Porn is everywhere nowadays. It is one of the primary ways young people learn about sex, it is fully mainstreamed — we see pornographic imagery in music, advertising, and young women’s instagram selfies — and it is accepted, generally, as a perfectly normal, harmless (even empowering for women!) pastime. Yet it’s also one of the most difficult things to talk about. Women who challenge or criticize pornography are called uptight, anti-sex, prudish, and jealous. In heterosexual relationships, women are pressured to perform acts their partners see in porn. Men who are avid porn consumers often find their intimate relationships and sex lives impacted negatively. Women who are troubled by their partners’ porn use often feel silenced, as their attempts to discuss this with the men in their lives are met with derision, dismissals, or mockery. But considering how ubiquitous porn is and the vast impact it has had on society and individuals, we do need to be talking about it. Rebecca Whisnant is professor and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Dayton. She is co-editor of Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography and of Global Feminist Ethics. Her recent articles on pornography include “Pornography, humiliation, and consent” and “But what about feminist porn?: Examining the work of Tristan Taormino.” Rebecca is also a board member of Culture Reframed, a nonprofit organization addressing pornography as the public health crisis of the digital age.  Rebecca will be speaking, alongside myself and Robert Jensen, in Chicago on February 13th, at the DePaul Humanities Center, at an event called, “XXX: Love and Life in a Post-Porn World.” This event is free and open to the public. In this episode, I speak with Rebecca about the impact of porn on men and women, why it is so readily accepted as harmless, and why it is so difficult to challenge.

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull — aka Posie Parker — is the founder of Standing For Women, a global women’s rights campaign group, and the creator of Women Stand Up, a week of activism set to take place January 26-February 2. Posie’s activism has never been without controversy. Her first action, a billboard with the definition of woman on it, was removed after trans activists labelled Standing for Women a “hate group.” In response to a complaint filed by Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, the Yorkshire police interrogated Posie on account of tweets she posted in 2016 and 2017. In October, her personal information was posted online, including the address of her family home and videos of her children. Yet she has remained determined to keep fighting. In this episode, I speak with Posie about her activism, the controversies surrounding her, and the upcoming week of action in Washington.  

Phyllis Chesler is a best-selling author, a longtime feminist activist, and a retired psychotherapist. She has organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns across the world. Yet she, like so many other second wave feminists, is being erased by mainstream media, academia, and third wave feminism. The author of 18 books and a central figure in the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, Phyllis has never played it safe. She has always been, as she calls it, “politically incorrect,” hence the name of her new book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women. In this episode, I speak with Phyllis about her experiences in the movement, her perspectives on today’s feminist politics, and the repercussions of being “politically incorrect.”

Nicole Jardim Women’s bodies are complex — our hormones, our fertility, our periods, the way our bodies function and change depending on what point we are at during our cycles, as well as throughout our lives, as we go through perimenopause and menopause. All this can impact our health, energy, sleep, libidos, mood, and more. Yet many of us know so little about our own bodies and cycles, as well as the way all kinds of things can impact our hormones, cycles, and periods — from the birth control we use, to what we eat, to things like the chemicals in cosmetics and plastics. In order to learn more about all of this, I spoke with Nicole Jardim, also known as “The Period Girl” — a health coach and all ‘round expert on women’s hormonal and reproductive health, over the phone this week, about everything from ovarian cysts to PMS to menopause and more. To learn more about Nicole’s work, visit her website at nicolejardim.com, and check out her podcast, The Period Party, on iTunes. To learn more about Essure, as mentioned during this episode, visit Dr. Shawn Tassone’s website: tassonemd.com.

  In 2017, Dawn Wilcox founded Women Count USA, a national database and femicide census of all women and girls murdered by men in the United States. The numbers are shocking. When I spoke to Dawn in July, she’d counted 805 women killed by men since January 2018. As of today, the number has reached 1037. Too often, when men kill women, we hear that “it was an isolated incident” or that a man “snapped,” when, in reality, these murders are more often connected to ongoing abuse and are premeditated. A domestic violence and sexual assault survivor herself, Dawn now teaches other women how to identify and challenge the misogynistic and victim-blaming narratives we see in reporting on violence against women, and does the very hard and time-consuming work of tracking femicide in the US in her spare time, on top of her job as a registered nurse. I spoke with her over the phone about her work and what she’s learned through tracking these murders from her home in Texas. To follow Dawn’s work, follow Woman Count USA on Facebook or on Twitter.

Earlier this month, a number of media outlets published pieces about a new “lesbian-run church” having been officially recognized by the IRS as 501(c)(3) organization and a church, giving it tax exempt status. But the news wasn’t only of interest to the media for tax purposes… At Forbes, Peter J. Reilly explained that the Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft was controversial on account of an ongoing “conflict” between “radical feminists and the transgender community.” Other sites, like the Advocate, Pink News, Them, Pride, and Reason outright labelled the Church “transphobic,” “anti-transgender,” and a “TERF church” on account of their female-only policy. Their website explains: “A Woman is an adult female human. A Girl is a minor female human. The Pussy Church serves Women and Girls only. Males are not permitted to participate, regardless of how they identify. We expressly reject the concepts of gender identity, transgenderism, and gender as being meaningful to defining what a Woman or Girl is.” In this episode, I speak with Sister Dandelion, a co-founder and trustee of the Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft. Sister Dandelion is a poet and priestess, she has been practicing witchcraft and reading the Tarot for 25 years. She honors Z Budapest, Starhawk, and Susun Weed as her witchcraft mentors and foresisters. As a radical feminist, Sister Dandelion has organized and collaborated with women on issues such as male violence, reproductive freedom and women’s health, lesbian liberation, and the creation of woman-loving culture in the context of a woman-hating system.

Embed from Getty Images Many people are rightly horrified by the Trump administration’s recent move to begin separating children from their asylum-seeking parents when they cross the US-Mexico border. Recently, the US government also determined that domestic violence and gang violence no longer qualify as grounds for asylum — a change that has particularly harmful impacts on women in Central America, who are subject to extremely high levels of violence. But beyond fighting for change in the US, what can Canada do to help? To learn more about the impact of these policies and what Canada’s role is in all this, I spoke with Jaymie Heilman and Maria Walker, who recently published an article here at Feminist Current titled, “If Justin Trudeau really cares about keeping refugee women and girls alive, his government needs to rescind the Safe Third Country Agreement.†Jaymie Heilman teaches Latin American History and the History of Illicit Drugs at the University of Alberta. Maria Walker has an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and volunteers at an immigration detention center on the US-Mexico border. I spoke with them over the phone this week.

The Liberal Party of Canada recently introduced Bill C-78, which proposes a number of changes to Canada’s Divorce Act, including better addressing what is referred to as “family violence,” changes to terminology like “custody” and “access,” and encouraging parties to use family dispute mediation services as an alternative to court. Divorce law has always had particular impacts on women, and though it has improved enormously in the past few decades, it remains important to consider the role power under patriarchy plays in divorce and custody battles. In order to better understand the proposed changes and their potential impact on women, I spoke with Susan Boyd. Susan is a Professor Emerita at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, where she held the Chair in Feminist Legal Studies from 1992-2015. She was also Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies for many years. Susan is a long-standing member of the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law and a board member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Her book, Child Custody, Law, and Women’s Work, remains one of the few feminist treatments of child custody law in Canada. Her latest co-authored book is Autonomous Motherhood? A Socio-Legal Study of Choice and Constraint. I spoke with her over the phone from her home in Vancouver.

Embed from Getty Images A decade ago, Serah Gazali escaped Saudi Arabia, leaving behind a life where her every move was monitored and controlled. She acquired refugee status while in Mexico, based on her sex, and her application set a precedent in Latin American UNHCR case law. She is now living in Vancouver, and has not had contact with any of her family members since she left. Serah is an MA graduate student in the Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, worked at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Mexico, as well as with the Women’s Economic Council, and was a senior counselor for the Syrian refugee project in Canada. In this episode I speak with her about women’s oppression in Saudi Arabian, the guardianship system, how she escaped, and how Western feminists can support the women’s movement in Saudi.

The notion that sex matters, in terms of the law, is a fairly new one. It wasn’t until recently that discrimination against pregnant women was considered to be discrimination against women, specifically. In 1974, an American court case, Geduldig v. Aiello, determined that differential treatment based on pregnancy only distinguishes between a group consisting of “pregnant women” and a group consisting of “nonpregnant persons.” In other words, this type of discrimination was considered only to be discriminatory against those who are pregnant, rather than against those capable of giving birth — i.e. females. “Nonpregnant persons,” is, of course, not sex specific… We know today, thanks to the work of feminists, that women have been discriminated against in a myriad of ways — notably in the workplace — on account of their assumed ability to become pregnant, regardless of whether or not they actually were pregnant, at that moment. In her paper, “Pregnant ‘persons’: the linguistic defanging of women’s issues and the legal danger of ‘brain sex’ language,” Andrea Orwoll addresses the danger of linguistically erasing women as a class from the law, all the while incorporating sex stereotypes into it. She writes: “The language of the law should acknowledge and constitutionally protect real, biological sex differences precisely because they are real: because they are based in the body — the only plane of reality that the law can effectively govern—and because they have historically imposed, and continue today to impose, material consequences on women. At the same time, the law should refuse to participate in the ages-old practice of stereotyping and disenfranchising the female sex based on assumed mental capacities.” Andrea is a first-year attorney and an alumna of William S. Boyd School of Law (magna cum laude) and Whittier College (summa cum laude). In this episode, I speak with her about the history of women-centered language in law and why it still matters.