A Better Balance in 2024. Previously, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the Justice Action Network, the nation’s largest bipartisan criminal justice reform organization. Her leadership and coalition building helped secure the passage of the First Step Act, which released over 30,000 people from prison, the Fair Chance Act, and other key federal legislation. Chettiar also served as the Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she established the Center as a national leader in ending mass incarceration, authored groundbreaking reports on crime and incarceration, positioned criminal justice as an issue central to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the national narrative, worked to transform law enforcement. Through Chettiar’s leadership, mass incarceration became recognized as more than an issue of criminal justice reform and was successfully framed around the deep and generational impact it has on families. She also served as Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, and Litigation Associate at Debevosie & Plimpton LLP. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Chicago Law School, is widely published in numerous journals, reports, and books, and is quoted extensively across top tier national media outlets.

S3 Ep12: Stefanie O'Connell: The Ambition Penalty

Mainstream career advice for women loves to pretend we can’t possibly know even the most basic facts about having a career.  We tell women to ask for a raise, as if they don’t know they work for money.  We tell them to “lean in,” as if the problem is just that no one ever bothered telling them to try.  We tell them to communicate better at work, as if women have never learned to talk, and as if men are known for their exceptional communication. It’s very similar to how we talk about domestic labor. We insist on locating the problem in individual women rather than acknowledging the political reality. The truth is that women are outpacing men on almost every imaginable metric: college graduation, law and medical school admissions, and more. Yet our hard work and competence never seem to translate into fair pay, equal respect, or even an acknowledgment that most women work.  Stefanie O’Connell’s The Ambition Penalty takes a hard look at the double binds and misogyny women face at work. She’s a brilliant speaker and writer, and I learned so much talking to her. Her book will be out in two weeks, but pre-orders are live now (and very important for publisher numbers).  You can find her book, as well as all books I talk about on the podcast, and a list of book recommendations, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop [https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood].  If you are in New York City, I hope you’ll consider attending Stefanie’s book launch event. [https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062207983-0] About Stefanie O’Connell Stefanie O’Connell is an award-winning journalist and author of “The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up– and Then Pushes Them Down [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stefanie-oconnell/the-ambition-penalty/9781541705210/].” Her work dismantles the myths keeping women from equitable pay, leadership and power — one data point at a time. With bylines in Slate, Bloomberg, CNBC, Glamour UK, Newsweek, USA Today and Business Insider, Stefanie exposes how power and gender collide to keep women “in their place.” She also wrote, hosted and co-produced the WEBBY winning podcast, “Money Confidential” for REAL SIMPLE magazine. Stefanie has appeared on ABC World News, CBSN, Fox Business, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, The Doctors and local news stations across the US. An honors graduate of New York University, Stefanie lives in New York City with her daughter. Follow Stefanie on Instagram here. [https://www.instagram.com/stefanieoconnell/] Follow Stefanie on Threads here.  [https://www.threads.com/@stefanieoconnell] Follow Stefanie on TikTok here.  [https://www.tiktok.com/@stefaniemoconnell] Follow Stefanie on LinkedIn here.  [https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanieoconnell/]

S3 Ep11: Cordelia Fine: Debunking Sex Difference Myths

You’re being lied to about gender difference science. Researchers are inflating, overstating, and falsifying their data, or building biases into the research that render it unreliable. Stories about research inflate the limited differences these flawed studies find, and parenting advice suggests that we should treat girls and boys as radically different types of humans.  So we do exactly that, and then we insist that different outcomes mean that gender differences must be innate and unchangeable.  No matter what researchers see in scans of female brains—and even when they see different things in different brains—they conclude that their data prove that women are naturally and inevitably more emotional than men. Lots of activity in a particular brain region, limited activity in that same region, lots of activity in some women and limited activity in others—it’s all used as evidence to support the same bias.  This research is everywhere, and everyone seems to “know” that the differences between men and women are significant and vast. When you dig into the research, though, that turns out not to be the case. The challenge is that most of us lack the expertise and time to read the research—especially since the promulgators of scientific sexism are constantly producing more research (and more questionable research).  Cordelia Fine is a researcher who argues that the science is weak, the assumptions underlying it are flawed, and that the goal isn’t scientific truth or progress. She’s written extensively about harmful gender difference science, and I was so thrilled to bring her on the podcast. Some of the topics we discuss include: * The myriad problems with studies of sex differences: research that doesn’t prove what it claims to, popular media that overstates research claims, and more.  * The false assumptions that go into gender difference research, and how those assumptions affect research outcomes.  * The misrepresentation, and occasional outright fabrication, of scientific research.  * The cornucopia of myths about testosterone specifically, and hormones more generally, that color our perceptions about gender.  * The numerous forces putting gender role pressure on children, including before they are even born.  * The normalization of gender roles in casual social relationships, and how often these issues come up in parenting small talk.  * Why something being biological does not mean it is innate, inevitable, or unchangeable.  * Spurious results, and the replication crisis in behavioral science.  * The just-so stories we tell to understand research findings and defend the existence of gender differences.  * The weaponization of perimenopause to stigmatize and dismiss women.  Find Cordelia’s books, all of the books recommended on the podcast, and numerous reading lists at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop [https://bookshop.org/shop/liberatingmotherhood].  About Cordelia Fine Cordelia Fine is an academic and writer. Her work analyses scientific and popular biological explanations of behavioral sex differences and workplace gender inequalities, explores the effects of gender-related attitudes and biases on judgments and decision-making, and contributes to debates about workplace gender equality. She was recently named a “living legend” of research by The Australian. She is the author of Patriarchy Inc., Testosterone Rex, Delusions of Gender and A Mind of Its Own and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Among other accolades, Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Delusions of Gender was listed in ‘Ten books about women that will change your life’ (Sunday Times), ‘22 books women think men should read’ (Huffington Post), ‘Top 10 books on women in the past 30 years’ (The Australian) and the New York Public Library’s Essential Reads on Feminism, 100 Years After the 19th Amendment, among others.  In recognition of her work on the understanding of gender stereotypes, challenging gender perceptions and contributions to public discourse to close the gender gap, Cordelia Fine was awarded the 2018 Edinburgh Medal by the City of Edinburgh Council, to honor men and women of science who have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity.  Cordelia Fine has degrees from Oxford University, Cambridge University and UCL and is now a professor in the History & Philosophy of Science programme in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.