Podcasts about cat bohannon

durée : 00:42:35 - Signes des temps - par : Marc Weitzmann - Avec 'l'arme' de la biologie évolutive, l'essayiste américaine Cat Bohannon retrace l'histoire de la différence sexuelle chez les humains et place la femme au centre de l'évolution. Son essai "Eve, 200 millions d'années d'évolution au féminin" paraît aux éditions Flammarion. - réalisation : Luc-Jean Reynaud - invités : Cat Bohannon Chercheuse et autrice américaine

In this episode, Cat Bohannon joins Laura and Adrian to discuss her most recent book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, where she reframes the stories we tell about human evolution with women at the center.Cat Bohannon's is a poet, academic, and scientist. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her work has appeared in Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and Poets Against the War.

durée : 00:38:04 - France Culture va plus loin (l'Invité(e) des Matins) - par : Guillaume Erner, Marie-Lys de Saint Salvy - Mieux connaître le corps des femmes et son évolution : un enjeu médical, ou plus encore sociétal ? Dans son nouvel ouvrage « Ève », Cat Bohannon retrace 200 millions d'années d'évolution du corps féminin et montre l'actualité d'une histoire encore méconnue. - réalisation : Félicie Faugère - invités : Cat Bohannon Chercheuse et autrice américaine

As Jurassic beasts roamed the earth, a little weasel-like animal called Morganucodon was making an evolutionary breakthrough in parenting — producing milk to feed her young. Author Cat Bohannon calls this creature Morgie in her 2023 book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon discusses the book, and insights from the evolution of Morgie, ahead of an author event in St. Louis County.

Cat Bohannon joins Minding the Brain to talk about the evolution of women. Get ready to learn about prehistoric gynecology, sexual dimorphism in humans, why [...]

Featuring : CAT BOHANNON, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human EvolutionYou loved Rachel Gross's VAGINA OBSCURA? Of course you did. Then you MUST join us for this myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved—answering questions like what IS the female body? How did it come to be? How does this evolution still shapes all our lives today? Some fast facts to whet your appetite: Women live longer than men; women are more likely to get Alzheimer's; girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet. What's behind all of this? And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause? (asking for me). Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We have to put the female body in the picture,” she writes, “If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts.” Which means we are gonna talk about breasts. And blood and fat and vaginas and wombs. Let's face it, the world has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. It's time to dig deep—so join us for book talk, cocktails, and evolutionary science.Episode was recorded live February 27, 2025.Email: peculiar@bschillace.comWebsite: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://brandyschillace.com/peculiar/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://eepurl.com/ixJJ2Y⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/PeculiarBookClub/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@PeculiarBookClub/streams⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@peculiarbookclub.bsky.social⁠Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠facebook.com/groups/peculiarbooksclub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thepeculiarbook

Evolutionshistorien har en blind vinkel: kvindekroppen. Den amerikanske videnskabsforfatter Cat Bohannon fortæller evolutionshistorien på ny og trækker tråde tilbage til vores glemte formødre blandt evolutionsbiologiens mange ”Eva'er”. “Vi skal have kvindekroppen tilbage i billedet. Hvis ikke vi får det, er det ikke kun feminismen, der bliver kompromitteret. Både den moderne lægevidenskab, neurobiologien, palæoantropologien og selv evolutionsbiologien tager skade, når vi ignorerer det faktum, at halvdelen af os har bryster.”  Derfor har Bohannon genskrevet evolutionshistorien og sat kvindekroppen og dens særlige egenskaber i forgrunden.  I stedet for den bibelske Eva sporer Bohannon kvindekroppens historie tilbage til en række evolutionsbiologiske ”Eva'er”.   Fra ‘Morgie', der som det første pattedyr producerede mælk, over det egern-agtige væsen ‘Donna', der var først til at udvikle en livmoder, og frem til de tobenede hominider ‘Ardi' og ‘Lucy', der med tidlige værktøjs- og omsorgsevner lagde grundlaget for Homo Sapiens' mange teknologiske og sociale fremskridt.    Oplev Cat Bohannon på årets Bloom, når hun med videnskabeligt klarsyn og oprørsk humor understreger kvindekønnets evolutionære – og revolutionære – betydning for, hvordan mennesket er endt med at blive planetens dominerende og teknisk mest succesfulde dyreart.

There is a historical lack of research on the female body—and this has hurt women, men, everyone. But now, there is some fascinating research on the female body, which Cat Bohannon, PhD, shares today. (Bohannon is the New York Times–bestselling author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.) For example, Bohannon explains why the fat around our butts and hips is quite special, and how women tend to metabolize painkillers differently than men. She breaks down the evolutionary origins of breast size and shape, and she debunks the myth that men are much larger than women. We talk about why women tend to heal better and live longer than men. And what's really at stake for our health and lives when it comes to understanding sex differences. For the show notes and more on Cat Bohannon, head over to my Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that the composition of a mother’s breast milk changes based on a baby’s saliva? Or that human pregnancy has been compared to running many marathons in a row? These are only a few of the mind-blowing findings researcher and author Cat Bohannon describes in her book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” She joins Danielle and Simone to talk about some of the lesser-known superpowers of the female body, and clears up some common misconceptions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this special episode, we revisit some of our favorite moments from Wednesday episodes in 2024. Molly McNearney remembers joining Jimmy Kimmel Live, Bill Gates wishes he were smarter, Finneas discusses the dynamics of a duo, Patric Gagne navigates romance as a sociopath, Vanessa Marin walks the walk of Sex Talks, Alegra Kastens explains the spectrum of OCD, Malcolm Gladwell delves into the science of the opioid crisis, Cat Bohannon talks about the medical discrepancies between men and women, Yuval Harari analyzes information networks through the lens of history, Orna Guralnik relates why we depersonalize, and Avett Brothers harmonize on We Are Loved. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Join us as we chat about so many of our favourite things: food, kitchen gadgets, people who comment on our weight, and the joys of being women. Just kidding . . . those aren't all our favourite things, but we DO talk about them all this week! We go from air fryers to shepherd's pie to menopause in just over an hour. Ready to join us?!   **Show Notes** Podcast we mentioned: Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel Book we mentioned: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

Gather round! We have a whole lot to say about Fudgie the Whale, learning chess, finding your inner paid tier, and a whole lot more. But what's new?    This many week post-launch of 831 Stories, we're so grateful for the love you've shared for Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff! If you're looking for additional recs to hold you over until Hardly Strangers by A.C. Robinson comes out in November, take a peek at our list.   Did you know Fudgie the Whale's mold moonlights as Santa during the holidays? Check out this CNN article for the deets. If you're feeling ambitious, we love this Ali Slagle ice-cream cake recipe.    We are now deeply committed to Jouer's Skin Barrier Cream. Shoutout to Knockout Beauty's facialist!    We're also hyped on Seed's Pediatric Daily Synbiotic and Storytime Chess over here.    "If" by Rudyard Kipling has some good life advice for 8th graders and grown-ups alike.    What's your personal paid tier? Let us know at podcast@athingortwohq.com, @athingortwohq, or our Geneva!   Challenge your preconceptions about the real origin of our species and check out Eve by Cat Bohannon, available everywhere books are sold. Tackle your fears with BetterHelp and take 10% off your first month with our link. Give your first Moonpig card for FREE with the code ATHINGORTWO. YAY.  

I årtusinder har filosoffer, videnskabspersoner og kunstnere forsøgt at finde frem til kærlighedens væsen. Men hvad er kærlighed egentlig? Hvad sker der i vores hjerner, når vi elsker – og mister? Er det et eksklusivt, menneskeligt fænomen at blive ramt af amors pil? Og hvordan har kærligheden udviklet sig evolutionært fra savannens sletter til nutidens hyperdigitaliserede samfund? Det satte vi til Bloom 2024 to af årets hovedtalere til at forsøge at svare på. Hjerneforskeren Lisa Feldman Barrett, hvis forskning lærer os, at kærlighed udspringer af vores hjerners sociale forbindelse og deres særlige evne til at påvirke hinanden på tværs af geografi, tid og kultur. Og videnskabsforfatteren Cat Bohannon, som undersøger kærlighedens dybe, evolutionshistoriske betydning – fra vores tidligste formødres første omsorgsevner til nutidens komplicerede landskaber af lyst, afhængighed og tryghed. Oplev to af tidens skarpeste videnskabelige stemmer, når de i selskab med kulturjournalist Felix Thorsen Katzenelson forsøger at svare på et af menneskehedens ældste spørgsmål: hvad er kærlighed?

Bobs, you all have been sharing a lot of Thingies that are unignorable. They've been moving, unhinged, funny—and we must discuss them.    We're loving the nym SNAG: Sensitive New Age Guy, ℅ Maia via the podcast Shameless.    Portlanders, have you been to The Croc Stop yet—a jibbitz lending library, brought to our attention by Kelly? See also: shoe charms…which we're kind of charmed by.   Your bathing rituals, friends. Kelsey had a tip on washing makeup brushes in the shower; Rebecca has a tub desk that we could talk about for hours.    Also, very publicly hoping our favorite establishments follow Garlic Expressions's lead and give us some bottled salad dressing! Thank you for the comments on this one, Laura and TK.   Keep those Thingies coming! Enlighten us at podcast@athingortwohq.com, @athingortwohq, or our Geneva!   Hire with Indeed and get a $75 sponsored job credit when you use our link. Support your hair with Nutrafol. Take $10 off your first month's subscription with the code ATHINGORTWO. Challenge your preconceptions about the real origin of our species and check out Eve by Cat Bohannon, available everywhere books are sold. YAY.  

Women have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have more sensitive noses, sharper hearing at high frequencies, and longer life expectancy than men. But why have women's bodies been so under-researched? It's one of the many questions Cat Bohannon raises in her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, Eve explores how women's biology has shaped human history and culture. In the lead up to the winner's announcement, New Scientist books editor Alison Flood meets all six of the shortlisted authors.In this conversation, we hear what motivated Cat to spend more than a decade researching and writing the book, how understanding the evolution of female traits can give us deeper insights into the workings of our species, and the overlap between sexism and science. The winner of the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize will be announced on the 24th October. You can view all of the shortlisted entries here:https://royalsociety.org/medals-and-prizes/science-book-prize/ To read about subjects like this and much more, visit https://www.newscientist.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Shelf Care: The Podcast, host Susan Maguire spoke to Allison Escoto of the Center for Fiction about book groups, being a solo librarian, and getting the opportunity to read nonfiction for the Carnegie Awards. Then, Audio Editor Heather Booth chats with librarian and author Van Hoang about the walking audiobook club she runs at her library. Finally, Susan and Adult Books Editor Donna Seaman talk about her forthcoming book, River of Books: A Life in Reading as well as what she's been reading and loving lately. Here's what we talked about: Stanley Ellin, mystery writer James, by Percival Everett Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance, by Victoria Blanco Girl Giant and the Monkey King, by Van Hoang The Monstrous Misses Mai, by Van Hoang Sociopath, by Patrick Gagne, read by the author Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein, read by the author Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon, read by the author Elyse Dinh, audiobook narrator The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams, read by Emily Woo Zeller In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by Shane O'Mara, read by Liam Gerrard River of Books: A Life in Reading, by Donna Seaman The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, by Sara B. Franklin The World She Edited: Katarine S. White at the New Yorker, by Amy Reading Booker Prize Long List Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud Playground, by Richard Powers The Overstory, by Richard Powers Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange Reading the Room: A Bookseller's Tale, by Paul Yamazaki

Hörbuchfans aufgepasst: Karla und Günter stellen euch in dieser Folge vier Hörbücher aus unterschiedlichen Genres vor. Ihr hört dazu jeweils einen Ausschnitt und bekommt bereits einen Vorgeschmack auf die großartigen Stimmen der Sprecher*innen. Den Anfang macht Richard Powers mit „Das große Spiel“. Auf einer einsamen Pazifikinsel verflechten sich die Schicksale des Paares Ina und Rafi, des Milliardärs Todd und der Forscherin Evelyne. Sie verbindet die Angst vor dem Klimawandel und die Hoffnung auf Künstliche Intelligenz. Das Sachbuch “Eva” von Cat Bohannon ist eine Offenbarung und als Hörbuch sehr unterhaltsam. Die feministische Wissenschaftsdokumentation verändert den Blick auf die Rolle der Frau und erzählt ihre Geschichte aus einer neuen Perspektive. Kriminalistisch wird's mit “Die weiße Stunde” von Alex Beer. Inspektor Emmerich ermittelt im Wien der 1920er Jahre in einem Mordfall. Absolut hörenswert ist die markante Stimme von Schauspieler Cornelius Obonya, der Emmerich den einmaligen Wiener Grant verleiht. Spannend bis zuletzt ist auch “So ist das nie passiert” von Sarah Easter Collins. Willas Schwester Laika ist vor 20 Jahren unter ungeklärten Umständen verschwunden. Erst die Psychologin Liv bringt Willa darauf, dass damals möglicherweise alles ganz anders war. Die Titel dieser Folge: Richard Powers „Das große Spiel“ als Hörbuch oder als gebundene Ausgabe,Cat Bohannon: „Eva“ als Hörbuch oder als gebundene Ausgabe,Alex Beer: „Die weiße Stunde“ als Hörbuch oder als gebundene Ausgabe,Sarah Easter Collins: „So ist das nie passiert“ als Hörbuch oder als gebundene AusgabeKarla und Günter sind auf der Buchmesse 2024! Trefft sie in der 30-Minuten-WG am Stand der Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe. Alle Infos und Termine findet ihr unter litlounge.de/buchmesse24+++ Viel Spaß mit dieser Folge. Wir freuen uns auf euer Feedback an podcast@penguinrandomhouse.de! +++ Unsere allgemeinen Datenschutzrichtlinien finden Sie unter https://art19.com/privacy. Die Datenschutzrichtlinien für Kalifornien sind unter https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info abrufbar.

Claire Mabey discusses 'the perfect Sunday read' from David Nicholls. She also recommends Commune: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones and a deep dive into evolution: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon.

Blessings babes! We are so excited to be coming to y'all with a new series!!! EYYY! Sacred sugars is topic we've been longing to share as many people have a strained relationship with “sugar” in our lives/diet/etc. This series is here to empower you and all about seeing the sacred in all things sugar and sweet! As always, we want to thank you for all of your support, in all the ways! we're trying to build up this patreon, so that we can sustainably fund the work we already do with the podcast. so if you're not yet a patreon, join today @ ⁠patreon.com/pettyherbalist⁠. Sources and what's In the episode: Womanism (book) Botanical Medicine for Women's Health by Aviva Romm (book) Eve by Cat Bohannon (herb) Mullein - Verbascum Thapsus (podcast) A Little Juju Podcast (plant) Corn - Zea mays  Amylase is an enzyme, or special protein, that helps you digest carbohydrates. Bones Bugs and Botany Patreon Soul Food Genius Course by Bones, Bugs and Botany ________________________ Follow us on social: ⁠@pettyherbalist⁠ ⁠@bonesbugsandbotany⁠ Join the Patreon Community to fund this amazing POD: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/pettyherbalist⁠ Join the bonesbugsandbotany Patreon Community to fund support all of Asia's work: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/bonesbugsandbotany⁠⁠ Rate us to show your support! Thank You! #StayReady #BePetty ***if you read this far, send me a dm @pettyherbalist for a shoutout!***

About Helen What makes a woman? How far do bodies set our gender? Immaculate Forms focuses on the history of the breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb. I've worked on the history of medicine and the body for many years, following a PhD thesis on ancient Greek concepts of menstruation. Since then, I've published on the reception of ancient medical ideas about the female body, menstruation and birth up to the nineteenth century. It still amazes me that ancient ideas about women survived for so long, despite changes elsewhere in how the body was understood. I've held research fellowships in Cambridge and Newcastle, worked for 8 years in Liverpool, and then for 14 years at the University of Reading. In 2011 I became Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University and I am now Professor Emerita there. I've been a visiting lecturer at Mount Allison University, University of Victoria BC, and University of Texas, as well as a Fellow at the Netherland Institute for Advanced Studies, and a Visiting Professor at the Peninsula Medical School, where I taught the history of dissection to medical students. 'Illuminating, thoughtful and scholarly' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Mind-blowing, fascinating stuff' BBC WOMAN'S HOUR 'Delightful, timely and critical' Cat Bohannon, author of Eve 'With unrivaled expertise and a wealth of classical and contemporary detail, the author weaves historical knowledge of medicine, anatomy, literature, art and religion into a narrative that surprises, informs, excites and frequently amuses' Adrian Thatcher, author of Vile Bodies Throughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a woman. She has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex, among many other monikers. Often, she has been defined simply as 'Not A Man'. Today, we are more aware than ever of the complex relationship between our bodies and our identities. But contrary to what some may believe, what makes a woman is a question that has always been open-ended. Immaculate Forms examines all the ways in which medicine and religion have played a gate-keeping role over women's organs. It explores how the womb was seen as both the most miraculous organ in the body and as a sewer; uncovers breasts' legacies as maternal or sexual organs - or both; probes the mystery of the disappearing hymen, and asks, did the clitoris need to be discover

Cat Bohannon (Eve) is a researcher and best selling author. Cat joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why strangers want to tell her about their bodies, the reasons women often live longer, and how the medical industry doesn't study women as much as men. Cat and Dax talk about why women are often seen as having more anxiety, how important females are to the success of a society, and why men have difficulties hearing women's voices. Cat explains how working night shifts affects the human body, why women are better designed to walk upright, and how diversity is a strength of our species. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Are you navigating the challenges of perimenopause and menopause? In this episode, Dr. Jan Schroeder, PhD, a fitness expert specializing in women's health, reveals how to manage hormonal changes, maintain fitness, and stay empowered through menopause. Learn how to take control of your symptoms, prioritize bone and heart health, and embrace your body's transition with confidence and grace.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:How hormonal changes affect fitness during perimenopause and menopause.Why adjusting cardio workouts can help reduce weight gain and cortisol levels.The critical importance of heart health and bone health for women in menopause.Managing menopause symptoms like hot flashes, brain fog, and sleep issues with exercise.Why strength training and shorter, more focused workouts are key to maintaining fitness.Episode References/Links:Jan Schroeder WebsiteEve By Cat BohannonGuest Bio:Dr. Jan Schroeder is a professor and past Chair of the Department of Kinesiology at Long Beach State University. She coordinates and teaches in the Fitness and Integrated Training Bachelor of Science degree program and has authored over 60+ articles in the area of exercise physiology and fitness. She also owns Garage Girls Fitness, an in-person and online training company focused on group exercise and health and wellness education for women. In 2021, she was named the IDEA Fitness Leader of the Year. Her areas of expertise include older adults, women experiencing the menopausal transition, as well as fitness trends and programming.  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. DEALS! Check out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox Be in the know with all the workshops at OPCBe It Till You See It Podcast SurveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates MentorshipFREE Ditching Busy Webinar  Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable Pilates Follow Us on Social Media:InstagramFacebookLinkedIn  Episode Transcript:Jan Schroeder, PhD. 0:00  The media around menopause so oftentimes is negative that it doesn't focus on the positive aspects of menopause, like, thank God I no longer have a freaking period. I mean, that's a huge positive. I just sometimes think that the media focuses on all the big changes that can affect us. But they don't focus on, hey, this is just part of life. This is natural. This is not a big deal. We can make it better. Lesley Logan 0:21  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Ladies, this is the episode you have been asking me for. This is the one I have been hearing from you. I already say this when we get to Jan, but I just want you to know. I want you to be excited. I love this interview. I know I love them all. I do. But I love this interview. Shout out to my friend Michelle Sims, who introduced me to Jan Schroeder, our guest today. We are talking perimenopause, menopause and fitness. And I am so, so excited for this, because in being until we see it, when our hormones change, it can be freaking annoying. It can be very difficult. It's a big change. There's a lot you'll learn about yourself. And so what I love is we are now armed with some information, how to listen to our bodies and what our workouts need to look like. And you are going to love this, and it is positive and exciting, and there's not doom and gloom when it comes to perimenopause in this episode. So I cannot wait for you to get this information in your ears. Here is Jan Schroeder. All right, Be It babe. You asked a lot. I heard you. I told you to be patient. I know patience is not for many of us, but also especially when you want to know about perimenopause. So today's guest is Jan Schroeder. She's amazing. She's a dear friend of one of my friends, and so I'm so glad when the world's collided and we can talk today. Jan, will you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 2:16  Of course. Well, first of all, Lesley, thank you so much for having me on because this is a topic that I love talking about. My name is Dr. Jan Schroeder. I am a professor at Long Beach State University. I am the coordinator for our Bachelor's of Science degree in fitness. We are one of the only universities in the country that has a degree in fitness. So we really focus on training students to go into the fitness industry, which is, I love it, because I developed the degrees.Lesley Logan 2:47  That's a degree I needed, and I went to college down the street. I should have gone there. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 2:51  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Most of, most universities have an exercise science degree, which is more of a clinical track. You know that students want to go into physical therapy or occupational therapy, but we focus on, let's get them into the industry and teach them how to work with clients, and all of that. The science plus the art of the industry. Lesley Logan 3:12  Yeah, because working with humans is a whole, I've been teaching Pilates for 16 years, and I'm often a client of a personal trainer or something. I was telling this to my, those in my mentorship today, they're complaining. They said one of their clients is like, complain about being uncomfortable. And I said, Well, change is uncomfortable, and sometimes we have to be honest with people. So there's a difference between pain and discomfort. And I said I had a trainer called me out because I had fractured my tibial plateau, non-surgical, but I was off it for eight weeks, and so I'm starting to squat and lunge again, and I was immediately like, ow, can't do it, it hurts. And he, the first couple of times, changed the exercise, and then one day he's like, so Is it painful, or is it hard? I was like, oh, noted, and that's like long story to talk about your thing, like the art of working with people.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 4:06  Exactly. But it's also what makes it fun. You know? Lesley Logan 4:11  Never a dull day. So okay, but that means you've been doing this for like, your whole life? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 4:18  Yeah, yes, yes, and we just won't say how long that's been. It's, yeah, I've been in academia for a very long time, but I'm also in the industry. So I teach group exercise. I have my own business that deals with women who are going through the, you know, menopause and beyond. That's a clientele that I love. I love, love, love working with these women, because it's such a unique transition in our life, not just what's going on physiologically, but what's going on socially and psychologically, that it just is exciting. And I find that these women that I work with, they want to know the education behind it. Instead of just, just tell me what to do so I look better, it's now it moves beyond that, tell me what to do and why to do it so that I feel better.Lesley Logan 5:14  Yeah, I agree. I was telling my team. I was like, OPC is not for the 20-something who needs a burn. This is for the woman who's like she is, she's done on things. She's not, she knows what working out means. She knows she has to do it. She wants to feel seen and supported, and she wants it to make to be amazing in a few minutes she has for the day and like, that is who this is for. But she wants to know how it's working. But I think you know when you're younger, you can get away with, like, not knowing. You could just do anything. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 5:41  Yeah, exactly.Lesley Logan 5:44  You do get to a point especially, it's also very interesting. I think it really, I don't know, maybe doesn't suck because it's not doom and gloom. But it's interesting that at the point that our bodies are changing is also often, for many women, the point when they have time to think about their bodies and why it changed. So then it's almost like they don't have a baseline to kind of go off of. I don't know. Maybe that's just like something I've noticed. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 6:06  Yeah, and I well, and I also think the, I don't want to call it, I don't know, I'll call it the press, the media, around menopause, so oftentimes is negative that it doesn't focus on the positive aspects of menopause, like, thank God I no longer have a freaking period, you know? I mean, that's a huge positive. I can't get pregnant. That's a good thing. I just sometimes think that the media focuses on all the big changes that can affect us, but they don't focus on, you know, hey, this is just part of life. This is natural. This is not a big deal. We can make it better. Lesley Logan 6:49  Yeah, I think you're right. First of all, I rarely heard a, I would call when I was younger, they called like, the change. And like, it was a little hush, and you just see grandma, like, just fanning, you know, and you're freezing. And so just very specific examples, and then it's you're on the other side. But no one actually, like, talked about it and I feel what's really cool for me, I'm 41, and I have most of my friends are over 45 there are in their early 50s, and so they are telling me all the things are going through, and they are also telling me, like, hey, I wish I'd done this in my 40s. It would have made my whole life a whole lot easier. And so since you are in fitness, like, our fitness does change, especially when we're in the change. So can we talk a little bit about perimenopause, fitness versus menopause? Like, what happen? Do we get to work out easier (inaudible)?Jan Schroeder, PhD. 7:41  Well, it's, you know, with what our body's going through. So if you think about our physiology, we really peak for our strength, our cardio, respiratory fitness, our range of motion, so our flexibility. We peak in our 20s, which is pretty young to be. Lesley Logan 8:00  Why do we waste the peak on the 20 year old? She doesn't even know what she wants. She thinks she does, but we all know when we look back.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 8:08  Exactly. So then once we you know, we get past that, late 20s, early 30s, where, okay, now things are a little bit different. And you hear women go, oh yeah, I can't just go run five miles and lose 10 pounds. It's those sorts of things. So what's happening in the body is there's a lot of physiological changes that happen with aging. So just real quickly, my area of expertise, my PhD, is in exercise physiology, with a concentration in gerontology, so with the older adult, so studying how we possibly will decline in our physiology, it's not something that we can stop. We're all aging, but we can make it so we delay it. If you're an elite athlete when you were younger, you're going to see declines. If you didn't exercise, and you start exercising later in life, you may be in the best shape of your entire life because you got stronger, you got fitter, you know. So it's everybody's a little bit different, but with fitness, it does not need to decline, like people think it does, but we also have to take into account, okay, it may be harder to maintain that really elite level of fitness that some people enjoyed, maybe they were an athlete or a fitness competitor or something like that. That's hard to maintain as we get older, to have really good fitness level, not as hard to maintain. So does that make sense? Lesley Logan 9:46  Yeah, I think I'm with you. People have told me, like, oh, after 30 you're not getting any muscle, and there's all this more doom and gloom. It's like, then what's the point? My dad is 72, the time we're recording this, and he deadlifts almost 300 pounds, he back squats almost 300 pounds, and he benches over 200 and he is 72 and yes, he's not having huge gains whenever we do one rep max is like, it's not like 15, 20 pounds difference, but he's actually getting stronger. It's kind of amazing. So, yeah, it's, I see what you're saying. It's very cool. We have to just have expectations. Like I'm I used to run seven-minute miles. I no longer do.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 10:25  And do you want to? Lesley Logan 10:27  You know, I don't. Actually once I, here's the thing I noticed that perimenopause, and we'll get there, ladies,but like once I started working out, based on my cycle, I got this app, but it told me, like today, do higher volumes. This is what it looks like, if it's cardio, this is what it looks like when it's strength training. I feel so much better than when I worked out the exact same every single day of every single week, right? Just but me, you know, I again. I'm older now, so my body needs.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 10:54  Yeah. So it's, you know, with working out, as we go through this change, our hormones change, and that affects how we should work out for whatever particular goal it is. So I always talk to my clients about when they're going through this, we want to hit three areas. We need to worry about the symptoms. Maybe you have hot flashes, or maybe you can't sleep, or maybe you have that brain fog or some cognitive difficulties during this. These are all typical symptoms of menopause. So we need to work out to make sure that we're addressing those symptoms, and that's usually what women focus on. I want the symptoms gone, and especially like weight gain. That's a huge thing, because we tend to gain weight around the middle during this time period. But I also have to explain to them, okay, that's fantastic, and we are going to get there. We are going to do that. We're going to work on providing exercises and exercise routines that hope to minimize the symptoms, but we also have to work on our heart health, because as soon as we go through menopause and we lose our estrogen, our risk of heart disease increases dramatically, about five times. Lesley Logan 12:15  I heard that the other day, and I was like, oh, because you know, like, you're, I'm like, okay, how do we prolong? How do I get menopause (inaudible) I'll have my (inaudible) in my 60s. I'm sorry, I shouldn't beg for it to go away. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 12:28  Yeah, exactly. And the problem is with heart we don't think about it as women. The men have the heart disease. The men have heart attacks. Well, we get right up there with them, the same risk factor, and we do it really quickly. And the scary thing is, is that we don't recognize the signs of heart disease and heart attacks in women, because they're slightly different than men. But not only do we have to worry about heart health, we have to worry about our bones because you break a bone and it's not great. Lesley Logan 12:57  Yeah, I know. Everyone listening, whenever I teach on tour, whenever I can, I teach this one Pilates marching exercise. It's a standing marching thing, and I would make my 80-year-old client do it all the time, and she came twice a week, and she and she hated it. She rolled her eyes, and she's like, why am I doing this? And I'm like, to be honest, it's because if you fall and break a bone, that's kind of it for you. Like, that's the end. I'm just gonna be, it comes with risk, it's just like, it's a downward spiral. And she was like, you know, whatever, that day she went to Rodeo Drive. So I taught in L.A., she went to Rodeo Drive, and she had her phone in one hand and her purse in the other, and she was walking down those rounded Roman type steps, and she missed one, and her body did the marching thing where it picked its legs up, and she basically ran down the stairs. She did not fall, she did not break anything. And she said, do I have to do it every day? I'm like, yeah. And then I was like, thank God it worked. Yeah, but it's true. Like, it really is. It's a bad thing. So okay, we've heard about bones. We've heard about our heart, and that's like, so yes, we, yes, in perimenopause, a lot of women are like, I would like to not have this. My body is changing, my clothes don't fit, but you're saying we need to have, we have other focuses that are more important.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 14:12  Well, and I'm not saying symptom relief is not important, because it really is. If you have one through menopause, those hot flashes are brutal. They are brutal. A friend of mine explained it to me as she said, my body is internally combusting. And I'm like, yes, that is it. Because it's not like you're hot from being out in the sun, you are on fire. And if we can reduce the severity of that through activity, that's fantastic. If we can improve sleep, which is critical in this stage of our lives through exercise, that is important. So all three areas we gotta kind of keep in the back of her mind of I need to work on my heart, I need to work on my bones, but I also want symptom relief. Lesley Logan 15:05  Okay. Yeah. And we can do that through fitness? Because that's, okay, hold on, you have to tell me. Because when I read something, it was like, well, the workouts you can do, it almost seemed like baby workout. I was like, this is not gonna work for me. I already work out like, this is that's great if you've never done it, and I'm glad that there's something out there, but like this, I'm not just going to do a little bridge and hope it helps.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 15:26  Exactly, yeah, it's, you know, for those of us who've worked out all of our lives, one, we're a little bit better off in menopause than somebody who starts later. So, if you're, you know, for your listeners, if they're in their late 30s, early 40s, they gotta get on it. They gotta get that regular exercise program going. Because what the research shows is that women who have been active are better at keeping off the weight gain that we see, especially the weight gain around the belly, our bones are better. Our heart disease risk is lower. Symptoms tend to be less severe if we work out prior. You know, if we've, so, continue to work out. That's a good thing. Lesley Logan 16:13  My ladies who are in that age range, I don't care if you've got kiddos, busy life, this is the time. So yeah.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 16:19  But if we start working out later in life, doesn't mean that, oh well, I'm not going to have those benefits. Yes, you will, I promise you will. Lesley Logan 16:26  Yeah, good, yeah. So that's not that it's ever too late. It's just that there are some signs that, an evidence that it could be easier if, if you have the option to start, do it. Okay. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 16:37  Right. Yeah. And then for those of us who have worked out consistently. I typically work out 14, 15 hours a week. But, I mean, I'm in the industry. I've always been active, those sorts of things. I can't slack off on that. So what we find is that when we go through menopause, we start to reduce our activity level. We reduce our exercise level. We reduce our what we call spontaneous physical activity. You know, where you're up and cleaning the house, or you're up and gardening or whatever, we reduce that by almost 40%. Lesley Logan 17:16  Oh, that's going to be, you're gonna start seeing changes everywhere, inside and out, because that's a huge, that's not a little bit, that's a lot. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 17:25  That is a lot and we might not even realize that we're doing it. So you know, keeping a fitness tracker that is letting you know how many steps you get into the day, or keeping a fitness journal where you're jotting down what did I do today? How often did I sit today becomes really important because, you know, a client sometimes will say to me, Jan, I'm doing all the workouts that you've prescribed, but it's not working. And I say to them, what are you doing in the other 23 hours of the day? You know, and that helps them to go, oh, oh, okay, I understand that. And here's the thing, I don't want to blame women for doing that, because that is dictated by estrogen. When we lose estrogen in our brain, so estrogen affects all different tissues in the body. So when we start to lose estrogen, it affects our brain, specifically the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus is responsible for how much food you eat, how much energy you expend, and when we take estrogen away through menopause, what the brain does is that hypothalamus can't regulate that anymore. We tend to eat more. We tend to move less. Lesley Logan 18:44  Okay, this is, so it's not a willpower thing. It's like biological and so we have to be conscious about getting up then having that spontaneous movement or tracking things to make sure that whatever, not whatever you were doing before it, but like, just that so you're not doing a 40% drop like you're, Jan Schroeder, PhD. 19:02  Correct. Lesley Logan 19:02  That's so huge, you know.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 19:04  It is. And I find that women all the time, they just go, it's my fault. It is not your fault. It is physiology. It is biological that your brain is putting you into this pattern. And so we just have to be extra aware of what we're doing. Lesley Logan 19:25  Yeah, yeah, intentional. So, okay, so if we are in the perimenopause, so the women who have not had that one year, no cycle, you know? And that's, it's like, it's like a moment that you're menopause, it's so confusing. One day and that's it. And you can be in perimenopause for years. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 19:48  Yeah, years. You can be in perimenopause for up to a decade. Lesley Logan 19:53  Yeah. Fun. One of my girlfriend says, I'm having hot flashes for her birthday. So enter these inserts that go in your bra. They're from the freezer, and you can stick them in your bra. And she loves them. I was like, I think that would be so hard to put in my bra one day, but I don't have hot flashes. So how should they be thinking about their working out in the perimenopause years? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 20:17  Okay, so a big thing with this working out is a lot of us who are going through menopause right now, we grew up in the 70s and the 80s, and cardio was king. You did high intensity cardio. You did tons of cardio. Lesley Logan 20:34  I did step classes as a teenager. I was, my mom, I would have step class, Jazzercise. Hello. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 20:41  Exactly. So cardio is, I should say cardio is queen, type of thing, but with it, a lot of times during this stage of our life, we need to actually back off on cardio. And the reason for it is because of our cortisol levels. So cortisol, they call it the stress hormone, and it can lead to weight gain. So cortisol is really, really important in the body, and it gets a lot of bad press, but it's a good hormone. It's that fight or flight hormone, and we naturally have a high and a low during our day with cortisol. We are naturally high in the morning, so that promotes alertness, and it helps us wake up and get our day going. And then throughout the day, cortisol is going to drop. So at night, we want our cortisol low so that we can sleep, otherwise it interferes with our melatonin and a bunch of other hormones. So that's what we want to have happen. But during this phase of our life, a lot of us are working, children, aging parents, you know, maybe financial stress, whatever it is, we have a lot of stressors going on. And when we have stress, cortisol comes up high, and it stays high. That's not good for our body. We are in this constant state of what do I do, where do I go? How do I solve this? As opposed to having a natural high and a natural low. So when we hold on to that cortisol, what it does is it increases our food cravings and it increases belly fat. So exercise is a stress. It is a stressor, but it's a oh, we peak and then we come down. So cortisol comes up while we're exercising, comes down. But if we are stressed, hot flashes are killing us, you know, I'm forgetful, I'm not sleeping, our cortisol level is high, and if we do a lot of cardio on top of that, we're going to really spike, which then can lead to additional issues. So a big thing in this phase is, if you are feeling those symptoms and you're feeling episodic stress or chronic stress, then we need to take that cardio down short bursts. So like a hit training, where you have a high and then a rest period, high and a rest period, but that activity is short, as opposed to doing these long duration exercises that maybe you know you've been used to you might do an hour, hour and a half. We need to cut those down to less than 40 minutes, to help control the cortisol levels. And that is probably the biggest thing I can suggest to women, because they say I gotta do cardio to lose weight, but the cardio could be making you gain weight. Lesley Logan 23:40  Oh, thank you for sharing this, because it is something that I've been really trying to help because I was a runner. I was a professional, so I ran all the time. And, you know, definitely in my 20s, like I was my leanest when I was running, I still run. I run very differently now, because it's not actually the same, because I run my own business. So there are stressful moments, and then, you know, I can tell, like, if I've run during certain times of my month, because I still have my cycle, it actually makes me feel worse, because I'm, you know, like I got, like it's a whole thing. So I have, I definitely have been trying to change how I see cardio, but also I've been trying to help people and women say, like, you don't have to do these hour-long like, kill yourself at the gym workouts to get results, you can do a lot in a little bit of time. I love that you're saying this. Like, that's hard for the hour-long session people, but like, we've it's because we pay people by the hour. I'm convinced that's why hour-long classes exist. But you know, like, we can give ourselves permission to stretch. You know, take some time to bring that down, instead of being at the gym doing cardio for an hour or some sort of like jazzercise class for 50 minutes. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 24:51  Yeah. So I own a website where I have in-person clients. I have on-demand classes, and most of my classes are 30 to 40 minutes, and I would get the question, why don't you have hour classes? And I'm like, Well, let's talk about hormones. And once you educate women and you give them the permission that it doesn't need to be an hour, then it just is like, oh. Because of all those stresses, you gotta get the kids to baseball practice or or gymnastics, or whatever it may be. And we're tide crunched, and you're, you may be working as well. Half an hour. Awesome. Beautiful. You know? Yeah, and the other important one on especially cardio and resistance training is the timing of them becomes important as well, that ideally, during this time period, we would love to see you working out in the morning, and that's challenging. I get it because I'm teaching at the university in the morning, but when we work out at night, our cortisol levels are going to spike because the exercise this is exact opposite of what we want to have happen, because we want the cortisol levels to drop so that we can have restful sleep. And that's a challenge. Lesley Logan 26:14  It is a challenge. My husband's going to listen to this. We're going to talk about it, and we work out from 6pm to like five and sometimes 4:30 and I am like, I wish you were a morning workout (inaudible). So just see, hear this babe. He wouldn't, when I say morning, my morning is like 6am but I would love 10. Okay, so we talked about the workouts for before peri, then peri, and once we're there, we obviously worry about our heart, but like, what are some working outs that? Is the workout still 40 minutes or? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 26:51  Yeah, because as we grow older, both men and women, our cortisol levels tend to rise. It's just natural. It's not something you can stop. So ideally, yeah, we still want to keep those workouts to 40 minutes or less, but now, if you're not stressed and you don't have any of the you're sleeping like a baby, you can go and do your two-hour workout. That's fine. If you start to see changes in your body or that's not working for you anymore, then you need to modify. So I don't want to discourage anyone from working those longer endurance sessions, but if you're not seeing what you expect to see, then we can modify and maybe take it down. Lesley Logan 27:38  Yeah, that's cool. So often people will then blame the food or the other things. And we're not often looking at the thing if they were doing the gym, that could actually be causing not the results we're looking for. Yeah.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 27:51  Yeah, as we say in menopause, and I use that as, from peri to post, we have to focus on three things, the exercise, the nutritional environment. What are we doing? We might not be able to do the same thing that we did when we were in our 20s. And then our hormonal environment. Those three work together to protect the heart. They work together for symptom management, and they work together for our bones. So if you just do one, if you only do exercise, it's not going to work. If you only watch what you eat, it's not going to work. If you ignore your hormonal environment, it's not going to work.Lesley Logan 28:31  Good luck. We had on a female telemedicine, and I was like, you know, I've had years of low testosterone, and everyone is just like, you need to lift heavy weights. And I'm like, I do. I lift as heavy as I could hold on to in this moment, I am aware I bought it. I'm not the girl who doesn't pick up the big weight like I am bought in. It is not going up. And so I finally had someone listen to me, and holy freaking moly, guys, find someone. I am loving life. This is amazing. Just a little bit of, a little bit, I'm like, I actually, like, I have, I have awareness. And my point is, like, we don't have to suffer with the hormones because we're changing. There are ways of helping your hormonal environment. And one way I heard about hormone therapy, that was a really great way of thinking about it is, it's so you don't feel like you dropped off a cliff. Yep, you're not replacing what you're losing. It's making it so that it's not, it's a slower, it's a slow downhill. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 29:31  Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I am all for bio-identical hormones. They make a big difference. Now some women cannot take them. I took them for probably four or five years. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, so I had to come off everything except testosterone. I was allowed to stay on testosterone, and I agree with you, it is, it makes a world of difference, the brain fog lifts, the belly fat decreases, sexual desire goes up, there's all these benefits. Your bone density can even improve, but it's definitely a personal decision that that female has to talk with about, you know, with their clinician. But I mean, science has come a long way. It's not like it was back when our moms were going through menopause, and they were taking hormone replacement therapy that might not have been the best for them. Lesley Logan 30:28  I know. Have you? Have you read the book Eve? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 30:31  No. Lesley Logan 30:31  Okay, all right, I just keep asking any amazing woman if they have because maybe they know her. It's me trying to get Cat Bohannon on this show. So, she talked about in her book, you would nerd out about it, by the way, it's about the evolution of female mammalian bodies, and each chapter is a different Eve on different body parts, and one of them's perception. It's a very cool chapter about how we can hear better than men and all these things. But it's true, the dosing on medicines are not usually tested on women ever, and so Ambien is like, the reason why women are, like, wandering around. (inaudible) So it is true, like we are very lucky to be in today's world of, like, what they are doing, and it's only going to get better. But I think what's really cool, and why I wanted to have someone like you on the show is that women are actually talking about perimenopause and menopause now, and we're talking about it in a way so that everyone around us can understand it. Because it's not just for us ladies to understand who are listening, but also the people in your lives, men and women and children, because you are going to be different. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 31:35  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Lesley Logan 31:38  And so it's important for them to, they, I feel like the more educated everyone is on the topic, the better circumstances and environments we can put into place for ourselves. You know? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 31:49  Yeah, I 100% agree, because we need the support of those around us. And I get where it's hard for a male to understand what you're going through, but we need to be able to help them understand, so that they can be supportive. Lesley Logan 32:05  Yeah, yeah. And I think not just in perimenopause, but that's kind of like all things like, the more that everyone is on understanding what your goals are, the easier it is for you to get where those are. You're so cool. Okay, so what are you most excited about right now, Jan? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 32:19  I'm really, again, a nerd out here, I am so excited about all the new research that's coming through, because, as you said, medications are tested on men. Well, exercise programs are tested on men in research, and now we are finally getting the research on women in perimenopause, on women in menopause with exercise programs in the different formats. And I am just, as opposed to just walking programs. And so, you know, heavy lifting, which we know is, I mean, that is just key to, one, esthetically look good. Two, to be able to perform all your activities of daily living, and it's the thing that's going to protect your bones. So we are now getting that research, and that, to me, is just like, oh, thank God, you know, because I've lectured for years and presented around the world on this type of things, and when it comes to the exercise programs, it's like, well, this is what was done with men. Well, this is done with college-age women, because they're the easiest people to get as subjects. And now we can actually say, okay, you know what those high intensity, long duration cardio sessions not working. We can say that now and that, I just love that, because it gives us a place to go. Lesley Logan 33:45  Yeah, yeah. It's not just, like, a feeling or like, oh, I've noticed in my own experiences, like, actually, there's research. And now it's not just, like, in this one example. I'm excited about that too, because it's yeah, it's, you know, every workout program I've ever done, I'm like, how, who is this is for? Like, how do we how are we doing that? And then you're like, okay, now I gotta find the female trainer over 40, and I'm gonna do her workout, which is great for her. But like, how do we know, you know what, it's, I want more information. We can have that we can arm people with information, and they can make the best decision for what their life is and what's wrong with them. And I think that we're not guessing, and that's really cool. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 34:20  Yeah, because with menopause in general, you know every client is unique of what their past experiences are, in activity, in their nutritional behavior. Every woman is unique when they go through menopause, some glide through with like they're just sailing through. Others are having some pretty severe symptoms. And so the exercise design can't be the same. You have to look at what is going on, you know, if I'm really stressed, then maybe I should be doing some more mind-body type activities to bring my stress level down. If I'm sailing through I can keep doing what I've been doing for years until something changes.Lesley Logan 35:03  Yeah, yeah. I think it's, I just love that so much. I really, really do, and this is really exciting. I will have to keep talking with you as more research comes out, as you're willing to share. But it's been great. We're gonna take a brief break, and then we're gonna find out where people can find you, follow you, work with you. All right, Jan, where do you hang out? Where can people stalk you? Because I have a feeling we've got some ladies who are like, I want to work out with this lady. She gets me. Jan Schroeder, PhD. 35:29  Well, I am in California. I'm in Southern California, and I'm in the Huntington Beach area, but I do have a website where it is education in this area, as well as on-demand workouts that can be put together. So that's at garagegirlsfit.com. I'm not a big social media person. It drives me. I just think it's a time waste, and I'm like, I'm too busy. I got other things I got to do, so I'm not really on social media that much. Just for my mom and dad to see their grandson.Lesley Logan 36:04  So many people, so jealous of you, including me, like I said before we hit record, like, amazing that you can if it's proof that you can do what you love, and you can do it without having to be on social. So I love that. You've given us so much already, but before I let you go for my perfectionist overachievers, my hold on, I love you so much, but what do I do right now? The bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it. What do you have for us? Jan Schroeder, PhD. 36:28  I think one of the things is, is you need to give yourself permission to back down, to, you know, when we're thinking about our workouts, it doesn't need to be here. We can be here and actually get greater benefits, but you gotta give yourself permission that that's okay, and you need to possibly try new things in exercise. So maybe you were a runner, but that's too intense right now, so maybe you back it down to walking with a weight vest. Those sorts of things. We don't always have to be at our highest level to be at our best self. So a lot of times we need to drop things down. And believe me, I am type A, all the way. Lesley Logan 37:13  I have a fitness instructor who isn't.Jan Schroeder, PhD. 37:16  Exactly and even you know, I have to remind myself, I need to back down because of what I'm feeling, and we have to be in tune with what we're feeling and be honest that I don't like to say when I'm stressed, but I occasionally, or either myself or my husband, go, Jan, you gotta bring it down. And that's when I go, okay, I need to drop down my workouts, and it's okay. And what I find is that I actually feel better at that particular moment. We just have to give ourselves permission to say, I don't have to be high-intensity, excelling at everything all the time.Lesley Logan 37:58  I really love what you said. You guys have to rewind. It has to be a quote. It needs to be knitted on a, stitched on a pillow. My knitters, you gotta put this in. I don't have to be up here to be my best self, whatever you sound like. That is, oh, I'm gonna repeat that to myself every day until this comes out so I can hear it again. Beautiful and brilliant. And thank you for the permission, and thank you for the education. And I hope our paths cross so soon, because I would just love to meet you. You're so great, Jan. Everyone, how are you going to use the tips in your life? Do yourself a favor and send it to every female because no matter what stage in life, Jan gave her amazing education. The more we're armed with information, ladies, the better decision we can make about ourselves and our lives, and we get to make them for ourselves. And I think that is so cool. We don't have to do what our friends are doing because it works for them. We can actually go, this is what works for me, and I just love this so much. So Jan, thank you so much and everyone until next time, Be It Till You See It.Lesley Logan 38:51  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod. Brad Crowell 39:34  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell. Lesley Logan 39:39  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co. Brad Crowell 39:43  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi. Lesley Logan 39:50  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals. Brad Crowell 39:53  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The familiar threats of the Alien franchise — namely xenomorphs and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation — take on new forms in Alien: Romulus. Josh, JR., and Sarah discuss how this installment fits with the other films, as well as what it might have to say about sin — both original and chosen. Oh, and JR. defends THAT choice involving a “new” synthetic. SHOW NOTES TC on Instagram! - https://www.instagram.com/thinkchristian_/ Josh on ‘Playing God in Alien: Covenant' - https://thinkchristian.net/playing-god-in-alien-covenant Sarah's book, Becoming Alien - https://wipfandstock.com/9781725283008/becoming-alien/ Josh and Sarah discussing Becoming Alien on the TC podcast - https://thinkchristian.net/podcast/biblical-beasts-godzilla-vs-kong-becoming-alien JR.'s book, Empathy for the Devil - https://www.amazon.com/Empathy-Devil-Finding-Ourselves-Villains/dp/0830845143 Josh's book, Fear Not! - https://wipfandstock.com/9781666738520/fear-not/ Cat Bohannon's book, Eve - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227568/eve-by-cat-bohannon/ Sarah's newsletter - https://seeingandbelieving.substack.com/ JR.'s newsletter - https://jrforasteros.substack.com/

Dive deep into the importance of integrative and preventive healthcare with Michele, CEO and co-founder of FemGevity. They tackled systematic barriers to women's health and how the healthcare system often overlooks these needs—particularly in perimenopause and menopause care. Learn actionable tips on balancing hormones, comprehensive health testing, and integrative solutions that can help you live your longest, most vibrant life yet. Tune in to take charge of your health today with confidence and clarity.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:The necessity of an integrative approach to women's healthcare.FemGevity as an accessible service prioritizing women's health. The importance of comprehensive hormone and microbiome testing.Failures of symptom-based treatments, especially in menopause care.Systematic barriers and the need for innovative healthcare solutions.Why women need community and safe space to discuss vulnerabilities.Episode References/Links:FemGevity InstagramFemGevityFemGevity TIkTokFemGevity LinkedInEve by Cat BohannonGuest Bio:Michele has expertly crafted her career niche within the healthcare sector, accumulating over 18 years as a strategic healthcare executive. Armed with an MBA in Healthcare Management from Northeastern University, Michele excels in aligning women's healthcare services with contemporary needs and expectations. Her contributions have been nothing short of revolutionary, particularly in introducing innovative women's health testing to New York City's leading physicians. Her focus spans molecular genetics, cancer biomarkers, and PCR Testing, making a significant impact in the medical community. Michele's professional journey has seen her in influential roles within Fortune 500 companies like Labcorp and Quest, but her prowess shines brightest in her role in smaller, specialized laboratories. Notably, she achieved remarkable success in expanding her client portfolio to an impressive $40 million in New York City. Michele's leadership extends beyond diagnostics and into innovation. She spearheaded the implementation of the first saliva-based COVID-19 PCR test in the New York Metro area, demonstrating her pioneering spirit. Her entrepreneurial flair is further evidenced by her role as the co-founder and CEO of FLOW Dental, a thriving multimillion-dollar cosmetic dental practice. This multifaceted career showcases Michele's unique blend of strategic vision and entrepreneurial acumen.  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. DEALS! Check out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox Be in the know with all the workshops at OPCBe It Till You See It Podcast SurveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates MentorshipFREE Ditching Busy Webinar  Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable Pilates Follow Us on Social Media:InstagramFacebookLinkedIn  Episode Transcript:Michele Wispelwey 0:00  You have three options in mind, you need to either accept it, change it, or leave it. And you need to pick your path. And whatever that situation may be, whether it's a fight with a partner, how you feel about your body, if you're having health issues, you have those three distinct options in life. And be very clear which one you choose, accept it, change it, or leave it. I think you change it.Lesley Logan 0:29  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.  Oh my gosh, you guys get ready. This conversation went everywhere, everywhere, ladies, in all the best ways. And to be honest, like, I knew I wanted to have her on the show. But then we got into talking and I was like, oh, we're gonna have a conversation. So we get down and dirty ladies about women's health and holistic health and signs and symptoms that people are getting confused and what doctors are doing and just all about, well just you know how to have ease in existence, right? Like everyone talks about find your purpose, but like sometimes you can know your purpose and it's not easy. And ease of existence can comes from like having really awesome balanced health and wellness. And so Michele Wispelway of FemGevity is our guest today. Get ready, ladies, this is a good one. So here we go. All right, Be It babe. I'm super excited to finally get this interview going because I was so excited when I met Michele Wispelway, our guest today, to talk about what she's just excited to talk with you about. And then you know my life. We all got a little bit busy. And so what's so fun about it happening today is this is the exact day that you should be hearing it. It's the exact day we should be talking about it. So Michele, will you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at? Michele Wispelwey 2:22  Yes. Hi, everyone. I am Michele Wispelway. I am CEO and co founder of FemGevity Health. We are a female longevity medicine and focusing on menopause and perimenopause treatments. I'm also a mom. I'm an aunt, I'm also I'm a sister. I'm lots of other things. But you know, my sole purpose here today is that, CEO of FemGevity. Lesley Logan 2:45  Okay, so that is really cool. Our ears are all perked up at female longevity and all the things. So I guess how did you get into that? Because I don't know, maybe you grew up going I'm going to be in medicine with female longevity, or I don't know, did you stumble upon it? What was the impetus to it?Michele Wispelwey 3:03  Yeah, so I, my background was always, I guess from if you want to kind of go back to just college years, right? And what I want to do, and I really wanted to be on the science back end of like diagnostics, and I love the innovation in medicine, and being able to work with doctors to collaborate different type of treatment plans on how their patients live healthier. And that was, really quickly, I learned that that just wasn't the reality of our healthcare system. It was driven by a payer system. And and there's very limited on what women are offered opportunity wise, especially if you are not, you know, top of the echelon of the income be able to pay out of pocket. And through my journey of with my lab background, I really got to see and dig in deeper on like, what I wanted for myself, and what I think other women would want for themselves. So that's what really long story short led led me here. And I also have a very personal journey where my mom actually was really gaslit for many years on what, she had symptoms, what she was told that were just menopause really, actually they call it go and you're just going through your changes.Lesley Logan 4:23  I do recall my grandma was going through her changes. Michele Wispelwey 4:27  Yeah, isn't that so tacky? You know, it's like when men said oh, she's on the rag. It's like that type of crap.Lesley Logan 4:34  Yeah, it is that type of crap. It's just like, can we just call it what it is? It has a name. Michele Wispelwey 4:39  Yeah, yeah. So my mom actually passed away at 51. Lesley Logan 4:44  Oh, my gosh that's so young. Michele Wispelwey 4:45  Yeah, yeah. She was misdiagnosed for years. And she had a lot of spotting and what appeared that it was her changes and fibroids and that is exactly where we still are today with a lot of doctors, majority of doctors, you know, 80% of them have no training on hormones and perimenopause and menopause and just how it affects women's longevity, ovarian preservation, metabolic, you know, cancer prevention, things like that. So I have a few, you know, caveats that have brought me to where I am today. And I think as a little girl, I was always very, I guess you would say neurotic, where I was always like, nervous and like health conscious and, and stuff about like germs. You know, like, I peed my pants all the time in kindergarten, because I never wanted to sit on the toilet because I didn't want to get germs and probably I'm probably diving into like psychological issues that we don't need to do right now. But my point is, I was very big into health and staying healthy and looking for ways to go down that route. So I think it's always inherently been in me. And just has driven me to here today,Lesley Logan 6:00  Okay, this is, okay, thank you for sharing that. Because yes, I'm, right now, like.Michele Wispelwey 6:04  Just being honest. Lesley Logan 6:05  I love it. Because I know I can already picture some of our listeners, I won't say their names who are, probably, doing the same thing. I'm so sorry to hear about your mom. I have many female family members who were misdiagnosed or just kinda pushed the wayside until it was too bad until it was too late. People just dismissing the symptoms as being oh, you know, like my grandmother, oh, she's just taking too many of her pain meds and she actually had more pain meds leftover than she should every month. So like, that can't be. That's, that's not how math works. So you know, and I, and I don't know that if, she did die of brain cancer. I don't know that finding out sooner would have done anything different for her type. But like also, I think she would have spent the last few months of her life feeling like she was a crazy person. You know, being you know, (inaudible) like, I do think that there's some interesting things I'm currently, I'm sure you've heard the book, Michele, but I'm currently reading the book Eve, the history. Michele Wispelwey 7:01  Oh my God, so am I. It's so good. Did you get to the section yet that men have nipples? (Inaudible) Lesley Logan 7:09  Every man I meet I'm like, you need to read this book, you're gonna learn that you can breastfeed. And so there are no such thing as gender roles, in my opinion. Also like that there has men currently breastfeeding on the planet.Michele Wispelwey 7:23  There is, there was a wave of Homosapiens that they took turns where the woman would breastfeed or if she would go out to gather and hunt and he would nurse. So, it's amazing. And men, if you're listening, you can lactate stuff. We can, we can help you. Lesley Logan 7:39  We can help you. And also apparently, if you got rid of your balls, you could live a longer life. Just another. Michele Wispelwey 7:45  Yes. Lesley Logan 7:47  The first chapter had me like going, oh my gosh, I was like Brad, you have to, every person we meet, like, you must read it. Every pregnant woman I mean, like, hold on, you need to understand there's a first and very important thing is the first few chapters go listen.Michele Wispelwey 8:01  It was amazing. It's a great book. I actually bought it for my co-founder Kristin and I sent it to her last week and she's super excited to read it. We were just talking about the nipple thing today. Lesley Logan 8:09  Yeah, it's so it's so fascinating. If if Cat Bohannon is listening, I would love to have you on the pod. Anyways, I but I loved it because she's doing this like thorough look. And as you mentioned, like you got into this medicine thinking like you could collaborate, and it's just not what happens. Those of you who live in other countries, maybe it's different for you. But if you're currently living in like a system that is like the U.S. it is non-collaborative, you are going to different silo doctors and you're trying to figure out the wrong with you and everyone is kind of trying to give you a pill to cover up symptoms. It is how I feel about it. And I'm not against medicine. I'm not against science, guys, I'm not, so don't put me in that category. But I get really frustrated because I had a massive health issue for 10 years I got exacerbated because no one would actually like work together like no one was actually understand me and like I said, I'm not sleeping very well anymore. And these things it was just terrible. What happened is I had definitely had some stomach issues and I stopped absorbing nutrition. And then I stopped going through sleep cycles, which means I stopped producing stomach acid, which means it's no longer absorbing nutrition and of course you're not sleeping. Michele Wispelwey 9:21  Did you have H. Pylori? Lesley Logan 9:23  No. We did have that. I had that for a little bit then I don't know how long ago that was. But I do remember that one. But yeah, I just like literally finally got someone to listen to me to do a full, full test. Just a full one. Of course this is where money, you have to have money to do this. So was a celebrity in the U.S. in LA., I heard what, who, he used to like gain weight to look like he had done like steroids but not take steroids and I was like who are you doing this with? And he told me about this guy, I was like, I'm gonna go to this guy and this guy looked at my blood and he goes hold on. You have no stomach acid, you're like, no, what is going on? I had no testosterone at that point. Yes, I had that. I mean like, just like I had a ton of (inaudible) there is a metal in my system, it was a whole mess. And I was like, this probably didn't start off this way. But it's gotten to this point because I could not get anyone to actually do an actual panel. And he's like, you don't have any vitamin D? Like you, you know, and I was like, I don't know how it's possible. I'm driving around in a jeep with the top off. I don't understand. So, you know, it took someone like that for me to get to someone who's probably similar to you, who helped me like more holistically and with (inaudible), but to look at the whole picture. So if people are feeling a little bit gaslit, or feeling like a little bit like they're going crazy, what should they be looking for in the medical system? Or how do they find someone like you? Michele Wispelwey 10:40  Yeah, so everything you said is exactly what we do. So what makes us so different is that we take a full integrative approach, we actually take a longevity medicine approach, because a woman's body at a cellular level is all these interconnected systems, the gut talks to your hormone levels, your estrogen affects your cardiovascular system, your gut affects cognitive, your skin, how you absorb nutrients. And I'll tell you a story about me and that situation too. But you need to look for doctors that aren't just spot treating, that aren't treating you just on your symptoms. And that's the problem. And that's the problem with the US health system is that we treat on sick, we don't, we're reactive, we're not preventive. So you need to find a provider, a GYN that is going to, oh you're tired and fatigued, don't just be like oh, well, let's just do a CBC and a thyroid, let's see what else is going on. Because if your gut is going on, you have acid, you have dysbiosis, you're not going to sleep, you're not going to absorb nutrients, you can have like GERD, a lot of different things, you're, a drop in estrogen is going to affect your cholesterol level. So a lot of women end up going to the cardiologist because they're you know, their LDL is through the roof, or they have (inaudible) issues. And that's actually interconnected with your whole hormonal system. It's all a web, it's not this or that it's the whole complex picture together. And if your doctor doesn't do that, then you need to go because this is like, these are the patients that we see everyday that come to us. And like I've seen this doctor, because, you know, I, you know, I've been to my internist. And then she doesn't know what to do. I've been to my GYN and he said, oh, you just have to wait this out. I've been to my cardiologist because I thought I was having, you know, a heart attack because I had a stiff shoulder. But that's one of the menopause symptoms. So, and that's what we do. We test, we do a full comprehensive hormone (inaudible), we do your gut microbiome, your micronutrient level, and even your food allergy levels to see what type of inflammatory markers your body's reactive to with foods. Because if you're fixing your gut, you kind of need to fix what's causing your inflammation from your food first, before you go in and fix your gut. Because that's just gonna cause your gut to just inflame even more or just fire up or not absorb the nutrients and things like that.Lesley Logan 13:00  Yeah, I definitely, I definitely learned that with the stomach, like if you just start to like, take different things for the stomach. The way that the stomach microbiome works, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's like what you're eating, you kind of start to crave more of, because that's what your microbiome is actually eating off of. And so if you're used to eating inflammatory foods, you've got a microbiome that's dealing with all of that, and you just go and put medicine on that if you can change the food intake, you get more organisms down there that can help with the situation. Is that right? Michele Wispelwey 13:28  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's definitely along the lines. And you definitely want you know, things like oregano oil, and a lot of probiotics, Akkermensia, we, I do a lot of things, things like that. But the thing is, and that's the thing with like, personalized medicine is what we are at FemGevity's, I can say, oh, yeah, you should take that. But you shouldn't be taking anything until you have testing to see what your body needs, right? So I could be like, take this oregano oil and take this probiotic and take Akkermensia. Yeah. But if, your your body may not need it, right, you know, you go to your internist and they'll say, take your vitamin D and a multivitamin and omega, well, how do you know what I should be taking? You know, like, you don't know what I'm missing. Lesley Logan 14:13  Right. And also, if your stomach isn't absorbing nutrition, is it getting (inaudible)?Michele Wispelwey 14:20  Flushing it out. You know what's interesting, I was at the pediatrician with my daughter yesterday, she had (inaudible) and she had this like this whatever a gland or not, whatever it is, we're following it and I because I have access to this testing. So my daughter's like, you know, very tired and kind of cranky and stuff like that. So I did a full micronutrient panel on her and she's gonna be a lab bench. Her CoQ10 is low, her vitamin C is low, her zinc is low, and her omega is low. And I'm like, this is why my child is cranky and she's tired and her stomach hurts. But and I just tested the pediatrician yesterday. I said, oh, what do you think we, she's really tired. What do you think we should do? What do you think? She's like well, her CBC and thyroid were fine last year. And she's, she's hormonal, so she's okay. And I'm like, that's exactly why you need a full integrative doctor because I'm listening to her, my child is gonna still continue on this this endless route of feeling worse. Lesley Logan 15:22  Yeah. Also a year ago, my dentist won't let me go more than a year without checking my teeth with an X-ray. Do you know what I mean? I'm like, is this really necessary? Like, well, it's been a year, and I'm like, okay, like, it's my teeth. Like your blood tests, especially on a young child. I think it's amazing that you, I mean good for you. and also like your daughter, so lucky. But it's so interesting, because now it makes me think like, a lot of our people who are listening are parents and like, your child might be cranky, not because they haven't slept enough, but maybe like something is off.Michele Wispelwey 15:54  It's vitamin and she, actually I, then I also did a one step further, I did a gut microbiome and tested her poop. And she had H. Pylori. And that's why her stomach was hurting. So that's why it's like you can't, you know, I have my own theories on uncertain things. But that's why I always need to take it that way, five steps further.Lesley Logan 16:15  When I lived in LA, it felt like so accessible to find someone like you. And now I live in Las Vegas, and I'm sure it exists. I haven't looked because luckily, I can just go to L.A. and see my person but like, but like, but also, can people access someone like you and live in a different part of the country? Like is what you do accessible in a mail order sort of thing? Like, yeah.Michele Wispelwey 16:42  Yeah. Which is great. And I should have mentioned that we are virtual healthcare. Totally telemedicine, convenience of your home. And that's how we're able to keep the costs down. And because we're not a brick-and-mortar, we don't have all this crazy overhead. And we're able to offer this type of concierge care and precision medicine to women all over the country. Lesley Logan 17:02  That's so cool. That is, okay, so that's amazing. So you can telemedicine, people all over the country can access you. And so let's say they do have someone that they trust, or they they want to test their own doctors, like they're not, they're not ready for telemedicine are they testing the doctors to just because I had a doctor that I totally tested. And I got really mad at her. And then I got an email or letter that said she's out of network now, I'm like, thanks, I didn't want to see her anyways. She, I was like, I want to get these things tested on my hormones. And she said, oh, you can't test those they change all day long. And I was (inaudible) and I was like, I'm, these test exists for a reason means you can and if you know how to read them based on where I'm at my cycle, and I do know where I am my cycle, you should know. And she was like, well, I could order it. But it's it's not gonna say anything. And I was like, it's not your money. And I don't want you to have the results. So no, but like, what should people be asking their doctors to see if the doctor they have is someone that they can trust or work with? Who is going to do the whole thing?Michele Wispelwey 18:06  Yeah, so a couple things, I would get all your hormones, progesterone, estrogen, make sure they're looking at your cortisol, your insulin levels, make sure they're looking at your lipids, make sure you look into your DHEA ,your HMH because you want to actually check your ovarian aging levels. If they have access to it, I would order a lot of like heavy metals. See the magnesium, mercury, you do a lot of amino acids and antioxidant testing. Glutathione testing is really good. We're big advocates of testing for that. If gut microbiome testing and make sure they're doing H. Pylori, if you really have to test from the stool, doing bloods is just, for H. Pylori purposes, it's just not because it lives in your intestinal tract and stuff like that. Food allergy testing, but just there's specific labs that do PCR DNA sequencing, too. So you also have to ask them, like, what labs are you using? What's the methodology and I know that's like, not something everyone wants to go into. But at the very least, have them do a very full comprehensive hormone asset, your thyroid your FSH, your LH, prolactin, estradiol, do it all.Lesley Logan 19:16  Wow. Okay, so everyone, don't worry, the show is transcribed, it's on the blog, and you can copy and paste. Michele Wispelwey 19:23  We have a lot of information on our website and blogs. My co-founder does a ton of like, videos where she talks about things a lot hormonal-wise because she does a lot of our medical protocols. And you know, yeah, so that you could find that all there not to be wary but and also women in their 30s, you should be getting your levels tested because you want a baseline, you want to know what you are now. So when you're like in your 40s and your levels are this you could compare them to what they were because even if you're like feeling am I feeling good, am I feeling not? You know you're like able to guide yourself very closely and almost like preventing yourself from symptoms and being able to live symptom-free before it hits.Lesley Logan 20:07  Yeah. And I actually want to chat about that because like one of my girlfriends, you know, she, she's going through the changes. Oh my God, I was going to say, no, so she's you know, she's 10 years older than me and she, you know, was assuming she is premenopausal and was just all these different things were happening. And she was also slowly over time and I was like, I think you might want to just talk with your doctor about like, really, truly like looking into why are you so tired all the time? Why are you having these aches and pains? Why is your hip bothering you? Like you have this? It's, you're, it's not because you're 50. It's not just because you're 50. Right? Like, if you're gonna live to 80, this is early, it's too early to go through all these pain points. So she finally, like really sought something out, like went for it. And then they gave her some hormones because her hormones were off. And she's like, holy moly, Lesley. I was so, like, I feel like I am unstoppable. And I was like, for years, she's been slowly over time managing it, in air quotes, managing it. And I think that we are trained from, I don't know, just society that like, it's, we'll just manage it, we'll just figure it out. We'll just do it later. And like, it's actually okay to demand that you feel really good all the time, especially if you're doing all the things if you're moving your body, if you're trying to sleep, if you're, if you're like trying to drink the clean water, like all the things like you should ideally feel good.Michele Wispelwey 21:34  Yeah, it's been very just highly accepted and overrated, that you just have to kind of deal with it. And it's a part of aging, and you're supposed to be tired, or you're supposed to have an ache or pain. That is not supposed to be how you're supposed to feel. I'm 43 and I feel better now than when I felt in my 30s. And, you know, I actually have more energy, because you're just more aware of how you're supposed to take care of yourself. So, you know, imagine if, like, younger women start understanding how they're supposed to feel and start feeling even more energetic in their 30s. And as you build up and progress, you're just gonna keep feeling better. And, you know, be able to get up from the floor when you're 75 and play with your grandkids.Lesley Logan 22:18  Yeah, and have the energy too, it's not just the strength too, but also all of the things that go with it. Okay, you mentioned something that like piqued my interest. You said someone had a shoulder issue and they were there so and it was perimenopausal, not a heart attack, or whatever. Are there any other symptoms like that that we should be aware of that like we may be perimenopausal but we might think are something else because I or maybe I've just opened up a can of worms because I feel like a like perimenopause. Unfortunately, menopause has not been studied nearly enough. I got really pissed off, did you hear this? There was a daily episode, probably six months ago, where this one scientist was trying to get research money for menopause. And the way he was able to get actual funding from people for his testing that he wanted to do was just to turn the title to like, well, if women stopped turning into men, then their husbands would want them longer. So if we can keep them women longer, and that's how he got the funding, and I was so irritated that that's how money, I was like, (inaudible) you should have been studying this already. So disgusting. So infuriating. He got money for it. And so yay. But also like, unfortunately, we haven't studied this long enough. And so we don't know enough everything I've ever been told that you just have hot flashes, and that you gain weight. But like you just mentioned a (inaudible) I've never heard of before. So like, what are some of those things that might people might be putting off that could actually have to do with like a hormone change happening?Michele Wispelwey 23:49  Yeah, so stiff shoulder like frozen shoulder, itchy ears, a ringing in the ear. Some women become like, like kind of like vertigo, off balanced. There's, I mean, there's 100 plus symptoms (inaudible). Lesley Logan 24:03  That's crazy. Just the ones you listed are like I was like, oh, I trip a lot.Michele Wispelwey 24:09  Yeah. You know, you're and you're like, do I have a brain tumors? You know, like there's some very serious symptoms. You know, women have like weird just like pains that you know, you start pulling things easier just because you have a higher likelihood for bone fractures and osteoporosis. So there's much easier breakage and there's a lot of a lot of women end up like having like a slipped disc or like, you know, like a joint pain or pull like a something in their shoulder. And you hear if you list start paying attention and listening like more women in the 40s 50s and 60s will be like, oh, I went to the chiropractor or the acupuncture, my back's acting up again and you ask them well, what did you do through perimenopause, especially if it's a woman who was in her 60s, I bet you she didn't do anything when she was going through perimenopause and menopause, and now it's catching up to her big time.Lesley Logan 25:03  Oh, okay, so this is interesting, okay, so (inaudible). Michele Wispelwey 25:05  Especially (inaudible) and testosterone is like maintaining your levels of testosterone is huge for women, your body composition is made up of much more testosterone than it is of any other hormone. We just have a smaller formula of it in our body, formula, composition of it. Lesley Logan 25:23  Yeah, that's what, that's the one that like, I'm really, really honest with everyone listening, I have been trying for years to maintain that level. I mean, I lift the heavy weights, I'm now, I'd take a CJC, which is not really for testosterone, but like, it's supposed to help me just feel good. But like, I cannot keep that level up to a number that is anything better than below average. And I'm like, do I just need to actually take testosterone and I'm like, Oh, my God, my grandmother had a beard. So like, I haven't gone down that rabbit hole. (inaudible)Michele Wispelwey 25:53  I mean, unless you're like rubbing it on your, on your, on your (inaudible) and you want a beard, then, you now, hell go for it, whatever, it's 2024. But, you know, you know, I, listen, I'm not the medical provider and the clinician, but there's could be a lot of things for you. Like, who knows what your progesterone level is? I don't know if you're on a Mirena IUD that's causing progestin, and you're getting over an estrogen dominance and and stripping your testosterone so there's like a lot of different things. I think you're probably younger than me. So these are all these factors that are like fully integrated and like a lot of physicians don't understand it, and they don't think about it so if you can't maintain your testosterone levels, there's there's a reason why it just does not because just because like you know you yeah, so just like think about those things they're interesting. Lesley Logan 26:40  I also just I want to just highlight something you're you've done you guys often listen to this every time something has come up she has mentioned that there's more than like, it's not just like this or this. Like there's this and then also there's a few other things that this could be going on. And I think that's so important. You're, anytime we're with a medical provider, they, there needs to be a holistic look at things because otherwise they're putting a bandaid on something or they can make something worse because it's totally off like they could be training you for a heart attack. And (inaudible) did you (inaudible) did you read Halle Berry's doctor mistook her perimenopause for like gonorrhea like a bad case of gonorrhea? (inaudible)Michele Wispelwey 27:25  Imagine, I mean, the poor woman, she probably has such vaginal dryness and like, you know, God only knows what's cool because there's a lot of stuff goes on down there. You know, you lose your atrophy and your collagen in there and it starts thinning out and then you know why? You know why she probably thought that? Because she probably had persistent UTIs because women when they're they start losing their testosterone, they got a lot of vaginal dryness and a lot of reoccurring. UTIs. So he she probably he'd probably get them tested for STDs. And if only he would have given her some bioidentical estrogen, your vagina would have felt a lot better. And the poor thing wouldn't have been accused of gonorrhea. I'm from like, the the lab world, right? So like, doctor's order, you know, urine cultures constantly. Any woman's like, you know, oh, I have a pain or have an itch or something. They're like, oh, do you have a UTI? Or is it (inaudible)? You know, they don't think that like, oh, maybe you have some hormonal thing going on. They don't even test your hormones. Like at your annuals, they don't look at anything. It's not even a part of like the health insurance. You have to do. It's preventative codes. The only thing is preventative is a PAP, not even HPV. That's like considered diagnostics. It's like, it's absurd.Lesley Logan 28:37  (Inaudible) I know, I am too. I'm really excited that this conversation like so okay, because this will just like horrify you. So when I had been (inaudible) on birth control in high school, I went on the patch because I was like, yeah, I'll put this on because I don't have to do a pill at the same time every day. (Inaudible) a badge, it was like you can put it on your arm or on your hip or whatever. Of course, you guys, you guys. I can't wear a BandAid, okay, not longer than a day, I just switched the BandAid out. So of course, like, every time I took this patch off, I had like a red square, super sexy, like everybody wants to be near that. And so I gotta keep moving the patch around. Anyways, I guess like it was but I was like, no, I don't want to be on the pill because I'm gonna have to remember to take anything and we're supposed like low hormone, the whole thing like you won't get a blood clot because it's like, it's like, easy the way that all the things I was told, right? So fast forward two years and I'm in a car accident. I'm on bed rest for a week. I get off bedrest and my leg is super swollen and it's getting hot. And I am it's I'm at work and it's now throbbing. And so I go to an urgent care and I was like, I think I have a blood clot. And he's like, no one was like, I can't sleep because I'm in so much pain. And I watched an infomercial on a blood clot. I think I have one. I have all the symptoms and the guy's like you're too young for blood clot. Kid you're not too young for blood clots, ice and elevate your leg. You were in a car accident a week ago. It's swollen from that. I was like this person doesn't, is not listening to me. And the worst thing I can do is elevate this leg. So I went to work because I had to go back and I, you know, unfortunately, had to pay my own bills. So go to work and it's now getting bigger you guys, like my leg was like twice the size (inaudible). It was I felt maybe it wasn't that big, but it felt that big. So I then went to the emergency room. And I walk in, and I'm like, well limping in because I can barely walk my like, and the nurse goes, oh my god, I think you have a blood clot. And I was like, thank you. I think so too. So sure enough I have a blood clot, (inaudible) and the hospital, I was pulled off of birth control, not by my gynecologist from then, but from a different one who looked at my history and just like, oh, she's like, I think you might be susceptible to clotting based on your family's history. You should not be on these hormones. And so I got on the copper IUD, which of course made my periods the worst thing in the world forever, for fucking ever. So, but anyways, I don't have children. And at the time, I was single. So here we are. So have this copper IUD. And aside from the bad periods, no problems whatsoever, it was pretty easy. Everything was like on time, go to get it removed. And I'd moved. And no one could find it. And they saw I'm at Planned Parenthood, they can't find it. They're like, I'm like, well, it's in there. I'm telling you right now it's there, I know, it's there. I can feel it's there. Right? So you got to like so sure enough, I got my insurance to cover a visit with a gynecologist. And she finds it with what an ultrasound a sonogram, whichever the one is. And it's like in the, I guess it's like in the uterus, and it was like off to the side and turned around. So this, this, the strings were facing the wrong way. So they had to go in with a camera. And this is, will piss you off, even though she could find it that day, my insurance would not let her remove it that day. I had to come back for another visit, to have it removed. And I was and she was like I would do it. But I'm like, can't you just like say I came back another day. Like, I'll just, I'll sign I swear. So anyways, I had that removed, it's now been out for almost two years, best thing I ever did is like have nothing. It's like I'm I'm so cyclical, it's I'm on time, all the time. It's amazing. But it's just the comedy of errors. Like what I would, it's a lot. So you know, I share all that with you. Because like, ladies, if you're listening, it's you're not the only one, even if you are advocating for yourself. And even if you're trying to educate yourself, it can be really difficult to navigate the medical system to get help for yourself. Michele Wispelwey 32:41  It really is, especially the payer system. And it's more difficult now, because a lot of independent physicians are being bought by hospital systems and peer networks because they can't afford to stay in business because, you know, the inflation, right, it's the cost to operate. But the reimbursements are going down. And there's only so many, you know, insurances that you can go to network with. So you're just being it just intertwined or being more caught up in the system. And that's why, you know, we're so adamant on, you know, doing what we do, and so passionate about it, because, you know, being in the lab industry, and Kristin had her own practice for many, many, many years. We know what the payer system is and prevents from women living longer, healthier lives, it just doesn't allow it. So there needs to be companies like FemGevity and, and others to be able to provide these opportunities to live longer and healthier and vibrant and build like an ecosystem and community support where women could be like, vulnerable and talk to each other about these things. Because it's embarrassing, you know, not everyone like where's everything on their sleeve? You know, so. Lesley Logan 33:48  Yeah, I have some girl friends who are like, they're like, I know, I talked about perimenopause all the time, like you should. I don't know anything about it. No one in my life talked about it. So they talked about it after it's over. So I would like I think it's important that we hear these things. I want to go into something so before because like, you've given us so much, but I feel like you are providing something to be unique and to be this different. And to get into the world. You're trying to get through all around all the different obstacles, and there's just all these different things that would probably keep FemGevity from working. How do you have that kind of resilience? How do you stay in line with your purpose? Like, what is it that you practice every day? Because it's, it can't be easy to have this vision and this idea and know what you can do to change women's lives and also know how hard it is for them to get to you.Michele Wispelwey 34:29  Yeah, so, you know, I think the biggest part of me is, you know, I've been through a lot and I'm not afraid of failure and you can't take risks and you can't grow as a person if you're afraid to fail. And, and that's, you know, failure really brings success and it brings it brings a system and you know a person who has been like kind of knocked out of phase his resilience is really like the strongest factor that contributes to a survive level of a system and possibility to really reach your full potential. And I think what's helped me is to really live by like a system right and because it's like a structure and life is a bunch of like interconnected systems like we say with FemGevity right with finding healthcare and, and once you see that it's when harmony and energy truly evolve, and you get closer to your goals. And you really get to this like perpetual state where you get to this like paradox world of having deeper clarity of what you want and to achieve. And I just feel that you know, it, the purpose of it is to like, live with high energy, effortless existence, because at the end, end of the day, you have limited amount of capacity. And it drains, you know, drains you because it's like decision-making, stress, what you're eating, how you're sleeping, and having like an optimized system on how you go about life, the more you're going to get out of it. And there's going to be like, there's going to be dysfunction in life in general. And, like believing that, you know, just because you have dysfunction means it's not possible to be happy. And it just helps you to drive to like more essentialism and making it your own ecosystem. And like a better quality of life. Lesley Logan 36:24  Yeah, before we hit record you were talking about effortless existence, I will say like life can be so hard. And then as we've talked about all the different things that we could control with our health. If everything was imbalanced, I think it'd be so much easier to show up as an effort in effortless existence. I mean, I feel like if you have all these different hormones, but all your you know, happy hormones that are like actually leveled out, like, you probably it'd be probably be easier to show up and, and be in the world.Michele Wispelwey 36:51  Yeah, it's, you know, it's effortless. It's easier to deal with, like the obstacles because you get out of bed and you're hit with your kids or your work and an email and, and just like constant things that can really just like, just set you over the edge over the cliff, you know, where you want to, like, have a nervous breakdown. But if you're balancing your health, that's what's going to keep you on a straight, narrow road, where you're not going to be having huge spikes where it's going to make you want to drop down too far.Lesley Logan 37:19  Yeah, I can totally see how that works out. Because I do have a lot of people who are like, Lesley, I'm doing all the things, I've my dream schedule designed. And I'm like, I've got you know, I'm doing all the things for my business but like these things happen, and I just want to quit, I just want to give up and it's like, well, first of all, there's, as you mentioned, like, gotta get over, gotta get over the failure, can't be afraid of failure, you've got to do that. And I think especially when you're feeling exhausted and tired, you so a failure feels really hard. Michele Wispelwey 37:46  It is, I mean, it really isn't granted, like, you know, running a startup, there's a lot of failures. And you're like, oh my gosh, do I suck at life? Or is it just a bad day? But I'm like, no, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to learn and not make that decision again, you know, and, and it's hard to get in that mindset, especially when you're like, yeah, having a bad day.Lesley Logan 38:11  Yeah. So okay, I do, I may think being okay with failure is what resilience really is. It's like, how did you get good at? How did you get okay with failure? Is it because you practice medicine and medicine is really a practice? Or is it like, were you raised that way? Like, because I feel like so many people, our listeners are super perfectionist, it means, no failure is ever allowed. So how did you get good at being okay with failure?Michele Wispelwey 38:36  I think I once I learned to have confidence in myself, and to trust my own decisions. And, and I think I also started to become more balanced with being intentional and trusting my instincts. And I think once I grew into that, and you know, throughout my, like professional career, it was, it was hard, you had to, you know, grinding it out. It was a very male-dominated industry. And I second-guessed myself a lot. And a lot of those second guesses that I had, where I didn't listen to my gut, I made bad decisions. So I think I know that sounds ridiculous, but I got there from making my mistakes and getting back up. And I just kind of like no mercy I think is also like the way my my dad brought me up. He was very tough. He was, you know, like, if you was in the military and stuff like that. So I think it's the way I grew up and just grown up with like divorced parents and things like that. You're just mentally tough, you know, biking blood.Lesley Logan 39:45  But I think that like thanks for sharing that because I do think that so many people can see maybe they grew up with divorced parents like you or they had all the tough parents or all these things and they don't realize that they have this like superpower of resilience that they can be taking with them into things like you know.Michele Wispelwey 40:00  You know what, that's what it is. You have to find your superpower. And my superpower is resilience and to work under fire. And if you embrace your superpower, and your superpower can be like lying compulsively, who cares? That's your superpower and own it but find to use it in a good way not to like, you know, hurt people. But you know, like Superman. Lesley Logan 40:26  Yeah. Okay. I love that. Michelle, this has been so good, you are amazing. We're to take a brief break and we can find out where people can find you, work with you in FemGevity. All right, Michele, where can people find you and work with you?Michele Wispelwey 40:40  They could find us on femgevityhealth.com our social handle is @femgevity. We are on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. And we have live text and chat on our website, too, if ladies have any questions.Lesley Logan 40:59  So good. Okay, you guys. Go check it out. I'm, I'm going to, I'm gonna get down. We're gonna figure out this testosterone thing. Michele Wispelwey 41:08  We're gonna figure it out. We're gonna figure it out for you.Lesley Logan 41:10  This is the year, this is the year I'm doing it. Okay (inaudible), but could you, could you, can you, can you understand why, why I've delayed it? Right? So long. I'm like, oh, I don't know, my grandmother had like a beard.Michele Wispelwey 41:23  We won't give you a beard. We'll just give you chest hair.Lesley Logan 41:28  Oh, my God. My grandmother was up there going are you, have you lost your mind? Anyways, okay, so you've given us so much already bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it, what do you have for us?Michele Wispelwey 41:44  Okay, you have three options in mind, you need to either accept it, change it, or leave it. And you need to pick your path. And whatever that situation may be, whether it's a fight with a partner, how you feel about your body. If you're having health issues, you have those three distinct options in life. And be very clear which one you choose, accept it, change it, or leave it? I think you change it.Lesley Logan 42:14  Yeah, oh, I love these because that can be everything that's coming up. And also, you can also say, I'm gonna leave it on until this date, and then I'm gonna change it.Michele Wispelwey 42:25  Yeah, those are like your, your rocks, you know, where we actually have company rocks where we set what, each quarter in the beginning of the quarter, we set our goals, personal and professional. And then we go back three, four months later and go and reevaluate them. So you can you can leave it now and change it in three months. But don't ever accept it. Like, your health and what doctors are telling you. Because there's always a way maybe no for now, but not no for later.Lesley Logan 42:58  Yeah. I love that. I love that. No accepting it when it comes to your health you guys. You guys can now reach out to Michelle and FemGevity because what you created for women is so cool. The fact that it can be telemedicine. I'm just so I'm so excited for everyone listening. All right, y'all. How are you going to use these tips in your life? Make sure you tag Michele, make sure you tag the Be It Pod, share this, okay, so here's my action plan for you. The only way women actually can get the help that they want is if they know what they need to ask for. Okay, so if doctors were hearing questions from their patients who actually were like I did the research here are the tests I want, the only way we can get them to change, or at least for you to know that that's not the doctor you need for it. We can I think that women are so powerful that if we rose up together and demanded that professionals take care of us holistically, it's the only way it's gonna change things until then, you can go see Michele. But so share this with your, with a friend who needs to hear it because you're not crazy. There's nothing. It's not, nothing wrong with you. They just haven't figured it out yet. And it's because you (inaudible) holistic look at it. So thank you all so much, Michelle, thank you so much for what you've done here. Michele Wispelwey 44:05  Thank you. It's been so amazing. Lesley Logan 44:06  Yeah, so awesome. All right, loves, until next time, Be It Till You See It. That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod. Brad Crowell 44:54  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell. Lesley Logan 44:58  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co. Brad Crowell 45:03  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi. Lesley Logan 45:10  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals. Brad Crowell 45:13  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. Transcribed by https://otter.aiSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Where would human evolution be without the female body? Despite the invaluable ability to create life, Cat Bohannon says the female body has been historically overlooked in medical research. As an author and researcher, she wants to close the gaps in our understanding of the female body by taking a trip through time. We unpack medical bias, sexism and Cat's book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the author, poet, scholar, and scientific researcher Cat Bohannon. Now, while this episode is not going to be centred totally on art, it is going to be looking closely at women's bodies – and what might have contributed to the lack of knowledge about women in wider history. Because Cat Bohannon is renowned for her acclaimed book “Eve” that revolutionises our understanding of the female human body, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left women “under-studied and under-cared for”. Spanning from the Jurassic period to the present day, Eve hones in on the impact of what females' exclusion from scientific research has done for our bodies (and world). Through chapters headed under womb, foot, brain, or milk, it recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology, by placing women at the centre. Because, as she argues, it's not just a case of sexism – that we don't know enough about the female body – it's because the data actually isn't there. For example, general anaesthetics weren't tested on women until 1999. I'm interested in getting to the root of these issues, as well as speaking about how art might correspond to this. Because as well as being a holder of a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, Bohannon has published widely, including essays and poems for Science Magazine and the Georgia Review. And I can't wait to find out more. -- Cat's book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446844/eve-by-bohannon-cat/9781529156171 https://www.waterstones.com/book/eve/cat-bohannon/9781529151237 -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

******Support the channel****** Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao   ******Follow me on****** Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT   This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/   Dr. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.   In this episode, we focus on Eve. We start by talking about females from 200 million years ago, going back to the early mammals, and we also talk about the difference between sex and gender, and the “male norm”, or how the female body has been neglected in biology and medicine. We then go through the evolution of some of the traits Dr. Bohannon explores in her book, namely milk, and whether men and trans women can produce it; breasts and sexual selection; the origins of the placenta; the female orgasm; menstruation; female vision and smell; bipedalism and birth; and menopause. Finally, we discuss the origins of sexism and patriarchy. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, YHONATAN SHEMESH, MANVIR SINGH, AND PETRA WEIMANN! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, NICK GOLDEN, AND CHRISTINE GLASS! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

Billig, Susanne www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Studio 9

Billig, Susanne www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Studio 9

Billig, Susanne www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Studio 9

Columbia University Professor Cat Bohannon asks how it was that the male body became the scientific default in her new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Jessica Pryce believed a career at Child Protective Services would be a rewarding way to help keep kids safe. What she learned on the job completely changed her mind, as the system itself kept getting closer and closer to home. Now she's a scholar of the system and works as a public advocate to help change it for the better.  Dr. Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her new book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker. Pryce earned her Master's of Social Work degree from Florida State University and a PhD from Howard University. She's currently a research professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work.  Transcript JESSICA PRYCE: I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them. BLAIR HODGES: When Jessica Pryce began working for Child Protective Services, she was shocked at some of the living conditions she encountered. She wanted children to be safe, so she worked with the courts and police to figure out who should be taken away from their parents or what parents needed to do to prove their fitness. It was a tough job, and it got even tougher when people she personally loved got wrapped up in the system. She started to see cracks in the foundation—ways the system harmed families instead of helping them. It set her on a path to advocate for big changes. In this episode, Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. FIRST DAY WITH CPS - 01:31 BLAIR HODGES: Jessica Pryce, welcome to Family Proclamations. JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: Your book starts off right in the thick of things when you were a graduate student in social work. You'd landed this internship with Child Protective Services, CPS—this is a government agency that's tasked with protecting children from neglect and abuse. Take us to your first day in the internship when you visited the home of who you call Naomi Harden. JESSICA PRYCE: Sure. A big part of writing this book was me trying to make sure the reader understood what happens when you get a CPS case. On my very first day I was going to meet my internship supervisor and didn't really know what to expect. As soon as I got into the office, she had a case so we were thrust out into the field to go meet this mom. As an intern we're really supposed to observe and ask questions afterwards and take notes if we can. We weren't allowed to do any of the direct interviewing or things like that. It felt overwhelming at the time, but I still said, "Okay, I have my supervisor with me. I'll see what happens," and was bewildered by what we walked into. BLAIR HODGES: Naomi was a woman in her late twenties. She was Black. She was a mom of three. She'd been reported for an environmental hazard. When you got in the house, how did you feel? Do you remember walking in there and kind of taking it in? What was it like? JESSICA PRYCE: I do. It's one of those things you could never forget because I hadn't been in a house that looked like that. It looked very—you know, I'm trying to say messy, but it was it was deeper than that. It was clear that Mom was having some sort of issue around the home because typically, as I learned on that day, environmental hazards are deeper than a messy home. It really depends on the ages of the children, and because there was an infant in the home this became a huge issue for CPS. We know what infants do. They crawl around, they get into things. So I think that was why it was a big red flag for the system to go into the home in that way. Because again, I was shocked that we got called for messy homes, but because the child was so young they wanted us to come and investigate. BLAIR HODGES: You say you felt things like disgust and righteous indignation. You had an attitude toward the mom of like, "Who is this person? This is disgusting and terrible." JESSICA PRYCE: I did. I talk about the fact that I didn't grow up in a home like that and I had never seen a home like that. I immediately felt like, why would she do that? Why would she be raising kids in this sort of environment? So yes, absolutely came in thinking this is ridiculous. These kids shouldn't live here. We have to do something. That was my mentality at the time. ROLES IN THE SYSTEM - 04:07 BLAIR HODGES: It was so different from your upbringing. You grew up in this small town. Everyone cared for each other. It was a clean home. You didn't have to worry about environmental hazards in your house. You had parents who took good care of the home and of you. So this was like walking into an alien planet or something. You're learning quickly how removals of children might work, the type of people who are involved. Walk us through the roles of all the different people in the system who would be involved in deciding whether or not they needed to remove a child from a home. JESSICA PRYCE: We typically start with calling the reporter of the abuse. Around the country, there are mandated reporters. They call in a CPS report and we touch base with them on. what are your concerns? Is there anything else you want us to know about before we make contact with the family? BLAIR HODGES: This could be teachers, doctors, and stuff like that? JESSICA PRYCE: School social workers. We talk to the school, we talk to collateral contacts—which is sometimes neighbors. Again, these collateral contacts are people that don't live in the home but know the family. We're talking to teachers, school social workers, sometimes knocking on doors around the home to say, "We have this going on with this neighbor and her kids. What are your thoughts about it? Do you have any concerns about it?" After we compile all this information, if we feel there's a danger threat, we then have to call our attorneys, really debrief the case, tell them our concerns, tell them what we found, and they let us know, "Hey, this isn't enough for removal," or "I think we have something here, let's take it to the judge." That's how removals work. We have to consult with our attorney to see if there's enough to do that. BLAIR HODGES: You had to do it every time? Sometimes I'm sure you would just know based on the system's rules, you'd be like, "Oh, this is a pretty clear-cut case." But investigators have to call attorneys regardless, and then they would make the call, and then they would call a judge to get an order to remove the child—is that right? JESSICA PRYCE: What's interesting about that is we remove kids and then see the judge. We do talk to our attorneys to see if we have enough to petition the court, but that happens after the fact. As you read in the book, those children were removed before we ever went to court. So we do make the removal based on an attorney saying, "I think we have enough to do this. Go ahead and shelter the kids." Then we put the kids elsewhere, and generally the very next day we go before the judge. I learned very quickly during the early days of my internship that sometimes judges send kids back home. Sometimes judges say, “You know what? This looks like you did the right thing, let's keep them in foster care.” People don't realize we actually take kids away from families and then ask for permission to keep the removal. BLAIR HODGES: Sometimes police get involved too. That's another element of this, that cops can be involved in the removal process. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. Generally, when we're removing kids we're encouraged to call law enforcement. In the book I take folks through my training, and during that training phase we are told if you're going to remove a child, also if you're dealing with family violence around intimate partner violence or domestic violence, we are encouraged to bring law enforcement. They play a big role in removals, because it gets very heated, and we wanted to make sure we had some support. BLAIR HODES: If I recall correctly, there are also special doctors who are licensed to assess children. They're going to look at a kid and figure out if there's been abuse and things like that, right? JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. If you're dealing with a case around particularly physical abuse, sexual abuse, and some cases with medical and physical neglect, we have physicians examine the child. That's really something we add to the evidence when we go to the judge. These are all pieces of the puzzle we're pulling together to take to the judge for a ruling. And sometimes the judge says, "Yes, the child should be removed." But the consolation prize, as I call it, for some families is, we're not going to remove your kids, but you're going to be monitored by the court for the next year or so. Again, somewhat a success, right? We didn't remove the children, but I think it's also important to know now you have the court system in your home really dissecting everything you're doing for the foreseeable future. NAOMI'S CASE – 08:28 BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so on the surface, Jessica, this seems pretty comprehensive. It seems fairly reasonable when we look at the process at this level. There are mandated reporters, there's investigators, there's attorneys involved, there's judges that make decisions, there's police that provide some protection, there's special doctors that assess the health of children, and it's an ongoing process. We all want children to be safe. This process seems important. It seems like it could work well. What your book does is show us the gaps in these services, the problems with some of these approaches and how yhe system disproportionately affects some people compared to other people. You experienced this firsthand. You had a follow up visit with Naomi, the mom you introduce us to at the beginning of the book, and she was told by the court to do certain things. When you went back, you were really troubled because you felt like she wasn't doing everything she could do. You felt like, “If I was a mom, I would be doing everything I could to prove I'm a worthy mom,” and you didn't see that with Naomi. So you were still bringing this judgment to her and now you had to build a case. Maybe talk about the case building that you had do at that point and the kind of things parents might be expected to do by the court to either prove they were fit to have their children or to get their children back. JESSICA PRYCE: With Naomi, I remember feeling like, why wouldn't she clean up her home in order to get her kids back? I just felt this was a very simple ask. But what I'm hoping people realize as they read the book, because a lot of these cases are left unresolved in the book—I give them what I experienced and then often I move on to a new case or I move on to the next part of my experience. And what I want folks to ask themselves, even if they're not in the field—I don't know who will read this book—is that what you would have done? Did that feel like a compassionate way to help a mom that was clearly going through something? If someone is not doing what you would do in a situation, how do we react? Do we react, saying, "You're not trying. You're not doing the right thing. Why are you doing it this way?" We need to ask ourselves, are we putting that judgment on this mom because it's something we would do? Are we projecting our standards on this person? Are we able to drill down into what's really going on? So she was asked to do several things, one of which was to clean up her home. There were several things I discovered a few weeks after her children were taken, and we realized she had been dealing with domestic violence in the past, that she was dealing with a lot of mental health issues. Her family started to weigh in on it. That she hadn't been the same since the domestic violence incident. She hadn't been the same since the birth of her child. It hit me in that moment, we saw what we saw, and we made—in my opinion, with our knowledge at the time, we made—the decision we thought was best. But what happens with a lot of families is we miss what's truly going on. As you saw in the book, we placed the children with Grandma, she lived about an hour away. We thought we were fixing a situation, but it created so many other issues with the kids possibly having to move schools, and Grandma being an elderly woman that doesn't drive much anymore. It became this issue of what does the system need to do differently with families? How do we pull the community in to help a family stay together? Somebody asked me who's read the book, "Why can't we bring in people to help clean the home? And mental health services?" Again, I know we're living in a certain type of world, but that was the point of the book. I wanted people to see what CPS professionals see every day and how they might have done things differently, and what we did in the moment and why we did it. INTRUDE AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE – 12:07 BLAIR HODGES: I think you made it clear the one person in the entire scenario that didn't get support was Naomi. There were things that could have been done perhaps to help her, instead everything was put on her in a sense of blame and shame and personal responsibility, instead of looking at systems and things around her that were contributing to this. Postpartum depression, and abuse, and mental illness—all of the different things that could be addressed for Naomi, and that's not what the system was doing. You found that more and more as you were working there, because you didn't just internship there, you became a full-time employee. That's when they took you through a short training. It's so funny when you're talking about how short it is. You're like, compared to what we're doing, it was pretty lightning quick to tell us what to do. [laughter] I have this quote from the training materials, it says, "CPS intervention should intrude as little as possible into the life of the family, be focused on clearly defined objectives, and take the most parsimonious path to remedy a family's problems." That's an ideal that you say did not match the reality of what you ended up doing. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I was in that training cohort with other colleagues that had either been in the field or done an internship and we're in training thinking, "Wow, this sounds good." And I do understand what they're asking us to do, but how are we not translating what we're learning into actually what we're doing in the field? That continues today, where people are trained, and then they come into the field and their supervisors and colleagues say, "I know you just got trained, but let me tell you what we're really going to do." I think that disconnect continues to create confusion and moral conflict with folks that are coming into the field to actually promote child safety. What we really start to do, as other colleagues of mine have said, if we start to police families and over surveil them—a lot of families are under surveillance and we're really not getting to what's actually going on. BLAIR HODGES: The idea of “intruding as little as possible,” that's fine to say, but there weren't a lot of actual ways to monitor that. To say, what does it look like to intrude as little as possible? Because a CPS case against a family can really take over a life. JESSICA PRYCE: Indeed. And someone recently asked me what would that even look like if CPS wasn't intrusive? My only answer to that was, a lot of things would need to change. We would need to partner with families in a different way—as opposed to going in their home, walking through rooms, opening up cabinets—we would actually have to partner with not just that family, but extended family on, what are the needs? Do I need to go in here and do what I just did, or can we actually sit down and talk about, do you have food? Do you have material needs that are not being met? What can we do to support you in that way? BLAIR HODGES: There would have to be a lot of trust built there too, because as the current system is, people might be reluctant to say whether they needed food or not or anything like that. That's because of stories they hear about how CPS works, and the adversarial relationship you describe between investigators in the system and the families that are undergoing it. We're talking today with Jessica Pryce. She's a research professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work. Her book is called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. SCOPE AND SYSTEMIC RACISM – 15:23 BLAIR HODGES: Jessica, I wanted to zoom out a little bit and just talk broad scope, give us a general sense—you might not have the exact numbers off the top your head, we're just trying to get an idea of how big the CPS system is. How many investigations are happening, how common it is for kids to get taken into the system? Give us that broad scope of the system. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. In a given year, there could be four hundred thousand youth in foster care. I believe in one of the years that I wrote about in the book, there were seven million cases called in across the country. That gives you a sense of how many people are calling in reports. I believe four million of those calls were actually screened in. I talk about in the book, every call that comes in isn't taken. We were thankful for that. The folks taking these calls try their best to screen out ones that don't seem like abuse is really happening. Then they screen in ones that really meet the protocols and the metrics they have to look for in order to accept a case. The data is clear in most of the states in this country, Native American children and Black children are experiencing disparate outcomes. They're spending more time in foster care. They're spending more time under court mandated services, meaning they didn't get taken out of their home, but their families are being overrun by the courts for a period of time, usually minimum of one year. And these youth are also moving from place to place more once they're put in the system. And the path to reunification is much longer for Black and Native youth. So that's a little bit of the data around disproportionality, disparity, and the broad strokes of how many cases the system is seeing each year. BLAIR HODGES: Let's look a little more at the racism here, because some people might hear what you just said and say, "Oh, well I guess Black parents and indigenous folks need to be better parents. It's on them. Of course, they would have more because XYZ." How do you educate people against that kind of racism and bias? JESSICA PRYCE: A lot of people feel that way. They really look at the fact that these families are who they are and they have a certain mindset toward these families. They say, "Well, of course that makes sense. They're abusing their children more." But there's actually data and scientific studies that have been done that actually have evidence against that notion. That Black and Brown families don't abuse their children more, but they're reported more and have their children taken more. So I try to educate people on what's happening and not the narrative, and also not the narrative we have in our minds around certain family. There's also a big discussion right now, that in my opinion, continues to happen around the conflation of neglect and poverty. At this point we're at 76% of the cases that come into child welfare nationwide have a maltreatment code of neglect. Often neglect is parents not meeting needs. That's the definition. They're not getting enough food to their kids. Kids are going to school and stealing lunches. These parents may not be taking their children to get medical care. These parents may not have a place to live. This broad idea of neglect is driving families into the system. When you think about the fact that indigenous families and Black families are overrepresented in the impoverished population, you start to realize there is this connection between poverty, systemic racism, and the long journey of social and racial disadvantage for families. ERICA'S CASE – 19:05 BLAIR HODGES: So it usually affects people in poverty, more often than not. Sometimes people aren't in poverty when they get trapped into the system. I think one of the most arresting parts of your book is the personal stories you tell, because things got personal for you really fast when you started working for the system. I'm thinking about your friend Erica. Tell us a little bit about Erica and how she got tangled up into your experience as a caseworker. JESSICA PRYCE: I'm so grateful I was able to share that story because that was really pivotal for my development. When people ask, "You thought a certain way in the system, and then you started to shift," I said, "Yeah, because I started to see people in my familial and social networks become entangled in the system." That's what brought me to sharing the story of Erica. And I appreciate her walking alongside me as I wrote this book. Essentially, I was in my full-time position at the Department of Children and Families, doing CPS investigations. One day there was a case that came in and a colleague took that case, and it was on my friend Erica. I was very shocked. I knew Erica had been providing caregiving duties for her godchild at the time. She had been going through a lot. She was a college student and trying to figure out how to take her courses, take care of this four-year-old, and the child's parents were in many different ways just unavailable, unreachable, and not helping at the time. Stress got to her in a situation where she did corporal punishment as a consequence for behavior. And she was reported to CPS for physical abuse. As I share in the book, everything that happened after was insane, in my opinion. I was caught in the middle of it because I understood on the system side, we have a four-year-old with evidence of abuse, based on what we call abuse and what the policies say about physical abuse, and we have a person who is not her biological mother. We need to shelter this child right away. I understood that in theory, but having the close connection I had with Erica, knowing that at that time there was possibly no other person on the earth that cared about that child as much as she did, it was really a tough situation to walk through. BLAIR HODGES: Erica is caring for this young girl. The girl's parents are experiencing poverty. Mom went back to New York, believed they would leave the girl with Erica for a certain time. And you describe the corporal punishment thing, because technically corporal punishment is legal. That's a big question about whether that should be the case, but it was. And it was something Erica seemed reluctant about herself, but felt backed into a corner, just didn't have the parenting tools and the skills and the support as a parent to deal with a child who was experiencing real trauma. That trauma was coming out in bad behavior and causing problems for Erica's life. So that's when she started spanking and doing this, and at one point leaves bruises on the child. In the meantime, the child's mom who's experiencing poverty was seeking public assistance, and that's how CPS got involved on her side of things—not to find out how to help but to assess her. She went to get help, and instead of, "How can we help?" it was like, "What's wrong with this person. We need to evaluate this person." Again, the system has this adversarial approach, even when people try to seek help it can start to cause problems. This little girl, her mom on one side and Erica on the other, were both going to get sucked into the system. As you said, you knew Erica as a wonderful person. She's your best grad school friend. What a shock it must have been. You describe the scene where the girl, who you knew, shows up in your office. You have no idea what's going on. All of a sudden, she's right there behind your chair, excited to see you because she knew you. JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and children don't come into the office unless they're on their way into foster care. When I saw her I knew something has gone terribly wrong. I did not know what had happened at that point. I had been working the entire day on my own cases and realized pretty quickly that Erica was about to be under a lot of scrutiny and was about to go through a situation and a process I take a lot of parents through. But watching how it affected her really made me reluctant to do that to other parents. To your point, Erica is on this side of the situation, and then Didi—which is the pseudonym I gave Madisen's biological mom in the book—Madisen is the little girl—is on the other side of this trying to get herself together in a very difficult, in my opinion, place to live in this country. It's super expensive. Trying to rebuild her life. Meanwhile, this chaotic exchange has happened in Florida around corporal punishment, which a lot of people have feelings about. I could have written, "There was a corporal punishment situation," but I wanted people to think about their reactions to that scene in the book. Because I know people are going to react to, “That should never have happened, this is completely inappropriate.” But I think that is a snapshot of a much larger picture that I knew of at the time, but others didn't. I realized when I go to meet a mom on a case I am seeing a snapshot and this person has an entire life and existence that is worth trying to figure out. BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the numbers you report. Anywhere between forty and seventy percent of parents have reported spanking at some point. That's huge. That's a lot of people. When does it cross the line from legal corporal punishment to abuse that the system would intervene about? JESSICA PRYCE: This is a discussion that's been going on for quite a while, but I can say when it comes to CPS if there are marks or bruises—and often these marks or bruises are left unintentional, and I know that might sound strange to people because they think, "Well, if you hit a child, you're intentionally causing that”—There are a lot of people that spank their kids and there are never any marks. So I don't think most parents intend to leave marks on their children when they are trying to provide a consequence to certain behaviors. For CPS, the line is crossed if there's evidence of marks and bruises on the child. But again, even when that happens I'm hoping the system continues to evolve into, what do we do at this point and what should be our next steps? Because the immediate ejection of a child because of that isn't working very well for the system. There are a lot of issues going on—not enough foster parents, not enough placements, too many kids in the system. So how can we tease that out and find some nuances. Like okay, maybe there is stress, maybe this parent made this decision and it went further than they thought it would go. But is that an immediate ejection? Is that an opportunity for the system to say, Hey, we see this happen. We don't like it. We don't think it was the best thing to do. But how do we partner toward a future where this doesn't have to happen and this mom actually gets the help, and what you said earlier, the parenting tools she needs? BLAIR HODGES: Erica felt up against the wall. She's a student. She had to start working to afford daycare and other expenses. That made her spend even less time with Madisen. She's desperate to find a way to get Madisen's behavior to change because daycare is saying maybe we can't have Madisen here. She's desperate. She's trying to find anything. Again, it comes down to whether she had enough money to keep this going, whether she could be supportive, whether she could learn parenting tools different than corporal punishment. None of that was happening. Instead, the bruises happened and then the system comes in to say, "Did this person harm the child? We need to protect the child and possibly prosecute the caregiver." In fact, Erica was later arrested for this, and you describe the case in the book. RACHEL'S CASE – 27:12 BLAIR HODGES: Now, if that was all you had encountered as a caseworker, in terms of it touching your personal life, that would have been a lot. But that wasn't the only way your personal life got tangled up. This next part really shocked me. I have to say, Jessica, it shocked me because I'm thinking about Rachel, this is your sister. You actually yourself reported her to CPS while you're working for the system. What was it like to include this really personal story in the book? JESSICA PRYCE: Essentially, I will say it was not easy to include it because it talks about culpability and the way I used to think and what I thought in that moment. I really appreciate that my sister to this day talks about how the system intends to help but often they exacerbate already very fraught situations. I appreciate her willingness to continue to advocate for change, specifically relating to domestic violence and child welfare. Although it wasn't easy, I wanted to include it because this continues today. When there is a domestic violence situation, we're trying to figure out which victim we're going to actually come in and try to help, and who gets protected in a situation like that. At the time I felt very much like CPS and law enforcement was the best route to take when I made the call. But I realized perhaps I was naive. What happened after that with my sister, I realized her life all of a sudden became even more stressful than it was before. Again I, at that moment, maybe being a little bit naive, called it in because she was experiencing domestic violence, but realized after that her stress levels were increased and services and support weren't there the way I thought they would be. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about the double bind your sister was in, and that a lot of women are in. She was abused by her partner. She was abused. When the system got involved, she also becomes a suspect of the system because they want to know if she is a perpetrator for not protecting the children from domestic violence, or even perhaps just witnessing domestic violence. Now she's gone from being a victim to being a suspect. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely, and I think states are moving away from the term "failure to protect." There was a time where that was the buzzword, that this mom is failing to protect her children. Although we're moving away from that term, there are still ways in which we come on the scene and there is a mom victim, and we're trying to ask questions here and there about, "We see this is happening, what are you going to do next to protect these kids? What are you going to do next to protect your home from this perpetrator?" This is a tough situation to talk about. I think people who read the book might have certain thoughts and feelings about it. And I welcome that. I welcome folks to say, "Well, a mother should protect her kids." And “She must do this, and she must do that.” And what I'm hoping they also stop and think is what it feels like to be a victim of domestic violence, because that's an entirely other phenomenon we need to really consider. Again, I don't know if CPS is prepared to understand the dynamics associated with that sort of abuse. BLAIR HODGES: There are all kinds of reasons why someone like your sister might not call. They might have some mental health issues because of the abuse that would lead them to want to cling tight to the relationship out of trying to be protective. Or maybe there are financial reasons. They're trying to protect the circumstances they're currently in and if they left, they wouldn't have resources to care for their kids. There's a ton of different reasons why. And again, the system is not coming in and saying, "How can we support this person who's been abused and their kids and get them out of the situation?" It's trying to figure out if they have culpability in some way. JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and they come with a lot of, "We want you to go do this, we want you to go do that. We want you to go and take care of this." It becomes this rat race of a mom trying to do these things, because now you're under surveillance and one wrong step, or one thing you don't do, are you going to lose your kids today? And I think that was the fear she had. A lot of parents I talk to have that same fear. I'm going to go do what they told me to do, even though it doesn't feel relevant. It's not helpful. It's not genuinely something I need. But if I don't, what are going to be the repercussions for me? Again it's policing and pushing families into experiencing certain services, when we didn't do the due diligence to actually see what they really needed. MORAL INJURY – 31:57 BLAIR HODGES: They might be telling them to go take some classes or do things that further burden. Maybe they already don't have time for stuff and now they have to do a bunch more. Like you said, it's not meeting the immediate need. It's adding more needs. You describe this time, and again it's not just the people who are being investigated that the system can harm, you also talk about the dangers of the system on the employees themselves. You experienced a lot of work-related stress, and double binds, and difficulties that affected your own mental health and your own sense of wellbeing. “Moral injury” is a term that comes up in this context. I wondered about your thoughts about moral injury and the impact on employees themselves. Because you saw burnout. You saw people working and then leaving. So many people came in, worked, and then got out of there. You yourself did that. Talk about the moral injury side of things. JESSICA PRYCE: I didn't want to write this book and not mention this, because if I'm anything, I am going to speak truth about the system, but I'm also going to say the professionals on the front lines doing this work, it's far bigger than them. I think there are systemic issues, systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and we are on the front lines trying to do the work to the best of our ability. Some people start to really experience that moral conflict, this idea of, "I'm making decisions, I'm doing certain behaviors to protect myself or protect the system. But am I really helping these families?" I started to feel that big time with what happened to my friend, what happened to my family, and then how that impacted the moms I started to interface with throughout my career. I also realized that, as it related to me and law enforcement, I think I put in the book that people don't know who's there to help. I arrive with law enforcement and I'm there trying to investigate child abuse, but these parents are looking like, “Are you here to arrest me? Are you here to help me? What is actually going on?” That conflict started to manifest in me as well. I call law enforcement because I feel safer. But what is that creating with this interaction? What is that actually doing to this interaction for the next few moments? And as you said, I started to experience a lot of anxiety. Ultimately, that impacted my departure from the system. The anxiety got to the point where I really couldn't manage anymore, and the stem of that anxiety was just the feelings of moral distress and moral injury I was perpetuating on families. ABOVE THE FRAY OR ON THE FRONT LINE – 34:43 BLAIR HODGES: That's Jessica Pryce. For the past fifteen years, she has been working in child welfare from multiple angles—directing casework, and then researching, teaching and training, and policy development. She's provided training to over two hundred child welfare organizations now, and we're talking about her book Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. Jessica, you left the system, but you couldn't leave it alone, so to say. You wanted to know more about it. You went to Howard University to study it. A lot of people think universities are disconnected from life. There's a stereotype that if you become a researcher or go to university, you're in the ivory tower. You're away from real life so you're not able to grasp it. You brought your own personal experiences of being on the ground to the university and say in some ways it gave you an even closer perspective than you had before. You could really zoom in on the history of it. What did you learn about the history of CPS when you went to Howard University? JESSICA PRYCE: I often talk about the importance of proximity to families you're serving. When I first read a book called Just Mercy years ago, Bryan Stevenson talked about how you really need to be in close proximity to folks you're trying to help. It dawned on me I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them. When I zoomed out, when I left the system, I did go to the ivory tower but then I was able to look at the history of child welfare—something I never knew about, something that wasn't taught in training, which of course it wouldn't be—and realized that at the onset of child welfare, Black families weren't even allowed to be serviced by the system. They had to go a completely different route, because they were seen as inferior. And as I tracked child welfare over time, I started to realize those remnants of systemic exclusion and systemic racism were still around in many facets of the system today. That's when I went down the path of looking at disparity, disproportionality—looking at Black professionals and how they viewed the system. Also looking at leadership changes and how that impacts policy. So it was huge for me to go—I think it took about five years—to really look at the system, write a dissertation, do some research. But I felt closer to the system at that point than I did when I was actually working with families. Because again, I was too close. And I think when I zoomed out I was able to get to the bottom of a lot of things. It really ignited this advocacy that I wanted to do something to help child welfare professionals, and by helping them create more ethics and create more compassionate services, ultimately to help families. WHEN INDIVIDUAL BLAME GOT BAKED IN – 37:36 BLAIR HODGES: I think laying out the history matters so much. You show how in 1974 the United States passed this law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. It was informed by a group called Mothers Anonymous, then called Parents Anonymous. A woman who went by Jolly K. was abusing children. She came to see the error of her ways, changed, and then became this huge advocate for preventing child abuse or addressing child abuse in the United States. This law gets passed. Then you point out something really important here we've talked about all along the way, that it was a very individualist ideology here. The idea was to identify parents as the perpetrators and to not really, at all, look at systems around the parents. Don't look at the economy. Don't look at jobs. Don't look at parental leave. Don't look at anything else other than, “If you harm a child, you're a bad person, and you made that individual choice, you bear all the blame.” So that Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was intended to help kids. It created this reporting system and then, to this day, laws direct money to programs that investigate parents based on this individualist approach, instead of putting funds into better mental health services, into better affordable housing services, into schools and programs that can help parents and children have better relationships and help alleviate the stresses that can lead to abuses, that can lead to neglect. Rooted in how these laws came together, you show clearly how society is focusing on individual blame, not systemic change. When you learned that at Howard, I'm just interested in your own process there because like you said, you were so close to the system. What was it like for you personally to learn that history and start to have to digest it? JESSICA PRYCE: It was bewildering and it was overwhelming, but it also created this motivation to make sure that I'm educating others, and to make sure I am always challenging people to look at how we perpetuate harm, how we perpetuate the very harmful parts of history in modern times. So it has created in me this idea that I'm not going to shy away from saying to child welfare professionals, “I used to be you. It's really hard. You're overwhelmed. You're overtaxed, and you're possibly dealing with burnout and moral injury, but families deserve a person that is going to do everything we can ethically to consider the full picture.” I appreciate you bringing up Parents Anonymous, because that was really eye-opening for me when I started to look at that, and look at congressional testimony around Jolly K. I think her story captivated America during that time because she was accepting accountability, some would say, that she was abusing her child. But she was very vocal that nothing was impacting her doing that. Now later, we found out that Jolly K. experienced so much mental illness, that she herself had been abused, and there were so many things that were going on with her that people didn't really pay much attention to. But again, I think that time in history created for child welfare, a microscope on the mom or a microscope on the dad, and what are you doing? Why can't you be better? BLAIR HODGES: You had seen that microscope come into the lives of people you loved. Erica, as I mentioned, your friend, was arrested. She does eventually get out of jail, and somehow is able to make it through the system. She adopts Madisen. People might say that seems like a happy ending then because it all worked out. But first of all, you invite us to remember all the things Erica had to go through, and Madisen, the child. But you also want us to say hold on, what happened to Madisen's mom? To Didi? There was no help there for her. So a happy ending is really complicated here. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. And in the first iteration of this book, Didi's perspective wasn't included and the publisher said, "Is there any way you can get some interviews with her?" And I took a long shot. I said, "I really don't want to write this without your story." So I appreciated being able to interview her because again, in one way, it was a happy ending—we had a permanent placement between a child and a person where they were bonded and loved, and this wasn't a stranger she was being adopted by, this is somebody she really cared about. But I want the reader and folks that are considering adoption to stop and think: What world do we need to build where Didi would have had the help, the services, the support, to bring her child back in her home? Because again, I think people are going to have mixed feelings and thoughts around Didi and her behavior if you focus on the actual behavior and decisions she's making without looking at the systemic barriers she was also experiencing. WRITING AS AN ADVOCATE -  BLAIR HODGES: You say this wasn't necessarily the book you set out to write. Your publisher helped with that. You talk about in the book that originally you conducted research with Black women in particular who were in the system. You wrote in a third person voice as a researcher, an intellectual book, and the publisher and your editor challenged you to dig deeper and said, "You know, I think you can reach more people if you make this a personal story." That was intimidating for you. Talk about that, because there's a big shift. You were a CPS agent, an academic researcher, and this book is written more in the voice of a public activist. That's a different role altogether. JESSICA PRYCE: I was overwhelmed and a little bit scared about switching gears. As I sit here today, I'm extremely grateful I was challenged and pushed in this direction because I want child welfare professionals to read the book, maybe they feel certain things about the book, maybe they feel like, "Oh, I'm pinched here. I'm jabbed here. But I'm supported there and validated there." Because there are nuances to doing this work that I don't want people to miss. I don't want people to assume all child welfare professionals are evil creatures that are snatching kids. I don't want that. But I also don't want them to assume they're all benevolent. So how do we bring this together in a balanced way to say this is a very difficult job, and I was able to show that, I hope, in the pages, because it was very difficult for me when I started in that work. But how do we push ourselves as a workforce and challenge ourselves to do things differently, not just better, because we can get better and better because in many ways we have, but things haven't changed. There's not a difference in how we're approaching the families we're supposed to be serving. JATOIA'S CASE – 44:31 BLAIR HODGES: Oh, that reminds me of Jatoia Potts. This is a mom who lost her children because of no fault of her own, it turns out. This is a story of grave injustice. Maybe take a second to tell us about Jatoia Potts' story. The follow-up question I have for it is whether it ever feels completely overwhelming. You're facing such difficult odds and change seems to be slow. Tell us about Jatoia's experience and then how it affects you personally now that you're an activist. Is there activist burnout? Is there activist fear? JESSICA PRYCE: As you read the book, you see I'm taking folks back to when I first started in the field, but I also wanted them to see these things are still happening. So you have stories that happened in 2008 and 2009, which feels like a long time ago, so you could read the book and say, "Oh, that's over. Why has she taken us through all that?" But then you see a story that happened in 2021, 2022, and 2023. That's where Jatoia came in. She was at the other end of my career, where I'm moving into the academic space. I'm speaking, I'm training, and I'm also doing quite a bit of expert testimony in TPR trials—TPR is the “Termination of Parental Rights.” If folks don't know what that means, it's when a court says legally you are no longer the parent to this child, and that clears children for adoption. When I became connected to Jatoia, I became an expert witness in her TPR trial. Again, this was someone who started to suffer at the intersections of all the things we've been talking about: systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and this narrow view of, “What did this mom do? Did she react the way we wanted her to react? Did she make decisions the way we would have made a decision? Surely she's done something wrong.” There was this mindset toward her, as folks will read, that she can't be exonerated. She certainly did something that hurt this child. And I'm so grateful Jatoia shared her story throughout this book. I think her placement in this book was huge because I don't want people to think the early cases of me when I was a twenty-two-year-old investigator are a thing of the past. These things continue to harm mothers to this day and it often results in literally severing the ties between a mom and her children. BLAIR HODGES: Someone like Jatoia becomes connected to you and is willing to use her voice to speak out about these issues. So some moms will turn into activists about the system, but not many of them either, and you also understand that. Talk about that, the fact that some moms and dads even can step forward and advocate, but a lot of others can't. Talk about those dynamics. JESSICA PRYCE: I'm always amazed when parents turn this sort of pain into purpose. That is a really good example for Jatoia and another mom in the book that I was able to highlight. To them, they want to do all they can to discuss their story, to connect with other mothers or other parents that are going through this, and to do as much community work as they can to make changes. I often say if I were Jatoia, I would want nothing to do with this case. I would want nothing to do with CPS. I would want nothing to do with being front facing for the movement. But I'm always astonished by her power that she's taken back, right? And also her resilience, and as I put in the book, Jatoia sees this as a much larger purpose than her individual story. When a mom goes through this now, Jatoia is a resource for them. And I think it's amazing. PLAYING JENGA: AN ANALOGY FOR THE FUTURE - 48:18 BLAIR HODGES: Take us through the Jenga analogy. Jenga is this game people might know where you're building these blocks, and the blocks are all stacked up and you're pulling one block out and putting it on top. You just kind of keep doing that. You use this Jenga analogy to talk about the system itself because a lot of listeners might be wondering, does the system get anything right? How solid is the system? Are there some people that are being helped by it? Are we just looking at rearranging a few pieces or do we need a fundamental change? JESSICA PRYCE: I'll start with responding to the question of, “Is the system doing anything right? What are we doing well?” I'll start by saying that I often talk about this, I believe the system needs to be here. I know not everybody believes that, but I believe that we need a CPS system—but we need a CPS system that investigates actual child abuse. I hope in my lifetime I see a parceling out of, what is child abuse and what is a family crisis? What is economic stratification? What is poverty? What is mental illness? I personally don't think CPS should be investigating as much as they're investigating. So back to the question. When there has been abuse, when there has been a child that has been willfully harmed by their caregiver, I absolutely think CPS is a structure that comes in and it's very clear this child needs protection and there needs to be accountability for what happened. I just wanted to put that out there, that I do think when it comes to willful abuse and children that are in need of help, this system can really step in in that way. Then when I go to other issues that are societal and community wide, CPS in my opinion is a little bit out of their depth. I think when it comes to neglect and poverty and mental illness and things of that nature, I don't think they're the best source of support. I don't think they're the best mechanism or structure to really come in and try to figure out what's going on with that family. You brought up Jenga, and Jenga became a powerful metaphor for me because I play it a lot with my nieces. And I realized we do that with child welfare. The entire point of Jenga is you move a block and you put it on top of the Jenga system. You're doing all you can not to make the system fall. You're just keeping it standing up. You're moving blocks from here and there, very rarely touching the bottom. If you're touching the bottom, you're being very meticulous about it, because again, we don't want the system to fall. I realized we're doing that in child welfare, and we have for a hundred years, continued to move programs, move services, add something here, add something there, but we're putting it back on the same system. But we're not getting to the root. We're not getting to the dysfunction and the assumptions that have been found in years of policies that are really driving the things we're doing. And until we actually get to the bottom of child welfare and until we start moving blocks from below and changing those blocks, I think we're going to continue to perpetuate what we're seeing. If we continue to have a block at the very bottom of our system that is absolutely targeting and blaming parents, then we're going to continue to be punitive and blaming parents with the policies and the practices we're doing. So I challenge folks to consider letting it fall. It's scary—the idea of letting the system fall down is huge and scary. People are like, "This is my livelihood. This is how I work." I think it takes courage to build something new, but that's what I'm advocating for—not being too afraid to go to the foundation of a system and say, “Why do we think this? Why is it built on that? Why are these families excluded? Why don't we send every parent to a parenting class? Why do we do the things that have built this system?” If we start to really tease that out and dismantle that part, and then rebuild a system that actually investigates actual abuse, right? And then diverts families that need assistance and support, I think that's when we get to rebuild something that we're actually proud of and rebuild something professionals can come into and feel less moral conflict, hopefully less burnout, and the families can really experience a different system. BLAIR HODGES: Do you have hope that we can move in that direction? JESSICA PRYCE: I do. I do. And the reason why I have hope is because child welfare, as a system, is doing things differently today. I was just at a convening this week around kinship care. Kinship care is when you remove a child from the home if there's a safety threat, but you place with family. Although I think we've always wanted to place with family, we haven't been having discussions about, “Are we supporting kinship here as much as we support a foster placement?” So we're having those discussions now. Don't just place with Grandma and say we've done it—which reminds us of the Naomi case. Don't place with Grandma and say we've done it, we placed with kinship. Now, how are you going to support that grandma? How are you going to support making sure those kids are connected to their mom? Because now they're far away from their mom, and not in communication. SoI do have hope we're moving in that direction. Again, I don't know how quickly we'll get there. But I think people are having those hard discussions about, “Why do we provide all of this financial support to foster parents, but we don't have that same energy toward a grandma or an older sibling or an aunt or uncle that have said, ‘I want the child to stay with us. They're our family.'" EVERYDAY ADVOCATES – 53:46 BLAIR HODGES: Is there anything actionable you would suggest everyday listeners do—like listeners to this show that might not have direct ties, a lot of them might not have any kind of direct involvement in the CPS system. Is there something that everyday folks can do to help push things in the direction you're advocating for? JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I'm so grateful I was able to include some resources in the book for folks, particularly around reporting abuse. I tell people all the time, there's a resource in the book that says consider these things before you report abuse. For everyday listeners, as you said, if you have thoughts about a neighbor, or you're concerned about folks in your life—is this abuse? Should I call this in? I do offer some things that hopefully make you pause and consider certain aspects of the family before you make that call. Some people when they go through these considerations, they no longer want to make the report, right? But some people still do. Now they have a lot more information to provide to the system because they've actually thought through what's actually going on. I am grateful I was able to include that resource for folks that might be wondering about a family, might be wondering how they might be able to support. I want people to understand what happens when you report a family, what they experience when a CPS agent comes to their home, and with that sort of knowledge I hope that it makes reporters pause. REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES – 55:08 BLAIR HODGES: The resources you offer have some ideas for mandated reporters, and also for people who might be considering talking to CPS, and you're inviting them to think about how well you know the circumstances in that family's life. If you've considered connecting them with community or social supports that can help them out, if there's a trusted colleague or community advocate you can connect with to brainstorm about what to do. There are things people can do if they're wondering what to do in situations where they're wondering about children. The book, again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services, really gives some good ideas and good tools that people can consider when they're trying to help out kids. Because at the bottom of it, I really believe that pretty much everybody truly does want to protect kids, and even the people who are overseeing the system and making policies that are actually damaging families, I don't see any evil people that are like, "Let's destroy lives." [laughs] JESSICA PRYCE: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: They're thinking in individualistic terms and not addressing systemic issues. The more we can get people thinking in that way, the more likelihood we have of impacting the CPS system. Jessica, I just want to say, the book was so helpful for me. I learned so much about the system. It was also really personal. I felt connected with you. So I hope people will check this book out, because together we can start to make inroads in the system. Again, that's Jessica Pryce, research professor at Florida State University in the College of Social Work there. Alright, that brings us to our final segment of the show. This is called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. Jessica, this is your chance to choose your own adventure. You can speak to one, two, or all three of these things. If there's anything you'd change about the book now. This book's just now coming out, so this is one of the freshest books on the show. Maybe you haven't had time to think about what you would do different at this time. But you can also speak to challenges, what the hardest part about writing it was, or the surprises, how you changed in the course of making the book. JESSICA PRYCE: I really appreciate the question. I'll start by saying the most challenging part by far was feeling that I've done justice to the stories that were shared with me. And also, connecting with former colleagues and really re-living what I did in the system. I did this exercise around narrative journaling, just writing out cases I've been on and how they impacted me and what I remembered about them, and how I thought in that moment, and how I think today. I think that was challenging in general to take that journey back. Another challenge is making sure I've done justice to the best of my ability to the stories that were shared with me. As far as surprises, I think for me, a big goal of mine was for people to see my development. I could have written this book from the seat I'm in now, and we've only talked for an hour but there's a lot of things I could have said about data and science and organizational change and culture. Because that's where I'm at now. I understand these things. But it was important for me that people saw my developmental trajectory because I hope it shows them they can also change. That if they think a certain way, if they see parents a certain way, if they have a certain opinion about certain communities, that you can get on the other side of that if you continue to educate yourself and you take a journey with colleagues who actually want to take this introspective journey. That you can also get on the other side of this work, do this work ethically, and do this work with compassion, and advocate and become an activist toward social justice and racial justice. So again, I think that's been the most surprising and the most edifying, that I was able to really show my development, and it surprised me how much I appreciated being able to share that. It's not easy to share how you used to think about families. But I think in sharing that it might show someone else they too can change. BLAIR HODGES: I certainly hope so. That's part of why I do this show myself, because I'm on a journey about all my thinking about families, what they are, about how we treat families, and your book is a really important part of that story. Again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services by Jessica Pryce. And again, Dr. Pryce, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for writing this book, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us about it. JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to this episode of Family Proclamations. I invite you to listen to other episodes if you haven't had the time to do that yet. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor, and to David Ostler, who sponsored the first group of transcripts. If you'd like to sponsor transcripts, please let me know. Reach out to blair@firesidepod.org. You can also send feedback about any episode you want. There's a lot more to come on the show. If you're enjoying it, please take a minute to rate and review. It makes a really big difference. It truly does. Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts—like Ryan G. Mullen, for example. He went to Apple Podcasts and gave me five stars. He said, "Wow, I just listened to the episode with Cat Bohannon, author of Eve. I initially thought, this will be good to listen to so I won't have to read the book. But Hodges and Bohannon gave such a lively interview that I changed my mind." I'm sorry about that, Ryan. This podcast can be hazardous to your book buying budget, that's for sure. Thanks for leaving that review. Also, another thing that would help is recommendations. Let people know you listen to this show. This is the number one way people hear about podcasts. Reach out to a friend or family member and let them know about the show. Thanks to Mates of State, a great band, for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.   [End]   Transcripts are edited for readability. 

I am so excited to interview Cat Bohannon about her New York Times bestseller book Eve, How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.It is recognised as Foyle's Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2023 and is a groundbreaking exploration into the female side of human biology and history, long overlooked by scientific inquiry. Delving into provocative questions—such as the roles wet nurses have played in the development of civilizations, the inherent strength of women, the evolutionary benefits of sexism, and the complex relationship between motherhood and biology—Bohannon offers a comprehensive review of female biological development over the past 200 million years.In Eve, Bohannon uses her incisive intelligence and engaging narrative style to challenge and expand our understanding of human history. She provides a crucial reevaluation that shifts focus away from male-centric studies, presenting compelling evidence on topics ranging from how modern C-sections are impacting the evolutionary shape of women's pelvises to the unexpected biochemical kinship between pus and breast milk. Her research not only revises but also enriches our understanding of why Homo sapiens have thrived, influencing everything from tool use and urban development to language.This book has been celebrated as a critical and urgent amendment to our historical narrative, earning accolades such as being longlisted for Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2023, and named a best book by The Guardian, Telegraph, and Prospect in 2023. Eve promises to transform your perspective on evolution and the pivotal role of the female body in the success of our species.https://www.catbohannon.com/https://www.penguin.com.au/books/eve-9781529156171Support the Show.Subscribe and support the podcast at https://www.buzzsprout.com/367319/supporters/newLearn more at www.profselenabartlett.com

https://www.catbohannon.com/ The talking points alone are enough to make you go hmmmm. She's insightful, intelligent and makes compelling points that science should listen to. We kept it more on the science end of the interview focusing on subjects you probably never thought about, but below are some of the talking points she includes in her book. Women outlive men because female bodies are just better at *not dying.* And with few exceptions, that's true from birth forward—even boys get more cancer than girls, and are more likely to die from it when they do—but this is especially true during our reproductive years. And that gap is only going to get bigger: 80 percent of the world's centenarians are female. We probably evolved to be sexist. But we don't have to keep doing it. From an evolutionary perspective, sexism and gynecology are two sides of the same coin: they're both ways we use behavior to innovate around our species' terrible reproductive system. (When you don't have the Pill or condoms, having strict social rules that restrict access to female bodies can usefully limit how many times a woman will be pregnant.) But gynecology has vastly outpaced sexism in this regard. Now that we can mostly deal with our glitchy, complication-prone reproductive systems, we can finally choose not to be sexist—which is good, because sexism is actually starting to kill us. Breastfeeding babies talk to their mothers through their nipples. Or rather, their bodies talk to our bodies in an ancient language: because of the physics of nursing at the breast, babies' spit is literally sucked into the mother's breast through the nipple in a kind of undertow, wherein it's “observed” by immuno-agents lining the mother's milk ducts. (Formally, this is called “upsuck.”) Sick babies get different breastmilk than healthy ones. So do stressed babies—mom's breast “reads” the cortisol in the babies' spit and adjusts the composition of the milk accordingly. Human penises are terribly boring. So, too, our testicles. And it's probably because men didn't compete for mates as much as other apes, and also because we didn't rape each other very much in our evolutionary past—species prone to rape tend to have whiz-bang penises and complicated vaginas to match, like the mallard duck's corkscrew contraption, or the dolphin's J-shaped prehensile phallus, which can literally swivel and whack a female until she submits. Female bodies probably led the way to bipedalism. The female musculoskeletal system is geared towards endurance, while the male's is a bit closer to the older (chimp-like) model. So male bodies are usually better at explosive strength, and female ones better at enduring. That's true all the way down to female muscle cells' metabolism. And the thing about walking upright is you need endurance. Shame about our lower backs and knees, though… female sex hormones also make us more flexible, which is great for yoga and pregnancy, but absolutely terrible for long-term wear and tear on the joints.

Guest: Guest: Cat Bohannon is a researcher specialized in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. The post How The Female Body Drives Evolution appeared first on KPFA.

“There's this really old, really crap story that how we got here is about what the guys did. And women were just like some side character behind a hill, just like pounding some tubers, saying, ‘Oh, sorry guys. I see you're busy. I'm just gonna build the future of our species in my actual body'.” That's how the brilliant and hilarious Cat Bohannon introduces the idea behind her New York Times bestselling book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Ten years in the making, and making a huge splash internationally, the book is a fascinating, myth-busting tour of biological evolution that re-examines everything we think we know about the human body by placing women at the center of it all. In honor of International Women's Day on March 8th, we're thrilled to talk with Cat about her boundary-breaking book, which puts the female body in the foreground of biological research. “ It's not that there's a sexist cabal saying, ha ha! We're gonna understudy females”, she tells us, “It's that there's this pre-existing idea that ovaries don't matter”. Cat shares how there's a long history of female bodies being excluded from medical, evolutionary and biological research, and why that matters for everyone.The interview also dives into Cat's sci-fi movie inspiration for the book, how female figures in evolution were key to the humans of today, why the “male norm” in biological research developed in the first place, and how change in the scientific community is happening…slowly: “paradigm shifts are hard…that's the hardest thing to break out of. A paradigm shift is the biggest thing there is”. Don't miss this eye-opening discussion that looks at the human body from a whole different vantage point. About the ShowThe Breakout is the hit podcast hosted by human resources and change experts Dr. Keri Ohlrich and Kelly Guenther. The founders of Abbracci Group, a results-driven coaching, HR Management and consulting firm, Keri and Kelly are laser-focused on getting the best out of people. They launched The Breakout in early 2023 to find the best stories and advice on busting boundaries and making change, and since then the show has charted #1 in self-improvement, #1 in education, and #7 in all podcasts.Join Keri and Kelly on The Breakout as they get advice and insights from change experts, and learn from people who have really done it how you can dive into personal growth, increase self confidence, and move your life into bold new territory.Each episode comes with lessons on living courageously, with topics on self-help, leadership, personal development, building success, setting personal boundaries, growing your confidence, overcoming self doubt, and knowing your self worth. From huge transformations to quiet shifts, The Breakout highlights why every change matters.At Abbracci Group, Keri and Kelly offer a four-step coaching process to help you increase your self-awareness, break out of expectations, and live life on your terms.  Learn more at abbraccigroup.com.Keri and Kelly's new book Whatever the Hell You Want – An Escape Plan to Break Out of Life's Little Boxes and Live Free From Expectations, is out in October 2024 and available for pre-order now!Dr. Keri Ohlrich's book The Way of the HR Warrior is available now.Connect with Dr. Keri Ohlrich and Kelly GuentherThe Breakout on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thebreakoutpod/Abbracci Group website https://abbraccigroup.com/podcast/The Breakout Facebook https://www.facebook.com/thebreakoutpodcast/Abbracci Group LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/abbraccigroup/The Breakout on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@thebreakoutpodcastAbout Cat BohannonResearcher, scholar, writer, freak. Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. Eve is her first book and a New York Times bestseller. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring.Connect with Cat BohannonCat Bohannon's WebsiteCat on XEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution 

Cat Bohannon's new book puts female anatomy at the center of human evolution. She tells Steve why it takes us so long to give birth, what breast milk is really for, and why the human reproductive system is a flaming pile of garbage. SOURCE:Cat Bohannon, researcher and author. RESOURCES:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon (2023).“Genomic Inference of a Severe Human Bottleneck During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition,” by Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan, and Haipeng Li (Science, 2023).“The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity,” by Cat Bohannon (The Atlantic, 2023).“A Newborn Infant Chimpanzee Snatched and Cannibalized Immediately After Birth: Implications for ‘Maternity Leave' in Wild Chimpanzee,” by Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2018).“War in the Womb,” by Suzanne Sadedin (Aeon, 2014).“Timing of Childbirth Evolved to Match Women's Energy Limits,” by Erin Wayman (Smithsonian Magazine, 2012).“Bonobo Sex and Society,” by Frans B. M. de Waal (Scientific American, 2006). EXTRAS:“Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).“We Can Play God Now,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).“Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).“Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).

Abortion laws cause birth rates to rise in Texas, the mother of a school shooter is charged, King Charles has cancer, and more in news. Then, Cat Bohannon joins to discuss evolution from a more female perspective, including but not limited to: corkscrew vaginas, castration, and blood sucking demon fetuses. Finally, Sani-Petty (The Brothers Sun, Law and Order, and…boogers-induced Alzheimer's?). For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. Show NotesCat BohannonEve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution  News SourcesAfter Abortion Ban, Texas Teen Birth Rate Rises (Texas Observer)Reproductive Freedom Alliance Urges Supreme Court to Respect Longstanding FDA Authority & Access to Safe Abortion Medication (Press Release)Florida's abortion measure: What to know as it heads to state Supreme Court (News Nation Now)South Dakota tribe bans governor from reservation over US-Mexico border remarks (Fox21 News)King Charles has cancer. Here's what we know — and what we don't (CNN)Gaetz, Stefanik offer resolution declaring Trump ‘did not engage in insurrection' (The Hill)Nikki Haley makes surprise appearance at "Saturday Night Live" town hall (CBS)Erin read the headline and subhead here: Taylor Swift Demands 21-Year-Old Stop Tracking Her Private Jet (Bloomberg)

Frank Schaeffer In Conversation with Author Cat Bohannon, exploring the themes of her new book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution._____LINKShttps://www.catbohannon.comBOOKEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolutionhttps://bit.ly/482OLNu_____Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider.  Eve is her first book.  She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring._____I have had the pleasure of talking to some of the leading authors, artists, activists, and change-makers of our time on this podcast, and I want to personally thank you for subscribing, listening, and sharing 100-plus episodes over 100,000 times.Please subscribe to this Podcast, In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer, on your favorite platform, and to my Substack, It Has to Be Said.Thanks! Every subscription helps create, build, sustain and put voice to this movement for truth.Subscribe to It Has to Be Said. Support the show_____In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer is a production of the George Bailey Morality in Public Life Fellowship. It is hosted by Frank Schaeffer, author of Fall In Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy. Learn more at https://www.lovechildrenplanet.comFollow Frank on Substack, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube. https://frankschaeffer.substack.comhttps://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16https://twitter.com/Frank_Schaefferhttps://www.instagram.com/frank_schaeffer_arthttps://www.threads.net/@frank_schaeffer_arthttps://www.youtube.com/c/FrankSchaefferYouTube In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer PodcastLove In Common Podcast with Frank Schaeffer, Ernie Gregg, and Erin Bagwell

Researcher Cat Bohannon joins This Is Hell! to discuss her new book from Knopf, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." Rotten History follows the interview. Check out Cat's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227568/eve-by-cat-bohannon/ Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access weekly bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thisishell

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keeping track of passwords can be a real pain. If you use a simple one or use the same one for everything, that makes you easy to be hacked. If you use a complicated one or lots of different ones, it's hard to remember. This episode starts with a strategy to create good passwords that you will remember. Source: Sid Kirchheimer, author of Scam-Proof Your Life (https://amzn.to/3SeWhA5) Men and women are different, obviously. However, some of the most interesting differences you may not know. For example, how men and women hear differently; the real reason women live longer than men, and how hormones affect behaviors differently in men and women. Joining me to discuss this is is Cat Bohannon. Cat is is a researcher with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and author of the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (https://amzn.to/3SgBUlO).  The world is full of pests: rats, insects, bees, deer, spiders – there are lots of them. So, what is it that makes a pest a pest? In some cases, what you consider a pest may not be to someone else. Generally, though, pests are something we strive to get rid of. What is the best way to do that? Maybe pests are really trying to tell us something. Here to discuss this is Bethany Brookshire. She is an award-winning science writer, a contributor to Science News magazine and a host on the podcast Science for the People (http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/) and she is author of a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://amzn.to/3vzlpZt). Most drivers don't take the time to adjust the headrest in their car. In fact, many of us don't even think about doing it and aren't sure of the best position for it anyway. If you are ever in a crash, the position of your headrest can make a big difference. Listen as I explain how to adjust it. https://www.adlergiersch.com/provider-blog/how-to-properly-adjust-your-headrest-to-prevent-whiplash/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare and find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, and more today at https://NerdWallet.com Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where do we come from and how did we evolve into the beings and bodies we are today? The new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution" argues for a better understanding of our origins with critical implications for our present. Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Cat Bohannon for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Where do we come from and how did we evolve into the beings and bodies we are today? The new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution" argues for a better understanding of our origins with critical implications for our present. Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Cat Bohannon for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

American researcher, scholar, writer and poet Cat Bohannon speaks to Georgina Godwin about her debut book, ‘Eve', a whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era and recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its centre. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition and once worked as an unofficial poet in residence for Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination, in Dalian, China.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind and Science Magazine. Her recent book is Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, which explores how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about the vital role that the female body as played over the course of millions of years. Joining Bohannon to discuss the book is Lucy Cooke, zoologist, presenter and author of Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal. If you'd like to get access to all of our longer form interviews and members-only content, just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. For £4.99 per month you'll also receive: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared episodes, wherever you get your podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series - 15% discount on livestreams and in-person tickets for all Intelligence Squared events - Our member-only newsletter The Monthly Read, sent straight to your inbox ... Or Subscribe on Apple for £4.99: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series ... Already a subscriber? Thank you for supporting our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations! Visit intelligencesquared.com to explore all your benefits including ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more ... Subscribe to our newsletter here to hear about our latest events, discounts and much more. https://www.intelligencesquared.com/newsletter-signup/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Family Proclamations” is the brand new podcast by Blair Hodges, host of Fireside. Enjoy this sample episode and make sure to subscribe to Family Proclamations now!

Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet.  Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and we're talking all about it in this episode.    Transcript   BLAIR HODGES: When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she noticed something was missing from the story she usually heard about human evolution. Specifically, women are missing. That seemed like a pretty big oversight. So she tracked down the most cutting edge research and pulled it together into a fascinating new book. Cat is here to talk about it. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Since we're taking a new look at families, gender and sex on the show, I thought, what better place to begin than the place where we all begin at birth? Let's look at how that messy dangerous, incredible process came to be. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm your host Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   INSPIRED BY SCI-FI (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: Cat Bohannon joins us. We're talking about the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Cat, welcome to Family Proclamations. CAT BOHANNON: Hey, thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is this is such a good book. Your introduction suggests the idea for it was conceived in a movie theater or after you had just seen a movie prequel to Alien. I didn't see that coming. Talk about how the book started. CAT BOHANNON: Right, so as a person who is femme-presenting, as a person who identifies as a woman, I have many triggering moments for where I might want to talk about the body and its relation to our lives. However, there was this one kind of crystallizing bit. I'm a big sci-fi fan, big Kubrick fan, big Ridley Scott fan, so I'm gonna go, when they come out, I'm gonna go. Now, this is a prequel to Alien, so you know going into this film that whatever characters you meet, it's not gonna go well for them. You just accept it in that kind of sadistic way as an audience of these things, like this is—yeah, you know where it's going. But in this case, what happened is the main character has been impregnated, effectively, with a vicious alien squid, as you do. And she's sort of shambling in a desperate state, and she arrives in this crashed spaceship at a MedPod. So it's like surgery in a box, you know, that's the idea. And she asked the computer for a cesarean. I think she actually says something like, “CESAREAN!”, you know, but she wants help with her situation, her tentacled situation. And the MedPod says, “I'm sorry, this MedPod is calibrated for male patients only.” And I hear in the row exactly behind me, a woman say, “Who does that?” Exactly. Who does that? Who sends a multi-trillion dollar expedition into space? Right? Presumably that's the, maybe it costs more and doesn't make sure that the medical equipment works on women, right? And it turns out us. Yeah, it's us. We're the ones who do that. Right now, in every single hospital, It's a problem. BLAIR HODGES: So your book is looking at the “male norm” problem. You're looking at how, and not just in medical science, but I think in the ways anthropology has worked, a lot of sociological studies, studies of medicine—they assume the male body as the norm and then proceed from there. There are practical reasons for this that you talk about in the book, with medicine trials, for example, where you want a body that isn't maybe going to experience a lot of hormonal flux over the course of the study, or that isn't going to be pregnant or something. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And so women get left out of scientific conversations a lot, not just in medicine but also in the history of evolution. Your book wants to address that gap. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they're inventing the first tool, right? And they're banging a bone on the ground that they use to beat the crap out of a guy. The camera tracks it, the bone goes up into the air and turns into a spaceship. This is the classic idea of tool triumphalism—that where we come from is male bodies doing what we stereotypically associate with male body stuff, like beating the crap out of people. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: And there's no females in that scene. Where are they? Are they behind a hill having the babies? Like how—this is where evolution works, people. These are the bodies that make the babies, that make the babies that make the babies, right? And it's absolutely true that in the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and where we come from, we often erase the idea of femininity. We often erase the presence of females as this kind of insignificant side character. But in biology, particularly in mammals, it's often quite the reverse. Things that drive mutations in female bodies, biologically female bodies, are often major drivers for the trajectory of that species because the outcome of our reproductive lives is strongly, strongly tied to the health of the bodies of the female. BLAIR HODGES: I love how you framed this: You invite us to think about our bodies as a collection of things that evolved at different times for different reasons. And you're looking especially at how female bodies have evolved. So breasts themselves have a heritage; milk has a heritage; ovaries have a heritage; senses have a heritage. And instead of one singular female that we'll look back to as our origin—like the biblical Eve, for example—you say there are actually a lot of different Eves. Because you're looking at the origins of all of these different parts of the body. CAT BOHANNON: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when you look in the mirror, what you see, if you're a sighted person is—well, it's a mix, right? It's actually the photons bouncing off of that mirror surface, which have already bounced off the surface of your body and then eventually find their way to your retinas. And that's all the technical features of how your eyeballs do what they do if you have eyeballs that do that. But it's also inevitably embedded in cultural understandings. And it's also embedded in an idea of time. That you begin at a certain point, your body arrives through—well actually through a very wet passage usually, into the world and so you are you. But actually, the body itself is a continuation of many processes that work very chaotically and intricately together that started a very long time ago. And your intestines are effectively way older than even your upright pelvis. Your pelvis is way older than your encephalized brain. So what you're looking at in the mirror is almost like, this might be too lyric, but it's almost like a point in a stream of light blasting out backwards from you and out forwards in front of you, because what you are isn't so much a thing, but something that is happening.   MORGIE AND THE MILK (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: And you take us way back in time. 200 million years ago is when you take us, back to the first Eve. This is the “milk” mom, the mammal who kind of brought milk here. You describe her, you call her Morgie, and she's sort of this little weasel mouse. Tell us a little bit about Morgie. CAT BOHANNON: Morgie's fun. We nicknamed her Morgie because the Smithsonian did that before I did, thank you very much. She is an exemplar genus. There are many species of morganucodon, but they're often nicknamed Morgie in the community of paleo folk. And they are this lovely little kind of weasel rat bitch. She's great. She's only about the size of a field mouse. She is presumed to be burrowing. So she lives in little holes in the ground. BLAIR HODGES: The drawing is so cute, by the way, that you have in there. CAT BOHANNON: Isn't she wonderful? I hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see in the book and duly cited, she was very, very talented and we worked together. She wanted to have portraits of all the Eves. And I was like, yeah, let's do portraits of all the Eves. But she's coming from a Catholic background, my mother's Catholic too, so she wanted to do them like Saint cards, where you have the iconography in the center, but then all in the periphery around the side, you have all of these symbolic things. So you have a picture of Morgie, which is the real Madonna, thank you. But she doesn't have nipples. She's sweating drops of milk out of her milk patches on her belly. And she has these weird little pups sipping from it. Anyway, this is a podcast. You can look at it for yourselves when you get the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful portrait. And the reason I picked Morgie as the start is, what people often forget is that, okay, yeah, we know we're mammals. You might've heard that even in high school bio. You're like, okay, homo sapiens, mammals, right? But what's not often talked about is, one of the many characteristic traits that make us mammals are deeply tied to how we reproduce, which is to say are deeply tied to the female sex of a species. And Morgie is this moment roughly when we think, okay, here's where we start lactating. Here's where we start making milk. And that becomes a key part of how we continue the development of our offspring after they exit the womb. And the funny thing about milk, of course, is that we're still laying eggs while we're first making milk, right? So we are egg-laying weird weasels, which is Morgie, in our little burrow, under the feet of dinosaurs, but also that we start lactating before we have nipples. When we often, for those of us who have breasts— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I didn't know this. CAT BOHANNON:  I know, isn't it wild? I also learned this on my journey in the research. So when we look in the mirror, we think, oh, breasts, these things, where do they come from? And we think of them as a sexual trait. We think of them as a thing that is meant to signal attractiveness to our partners. But the thing is, is that exactly—But we may not even parse that, “Oh, are we talking about the shape? Are we talking about the fat? Are we talking about the—" And it's like, whoa, no, the origin of lactation is before you even have a nipple, that you actually are just sweating this thing out from modified endocrine glands out of your skin through your hair. And in fact, the duck-billed platypus, which is often modeled as a kind of weird monitoring basal mammal, she doesn't have nipples either. Her pups through their weird little bills are slurping the milk off the bottom of her belly through these milk patches. So that's where these things come from. BLAIR HODGES: I had no idea. And also that milk wasn't just for nutrition, but also a way to sort of protect the eggs, right? So Morgie was laying eggs and then milk would be produced to help the eggs, rather than just feed the babies? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So for a lot of egg layers—not hard shell, not like a chicken, but a softer leathery shell, there are many species that make leathery eggs, yeah? The trick is, is when you're on land, you need to keep them moist. You can't have them dry out while that offspring is continuing to develop in there. So a lot of egg layers, it's kind of gross, but they secrete this kind of egg-moistening goo that also has a lot of useful anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. Because of course you also don't want the eggs to be overrun like old bread. You want it to both be wet but not moldy. Wet but not infested with parasites, right? BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Sure. CAT BOHANNON: And so, yeah, the best model I've seen for the evolution of milk is actually derived from that original egg-moistening goo. Which is of course incredibly gross to think about, but more likely the origin of lactation. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about the mechanics of the nipples themselves. So we do get to a nipple, evolutionarily we do develop these nipples. CAT BOHANNON: We do. I got two. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I do too! CAT BOHANNON: Some people have more. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: I mean, mine would be a little bit trickier to get to milk from, but you do point out in the book that some male folks can lactate, given the right exercises and the right stimulation, et cetera. But with the nipple— CAT BOHANNON: And the right hormonal cocktail, usually. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so straightforward. So even today, babies—it's not this natural, you know, it can be tough to get babies to latch. So it's like the odds were still stacked against us. Even though we developed a nipple. It's this dance that a breastfeeder and a baby have to do to figure out how to still transfer that food across. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and some species seem to be a little bit better at that, what we often call latching than others. My son was terrible at it. Absolutely just mangled my chest wall in ways that alarmed even the nurses. They're like, “oh God, here's a pump.” It's okay, eventually, whatever, I didn't have a moral goal for it. Luckily, I was able to not be embedded in that debate that many women do in the way we punish ourselves. “Oh, I wasn't able to lactate well enough!” But yeah, come on, it's fine. I mean, and when you think of it from a biological perspective, when you think about it in that evolutionary frame, in many ways, the mammalian chest wall, our bodies know how to make milk better than babies know how to latch. It's an older trait, right? But there are many really, really cool traits about the latching when it does work, because milk is what's called a co-produced biological product. That means the mother and the offspring are actually making it together. Not simply because when you suckle, when an offspring suckles, that means you arrive at that letdown reflex—because we're not carrying a sloshing cup of milk around in our boobs no matter how big they are. This isn't a Ziploc bag in there, right? This is actually like maybe a couple tablespoons at a time if you're lucky when you're lactating. But no, the suckling actually triggers the milk glands to kick up production, and that's what starts the whole process rolling. But the more important thing there, for the latching—because once you have that vacuum-like seal, once the kid's mouth latches on, forms the seal like a weird lamprey, and sucks that relatively giant nipple into its mouth, well now actually you've created something of a tide. Because as the child suckles, it's creating a vacuum while it sucks its cheeks in. And that's to suck the milk down as it's coming. But the tongue's moving back and forth, which moves the focus of the vacuum back and forth, which creates a tide, like a wave on the shore, of milk over the top and under the bottom. The baby's spit is sucked back up into the nipple because that's how undertow works, it's just physics! Which is gross and invasive to think about as a person who's done it. But it's true that the spit is then drawn up into the whole lining of the tubing of the breast where it's read like some weird ancient code. BLAIR HODGES: Right! CAT BOHANNON: And the mother's immune system is responding. All sorts of different sensors are responding and changing the content of the milk to suit. So if the kid's sick, then you get more immunoagents coming down that nipple to help the kid fight off the infection. And a bunch of hormonal stuff and ratios of proteins to sugar. We make our milk to suit, given what we're effectively, anciently reading in the kid's spit. Now that said, breast pumps are awesome. Your kid will be fine if you're not able to do this, okay? You know, modern technology is beautiful, “Fed is best.” But if you are getting the latching, then that's what's actually happening. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of thing your book is chock full of. So many times people are going to run into things they may have never heard of that are just unreal. You also talk about how the breast can be dangerous business too. I mean, evolution has trade-offs. Breast cancer, for example, is so common with women. So you can benefit the baby, but having the ability to produce this milk and do this thing through the breasts also increases a risk to the breast-haver as well. You talk about such trade-offs throughout the book. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and I'll also offer that male bodies and men and trans women are also all capable of getting breast cancer. We all actually have mammary tissue, but male typical bodies tend to have way less of it. And mammary tissue, because it's so dynamically responsive to hormonal signaling, is just one of those places in the body that's more vulnerable to the processes that can drive cancer. And BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm. Cells going haywire. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, exactly. So it's still something absolutely that non-binary folk and gender queer folk of all types should pay attention to. If something's bugging you in your body, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are so many footnotes that have that caveat of like, by the way, talk to your doctor just in case. CAT BOHANNON: Well, it's so important.   DONNA AND THE WOMB (16:27)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next Eve, this is Donna. And this is a chapter about the womb. Donna emerged after a catastrophic cataclysm, whatever killed off the dinosaurs. There was this little weasel type animal that made it through all that destruction. This is 60 million some odd years ago, and you point to her as a reason why so many women today have periods. Let's talk about Donna. CAT BOHANNON: Donna, which is, I nicknamed her Donna, of course, Protungulatum Donnae, but Donna's easier. It's cuter to call her Donna. So she is an ancestor of the modern placental womb. Now we only have one womb. Many mammals still have two because they're evolved, of course, from the shell gland of our former egg layers. And the reason we have one, we're not entirely sure why, but we know the mechanism is that you have these two organs that are merging into one and producing that kind of, in our case, pear-shaped thing, but many, many women and girls are still born with a uterus that has a little dent in the top. Very common. Some even have a whole fibrous divide down the middle. Some are even still born with two uteri, less common, but happens, and two cervixes and two vaginas to match. CAT BOHANNON: So the easiest way to remember the difference between us and marsupials is: marsupials pouch, us no pouch. But also marsupials: two or more vaginas, which is fun, and us only the one. But the thing the reason to think about that isn't simply that it's cute and weird and fun imagining all of the things you might do with an extra vagina—all of which I'm sure are for the good, but that it's really talking about, at what point in development is that offspring coming out of that maternal body, and how much of development is finished outside of the womb, in or out of a pouch or a burrow or what have you. So this is the moment we start going down the path towards our somewhat catastrophic human reproductive system that is long derived from early, early mammals just after that cataclysm, which knocked out almost all the dinosaurs except for a few disgruntled birds, right? That's what's left of them. Your house sparrow. But what we have now is, we have this really patently crazy thing where instead of laying eggs like a sensible creature, we effectively hot dock them into our bodies within a uterus and then transform, not simply the uterus, but the entire body into this kind of eggshell slash meat factory of a burrow. Because our body is now effectively the burrow for that phase of development. In marsupials, it comes out like the size of a jelly bean, comes out a lot sooner, finishing out most of that development in the pouch and then elsewhere. For us, we're finishing a lot of the development inside our bodies, which has all kinds of knock-on effects. BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book that just blew me away was the illustration—I think it's on page 76—of the female pelvic anatomy. What we usually see is the uterus, and it's stretched out and it looks kind of like hip bones. It looks like our hips, like the ovaries are stretched out, the tubes are. And you show, no, it's actually sort of just like balled and smooshed up in there all together— CAT BOHANNON: Totally. BLAIR HODGES: —which I mean, I have never seen this illustration before! I've always seen that other illustration where it's all laid out. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. So a lot of us learn—if we're lucky enough to have something like sex ed. Sadly, not all of us do, but for those of us who are able to have that be part of our education, it's kind of like a T shape, like a capital letter T, where you have that uterus and the vag in the middle, and then you have those fallopian tubes extending out to the side with two little grapes, you know, near the fringy bits, right, which are the ovaries. But the body doesn't have all this extra room in it. It's not like stretching out its arms. It's all kind of smooshed up in there. Which means that I've had the very real and very common experience of having had a transvaginal ultrasound, where they're like trying to image my ovaries and they can't find one. Because for whatever reason, the path of that ultrasound beam is being blocked by a part of the bowel or the uterus itself, or just, something's in the way and the ovary's hiding.  And I was very alarmed at this moment, partially because I had a large thing inside my vagina and I was trying to maintain a conversation. It's rough. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also like, this person's telling me they can't find one of my ovaries. I'm like, “Well where the hell is it?” Like, did I lose an ovary? Like what? You know? And no, actually it's just that everything is very smushed in there, which is part of why ovarian cysts can hurt so much for people who have them. Because you have that radiating signal of irritation hitting many different organs in that area, right? And so it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what you're feeling exactly. You just know it hurts or that it's like pressure, right? And it's different person to person. It's also unfortunately why ovarian cancer is so very dangerous. People who have these biologically female bodies, we kind of get used to aches and pains down there. It's kind of a weird common sensation, for fluctuations over a menstrual cycle, to have some kind of achy bits, some kind of bloated bits, some kind of “what was that sharp pain, I don't know, it went away, cool,” right? So in the early stages of ovarian cancer, it's often the case that a patient may not be fully aware that what's happening might be new. Now that's not to have your listeners be terrified. If something's bothering you, again, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it is absolutely why it's so dangerous, because of course, given that it's so smushed against everything in there, it's not hard to metastasize. You're right up against the bowel. You're very close to the liver. You're in the mix in there. BLAIR HODGES: It's packed in there! And you talk about how bonkers this is, and how many people who have gone through pregnancy have said, like, “What the hell is this?!” [laughs] Like, why do I have to do this? CAT BOHANNON: Fair! Fair question. Yes. Somewhere in our very deep sci-fi future, if we don't blow ourselves up first—which given the news today seems very close to happening, thanks—but assuming we survive the insanity that is human culture and conflict, there is a future in which there is a truly external womb. Which would have to be effectively an entire synthesized female body, right? Because it's not just, it's also your immune system, it's your respiration, it's many things. But assuming in the very deep, many hundreds of years in the future that this happens, it immediately changes everything. Because of course, then it immediately becomes unethical to ever ask a female to do this dangerous thing. She may still choose, but it becomes unethical to ask, because there's truly an alternative. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, so there's a thought experiment for you in our future sci-fi. But yeah, it is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way we do. Our pregnancies and our births and our postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous complications that can and do cripple and or kill mother, child or both. And that's true compared to almost any other primate except for squirrel monkeys, and we feel sorry for them. But that's true for almost any other mammal. We suck at this! We're actually bad at reproduction, which seems counterintuitive because there are eight billion of us. But it's true. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And we see you trying to theorize as to why that is. Like, we're so bad at reproduction, but we're also so highly successful, one might even say an invasive species in a way. CAT BOHANNON: Right. BLAIR HODGES: We've spread out everywhere. How did that happen if we're so bad at reproduction and it's such a costly and dangerous thing to do? CAT BOHANNON: Well, it took all of our very classic hominin resources to pull it off. We had to be super social and super clever problem solvers who are good at thinking about the world as a tool user. Which is to say, tool use is about behavior. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a damn about this rock that someone used to cut something, right? The stone axes are not the thing they care about. They care about what they can infer about the behavior of its user. All paleoanthropologists are deeply behaviorists. What that means is, if all tool use is essentially overcoming a limitation of your body in order to achieve a goal in your given environment and using some manipulation of your behavior to do that, well, our most important invention, if we suck at reproduction, was gynecology. Lucy—and I'm not the first to say this—Lucy the australopithecine, 3.2 million years ago, had a freakin' midwife. And habilis after her had even more reproductive workarounds, as did erectus, all the way up to homo sapiens. We were manipulating our fertility patterns through behavior. And that's a huge upgrade. Now you don't have to wait around for your uterus to evolve to a thing that's less deadly—because, of course, you could also just go extinct. There's that. That's an option in evolution. You could also just not exist when you have bad reproduction. But if you can work around it behaviorally, if you can have midwives—we're one of the only species that regularly helps each other give birth. If you can manipulate your fertility patterns to up or down regulate your fertility too, because in any given environment, it might be better to cluster your births earlier in your reproductive life and then care for your sort of “useless” babies—I love my kid, but they're useless, right? For a long period of time, right? Like in your given environment, given your food supply, maybe that's a good plan. Or maybe things are more seasonal, or maybe it's actually there's not a lot of food at all and you need to stretch that sh*t out. You need to actually have them every four to six years or so, which is what chimpanzees do, which is what some known human communities do. So you have to think about how we choose to have babies and what we do to manipulate our fertility, including medicinally, including behaviorally, in the space of medical practices, as something that's adapting this buggy and fault-prone thing that is human reproduction to suit our different environments and lifestyles. And that starts not a few hundred years ago, not just in the deep history of racism and eugenics sadly in modern gynecology, but actually millions of years ago. BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you're inviting us to think again about tools. So you talked about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the tool is this bone that's a weapon, and we think about the rise of humanity as being tied to this type of tool. You're inviting people to re-envision that and say, actually, the tool of gynecology—which would have involved our own hands as tools—would have been such a crucial turning point for who we are as a species or who we could become. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: Because I think you even say, we “seized the means of reproduction,” or something at that point, which is a great pun. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, yes, and meant to be, because I too am a nerd. Yes, we do. We do indeed seize the means of actual freakin' reproduction and get our hands on the levers that are controlling not only our reproductive destiny, but then effectively our destiny as a species.   PURGI AND HUMAN SENSE PERCEPTION (27:29)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Cat Bohannon and she's a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. We're talking about her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It's a brand new book, and it's a fabulous book. The next part I wanted to talk about was perception. And you say you got thinking about whether men and women perceive the world in different ways. And you got thinking about this as a college student working as a nude model at the local art school. And when students would take a break, you'd kind of wander through and check out how people were seeing you, how they were drawing you. And you noticed, invariably often, the men would be drawing your breasts too big. You're like, those aren't mine. But then as the weeks went by, they would get closer to normal size. Like something was changing in how they initially saw you, how they were drawing you. And so you wondered, like, are they seeing things differently than me? Is perception different? CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. BLAIR HODGES: Now, the danger in this question is falling into the trap of “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” right? Essentializing gender. CAT BOHANNON: Yyyuuup. BLAIR HODGES: So we'll keep that in mind as you talk about perception and what you found in this chapter. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, so there were some genderqueer folk in the art classes where I was a professional naked person, which was my job at the time. But for the most part, they were cis folk with a variety of sexualities. So I would just point out that in these rooms, there of course was diversity, and there was racial diversity too. However, the most obvious variable, you know, if you want to call it that, was simply that the male presenting folk who were almost universally cis, were drawing my boobs too big. Now, they're not small. I'm like a 34D. It's a problem. The straps dig into my shoulders. I know that I am not a small-breasted person for good and ill, but it's more that there's just the skill of literally, proportionally, how big are these knockers you're putting on this figure drawing. And the females, the women, the femmes, were not doing that. And it wasn't the case then—And it was happening semester after semester in multiple classes. So this is not a scientific study that I'm basing this on. This is an anecdote. But like, it was a thing. And I asked some other people who had been models and they were like, “Oh yeah, they always do that.” And I was asking them, what do you think it is? And they usually said something like, “Eh, it's just porn. Whatever, they get over it. It's fine. They just don't know how to not see porn when they see naked female bodies,” right? Although this was the late 90s and early aughts, so it was before the massive proliferation of internet porn, but whatever. It was a thing, is what I'm saying. It was a freakin' thing that was fairly consistent. And so I had to ask myself, like, do they literally look larger to them? You know? Is this a cultural thing? Is this gender mess? Is this just sexism? Is it just, you know, that soup of that thing where it's complicated? Or is there something physiological going on? And so for that, I take us back to the dawn of primates. Not in the “men are from Mars, women from Venus” way, but actually when were we actually weird little proto monkeys in a tree? And can that tell us anything about why they draw my boobs too big? And it's a journey. I go through quite a lot because there's a lot that goes into the evolution of the sensory array. The nose, the eyes, the ears. So there's a lot to work with there and it doesn't always come back to my naked self. The central reason why, as best as I could tell, they were drawing them too large is that they were literally fixating on them. So when your eye looks out on the world, it's doing a mixture of things. It's doing a mixture of saccades, which are these twitchy little movements. Your eyes are doing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that you don't even notice. And fixations, which means they're landing on one spot and staying there for a period before they move around again. And there does seem to be in the lab notable sex differences in how male saccade versus fixation patterns seem to work. Again, mostly these subjects are cis men. So there's your caveat, right? But one of the famous things about male versus female facial perception that classically in the psychological literature, cis women seem to be better at remembering faces—and these are sighted people of course—than cis men. And it seems to be, after doing some eye tracking studies with some careful cameras, that what's happening is that male eyes seem to focus more centrally on the center of the face, almost kind of around the tip and bridge of the nose, like that center zone. Whereas female typical eyes are doing fixations through all of the major points of facial features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, up again, all around, all around, all around. BLAIR HODGES: Huh. CAT BOHANNON: Which is to say it may be the case that it's not that—you know, the stereotype women are more social, we're just better at remembering people because we're all kind of emotionally mushy or some sh*t, right? No. It's actually that where you fixate is giving you more signal for your long-term memory. And so if you're getting a broader range of information to dump into long-term memory, just literally what your eyes are doing may be helping you do that, right? Which is not about a psychology thing, it's a physiology thing. And in the boys' cases, I think they were quite literally fixating more on my breasts. Now, why they were doing that may well be cultural— BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: They don't have them for the most part. And you know they're 18 years old, people. I was naked in front of 18-year-old boys, so I have no more nightmares, right? But like, that's new. That's not in our culture. That's not a thing they've seen a lot in the social setting as opposed to an intimate setting, right? So you know, literally it's looming large in their mind and over the course of the semester as they get used to it—right? So it's both what their eyes are doing, but it's also cultural. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and this is where—and you point this out as well sometimes, especially in the footnotes—where studies on trans folks are going to shed a lot more light on this— CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. BLAIR HODGES: —where we can probably get a better sense of where culture fits in, where expectations fit in versus physiology. And we're still so early in scientific endeavors of thinking about trans perception— CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely we are. BLAIR HODGES: It's just huge questions to explore, so much more to explore there than we know. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be great.   THE NOSE (33:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! This also talks about—So our eyes, our nose, and our ears are in this chapter. The nose, it was really cool to learn about how our faces flattened out over time, which made smell—We're not as great smelling like as we used to be. Our faces are flat. We don't have this big organ in there that does a lot of good smell stuff. And a lot of these changes happened when we were up in the trees, to our eyes and ears, that point to what seem to be some sex-based differences. Give us some examples of these sex based differences in smell, in sight, in sound, that still carry through today that are kind of throwbacks to this time when we were swinging from the trees, or I guess really just kind of crawling around in the trees. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those brachiated shoulders yet. So swinging less so. But no, this is a kind of classic story of how we got the so-called monkey face. Even a kid can kind of draw a monkey face on a piece of paper. You got the big ears, got that kind of flat face, two forward-facing binocular stereoscopic eyes. Like we know what that looks like, but that's a very big change from something like a weasel or a mouse, right? Where you have that elongated snout, you have eyes a little bit more to the side. Right, and most of the people who talk about the evolution of primates do talk about how this came about. If a face is a sensory array, it's not just what we use to smile at each other. It's where we're hanging our primary sensors of the eyes, the nose, and the ears, and how we position them on our head is very much shaping how we perceive our environment. So the move up into the trees is a very different environment from the ground, especially from burrowing. There are many different ways in which we have to process the world differently. When it comes to the nose, one of the things that's interesting about human beings is we lost what's called the vomeronasal organ. In a lot of mammals, the perception of pheromones, you know, smells that usually the opposite sex put out that we innately strongly react to, which in a mouse is incredibly a dominant part of their perceptive lives. For us, we don't have it. We evolved away from it. We actually still have a teeny tiny little passage. It's like at the bottom of our sinuses, but it ends in kind of a—it hits a wall. It's not much going on there. Human beings don't seem to have a whole lot of pheromone perception left. But what we do have is a whole bunch of cisgender women who are a lot better at smelling stuff than males are. And we're not entirely sure we know why it is. But it is absolutely true classically in olfaction that female subjects are going to be better at detecting scents that are faint in a room. That's a concentration thing. You only need a little whiff, you know, whereas a male typical might need a stronger dose. We're better at discerning between different kinds of scents and we're better at recognizing it quickly. So we're literally smelling more finely than males are. But it's not because we have more receptors, actually. And in fact, our noses, our nostrils sucking in that air are smaller than most males in fact. No, the big difference actually seems to be in the olfactory bulb itself. This is the part of the brain that processes smell information. Yeah. And the cells are more tightly packed with more of them, even controlling for body size, in a female typical brain than in a male. And that just means it is transmitting that signal more quickly and more widely and more effectively, and then sending a stronger signal out to other parts of the brain. So we're literally wired differently. Don't entirely know why. And we're not really sure if that's a tree problem or if it's just like a sex pheromone problem that's a leftover. Not really sure.   THE EARS (37:19)   BLAIR HODGES: Not only not only our smell is discussed in this chapter, but our hearing is as well. You say that probably the most important differences between sex as pertains to hearing here—volume and pitch, women tend to hear better in higher pitches, they retain hearing better with age. What are the differences that stood out to you in a male typical versus a female typical body when it comes to our hearing? CAT BOHANNON: Uh, this was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the story, and maybe you have too, that female ears, human female ears, are better tuned to higher pitches that often correspond to baby cries, right? Men and women can hear the same pitches for most of our early lives, but we're more tuned in to the pitches that are associated with the pitches that babies usually use when they cry. To me, this was kind of an annoying story. Once again, I seem to be hardwired to make babies. And as a feminist, I'm like, “ugh.” But it's true, so it's fine. It's a long-evolved thing. But the more interesting thing in that story for me was that most cis men start losing the upper range of their hearing starting at age 25. Now it's a gradual slope. Guys in their thirties don't need a hearing aid necessarily if they're normally hearing people, right? But you do have this slope of decline that's just, it's like a band filter. It's just cutting off the top end of your range, every year a little bit more, down, down, until you arrive in your fifties. And the thing is, female voices, female typical cis women's voices are a little bit higher pitched and our overtones on our voices, the full timbre of our voice, it really extends up to the top end of human hearing. So what happens is quite literally starting age 25, cis men aren't hearing women's voices very well and the older they get, the worse it gets, until finally in their fifties or so, quite without realizing it, a lot of men, a lot of cis men, our voices, our female voices sound thin, a little bit tinny, harder to pick out, and may well be boosted by a hearing aid. Right? So that totally changes some of how I understand the dynamic of a boardroom. Now, it doesn't explain why a sexist man cares about what a woman says less. It doesn't say that. That's just sexism. BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it does say that literally he might be having trouble hearing you without realizing he is. BLAIR HODGES: And again, as you discuss, all of these interesting things throughout the chapter of perception—and I don't remember if we mentioned Purgi is the name of this Eve, 60-some-odd-million years ago. CAT BOHANNON: Purgatorius, yes! BLAIR HODGES: Yes, ancestor of the primates. So if people want to learn even more about these kind of things about our nose, our eyes, our ears—Purgi's chapter is the place to go. We're talking with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. You can also check out some of Cat's essays and poems. They've appeared in Scientific American, Mind Science Magazine, The Best American Non-required Reading, and other places. She lives with her family in Seattle but is currently touring to talk about this new book called Eve.   ARDI AND THE LEGS (40:21)   Let's talk about the legs. So we talked a little bit about being up in the trees already. But at some point, we came down, this is about four and a half-ish million years ago, we decided to stand upright. And that had some big implications for differently sexed bodies. Let's talk about some of those. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we decided to do much of anything, at least in the sense of conscious choice— BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Maybe had to. CAT BOHANNON: We didn't choose, I mean, to modify our pelvic arrangement. Although some individual choices happen along the way. So yeah, one of the big things in a shift for the human evolution pattern is that we mistakenly believed for a while that our ancestors were knuckle walkers, like chimps or gorillas, and then we stood upright. You remember that old diorama, that old, you know, you got the knuckle walking— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's classic. CAT BOHANNON: —and then you eventually stand up and then there's jokes about it, eventually you're like sitting typing on the computer at the far right. You know? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all hunched over, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been around, but actually we were never knuckle walkers, none of our ancestors were, none of our Eves certainly. We were just hanging out in trees and then on the ground a bit more and eventually walking. The thing about walking is that what you really need to be able to do besides just having a spine absorb more pressure than it would otherwise—that's why we have an S-shaped lower back to help distribute that force over our bodies without crippling us. But also, what we needed to be able to do was endure. In other words, the story of walking and bipedalism is an endurance story. A primatologist once told me that there is no safe place to be in a room with a chimpanzee. There's no possibility that you are in a safe space because they are incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and can be incredibly violent. They will rip off your face—sometimes, literally, hopefully not, and they'll do it really, really fast. So the idea that we got faster when we became upright is actually wrong. What did happen, however, is that if a chimp does attack you, not long after all of that incredible violence and speed and running away more than likely, because that's mostly going to happen if the chimp's scared, you know, they're going to want to go eat a mango under a tree somewhere. They're not keeping it up for a long period of time. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: What we can do is we can walk all freakin' day. Very few animals have the kind of metabolic capability of doing such a thing. Because it's not simply what your muscles can do. It's how your muscles are utilizing what's called the substrate. Utilizing local energy resources, and when those run out, tapping into other resources—usually in our case from fat. So that's why we're able to walk from point A to B for hours and hours, whereas a chimpanzee can't do that sh*t, right? So the interesting thing about sex differences here is that, we know that female bodies in human bodies are slightly better at endurance by many different measures. So untrained bodies—bodies that haven't been trying to do this, in other words, haven't been working out in the gym—your classic female body does have slightly less muscle mass, but that isn't the big story. The bigger story is that when you do a deep tissue biopsy, female typical skeletal muscles have a little bit more of what's called slow twitch muscle. You might have heard, that's an endurance muscle. That's a type of tissue that's better at doing things for a long period of time, as opposed to fast twitches, which is what lets you be a sprinter, which is what lets you really have explosive strength. There does seem to be that sex difference, I mean, between male bodies—typical, average, I mean—and female bodies, just in terms of what those muscles seem to be geared for, right? And it's tricky, right? Most of us aren't ultra marathoners, for many reasons, most of them psychological! Uh, some of them financial actually, right? But most of us aren't going to do those extreme tests of endurance. But once you get up to those extreme lengths, actually, female runners, tend to not only match or beat male runners in those races, but actually tend to outpace them over time. Which is to say there may be something about the female body that, in long feats of endurance, is slightly better at this. Very slightly better at tapping into a second wind. And so if that's the case, then it's curious that usually how we tell the story about becoming upright is all about some sh*t that we assume guys were doing. Usually it's around hunting. The idea that we were running down big game, you've probably read some popular science books about that, that we evolved to run, right? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: And sort of. Maybe. But it's a little bit weird, one, to assume that the males were the ones doing that. Two: We were upright way before we were hunting big game. Like Ardipithecus is the Eve I use in the legs chapter— BLAIR HODGES: Yes, Ardi! CAT BOHANNON: And you know, this is a very, very—Ardi, she's wonderful, recently discovered, wonderful, wonderful fossil. She was upright well before big game was a big part of our food strategies. So like we were actually doing stuff on two legs way before it was a matter of running anything down.   CRAFTING SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES (45:23)   BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it seems tricky for researchers to pin down is, we're dealing with these huge lengths of time, and we're dealing with a pretty limited record. CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: And we see you piecing the story together in ways that challenge the conventional narrative. And you've got the evidence there—just as much evidence and sometimes more than what the typical narrative tells us, which is, like you said, we started walking upright because males were hunting and running after game or whatever. And you're like, “Well, actually, there's all this other evidence that shows there's probably other stuff going on.” And looking at today's bodies gives us some ideas about the bodies of the past as well. So you mentioned the different sort of muscle things that female bodies tend to have. Now would that definitely be something that developed through evolution rather than through, like, boys getting played with more or something in their youth than girls do, or roughhousing with boys versus girls, or something like that? CAT BOHANNON: You know, it's hard to say. I think that's a smart question. I think of the studies that I was using, that I was wielding—juggling even, in the legs chapter—those were all done on adult bodies, in part because there are ethics around doing a deep tissue biopsy in an infant. You know, like what is consent there? Why would a—you know, and also the occasion; why it might happen and what's the clinical setting. Like there are many ways into a scientific study, but adult consent and informed consent's a big one, right? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So yeah, I don't think those were pediatric studies, and I think it's smart. I think it's smart to say that when we do studies on adult bodies, there have been whole lived lives and whole lived childhoods up to that point. That's absolutely true, and that plays into some of the issues we talk about later in the book too. So I don't know, I don't know. I do know that at least when there have been cellular studies of metabolism in human muscle cells, XX cells seem to be slightly better at utilizing multiple substrates, which is to say multiple energy sources—tapping into that second wind when the local sugar runs out is usually how we tell that story, yeah?—than XY cells, right? So it does seem to be true at the cellular level and not just types of tissue. But you're absolutely right that I don't know how much childhood is gonna play into that adult musculoskeletal system, at least not from the research I've seen. BLAIR HODGES: And you also say that going upright was harder on female bodies. Can you give me an example of why that would be? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So, for one thing, relaxin. Relaxin is this thing that is floating around in the bloodstream of both male and female bodies, but it is slightly more dominant in female typical bodies. Again, I'm always here talking about “biological females,” usually pre-menopause here, okay? Just to put a pin in that so we know what we're talking about. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay. CAT BOHANNON: Relaxin is a thing that during pregnancy loosens the ligaments and the support structures around, not only the hip bones and the pelvic structure to help it widen and carry that additional load, but of course also to widen our very narrow birth canal, which is a problem! BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also, even when we're not pregnant, it tends to make the fixtures of the joints a little looser. It actually has to do with a vascular response around the joints, so I won't get too technical with you. But basically what it does is it makes a typical female body a bit more flexible, you know. Now this is part of why our feet expand when we are pregnant. It's not simply fluid retention, but for female bodies that become pregnant, it's also that these higher doses of relaxin are loosening the ligaments that are binding all of those foot bones together. So they literally get wider, and sometimes a little bit longer, which is very freaky when you think about it. And, uh, it doesn't always quite go back—I can tell you—afterwards, many women gain as much as a whole shoe size during pregnancy— BLAIR HODGES: Wow. CAT BOHANNON: —and then just retain that, which sucks for buying new shoes, but there you go. You have greater concerns when you're in your postpartum period, I could say, um, yeah. But it also means that we're especially prone to lower back pain, possibly because of some instability there in the lower back. Especially going through pregnancy and back again, that can make you more vulnerable too, because it does a lot to the curvature of the spine. Right? So in other words, being upright with this extra relaxin in your bloodstream can make you a little more vulnerable to certain kinds of bone and muscle related pains than it would be if you were a totally sensible four-legged creature who isn't doing this crazy thing, because basically we used to be like tables with four legs and now we're standing on two of the legs of the table and our body is still kind of catching up. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. Yeah, and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy, too, on that back. And so the common lower back pain is a remnant of this decision—or not “decision” as you pointed out, but this evolutionary move of going upright, exactly, right. CAT BOHANNON: Accident. Yeah.   PREGNANCY AND THE BRAIN (50:06)   BLAIR HODGES:  That's not the only change that women undergo during pregnancy, these physical changes you talked about—the joints, the feet. But also the brain undergoes changes similar to what happens to the brain during puberty. You describe it almost like a second sort of puberty. There's so much development and change happening in the actual brain that it's like a second puberty for women who become pregnant? CAT BOHANNON: It's like an extra transition in a life cycle. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, right. CAT BOHANNON: So in biology, you have these classic, maybe you've seen, developmental trajectories in the life cycle. It usually looks like a circle with arrows around it. You see like an egg and then a juvenile—like in insects, you'll have like a larva and then you have a chrysalis and then you have a butterfly. For mammals, we do this too. And we say, what are the developmental phases? What are the phases of this life cycle? And one of the interesting things, at least when it comes to how the human brain seems to go through this life cycle—because there are changes in our incredibly plastic, very malleable human brain that shift and actually have very notable physiological changes at each of these major transitions. So in puberty, there's actually an incredible rewiring and developmental thing that happens all throughout the teens. Can be very challenging, can make you more vulnerable to certain kinds of mental illness, actually, and then not suffer as much when you come into your twenties. There are outcomes, in other words, from what's going down in there. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Schizophrenia will often emerge around that time, for example, and a little bit later for women than men, right? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely so. And one of the cutting-edge things in research there is whether or not the brain development during puberty is in any way affecting that trajectory. Both men and women—and by this I mean males and females—are prone to schizophrenia, right? Schizophrenia, it's a strongly genetically related thing, but we're not entirely sure what all the triggers are. What we do know is that males and females both get it. But what happens is that males are diagnosed sooner. And very obviously so, they move into psychosis. Whereas females have a slightly different symptomology, slightly different path towards diagnosis. And then they have, and are diagnosed later in their twenties. Now some of that's a diagnosis bias in that— BLAIR HODGES: Sure. How signs are read by society or whatever. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, which is a cultural thing and sometimes a sexist thing. There are just, there are complications there. There are confounds. However, it may also be the case, that because the pubertal shift is sort of long and slow in humans, we actually start many of the features of our puberty sooner and then take longer to complete them in female bodies. Whereas for males, it hits you later and it hits you like a truck. It just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's just, um, it, that's just, it's just faster and a bit harder, if you will, because you're condensing that into a later point. And interestingly, even in rodents actually—though what you might call a puberty isn't exactly the same as what we do—they likewise in the female have a sort of longer period of going through it than the male. So it might just be a basic mammalian thing. But the effect in the human brain is that you have this longer and slightly…Subtle isn't the right word but you have this longer period of brain development that's dealing with the hormones of puberty, that has a slightly different slope while that brain's developing, whereas in the male brain, it's shorter, it's more impacted, it might be a bit rougher, you know. So in a brain that's already prone to psychosis—this is where the research, some branches of research are going, you know—is that a factor? Are there physiological shifts in sex differences in puberty that make those brains differently vulnerable to different kinds of mental illness? BLAIR HODGES: And so female brains are undergoing these changes during puberty. But then later during pregnancy, as we were talking about, there's also more shifts. And this is literally like stuff sort of moving around. Is this like neurons kind of remapping and different things? Like what's actually happening up there? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell is this wet lump of tissue in our heads that we center the self in? Good question, good question! Neuroscience would like to know. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: No, it's true. Well, a pregnant female's brain—and by this I mean human now, actually shrinks in the third trimester, like significantly so, which is alarming. Like is the baby actually eating my brain? Good question! No one's really sure quite why this is happening. BLAIR HODGES: Mom brain! CAT BOHANNON: I know, actual mom brain, it turns out, is hella real. Yeah, in the stereotypical sense. So yeah, some of it actually, interestingly, doesn't seem to be a loss of neurons. It's not a loss of cells necessarily from what little they've been able to see in various studies. It seems to be more a loss of—There is a rewiring. There is a kind of clear, you know, snipping out a bunch of connections in your existing neural network, which in some ways may make room for new pathways. So one of the big arguments for why our brains develop so long during that pubertal period—which is very unlike other primates, right? We really have this huge period of social learning in our childhoods and then our adolescence—is that we have deep social learning to do. We have really complex social societies, and we're constantly having to map them and learn not just new things to do with ourselves, but new ways to be in different social environments, especially as we shift around through different social environments. So in that case, when you think about what's happening in the last trimester of pregnancy, and then in the postpartum recovery period, this is someone who is having major social shift. Now the story in the sciences is usually told that, oh, this is helping her better bond with her baby, her really, really vulnerable baby, who's so very useless, can't even hold up its head. You know, so like, wow, so this is all about that bonding. And it's true that some of the regions that show some of that shrinkage, if you will—which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually allowing for more pathways to form. That's the argument that's usually made about it— BLAIR HODGES: Okay. CAT BOHANNON: —have to do with social bonding and reading social cues, and so it's a sociality story. One of the things that I say in the book is that, must we again render the mother invisible? Maybe it's not all about the baby. Maybe she matters too. Because actually one of the big things that happens in a social species like ours when we give birth and come into motherhood, especially for the first time, is that we are learning new ways to be. We're learning how to differently map our social environment and new relationships with different sorts of people, and who's going to be most helpful in this new feature in my life. And who of my old friends are like, maybe not gonna help out with the kids so much. Just, you know, we love them, but that's not their strength. You know, in other words, and how to ask for things that you need, and when to learn new social rules. Which is to say, I suspect some of the brain changes that are happening there are not simply about bonding with the baby, but are about being able to read the room once you have one. Which I assume is a long-evolved trait that is just repurposed in the human. This is probably happening in chimps to a degree. It's more like, “Okay now that you're human, let's repurpose this trait in your hyper social environment.” Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it does. CAT BOHANNON: Okay.   WHAT MAKES A WOMAN (57:16)   BLAIR HODGES: And time and time again, we see this in your book where you'll take the mainstream story about why a particular biological thing is happening—so mom brain, for example, which is that maybe people might encounter forgetfulness or feeling scattered or like ADHD type symptoms or whatever—and saying, “Oh, this is happening because they're doing this for baby.” And you're saying, “Okay, like, sure. But also, what if it's also this?” CAT BOHANNON: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: Because those type of questions are what are driving scientific outcomes and the theories that we have about it. So your book, again and again, is saying, well, what about this as well? Or what about this instead? So we're just sort of getting a different point of view. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And I think with a lot of these questions, it's hard to just say, this is the definitive answer. And you do write with a level of humility there. But you're really opening up possibilities that can change the way we the way we interact with people who aren't parents, or people who are. Because you're also not saying, “Look, in order to be a perfect woman, you need to go through this change in your brain or else you're an unfulfilled woman!” CAT BOHANNON: Oh, god no. No no no no no. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So you're speaking to a lot of different experiences. CAT BOHANNON: You know, I think this is true for all women. We people who have uteri are not merely vessels for babies. Even in an evolutionary sense, because we are a hyper-social species in interdependent complex social environments and cultures. Which is to say, it is not a woman's destiny to freaking give birth. It is a woman's destiny to survive as best as she can, just like any other organism. You know what I mean? And it's also true that there are many, many ways to contribute to the wellbeing of a group, even in a biological sense, even in an ancient ancestral sense, besides simply producing more babies. And that's sometimes the confusion when we talk about the book. Some people have been confused thinking, “Are you saying that women are the way they are—you know, cis women—because it's our destiny to have babies?” And I'm like, “No!” It's more that the way we have babies is really crap, and many, many features in our bodies have evolved to withstand it. If this is a thing that hopefully you choose to do and isn't forced upon you, hopefully you have some long-evolved traits to make it suck less. It's more like that, more like that. BLAIR HODGES: And so, women who don't undergo that or have the same kind of like brain changes, it doesn't mean that their brains are somehow lesser than or whatever, they're just suited for different things. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: And this is also where trans identities come into play as well. You don't have to be this “biologically sexed”—let alone intersex folks as well, where there's not this sort of binary that exists there—but that trans women can experience the world as women, as trans women especially, even though they may not be able to physically carry a pregnancy. Because I think one of the reasons people who are sort of anti-t

Jacotte Brokken en Tinne Claes lazen het boek 'Eva: hoe de evolutie van het vrouwelijk lichaam de mensheid heeft gevormd' van Cat Bohannan. Waarom leven vrouwen langer dan mannen? Hoe komt het dat vrouwen borstvoeding kunnen geven? En bestaat het vrouwelijk brein echt? In 'Eva' beantwoordt Cat Bohannon vragen die wetenschappers tientallen jaren hebben laten liggen.

In a special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt talks to Cat Bohannon about her new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. SOURCE:Cat Bohannon, researcher and author. RESOURCES:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon (2023)."Genomic Inference of a Severe Human Bottleneck During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition," by Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan, and Haipeng Li (Science, 2023)."The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity," by Cat Bohannon (The Atlantic, 2023)."A Newborn Infant Chimpanzee Snatched and Cannibalized Immediately After Birth: Implications for 'Maternity Leave' in Wild Chimpanzee," by Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2018)."War in the Womb," by Suzanne Sadedin (Aeon, 2014)."Timing of Childbirth Evolved to Match Women's Energy Limits," by Erin Wayman (Smithsonian Magazine, 2012)."Bonobo Sex and Society," by Frans B. M. de Waal (Scientific American, 2006). EXTRAS:"Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022)."Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).

The female body has been neglected in anthropological narratives, minimized in the archeological record, and excluded from modern-day clinical trials. But what if that weren't the case? How would our origin story change if we made women the protagonists? Cat Bohannon asked herself that question a decade ago. She has finally shared her answer in a New York Times bestselling book called “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.”

Paddington director Paul King returns with Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet in the title role. He talks with Samira about exploring the backstory of Willy Wonka and Roald Dahl's surprising vision for fiction's greatest confectioner.Front Row rounds up the best non-fiction books of 2023 with Caroline Sanderson - non-fiction books editor for The Bookseller and chair of judges for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2022, Stephanie Merritt - critic and novelist, and John Mitchinson - cofounder of Unbound, the independent crowdfunding publisher and co-presenter of literary podcast, Backlisted.The extraordinary work of the artist Pauline Boty (1938 – 1966) is explored by the curator of a new exhibition, Mila Askarova, and the art historian Lynda Nead.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer: Paula McGrathFront Row non-fiction recommendations for 2023Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Patterson published by Faber and Faber Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art, Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming published by Chatto & Windus How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair published by Fourth Estate Twelve Words for Moss by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett published by Allen Lane The British Year in 72 Seasons by Kiera Chapman, Rowan Jaines, Lulah Ellgender and Rebecca Warren published by Granta Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith published by William Collins High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt published by Headline Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon published by Hutchinson Heinemann Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio by Chris Laoutaris published by Williams Collins

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comCat is a researcher who focuses on the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other publications. Her fascinating new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and I highly recommend it.For two clips of our convo — on the combat that occurs within a pregnant woman between mother and child, and the magic of nipples while breastfeeding — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Cat growing up near the “Confederate Mount Rushmore”; her mom the pianist and her dad the research psychologist; Cat helping him in the laboratory he ran; why medical research has ignored female subjects; plastination and Body Worlds; studying the first lactating mammal, Morganucodon; the origins of sex bifurcation; how “binary” is now controversial; how your gut contains countless organisms; how the placenta protects a fetus from being attacked by the mom; the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth; preeclampsia; how human reproduction is much longer than other mammals'; postpartum depression; why the left breast is favored in breastfeeding; the maternal voice; Pinker's The Language Instinct; humans as hyper-social animals; how women hunted and obtained just as much protein as men — in different ways; our omnivore flexibility; sexed voices; how even livers have a sex; the only reliable way to determine the sex of brains; how male cells can end up in a female brain; why women are more likely to wake during surgery; sexual pleasure; bird copulation; duck vaginas; the chimp's “polka dot” penis; why the slower sex of humans was key to our evolution; my challenging of Cat's claim that 20 percent of people are homosexual; and foreskin and boobs and clits, oh my.On that “20 percent of humans are homosexual” question, which I challenged directly on the podcast, it turns out Bohannon made a mistake which she says she will correct in future editions. As often happens, she conflated the “LGBTQ+” category with homosexuality, and relied on a quirky outlier study rather than the more reliable and standard measurements from places like the Williams Institute or Gallup. Williams says 1.7 percent of Americans are homosexual, i.e. gay or lesbian. Gallup says it's 2.4 percent. The trouble, of course, with the LGBTQIA+ category is that almost 60 percent are bisexual, and the “Queer” category can include heterosexuals as well. As a way of polling actual, same-sex attracted gays and lesbians, it's useless. And designed to be useless.Note too Gallup's percentage of “LGBTQIA+” people who define themselves as “queer”. It's 1.8 percent of us. And yet that word, which is offensive and triggering to many, and adopted by the tiniest fraction of actual homosexuals, is now regarded by the mainstream media as the right way to describe all of us. In the podcast, you can see that Cat simply assumes that “queer” is now used universally — because the activists and academics who form her environment have co-opted it. She readily sees how that could be the case, when we discussed it. I wish the MSM would do the same: stop defining all gays the way only 1.8 percent of the “LGBTQ+” “community” do. Of course they won't. They're far more interested in being woke than telling the truth.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, Joe Klein with a year-end review, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist? Considering the science and data collection methods we currently have, it is somewhat of a wonder that there is so little known about biology as it relates to sex, as well as our behavior. Author and Researcher, Cat Bohannon, argues that these questions should have been investigated decades ago, with a level of thoroughness and care that is still lacking in mainstream science. Bohannon points to the fact that societal attention has been on the male body for so long, that even natural occurrences like menopause, are considered a medical mystery. In her debut publication, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Bohannon examines the evolution of the female sex. From the development of breastmilk, initially in mammals no larger than a field mouse, to the first placental mammals, to the way C-sections in the industrialized world are altering women's pelvic shape, Bohannon brings hard science and a passionate curiosity to the subject of female biology. Please join us as Town Hall as Cat Bohannan makes the case for a greater understanding of the female body. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.  Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She's an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two pretty amazing daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.  Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution Third Place Books

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com(The main Dish and VFYW contest are taking a break for the holiday; we'll be back with full coverage on December 1st. Happy Thanksgiving!)Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He's currently a senior fellow at UVA's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia.This episode was recorded on October 17. You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the antihumanism of Silicon Valley, and the obsession with kid safetyism — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: Matthew's birthplace in Berkeley; his dad the physics professor and jazz player; his mom the New Age “seeker type”; Matthew taken out of school at age 10 for five years to live in an strict ashram and travel to India; he left to join “the great bacchanal” of high school where he “didn't learn much”; did unlicensed electrical work and studied physics in college; he believes bureaucracy “compromises the vitality of life”; Hannah Arendt; Tocqueville; Christopher Lasch and the close supervision of kids' lives; Johan Huizinga and the spirit of play; Oakeshott's metaphor of a tennis match; Enoch Powell; behavioral economics; William James; Nudge and choice architecture; Kant; TS Eliot; Nietzsche; gambling addiction and casino manipulation; Twitter and “disinformation”; self-driving cars; plastic surgery; kids and trans activism; the Nordic gender paradox; nationalism; why the love of one's own is suspect on the political left; how “diversity is our strength” decreases diversity; Hillary's “deplorables”; Matthew's book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction; brainy people not understanding practical ones; knowledge workers threatened by AI; the intelligence needed in manual work; why Americans are having fewer children; liquid modernity; the feminization of society; Bronze Age Pervert; Ratzinger; Matthew's recent conversion to Christianity; and gratitude being the key to living well.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

This week, Kate sits down with author Cat Bohannan to talk about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. This conversation takes you on a captivating journey through the intricacies of human evolution viewed through the stories our bodies have to tell - and the female body in particular. In this podcast, they explore elements of the book as well as exploring what it means to look at the narrative arc of female bodies through deep time. We look at how our evolution is a product of environment, culture, behaviors, context, and bodies exploring topics like menopause and menstruation, tool use, mating behaviors, and so much more. Cat shares a message of agency and empowerment and what it might mean to think about how the human species might evolve from here. Find Cat:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human EvolutionX (Twitter): @catbohannonBooks Mentioned in the Podcast:Ultra-Processed People by Chris van TullekenSkin: A Natural History by Nina Jablonsky Current Discounts for MBS listeners:15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1520% off Home of Wool using code BF 20 through November 27th (code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% after that). Support the Podcast:SubstackLeave a one-time Tip

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comJohn Judis is an editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior editor at The New Republic, and an old friend. Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing columnist at the WaPo, and politics editor of the fantastic substack The Liberal Patriot. In 2002 they wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, and their new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the ways the Democrats are losing on immigration, and discussing the core failings of Obama — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: John's wealthy upbringing in Chicago until parents fell on hard times and faced anti-Semitism; Ruy raised by a single mom in DC and whose dad worked at the Portuguese embassy; John and Ruy becoming friends in the early ‘70s as socialist radicals; John writing a biography of Bill Buckley in the ‘80s that garnered him respect among conservatives; Ruy working in progressive think tanks before ending up at the center-right AEI; the Reagan Era shifting to the New Democrats and a triangulating Clinton; John and Ruy writing the famous Emerging Democratic Majority that did not, in fact, write off the white working class; Brownstein's “coalition of the ascendent” seeming to gel with Obama's election; how Obamacare didn't help the working class enough; the 2008 crash and recession; how Obama was “the last New Democrat” and failed to strengthen labor laws; how he enforced the border; how Hillary deployed identity politics to her peril in 2016; Trump capitalizing on trade and immigration; how even John endorsed the feeling behind “Make America Great Again”; the rise of BLM; Wendy Davis' campaign as a harbinger for Latino support on border enforcement; Trump's growing support among non-white voters; how the GOP became the party of the working class; how Biden hasn't changed Dems into the normie party; his industrial policy, IRA and CHIPS; being mum on boosting energy production; his main weaknesses of age and inflation; the dearth of patriotism on the left; how blacks are a moderating force within the Dems; Asians drifting toward the GOP on education and crime; the war in Israel and Gaza; how Ukraine could be a big issue next election; the GOP weakness on abortion; Trump's “vermin” and enemies list; and who could replace Biden among the Dems or independents like RFK Jr.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Matthew Crawford on anti-humanism and social control, David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In her new book Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon explores the history and science behind the development of the female sex. In this episode, Bohannon explains to Róisín Ingle why the frequent omission of female bodies from scientific research inspired her to write the book, the ‘superpowers' that she says only females are born with and how the advancement of gynaecology and midwifery helped drive civilisation forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? And why the hell are we just finding out about it now? That's today's big question, and my guest is Cat Bohannon. Cat is the author of the incredible new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution”. Cat is also a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative in cognition. Cat's essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American, Non Required Reading, The Georgia Review, Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. Look, for a very long time, scientists ignored everything about the female body, except for how to have sex with it. And even that, they barely understood (and still don't). They didn't think or care to ask helpful questions like: How did we get here? What else about the female biological body is different from the traditional male body? Why might those differences matter? And how might they have gotten us to where we are today, atop the animal kingdom, for better or worse, and a huge outlier in about 500 different ways from even our closest primate cousins? Why are we so weird? Cat's book asks all of these questions, and I genuinely cannot wait for you to listen to this conversation, and read the book.-----------Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.comNew here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.-----------INI Book Club:Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katharine BooFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Read Cat's book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"Keep up with Cat's workOur World in Data: Life Expectancy Support the Trevor ProjectFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.comSupport our work and become a Member at importantnotimportant.com/upgradeFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpSubscribe to our YouTube channelFollow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmettEdited by

Sarah Silverman guest hosts The Daily Show for a second time this week. She discusses her lawsuit against AI companies and addresses why it is necessary for artists to protect their work. Also, Sarah sits with Cat Bohannon to discuss how science has overlooked the female body and Margo Price to break down how psychedelics helped her write her latest album, "Strays."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comGraeme is a foreign correspondent, and one of the most brilliant men I've ever met. He's been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2006 and a lecturer in political science at Yale since 2014. He's also been a contributing editor to The New Republic and books editor of Pacific Standard, and he's the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Graeme was in Israel when we spoke earlier this week. It's — shall we say — a lively conversation, covering every taboo in the Israel/Palestine question.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the ways Hamas is more evil than even ISIS, and on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in an upper-middle-class home in Dallas; how his parents gave him the travel bug, which he took to the extreme; why the challenges of travel are often the best parts; how time slows down abroad; Paul Theroux and Emerson on travel; going to Afghanistan in 2001 at age 21; why ISIS hated the Taliban and considered them non-Muslims; the caliphate; the easy divisibility of Islamists because of doctrinal differences; Israelis leaving Gaza in 2005; a Nakba in the West Bank; Bibi opposing a two-state solution; the savagery and evil glee of 10/7; the rank corruption and greed of the Hamas government; the dismal economy of Gaza; the terrible conundrum of killing Hamas among human shields; Fallujah vs. Gaza; the fanatical settlers; how the Orthodox right doesn't start tech companies or join the military; Kushner funding the settlements; Trump and the Abraham Accords; Graeme disagreeing with me over the Accords; the protests over judicial reform; the Israelis who oppose settlements; AIPAC and the dearth of US pushback on Israel; the Dem rift over the Gaza war; far-left denialism over 10/7; destroying the posters of hostages; and the upcoming mass protest in London on 11/11.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Matthew Crawford, and Jennifer Burns. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Cat Bohannon about the evolutionary history of females. They discuss her background, limited female subjects in many research papers, “morgie” and how milk became important, other features of milk such as bonding, attachment, and the “let-down” reflex. They also talk about the different types of wombs for monotremes, marsupials, and placentals, placenta and the menstrual cycle, and risks of pregnancy. They also talk about the grandmother hypothesis, future of females, and many more topics. Cat Bohannon is a research and author with her PhD from Columbia University. She has studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, and other outlets. She is the author of the book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Website: https://www.catbohannon.com/Twitter: @catbohannon Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe

Sarah Silverman covers RFK Jr.'s three-way race with Biden and Trump, orcas sinking another yacht, and Ronny Chieng chimes in on WeWork's bankruptcy. Smoking pot is now legal in NYC, but is it still cool? Sarah hits the streets to find out how New Yorkers have changed their weed habits and checks out one of NYC's newest licensed dispensaries. Plus, Cat Bohannon, researcher and New York Times Bestselling author of "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution,” stops by to discuss some of the crazy ways the female body has evolved to survive reproduction, why the female body has historically been left out of biological and medical research, and how men can actually live longer, healthier lives without testicles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comPamela is a journalist. For nine years she was the editor of The New York Times Book Review, where she also hosted a weekly podcast, and she's now a columnist for the Opinion section of the Times where she writes about culture, ideas, society, language and politics. She's the author of eight books, most recently 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. We had a fun chat about a whole host of topics.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on how computers are killing off deep reading, and the growing rate of anorexia among girls — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in NYC and Long Island with divorced parents; her mom wrote ad copy and her dad was a contractor; Pamela was the only girl among seven brothers; she always wanted to be a writer; studied history at Brown; considered a PhD but didn't want to focus on an “ism”; spent a year alone in northern Thailand with little tech — “probably best decision of my life”; how a career is not a linear path, especially in your 20s; the benefits of very little Internet; how media today is homogenized across the Western world; the publishing industry; Jon Stewart ambushing me on his show; how non-natives often see a country better than its natives; Tocqueville; how professors have stopped assigning full books; the assault on the humanities; Reed College and Hum 110; the war in Israel and Gaza; the ignorance and hateful ideology against Israel; Jewish liberals waking up to wokeness; how Israeli officials are botching their PR; “the death of Israeli competence”; gender and trans ideology; how gays and trans people are far more persecuted outside the West; Iran's program of sex changes; what priests and trans activists have in common; Thatcher a much better feminist than Clinton; the decline of magazines and the blogosphere; The Weekly Dish; and Pamela defending the NYT against my barbs.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Matthew Crawford, and McKay Coppins. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comDavid is a long-time columnist for the New York Times. He's also a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR's “All Things Considered” and NBC's “Meet the Press.” Plus he teaches at Yale. His new book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on how to be a better friend to suffering loved ones, and how loneliness leads to authoritarianism — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: his upbringing in Greenwich Village among intellectuals and gays; his beatnik Jewish parents; his father the NYU professor and his mother with a PhD from Columbia; “not the most emotionally intimate” family; how people shouldn't separate thinking from emotions; the French Enlightenment; Jungian/Burkean conservatism; Hume; nationalism and King Charles III; Orwell's “The Lion and the Unicorn”; Disraeli; conservatism and the current GOP as a nihilist cult; Isaiah Berlin; how you're an “illuminator” or “diminisher” when meeting new people; how most don't ask questions and instead broadcast themselves; Trump; how Trump supporters are “hard to hate up close”; Hamas and Israel; Hannah Arendt; how to encounter a super woke person; arguments as a form of respect; suppressing your ego for better conversations; Taylor Swift on narcissism; suicidal friends; the distortion of reality when depressed; the AIDS crisis and losing friends; marriage equality; one changing in midlife; Oakeshott; overprotective parents; the value of play; Gen Z's low social trust; boys growing up with poor flirting skills; casual dating and ghosting; the historical amnesia and unhappiness of young gays; the tension between individualism and belonging; extroverts vs. introverts; how Jesus disarmed people; and the loving kindness of Buddhism.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, NYT columnist Pamela Paul, and the authors of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? — John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Later on: Cat Bohannon and McKay Coppins. Please send any guest recs, pod dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Guest: Cat Bohannon is a researcher specialized in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. The post How The Female Body Drives Evolution appeared first on KPFA.

Jane Mulkerrins is still sitting in for Fi, but who doesn't love a bit of Jane²? They chat well fitted bras, sexuality and brush up against book shelves... Plus, researcher and author Cat Bohannon discusses her book 'Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution'. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Eve Salusbury Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comSpencer is a writer and podcaster. He's currently an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the host of the “Young Heretics” podcast. He's also the author of How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and the editor of Gateway to the Stoics. You can follow his latest writing on Substack.For two clips of our convo — on finding God in the humanities, and why so many gays throughout history have been drawn to the Church — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Spencer's upbringing in NYC and London and elsewhere; his rigorous schooling in Britain; his dad the prominent novelist; his lapsed Catholic mom and lapsed Jewish dad; Spencer as a teen converting to Christianity — “conversational, not doctrinal”; coming to terms with his homosexuality; Yale for undergrad and Oxford for a PhD in the Classics; his initial calling as an actor; learning Latin and ancient Greek; how the Greeks had two words for forgiveness; the Gospels; Aquinas; the Scientific Revolution; how evolution is compatible with Christianity; James Madison; Tocqueville; the suffering that brings one closer to God; the waning of both the humanities and religion in American life; climate doomerism; postmodernism; Judith Butler; the transing of gender-dysphoric kids; Alasdair MacIntyre; and how genetics is “necessary but not sufficient” for seeking truth.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Brooks on his new book How to Know a Person,” his fellow NYT columnist Pamela Paul, and the authors of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? — John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Also: David Leonhardt, Cat Bohannon, and McKay Coppins.Have a question you want me to ask one of those future guests? Email dishpub@gmail.com, and please put the question in the subject line. Send any guest recs, pod dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In this episode, meet researcher Cat Bohannon, children's writer Jacqueline Woodson, and puberty expert and writer Vanessa Kroll Bennett. Press play to hear how these authors radically celebrate the human experience, from the processes of the human body to the relationships we share with each other. Eve by Cat Bohannon https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227568/eve-by-cat-bohannon/ Remember Us by Jacqueline Woodson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535797/remember-us-by-jacqueline-woodson/ This is So Awkward by Cara Natterson, MD and Vanessa Kroll Bennett https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/723035/this-is-so-awkward-by-cara-natterson-md-and-vanessa-kroll-bennett/

The writer and academic Emma Dabiri encourages unruliness in her latest book, Disobedient Bodies. She puts the origins of western beauty ideals under the spotlight and explores ways to rebel against and subvert the current orthodoxy. The book is accompanied by an exhibition, The Cult of Beauty, at the Wellcome Collection from 26 October 2023 to 28 April 2024. It was in the Wellcome's archive that the filmmaker Carol Morley came across the works and writings of the artist Audrey Amiss. In her new film, Typist Artist Pirate King, Morley creates an imaginative tribute to an unjustly neglected and misunderstood artist. The norm in the world of medical research has been the male body, but in her latest work the scientist and author Cat Bohannon focuses exclusively on women. In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 million Years of Human Revolution she looks at everything from birth to death. Producer: Katy Hickman

This week we smash the patriarchy with interviews with multidisciplinary artist, poet, and author Mimi Tempestt on her new collection of poetry, "The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals" and writer and researcher Cat Bohannon on her book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Catch up on the week's most compelling interviews in 30 minutes or less.

This shouldn't shock any woman in the world: most medical research is based on male bodies. The effects of that reach out across our societies, leaving women behind not only in medicine but in so many other parts of our cultures. Cat Bohannon is working to change that—painting a picture of the evolutionary history of women in her stunning new book “EVE: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution.” Cat is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alyssa-milano-sorry-not-sorry/message

Musician Allison Russell talks and sings about the physical and sexual abuse she endured from her racist adoptive father — and about how she learned she was worthy of being loved. Her new album is The Returner.David Bianculli reviews Wes Anderson's adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories, now on Netflix. Also, Cat Bohannon talks about her new book Eve, which explores the development of the female body-- from its ability to produce milk to why women menstruate — and why women's bodies for so long have been left out of biological and medical research.

Musician Allison Russell talks and sings about the physical and sexual abuse she endured from her racist adoptive father — and about how she learned she was worthy of being loved. Her new album is The Returner.David Bianculli reviews Wes Anderson's adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories, now on Netflix. Also, Cat Bohannon talks about her new book Eve, which explores the development of the female body-- from its ability to produce milk to why women menstruate — and why women's bodies for so long have been left out of biological and medical research.

How many vaginas does it take to understand the role of evolutionary biology into modern social environments? On One Bad Mother, two. Maybe. Cat Bohannon, researcher and author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, joins Biz to talk fancy miscarriages, chimpanzees, and the oeuvre of Ridley Scott.Get your copy of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution wherever books are sold.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of MaximumFun.org. Go to MaximumFun.org/join to become a member! This week, we're sponsored by Factor. Go to FactorMeals.com/BADMOTHER50 and use code BADMOTHER50 to get 50% off.Share a personal or commercial message on the show! Details at MaximumFun.org/Jumbotron.Visit our Linktree for our website, merch, and more! https://linktr.ee/onebadmotherYou can suggest a topic or a guest for an upcoming show by sending an email to onebadmother@maximumfun.org.Show MusicSummon the Rawk, Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com)Ones and Zeros, Awesome, Beehive SessionsMom Song, Adira Amram, Hot Jams For TeensTelephone, Awesome, Beehive SessionsMama Blues, Cornbread Ted and the ButterbeansMental Health Resources:Therapy for Black Girls – Therapyforblackgirls.comDr. Jessica Clemmens – https://www.askdrjess.comBLH Foundation – borislhensonfoundation.orgThe Postpartum Support International Warmline - 1-800-944-4773 (1-800-944-4PPD)The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Helpline - 1-800-662-4357 (1-800-662-HELP)Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call or chat. They are here to help anyone in crisis. Dial 988 for https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org and there is a chat option on the website.Crisis Text Line: Text from anywhere in the USA (also Canada and the UK) to text with a trained counselor. A real human being.USA text 741741Canada text 686868UK text 85258Website: https://www.crisistextline.orgNational Sexual Assault: Call 800.656.HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.https://www.rainn.orgNational Domestic Violence Hotline: https://www.thehotline.org/help/Our advocates are available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) in more than 200 languages. All calls are free and confidential.They suggest that if you are a victim and cannot seek help, ask a friend or family member to call for you.Teletherapy Search: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/online-counseling

What does it really mean biologically to be a woman? That's one of the central questions Cat Bohannon explores in her new book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon makes the case that until recently scientists have effectively ignored women: the majority of subjects in clinical drug trials are male, and too many researchers still mistakenly assume that sex differences are mainly about sex organs, rather than a panoply of biological and physiological features that evolved in the female body over millions of years. We talk to Bohannon about her new book, at once an evolutionary history and a call to action to “tear down the male norm and put better science in its place.” Guests: Cat Bohannon, researcher; author, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"

Cat Bohannon, researcher and author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution  (Knopf, 2023), uses the latest research into women's bodies to recast the origins of humanity. →Event: Cat Bohannon appears in conversation with Claudia Dreifus at Book Culture (112th and Bway in NYC) at 7pm on Tuesday, October 3rd. 

Cat Bohannon, a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, discusses why gynecology was the most important human invention, why not conducting medical research on females is dangerous, and how the female body drives evolution. Cat's new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Researcher and writer, Cat Bohannon, discusses her new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." (1:03)Ultra runner and Park City resident Jared Campbell joins the show to discuss the READY Speaker Series which focuses on highlighting, empowering, and inspiring athletes. On Oct. 14th at the Park City Community Church, award-winning endurance athlete Jennifer Pharr Davis will speak. She holds a record on the Appalachian Trail, averaging 47 miles a day to complete the 2,091 miles of the trail in 46 days. Jules Campanelli joins Jared to discuss. (29:10)