Liberating Motherhood

Supremacy culture wants to convince us all that it is inevitable. If oppression is natural, it’s hardly worth fighting, after all. Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have always weaponized science—and too many scientists have allowed themselves to be mouthpieces for oppressive ideologies. 
Angela Saini has written about the use and abuse of science to uphold oppression for years. Her books investigate the origins of misogyny, analyze how science is weaponized in service of oppression, and debunk common sexist and racist myths about human biology. 
In this episode, we talk about a range of topics, including: 

The origins of patriarchy, and why patriarchy is social and not biological. 

The relative recency of patriarchy, and why patriarchy has not always been a part of human history. 

How biology is misused to uphold systems of oppression. 

How marriage became an arm of the state, and how marriage and family enabled women’s oppression.

Patriarchy as an accident, not an inevitability, and the role patrilocality played in its creation. 

How myths about gender and biology, gender roles, and gender as natural or inevitable uphold patriarchy. 

How scientific racism continues to influence medicine and politics. You can find the study I reference in the podcast here. 

How racialized medicine can worsen outcomes in marginalized communities. 

As always, if you like this podcast, please help support it by heart-reacting it, leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform, or sharing it with your friends.
About Angela Saini

Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist and Assistant Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She presents radio, podcasts, and television shows for the BBC among others, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in the Financial Times, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Wired.
Angela’s 2023 book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Nonfiction and a Waterstones politics book of the year. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017 and named the Physics World book of the Year. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages.
In 2020 Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers. Angela started her career with the British broadcaster ITN on its news trainee scheme, before joining the BBC as a reporter, where her six-month investigation into bogus universities featured on the flagship national News at Ten and won a Prix Circom European television news award.
Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Between 2012 and 2013 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a 2022 Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as a resident scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. She has given distinguished and keynote lectures at universities across the world, including the 2022 Simonyi Lecture at Oxford, the Yale Poynter Fellowship lecture in 2022, and the Wollstonecraft Lecture at the London School of Economics in 2023. She was made an honorary fellow of her alma mater Keble College, Oxford in 2023.
You can find Angela’s books, all books recommended on the podcast, and numerous reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page. 
Angela’s latest book will be out in January of 2027, and you can preorder it now.

No matter how much we try to relegate sexuality to the most private corner of our lives, it inevitably escapes. Sex is not really a private act. It’s a political one, which both influences and is influenced by our culture, politics, history, and more. 
Angela Jones’s new book, Sex in Public, names sex as a public act, and talks about what it means for our sexuality to be politically and socially constructed and reconstructed. She has so much wisdom on so many topics, and I was thrilled to get to talk to her. 
Some of the subjects we cover include: 

Angela’s incredible new book, Sex in Public, which everyone should go out and buy immediately. 

What truly comprehensive sex education actually looks like, and how parents can get better at talking to their kids about sex and sexuality.

Teaching bodily autonomy and consent, and how we are teaching kids sexual ethics well before we talk to them about sex.

How teaching kids consent can be an act of challenging authority, and why this is often difficult for parents. 

Why sexuality cannot exist independence of politics and culture, and how this makes sex a political act. 

Desirability politics, and how systems of power shape who and what we are attracted to.

Sexuality as something that is constantly in flux—not a fixed identity.

The hollowness of the notion of sexual empowerment, and how sex positivity has been reduced to the freedom to have sex. 

About Angela Jones
Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Jones’s research interests include sexualities; sex work; Black feminist theory and methods; trans studies; and African American political thought and protest. They are an award-winning teacher and writer, as well as a winner of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Jones’s newest trade book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, will be published with Seal Press/Hachette in May 2026. Jones is also the author of the award-winning book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Bloomsbury, 2011). They are a co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (2025, Bloomsbury) and co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2024).
Jones is the editor of the award-winning reference book, African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jones is also a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012) and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013).
They are also the author of scholarly articles, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Black Scholar; Social Problems; Gender & Society; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Sexualities; Disability Studies Quarterly; Porn Studies; International Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Law; Culture, Health, and Sexuality; Sociology Compass; Fat Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society; Sexuality and Culture; Sociological Focus; The Journal of Historical Sociology;and Interalia: a Journal of Queer Studies.
You can learn more about Angela and her work on her website.

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. 

Do I hate men? Should you? Yes. No. Maybe. Misogynist men love to weaponize false claims of misandry against women. In fact, one of the clearest signs that a man is a misogynist is that he thinks misandry is real, common, and a threat. 
Jeff and I have wanted to talk about bogus claims of misandry for a long time. Here’s the result. 
Some of the many topics we talk about in this podcast include: 

Why we need to stop saying “sexual coercion” or “obligatory sex” and start calling it rape. 

The history of the term “misandrist,” and why it’s always been a part of bad faith arguments against women’s rights. 

Does Zawn hate men? (Jeff’s answers: “No. Yes. Not all men.”)

Why so many men see movements for women’s rights as a threat. 

Why men who actually like women are unthreatened by feminism. 

Men’s frustration at having to actually work for things. 

Jeff on the most pathetic kind of sex anyone can have. 

Why misandry can never be analogous to misogyny.

The disparity between Zawn and Jeff’s experiences complaining about poor medical care. 

Why men are so committed to wasting so much of women’s time. 

We end with our new feature, the Liberating Motherhood Complaint Box. This is where we address the whining, bloviating nonsense your husbands tell you about my podcast specifically, or feminism more generally. It culminates in Zawn referring to a man as a “loser bitch.” 

Make your partner’s ignorance famous, and subject him to my judgment! You can submit your own complaint for next month’s complaint box here. Please only use this form to submit complaints from men specifically about feminism or my podcast—not general complaints, not general questions, not general messages for me. 

If you need to contact me for something else, you can find forms for just about everything on the Liberating Motherhood website. 

We have new kittens, and they currently live in my office, which they are destroying. They are aspiring misandrists, and were quite interested in the podcast. For this reason, you’ll hear some background noises. Just remember that these minor annoyances come from these adorable angels: 

If you’d like to contribute a story for the podcast, you can submit it here.

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Justine van der Leun about criminalized survival, and why women so often end up in prison for “crimes” of self-defense. The truth is that women often end up in prison for behaviors that aren’t criminal at all—not just for self-defense or for killing. Today we are talking about the widespread victimization of women at the hands of the legal system. 
Patriarchy specifically targets mothers, and women from oppressed groups, then weaponizes our identities. Sometimes it uses these identities to prosecute and incarcerate us. Attorney and activist Valena Beety has worked to overturn wrongful convictions, taught other lawyers about the injustices in the criminal justice system, and is now a powerful advocate for systemic change. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity.

The ways our criminal justice system (and associated systems, like CPS) silence and control women. 

How motherhood creates unique vulnerabilities within the criminal justice system.

How women can end up in jail or prison even when they are innocent, and even when there was no crime at all. 

The criminalization of tragedies: stillbirth, infant and child deaths, and miscarriages. 

Prosecutions of abortions and miscarriages. 

How our fear promotes victim-blaming, and how victim-blaming revictimizes women who survive trauma. 

Criminalized victimization, and how the legal system weaponizes women’s trauma against them. 

Bias in prosecution, and how prosecutors get tunnel vision and decide a woman deserves punishment no matter what. 

The ways in which we criminalize and punish disabled mothers. 

How a coercive system weaponizes women’s trauma, and can easily induce false confessions. 

Pink Crime is an incredible book. Read it. Buy it. Give it to your friends. Pre-orders matter greatly for the success of a book, and they show publishers the importance of feminist work. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it. Valena has graciously offered a coupon code for my readers, that you can use to buy her book here. Simply enter code 
I’ve listed all of Valena’s books, as well as all of the books I mention on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. 
The excellent paper by Valena that I reference in the podcast is here. 
About Valena Beety
A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions. Her latest book, Pink Crime, examines the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
She lives in Indiana with her wife, daughter, and tripod dog.

In patriarchy, there is no sure escape from violent relationships. The courts and police may not help. Friends and family may turn their backs. And even when a woman’s life is in danger, she does not have the same right to self-defense as a man. 
Journalist Justine van der Leun began researching this phenomenon when she learned about Nikki Addimando, a woman who killed her abusive partner in self-defense. Thanks to a grassroots campaign and some great lawyers, Nikki has now been freed, but just a few years ago, Nikki was sentenced to 19 years to life. 
Justine wondered how many other Nikkis were out there. Experts told her that jails and prisons are full of women just like Nikki. Her new book, Unreasonable Women, is about what we do to women who kill in self-defense, as well as the patriarchal norms that reinforce men’s right to violence—and women’s right only to die from men’s violence. 
In this conversation, we confront the reality of criminalized survival, and patriarchy’s unquenchable desire to punish abuse victims. Some of the topics we cover include: 

Criminalized survival, and why our legal system ignores women’s right to self-defense. 

Why being in an abusive relationship is a risk factor for ending up in prison. 

The crime of surviving as an abuse victim. 

The common theme that government will spend few or no resources to help impoverished kids, abused kids, or battered women, but will quickly and competently put those same people in prison, expending massive resources to do so. 

The expectation that women being attacked by men will apply a perfect legal standard of self-defense, exert more self-control than we expect from trained police officers, and behave like perfect victims at all times. 

The concept of violence against women as regulated rather than illegal. 

Stories of three women who killed in self-defense, and how all three ended up incarcerated. 

Unreasonable Women is out now. I hope you’ll buy it, since doing so supports feminist scholarship and shows publishers that we want more feminist work. You can find Justine’s book, as well as all books I mention on the podcast, along with several reading lists, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.
About Justine van der Leun 

Justine van der Leun is a journalist, author, and creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Believe Her. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, and more. Justine brings both deep investigative reporting and a thoughtful, engaging interview presence to conversations about violence, justice, and survival.