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Hello and welcome to The Premise. I'm Jeniffer Thompson and I'm Chad Thompson, and we are here today with a very special author indeed. Susan Osborne is a PhD and award winning author, educator, and cultural critic. She is the author of Surviving the Wreck and Elizabeth Bowen New Critical Perspectives and director of the Writing Center of Princeton. Today we will be talking about her most recent book, She's Such a Liar Incest Knowledge and Power a manifesto.
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Susan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate your invitation. Absolutely. And this book is really a tour de force, which is one of the blurbs that you got from from a particular author of An Accident of Hope, The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. That's done. I'm going to totally butcher her name scores.
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Yep. You got it. Close enough. But yes, she is a scholar
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who's very interested in trauma studies. And of course, Sexton had been incest by her father and
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has written poems
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about her
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experience of her father. And so her poems are quite powerful. Wow.
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And of course, she was writing in the 1960s. And so they're written in code.
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But that would be the way Sexton did things anyway. Yeah, I feel like that's a pattern, though. I feel like a lot of women in particular, when they talk about incest, specifically incest by their father, they tend to talk in code because we don't really talk about it, and it comes out in a lot of poetry. I mean, maybe as of late there are more memoirs that are being published.
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But I mean, for a long time it was always in code. You weren't supposed to talk about it. But even Jeniffer, the memoirs that are coming out after not using the word incest, often they're using the word sexual abuse or sexual molestation. And one of my purposes was to use the word incest, because it's important that we begin to use the word incest, because if we don't use it, it's almost as if it doesn't exist.
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And that really is the point of this book. And I want to repeat the title because I think it's important. She's such a liar. Incest, Knowledge and Power a manifesto. So talk to us about this title and how you came to use this particular combination of words.
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Well, she's such a liar is or some version of it is usually the first thing
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that a woman is accused of when she accuses a man
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of sexual violence.
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So
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whether it's she's crazy,
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whether it's we've heard this often enough of the past couple of years, it's a hoax.
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She's out to get him. It's exactly.
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These are all
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ways
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of discrediting
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the woman. And I think it's important that we remember that this discrediting
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is not accidental. It's part of the systems machinery of disbelief that has been developed over the millennia to keep women shut up and to maintain
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conventional gender hierarchies and men's sexual entitlement.
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And this book really is about the patriarchy almost more than it is about incest. Well, I would say rather it's a both.
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At its core, it is an analysis of credibility, power, knowledge,
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the ways that.
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The legal, medical, political and cultural institutions have determined what counts and what doesn't, and whose voices are heard and whose voices are not heard. But it is also about the persistent disbelief minimization and concealment of incest. So I think overall, you could say that it investigates the ways patriarchal systems has historically regulated and subordinated girls and women through the control of knowledge, credibility and bodily autonomy.
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But it was very important for me to write about incest specifically as well.
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When I I've been dwelling
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on this book for decades
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because I
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simply as the more I taught, the more I lived, the more outraged I became at our cultures and difference toward sexual violence against girls and women. And I discovered that incest is the most common crime of sexual violence. Conservative data indicate that at least 1 in 6 girls will be insisted by their fathers or father surrogates before their age.
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Nine. And that's
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and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
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We know that fewer than 10% of incest crimes are ever reported. And so if we put that in perspective, if you think for a minute, if if 1 in 6 prepubescent girls under age nine, okay, woke up one morning with a disfiguring facial condition, we would be outraged.
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We would do something about it. We would try to remedy the problem, but we see no similar outrage when it comes to the prevalence of incest. And I kept wondering, why are we not talking about incest during the 70s when we started talking about, you know, date rape and
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slowly,
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you know, phrases that described men's sexual violence were entering
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the cultural vocabulary.
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There was one omission and that was incest. And so as I read and researched and continued my life, I wondered, why is this? Why is this subject so silenced, and why is that what? I mean, you've spent a lot of time researching this, so yeah,
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a long time researching it.
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What what we have to remember is that we live in.
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A masculine society where one of the primary goals has been the subordination of women in order to preserve male power. And so. Incest.
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Really speaks directly to the the system, the patriarchal system
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that is responsible for producing, promoting and perpetuating sexual violence. So incest, the our knowledge of incest had to be suppressed. It was going to be had to be suppressed according to those in charge of our culture, those in charge of
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what we know and what we don't know. It was going if knowledge of incest, the prevalence of incest was exposed,
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it was going to ballocks the whole system.
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And may I take a moment to share an anecdote with you that I think is illuminating about Freud? Please do. Yeah. So in the early 19th century, going on the mid 19th century, young Sigmund Freud
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was learning about neurology and psychiatry, and he spent his early years after he had developed with many women's health, the so-called talking cure.
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He listened primarily to
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middle and upper middle class women, report stories of having been insisted at the hands of their fathers or stepfathers. And Freud was surprised
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by a couple of things the consistency of these stories and the number of these stories. New patient after new patient after new patient told him the same story. And he finally, after he had collected enough data,
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he presented his findings at the University of Vienna and
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he expected.
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He was so convinced of the rightness of the evidence, of the truth, of the evidence that had been reported to him, that, of course, he expected to be hailed a hero. But instead his ideas were met with silence. And as he was leaving the the auditorium, the then head of the Department of Psychiatry warned him against publishing what the department had called fairy tales.
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Unknown
Wow. Yeah. And Fred was mortified. So what that indicates to us is that clearly physicians, one of the great institutional powers in our culture medicine, feared that taking incest seriously could undermine their emerging authority in the field. And so, in the face of the the rebuke that he experienced, Freud went home and after months of sulking,
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he renounced his, as he called them, erroneous ideas.
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He said he had misinterpreted his data. He revised his theory
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in his theory. He lambasted lambasted daughters for lying. She's such a liar. Write about their innocent fathers. And he renamed his theory the seduction theory. Interesting daughters had seduced their innocent fathers. He went again to the University of Vienna, and Prevention presented his revised theory. And this time, instead of giving him the boot, the professional society that he longed to be part of embraced him.
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The voices of those who were insisted were silenced. And there you have it knowledge, power and silence.
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I think the the silent moment we're experiencing right now, experiencing right now is important. Did you think? Yeah, I think so, too, because I think you and I are,
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are experiencing.
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I don't know if this a word, but. Appleman. Yeah. Total total surprise. I mean, every time I think about that,
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I'm blown away.
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See, when I, when I hear that, I. And I look back through the entirety of human history, I'm like, oh, that tracks. That sounds about right.
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A Pullman is a word, by the way. It's the state of being shocked, dismayed or brought to depression and discouragement. Yeah. Yeah. Well sums it up. There we have it. You know, I, I
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want to tell our listeners, you know, that when you read a title with incest knowledge and power in the title, I mean, most people are turned off.
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They're like, oh, God, I don't want to read about incest, but this book is not actually about the act of incest. Like there are no descriptions of incest. There are no examples per se from like a someone you spoke with. This is more about the history of how women have been silenced. Like the example you just gave. But I also want to add, because hugging about such a really dark subject, your book is actually really funny.
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Let me rephrase that. It's not funny. It made me laugh out loud in several places because of your wit and your dark humor. The way that you look at it with this wry like almost. You're so sarcastic that it's a very quick read and it's so illuminating. I learned so many things that made me go, whoa! You know, you open your eyes to how how
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are people suppressed?
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And you so clearly explain how we have gotten here. Then I hope people will want to read this book. If you're a feminist and you care about what's happening in America right now, I want you to read this book. But, Susan, so there's two things I want to ask you. And they're different. And but I want to make sure we get to both of them.
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You experienced something similar to Freud when you were in college, and I want to talk about that. But also let's start here. Was it important to you to make this book really accessible and have those moments that made people laugh? It was because I was writing about a dark reality
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that
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is very difficult for many people to approach, especially when you use the name for the behavior and don't use a euphemism.
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So, for example, incest is sometimes referred to as an ace or adverse childhood experience. Wow. No no no no no. Yeah, right. Come on.
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No no no no no no no no. Right.
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Those bland anodyne. You are not going to get us anywhere. And I was determined to use the word that describes the behavior in the hope that other people
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would, would gain the courage to start using a word that the system has made taboo.
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I mean, incest is no dirtier, a cleaner a word than any other word,
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but it has become taboo
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by a system that doesn't want to
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people to know about the behavior. But the humor I felt writers have always used humor as a way of dealing with difficult realities.
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And we see that in cartoons about Trump all the time.
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You know, every day. Now,
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for me, humor isn't wasn't a distraction from the themes in the book. Rather, it was another way of illuminating them, because sometimes I felt a sharp observation. Let's say you're a ride joke exposed an uncomfortable truth even more effectively than my
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argumentation did. Sure. So it was a way of
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not just underscoring, but illuminating some of these darker truths.
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When you were in college, you wanted to write about incest, and I forget if you were doing your PhD at that point. But tell us about that experience and how it affected you.
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When I was
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well, I've been working on incest for a very long time, and I,
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I'm, I have so many incest stories from graduate school
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where I was told to shut up.
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I give you a few
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that I think I can summarize very succinctly.
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I was in a Victorian literature class, and the men in my department were
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almost to a man known for their misogyny.
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But in this particular novel,
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I saw that there was an incest theme coded within the language and the behaviors, and I went running to my mentor, and I was thrilled because, no, I went.
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I had gone to the library first. Nobody had ever written about this. And I said to her, I'm writing my final paper on incest in Gaskell's novel This and That for George Levine. Oh no you're not. Go back to your classroom and get your A.
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That was basically shut up, right. You know. Right. And
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then I
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worked with a feminist scholar, well-known poet named Alicia Striker.
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And we were studying Sexton's poetry, which I, we talked about earlier, and I wanted to write about some of the
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incest that was coded in her poetry and, and
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off Stryker gave me the okay to do it. So I did, and I sent it to a well-known feminist journal at that time, and they accepted it immediately. But when they
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sent there,
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by the way, I'm terribly old when they sent their letter back to me.
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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Pre email. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
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They said we there was a four sentence paragraph and they wanted me to rearrange the sentences in the paragraph. And I called my older brother who was a scholar, and I said what does this mean. Does this mean they've accepted it? And he said, that's all they want. Rewrite the paragraph and send it back to them. They they've accepted it.
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Unknown
So I, I rewrote the paragraph and sent it back to them. And within two weeks I got a letter back from the editor in chief saying, how can we trust anything that anyone says who can't spell the word plagiarism? And I had misspelled plagiarism. And so these were various ways of telling me to shut up. And that I will say is,
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you know, has stuck with me being told since I was in graduate school.
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Shut up, shut up, shut up. Don't talk about this. Don't talk about this.
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You're going to get in trouble.
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I was told that repeatedly when I started research the book. Aren't you afraid of getting in trouble? I said, what kind of trouble? Why do you think that we're okay with talking about sexual violence, but we can't talk about incest.
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Well, as I said, it's become taboo ized. And
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the powers that be, the, if you will, epistemology, stakeholders. In other words, those who control knowledge and power in our society don't want the the word out. And I don't think it's that we really talk that much about sexual violence. I mean, you'll remember that I said one of my impetus is for writing the book was my outrage that we didn't we don't talk enough about sexual violence.
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If if we know that at least 81% of the female population
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has been victim of sexual violence at least once in their lifetime, why is this not headline news? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And a fear that if the father falls, everyone falls. I mean, I'm a little confused by it. Yes, because exposure of of incest
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can ruin a family if
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it's a traditional heterosexual family and the mother is unemployed or underemployed.
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She could lose her her means
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by which she is supporting herself and the children.
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And so it really
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that's just one example of the way exposure of incest
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can really have
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a very,
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to me, constructive, damaging ripple effect, because I do think that we need to change the system in radical ways in order to, to make it
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the system more equal for women, in order to give women real opportunities for equal personhood, and certainly for control over their own bodily autonomy.
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Unknown
Absolutely. Well, and it makes me want to talk about women's rights. I mean, I think a lot of young people today might be surprised and maybe, maybe they know, but I think they might be surprised to know that, you know, before the 1960s, women weren't even allowed to have a bank account, and they certainly weren't allowed to have a credit card until, I think, the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, when women were finally allowed to have credit and from their able to have businesses, it's like it's it hasn't been that long that women are able to, you know, have autonomy to care for their families and themselves.
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This is very new. Right, right. And and young women. Remember I was teaching mostly 18 to 24 year olds. Young women are flawed. That I spent my
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high school years sewing armpit shields into my school blouses.
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Tell us more. Where. Armpit shields. Yeah, exactly. Chad, where have you been?
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Under a rock. Girls were not allowed to show perspiration stains. Basically, we were not allowed to sweat. Oh my gosh. Wow. And so
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I had to tack these. They looked like what my mother would call falsies, but like a bra.
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Something you'd stick in your bra
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to make your breasts look larger, and you would carefully tack them under your
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the armpits of your blouses.
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And then when they got stinky, you'd snip them out and wash them and dry them and sew them back in. Oh my God of shoulder pads. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And and that was 50 years ago. But you're right, Jeniffer. The idea for most young women that a woman could not get a credit card or buy property. Just a few years ago is is always a surprise.
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I think we like to think of history as progressive, but the progress in terms of women's rights has never been linear, and every major advance has been accompanied by periods of resistance, backlash and attempts to reassert older social arrangements.
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And we see that pattern over and over again in history. It doesn't mean that the progress isn't real. It is.
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As you said, women today possess rights and opportunities that would have been unimaginable for women throughout history when my mother got her first credit card, I remember
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she felt new power. Sure. And she gave me my first and probably only feminist lesson that I got from her. When you get one of these, pay off the balance every month, never go into debt because she felt the right to have a credit card was so precarious, and that right could be taken away from her any time.
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Unknown
Interesting. So. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry I cut you off. No, no, I was just going to say so. It really wasn't about like, you know, being in debt is bad. It was more like, if you abuse this, the right will be taken away from us. The powers that be. Yeah. Interesting will take it away from you. And I think this is.
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This is why, you know, a gain seems secure. Such as the right to hold a credit card or abortion. But those gains generally become contested or
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often become contested. Which is why each generation finds itself renegotiating questions of women's equality, autonomy and power. So right now, for example, we're going through a particularly ugly moment. Well, you can say that for some.
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Unknown
Yeah.
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Okay. Right now we're going. I mean, honest to God. Yeah. You know, there aren't words for it,
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but I don't see this moment as evidence that we're moving backward. Rather, the way I would talk about it is to say that it's another chapter in the ongoing struggle over who gets a voice and who doesn't, and who has agency, and whose interests are reflected in our social and political institutions.
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Unknown
Indeed, indeed. Well, that's optimism I wasn't expecting today.
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Believe it or not, folks, there's a
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optimism within this book
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about something that I think you know, the thing about this book is it does provide knowledge. I mean, there are so many examples throughout history that just really, like I said, open your eyes and that understanding of what is happening. Like the manipulation behind it is what helps us bring about change once we understand.
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Unknown
Well, I'm I'm hoping Jeniffer, that the most that.
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Let me say this,
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I hope the book would educate, but I also hoped that the book would, in some small way empower readers. And by empower, empower as a word we use so often, we don't need to know what. It's almost a throw away, I agree. Yeah, right. But to me, it always meant
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I wanted students to be more aware of their options for negotiating a smothering system
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that stifles and defines us.
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And so in this book,
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I try also to suggest that there are a number of ways that we can make our society more aware of the prevalence of incest. And one of those ways is by reframing the discussion.
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We don't talk about when we read reports, or the rare time we
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here about incest. We we don't.
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We don't focus on the perpetrator or the system that permits
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the behavior to happen. And I think that the we have to ask ourselves a number of questions. Why is the woman, as a victim, such a beloved cultural stereotype in our in our world that we don't want to give it up?
00;31;06;14 - 00;31;11;27
Unknown
And why is no one talking about the perpetrator?
00;31;11;29 - 00;31;16;12
Unknown
So that would be one way
00;31;16;15 - 00;31;20;19
Unknown
if we started talking about the perpetrator
00;31;20;22 - 00;31;22;05
Unknown
as well as,
00;31;22;12 - 00;31;31;12
Unknown
you know, not to dismiss the private personal tragedy that has happened. But we need also
00;31;31;15 - 00;31;35;16
Unknown
to contextualize that conversation.
00;31;35;19 - 00;31;58;19
Unknown
And we need to talk about the system that permits this behavior to to take place. And the other way that I, I think we were talking about language earlier and.
00;31;58;21 - 00;32;11;23
Unknown
Language is is not neutral. Language determines what we can see and what we can't see, what remains hidden from our view. And.
00;32;11;25 - 00;32;15;02
Unknown
If you think about it, we
00;32;15;05 - 00;32;29;22
Unknown
and I can't underscore the importance of naming things. You cannot talk about anything without it having a name. Famous anecdote about Gloria Steinem
00;32;29;29 - 00;32;40;09
Unknown
when she was asked by a young student, what did you call date rape before you had the work for the phrase date rape? And she responded, just life. Oh, wow.
00;32;40;15 - 00;32;42;10
Unknown
Yeah. Right. Okay.
00;32;42;10 - 00;33;07;27
Unknown
And and it was just just life. And if you think about it, we have the name. A name for someone who reads. He's a rapist. We have a name for somebody who sexually harasses. He's a sexual harasser. We have the name for somebody who sexually traffics is a sexual trafficker. And Jeffrey Epstein, by the way, is also a rapist.
00;33;07;29 - 00;33;44;00
Unknown
But we don't have a name for the father who sexually exploits his daughters or daughter for years. In other words, linguistically speaking, he doesn't exist, right? Right. We don't. If we don't name him, he is eclipsed from our site. You could actually say it's not too far to say that the absence, the linguistic absence, harbors and abets a criminal.
00;33;44;02 - 00;34;09;11
Unknown
We don't even have a verb that describes how his behavior is different from other sexual violence behaviors. And this matters really big time when it comes to revealing the truth about the prevalence of incest. Because the linguistic omission is a form of social concealment used to shelter perpetrators from scrutiny.
00;34;09;11 - 00;34;33;15
Unknown
And so, as I say in the book, it's very important that we introduce not just really get comfortable talking about the behavior incest in the word incest, but that we signed a name for the father who sexually victimized his daughter, perhaps for years.
00;34;33;15 - 00;34;36;29
Unknown
And I suggest we use the word incest door
00;34;37;02 - 00;34;50;12
Unknown
and that we come up with a verb. The verb that I introduce in the book is to incest. He insisted her for over ten years
00;34;50;15 - 00;35;09;24
Unknown
because, as Gloria Steinem said, without language, it's just life. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to me that the word ancestor, like, literally doesn't exist. It's not a standard English word.
00;35;09;25 - 00;35;26;02
Unknown
And, you know, it's mind blowing. It is mind blowing. In fact, when I was typing in my notes for this, my my system kept auto correcting to investor. I was like, no, that's yeah. It's not a word. Yeah. You know, Jeniffer, after all these years.
00;35;26;04 - 00;35;39;20
Unknown
My systems will not accept insisted or ancestor. I mean, how many times have I written those words over the last 4 to 6 years? Right. And
00;35;39;20 - 00;35;55;12
Unknown
now the system is not going to accept it. But I think it's really, really important to think about language and etymology because it does affect how we view things. You know, what we call something and how it feels
00;35;55;15 - 00;36;01;00
Unknown
affects all of it, affects every single opinion we have.
00;36;01;01 - 00;36;25;15
Unknown
And which is why, you know, in politics, the. Yeah. Come on Chad. So the one that gets me the most and I'm sorry, I'm about to wander off on a tangent. Is officer involved shooting? Right. Oh, who's the one with the fucking gun here? Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a form of manipulation that you don't actually realize is happening.
00;36;25;15 - 00;37;00;12
Unknown
And words can make you feel safe. They can make you feel curious. They can make you feel unsafe, you know, and and this in Chad's example, it just minimizes. That's right. What has happened. And that's the point right? That is the point. That is exactly the point. I imagine you pouring through all of these old texts and manuscripts and throughout, you know, Victorian history and what have you, and looking for all of the coded language.
00;37;00;14 - 00;37;06;14
Unknown
Yeah. Oh, of which there's a lot. Right. One of my, one of my favorites
00;37;06;21 - 00;37;14;27
Unknown
used in. Let me get my facts straight here. I believe the early 19th century
00;37;14;29 - 00;37;36;18
Unknown
was non accidental injury for incest. Wow. Say that again. That's a little tongue twister and non accidental injury. Wow. It's not something. Have you encountered. I'm sure you've been. Maybe you've been online a little bit these days.
00;37;36;20 - 00;37;46;13
Unknown
Have you. Have you encountered what the kids are doing to to get past like AI sensors on TikTok and Instagram and what have you
00;37;46;17 - 00;37;49;01
Unknown
know? I've tried to avoid that.
00;37;49;01 - 00;37;52;17
Unknown
Tell me. So they're using like, coded language. Like so instead of
00;37;52;23 - 00;38;00;29
Unknown
porn they say corn instead of rape, they say grape, and instead of pedophile they say PDF file.
00;38;01;02 - 00;38;01;21
Unknown
Wow.
00;38;01;25 - 00;38;02;03
Unknown
Oh,
00;38;02;03 - 00;38;07;07
Unknown
I'm trying to remember some of the other ones, but yeah, it's like they've got their own coded language to get past
00;38;07;07 - 00;38;20;13
Unknown
the censors on TikTok and what have you. Well, so someday in the future, we're going to have all these anthropologists sifting through our hard drives, going, what? Which brings us back to, like, the very first thing we started talking about.
00;38;20;13 - 00;38;48;18
Unknown
When people talk about incest, it's done in a coded way. It's in poetry. It's hidden beneath the text. If you're looking for it or if you're paying attention, you might see it. And that feels like rebellion in general, when anytime there's a fascist dictator, you know, and the people are not allowed to speak poorly of the dictator, you know, people are going to do it anyway in a coded way.
00;38;48;21 - 00;38;50;16
Unknown
And people who don't,
00;38;50;22 - 00;38;53;25
Unknown
as we've seen in the Trump administration,
00;38;54;01 - 00;39;13;10
Unknown
get punished. I want to go back to talking about feminism, because it's interesting to me that anytime we have a wave of feminism, there's always a backlash, and it's typically heralded or driven by other women. And I think a good example today is the trad wife movement.
00;39;13;13 - 00;39;21;09
Unknown
But I don't see that.
00;39;21;12 - 00;39;24;16
Unknown
I don't see that, first of all, as
00;39;24;19 - 00;40;17;07
Unknown
an unusual phenomenon or an anomaly. I see it more as expected. We've seen countless iterations of the trad wife over the centuries, and to me, Jeniffer and Chad, the way I see it, it's just another example of the complex and sometimes conflicting ways that women, all women, Jeniffer, including you and me, attempt to negotiate our own agency, identity and power in a system that overwhelmingly excludes and suppresses our voices.
00;40;17;10 - 00;40;42;28
Unknown
I agree, and it's it's interesting to me, you know, when I see a woman who's in a situation that she's in a good situation, she's happy, she loves her husband, he makes good money, she's a stay at home mom. She loves her kids like she has to believe in the system that she has created for herself. Because if she starts to disagree with it, things are going to get difficult for her and she's going to lose everything.
00;40;42;29 - 00;40;47;25
Unknown
And I see that a lot, and I don't. I think it's a Pontius in a lot of this.
00;40;47;28 - 00;41;08;28
Unknown
And the trad wife movement in some ways might just be people wanting attention, and it's a topic that they want to get behind. Who knows? Could be, you know, in this era of social media, it's really hard to say. Well, I did want to talk about, you know, you've seen several waves of feminism and what do you.
00;41;08;29 - 00;41;40;00
Unknown
Do you think that we're in or where are we now as a culture with regard to feminism? As I said earlier, we're in a provisional moment. You know, we could say that the stakes for female equality might seem higher right now because of all the noise in the room, all the information that comes at us every second while we're sleeping, while we're dreaming.
00;41;40;02 - 00;41;51;20
Unknown
And of course, because of the actions taken by the current administration and those who are determined to tick off every
00;41;51;20 - 00;41;57;28
Unknown
chore on project 25 2025 list
00;41;58;01 - 00;42;20;15
Unknown
people like Stephen Miller. But again, we have to remember that women have always had to struggle for equal opportunity, and especially the right to equal personhood. I mean, think back to the Anita Hill trials.
00;42;20;18 - 00;42;31;04
Unknown
She was basically told that she was a non-human and her race didn't help. Yeah.
00;42;31;06 - 00;42;38;11
Unknown
And I do think, as I said, you know, the particular concerns will change over time.
00;42;38;14 - 00;42;49;07
Unknown
You know, what a century ago mainstream feminists were most concerned with, with the right to vote. And now it's
00;42;49;07 - 00;43;08;04
Unknown
the right to to choose to have an abortion. But what we have to remember is that century after century, we we are dealing with a millennia old system that simply wasn't built for women.
00;43;08;07 - 00;43;22;18
Unknown
Period. Right. Right. And is it even possible to change it without totally breaking everything? You know what I mean? That's the point. I,
00;43;22;18 - 00;43;47;27
Unknown
I do, I'm not sure. And I really have thought about this a long time. I mean, there there are some days when I think we have to accept sexual violence the way we do war victims, you know, sort of as a kind of collateral damage.
00;43;47;29 - 00;43;50;20
Unknown
There's the pessimism I was hoping for. Yeah,
00;43;50;20 - 00;43;55;27
Unknown
well, there you got it. You know, that keeps the system going.
00;43;56;00 - 00;44;04;01
Unknown
But I do think that each. Right. That is one each time.
00;44;04;04 - 00;44;12;20
Unknown
Women as a body win a right to.
00;44;12;23 - 00;44;23;19
Unknown
Especially bodily autonomy that that chips away at the system. Might that be the best we can do? Yes,
00;44;23;22 - 00;44;32;10
Unknown
but I don't know. Change doesn't happen fast. It never has.
00;44;32;13 - 00;45;07;21
Unknown
You know, it took ten years for Betty, for Dan's book. The problem that has no name to get any currency. And Jackson Katz, who's been working on masculinity and masculine and men's role in sexual violence against girls. Well, women. He does not talk about violence against girls. It took him,
00;45;07;21 - 00;45;16;11
Unknown
I believe, 6 or 8 years to get his book, his inaugural book published in the US.
00;45;16;12 - 00;45;27;03
Unknown
It was published in Britain, but then nobody in America would publish it. Tell me the name of his book again.
00;45;27;06 - 00;45;44;20
Unknown
What is his name? Jackson Katz. Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Okay. And the book is every man. Every man. Yeah. Why? Violence.
00;45;44;22 - 00;46;18;24
Unknown
Why? Violence against women is a men's issue. And how you can make a difference. Actually, there's two parts to the subtitle. Yeah, and nobody here wanted to publish it. And he is doing his damn best. To to get women gathered around in beer groups. It's the 2020 version of of Bang Drums, I guess, but in beer groups and talk about
00;46;18;29 - 00;46;20;17
Unknown
what they can do.
00;46;20;23 - 00;46;35;03
Unknown
That sounds like a man after your own heart. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Let's have a beer and talk about it. Yeah. In terms of. Go on. Yeah. No, I do love beer, but.
00;46;35;05 - 00;46;46;25
Unknown
But I've never met Doctor Katz. But if I, if I did meet him, I would certainly want to have a beer with him. I feel like we need to help make that happen. We need to arrange a meeting. So,
00;46;46;25 - 00;46;53;12
Unknown
Mr. Katz, if you're out there, if you're listening, give us a holler. We'll we'll connect you. You know,
00;46;53;12 - 00;46;54;22
Unknown
we're getting to the end.
00;46;54;23 - 00;47;15;22
Unknown
I really was hoping we dive into a lot of the anecdotes in the book, but, alas, we only have so much time. But I just. I wanted to ask you, what about writing this book? Most surprised you?
00;47;15;25 - 00;47;19;22
Unknown
There were.
00;47;19;25 - 00;47;24;14
Unknown
So many things that surprised me
00;47;24;17 - 00;47;38;02
Unknown
that it would hard be hard to say. Just one. One thing, I think.
00;47;38;04 - 00;47;42;03
Unknown
The medical establishments
00;47;42;06 - 00;48;15;25
Unknown
obdurate, callous willingness to do harm even when very young girls were involved. Think back to my Friday anecdote. Some of the women who reported and says to him were insisted when they were very little girls. And he's just one example. But the medical establishment was callous willingness to do harm. Even when little girls are involved,
00;48;15;28 - 00;48;20;19
Unknown
is something that my mind still can't wrap itself around.
00;48;20;21 - 00;48;37;18
Unknown
It is a very dark topic to dive into, especially as deeply as you did. And I think this is a good time for you to actually talk about the gonorrhea epidemic that happened in young girls. I think you even said as young as nine months. We're basically imprisoned for having gone. Aria.
00;48;37;21 - 00;48;46;27
Unknown
Well, in in some it's rather long story to try to summarize at the end of a podcast, but
00;48;46;27 - 00;48;48;26
Unknown
I'll do my best.
00;48;48;28 - 00;48;56;25
Unknown
I could go on a great length about this, but in some there there
00;48;56;28 - 00;49;06;03
Unknown
epidemics of gonorrhea were occurring across the country and Western Europe. By the way, it starting in
00;49;06;03 - 00;49;11;26
Unknown
about 1840. And why do we call them epidemics of gonorrhea?
00;49;12;01 - 00;49;22;24
Unknown
Because finally we had medical tools. And those medical tools like the microscope and the grand stain had been accepted by the medical establishment.
00;49;22;25 - 00;49;25;25
Unknown
So the vaginitis
00;49;25;28 - 00;49;49;02
Unknown
that they used to diagnose young girls with repeatedly, they could now clearly identify as gonorrhea. And then the question was, how did that get there? Does this happen? Yeah. What's that doing there?
00;49;49;05 - 00;49;52;26
Unknown
And.
00;49;52;28 - 00;50;02;04
Unknown
The everybody was blamed but the perpetrator because,
00;50;02;07 - 00;50;27;29
Unknown
as one doctor said, blaming the perpetrator of a three year old gonorrhea, the three year old had never been out of the house. Right. The mother had been tested. She was negative. The father had been tested. He was positive. But this was so implausible. The doctors said that it had to be somebody else.
00;50;28;06 - 00;50;38;19
Unknown
Wow. And they. And they blamed everything else. Toilets for it. Well, you know, that was that was the final thing.
00;50;38;21 - 00;50;48;25
Unknown
You know, even though they knew that gonorrhea could not remain viable for more than a few seconds,
00;50;48;28 - 00;51;04;20
Unknown
if it if it was deliberately laced all over of the toilet seat. But they, they blamed mothers. They blamed toys. They blamed the girls themselves for giving it to each other. The girls were
00;51;04;24 - 00;51;08;20
Unknown
condemned. Separate schools were built for them.
00;51;08;20 - 00;51;10;29
Unknown
Separate words in hospitals.
00;51;10;29 - 00;51;13;09
Unknown
Their hospital beds were
00;51;13;09 - 00;51;16;04
Unknown
marked with red ribbons.
00;51;16;07 - 00;51;45;18
Unknown
Some surgeons called them, you know, messengers or from from the serpent, referring to, to the Bible. And then finally, an ingenious doctor named in Saint Louis came up with his toilet theory, and he decided, actually, Jeniffer, it was not the toilet seat so much, but the design of the toilet seat.
00;51;45;20 - 00;51;58;27
Unknown
And so, I mean, we were really doing hard, some hard and very innovative thinking in the medical establishment. So a little girl, it was theorized,
00;51;59;01 - 00;52;19;22
Unknown
could not use a toilet seat without rubbing her genitals on all parts of the toilet seat. So he suggested U-shaped toilet seats. And mothers were instructed to teach their little girls to get on the toilet seat
00;52;19;22 - 00;52;20;10
Unknown
without,
00;52;20;10 - 00;52;26;20
Unknown
you know, ensuring that their genitals did not
00;52;26;23 - 00;52;28;16
Unknown
come into contact
00;52;28;21 - 00;52;31;08
Unknown
with the toilet seat proper.
00;52;31;09 - 00;52;42;22
Unknown
Wow. But rather would pass through this canal, cut in the, in the, you know, in the, in the toilet seat and
00;52;42;24 - 00;52;51;13
Unknown
and of course, that solved the epidemic. Right. Totally. Everything. Yeah, that was the problem, Chad. It didn't.
00;52;51;17 - 00;52;59;06
Unknown
And so if you want to hear something really dark and not bright, Chad,
00;52;59;09 - 00;53;06;18
Unknown
it is, said darkly, Riley, in some incest circles that incest.
00;53;06;20 - 00;53;10;08
Unknown
Penicillin cured incest. Wow.
00;53;10;08 - 00;53;29;17
Unknown
And penicillin was introduced into our culture for general distribution in about 1945 46. And then we all went silent again.
00;53;29;20 - 00;53;40;22
Unknown
And to me, this is not acceptable. And.
00;53;40;24 - 00;54;34;17
Unknown
I wrote the book to be a clarion call, simply to bring what I feel is an urgent issue to the reading public's attention. And I know it's a difficult subject for people to approach, but if it prompts, if she's such a liar prompts one reader to question what they've normalized or to recognize patterns they hadn't previously named, then the book will be meaningful to me if it adds even one thread to the larger fabric of awareness and dialog about incest and sexual violence in this country, then I feel the book has done its job.
00;54;34;20 - 00;54;39;27
Unknown
You're here. What's next for you, Susan?
00;54;40;00 - 00;54;49;10
Unknown
During the writing of this, I've become interested in another optimistic subject.
00;54;49;13 - 00;55;01;18
Unknown
Female shame, and how it's been constructed over time and institutionally maintained. There's a whole chapter on shame, and she's such a liar.
00;55;01;21 - 00;55;05;17
Unknown
What I'd like to do is to figure out
00;55;05;17 - 00;55;10;17
Unknown
how it's been reinforced over the millennia through institutions
00;55;10;20 - 00;55;16;14
Unknown
such as law, religion, medicine and cultural norms. So the question,
00;55;16;18 - 00;55;36;06
Unknown
you know, writer always starts with a question or hopefully always starts with a question that she wants to answer is how do historical structures, the historical construction of female shame continue to shape contemporary women's experiences?
00;55;36;08 - 00;55;37;01
Unknown
You know, I
00;55;37;01 - 00;56;16;21
Unknown
was recently in the grocery store and I accidentally banged my cart into the Achilles tendon of the woman in front of me, and she immediately turned around and apologized to me, as she should. Right. And and I said, no, no, no, it's my fault. I should be saying, I'm sorry to you, but how many times in a day if if we're at gatherings, do we hear women saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
00;56;16;22 - 00;56;21;14
Unknown
It's as if we're saying I'm sorry I even exist.
00;56;21;14 - 00;56;39;08
Unknown
Yeah, well, I'm not allowed to be here. I'm sorry. You're right. When I walk by someone in a grocery store and there's not enough room for me to get by, and I say, oh, excuse me. If it's a woman. They say, oh, I'm sorry. And if it's a man, they just step out of the way.
00;56;39;08 - 00;56;44;16
Unknown
It's a very different way of moving through the world, for sure. Yeah.
00;56;44;18 - 00;56;52;28
Unknown
Yeah. So we all, as those of us who have been.
00;56;53;00 - 00;57;11;05
Unknown
Raised and raised ourselves as females, we are all burdened by millennia of shame. Yeah. And I, I think you know that woman who said. I'm terribly sorry
00;57;11;12 - 00;57;34;05
Unknown
I couldn't convince her, but. No, it's my fault. It's my fault. I'm sorry. No, I really, you know, and it didn't matter what I said. It was again, Jeniffer and Chad, part of the way that she was trying to negotiate gender, her own gender in this culture.
00;57;34;06 - 00;57;36;17
Unknown
Yeah. Does that make sense?
00;57;36;23 - 00;58;09;14
Unknown
I mean, what do we what do we do in that situation? For her, she felt it was best to identify herself as someone who was ashamed. Subject. Not a troublemaker. Exactly. How old was she? Say mid 40s. Close to 50. Because I feel like our younger generations don't suffer from that quite as much as our, you know, Gen Xers and older.
00;58;09;16 - 00;58;20;12
Unknown
That's how we were raised. But I feel like younger generations have a little bit more agency. I think they're demanding more. I, I hope so, I see it a little bit too,
00;58;20;15 - 00;58;25;11
Unknown
but not enough. And I think.
00;58;25;14 - 00;58;29;07
Unknown
We need to do everything that we can
00;58;29;10 - 00;58;37;10
Unknown
to again, when a woman exercises a non-conventional option.
00;58;37;13 - 00;58;45;07
Unknown
Gender unconventional option. I think it's very important that we do what we can to.
00;58;45;09 - 00;59;13;16
Unknown
To support and applaud that gesture. Indeed. Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, we really appreciate the conversation, folks. Susan Osborne is the author of She's Such a Liar Incest Knowledge and Power, a manifesto from Shake the Table Press. You can learn more about Susan Osborne on her website Susan Osborne net.
00;59;13;17 - 00;59;23;17
Unknown
Follow her on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook at. Susan Osborne, author. This has been another episode of The Premise. You can visit us online at The Premise podcast.
00;59;23;17 - 00;59;34;27
Unknown
Please be sure to subscribe and rate or review the premise wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow me, your host on Instagram and Facebook at Jeniffer Thompson Consulting. And till next week.
00;59;34;27 - 00;59;37;25
Unknown
Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye.