Please Stay on Topic

It's time for part two of Push Back! But before we get to that, something...weird happened in the United States this Wednesday. Donald Trump threw himself an itsy bitsy wittle coup. You know, the kind of mistake that ANY fascist dictator might make as he's being shown the door!

Why is everyone being SO UNCOOL about this?

Anyway, Erika and Clare discuss that landmark historical event for...awhile, as an intro to the episode. If you're all coup-ed out, our discussion of Push Back begins at 49.14.

As for the actual episode, we get into the nitty gritty details of how, exactly, the natural childbirth, lactivist, and attachment parenting industries are lying their asses off and causing parents (especially mothers) undue stress and torment. Highlights include the fact that breast milk is not the liquid gold lactivists claim it is: Breastfed infants do have some minor protection against colds and diarrhea for the first year, but that's it. Seriously. THAT IS IT. In addition, an epidural cannot "sedate" your baby, and children actually attach to their parents very quickly and easily--which means that all the elaborate rituals attachment parenting gurus demand are a bullshit waste of time. Get ready to enjoy a full buffet of pseudoscience, misogyny, and treating children like glorified props in their parents' lives!

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Happy New Year, nerds! It's a Social Justice Book Club week, and this time around, we're discussing Dr. Amy Tuteur's "Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting."

Dr. Tuteur is a retired OBGYN who has become somewhat notorious in certain crunchy corners of the Internet for critiquing the natural childbirth and natural parenting industries. In her book, Dr. Tuteur discusses the anti-feminist origins of natural childbirth in particular, as well its gender essentialist rhetoric.

Why do we care? Because as Tuteur makes clear, so much of the information natural childbirth and natural parenting advocates spout is fundamentally wrong--and yet they've been allowed to dictate the course of many public health campaigns, including the ongoing effort to bully women into breastfeeding for longer. Also, taken to its most extreme, this shit can become a death cult--but no one cares, because the only people who die are women and babies.

So strap in, folks: We're going to start off 2021 by talking birthing plans, midwives, and why you should absolutely, positively NEVER "trust birth."

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Hey guys, it's Christmas 2020! Erika is a practicing Christian, and Clare is an atheist who really enjoys presents, so we're audi today. However, we do have a minisode to tide you over until next week! When we were recording episode one, about Susannah Cahalan's "The Great Pretender," we ended up having to cut a section for time. Now, here it is! You should definitely listen to episode 1 before diving into this week's ep, but otherwise it should be fairly self-explanatory.

Happy Holidays! See you next week!

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It's time for the rest of Cleopatra VII's story! When we left off, she'd just lost her boyfriend Julius Caesar to assassination--and also assassinated her brother-husband as a housekeeping measure. In this episode, Cleopatra hooks up with her "great love" Mark Antony...but was their love really so great? Asides include whether or not Cleopatra was even capable of true love, having been raised in an actual snake pit, and why Caligula is our favorite.

Sources:

Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World by Diana Preston

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

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This week, we're talking about one of the more maligned women in history: Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt! Cleopatra was the last pharaoh, but she was not an actual Egyptian: Her ancestor, Ptolemy I, was a Macedonian Greek who claimed the land in part by running off with Alexander the Great's mummified corpse.

The Ptolemies were...a lot.

In this episode, Clerika discuss the hot mess incest express that was Ptolemaic Dynasty, and how Cleopatra made the best of the absolute shit sandwich she inherited. We cover her early reign--during which she was kicked out by her own court--and her "epic romance" with Julius Caesar, who was old enough to be her dad. Asides include whether or not a severed head EVER makes an appropriate gift, and which one of us would have willingly banged Caesar.

Sources:

Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World by Diana Preston

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

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It's a Social Justice Book Club week, and today we're discussing Mikki Kendall's Hood Feminism! Using Kendall's work, we dig deep into issues of white feminism: Namely, how centering middle class white women damages the feminist movement as a whole. We get into what "really counts" as a feminist issue--including a hard discussion about why, when most hungry Americans are WOMEN, mainstream feminism isn't doing much to combat this most basic of problems.

Also, hey! We're doing a giveaway! Listen for details.

Source:

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

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The theme of this season is royal women, and up first is Rosemary Kennedy! Rosemary was the oldest daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy, and sister to one president and two senators. Unfortunately for Rosemary, her birth was badly mishandled, and she was left with an intellectual disability because of prolonged oxygen deprivation. Even more unfortunately, her parents could never accept her for who she was, which led Joe to have her lobotomized at the age of 23.

Uplifting!

Sources:

Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

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Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicide, graphic self-harm, and general discussion of mental illness.

And we are BACK! We're going to a new season system so that Clare actually has time to research, and we're starting off with a Social Justice Book Club entry. This week, we cover Susannah Cahalan's The Great Pretender. Cahalan's book begins as an investigation into the Rosenhan experiment, in which a handful of people faked their way into mental institutions back in the late 1960s/early 1970s. From there, the book spirals out into a broader discussion of the history and present state of mental health care in the United States. Spoiler: It's real bad, folks.

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Because September 11 is next week, we're reposting our series about the attacks.

Original description:

Aaaaaaaand we're back! In this episode, Erika and Clare discuss "The Unthinkable" by Amanda Ripley, which is about the way human beings behave during disasters. Learn about why panic is largely a myth, Black Friday stampedes are the fault of store owners, and how capitalism + peer pressure killed a ton of people on 9/11.

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Sources:

The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry

102 Minutes byJim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

Fall and Rise by Marcus Zuckoff

September 11 is next week, so we're reposting our series about what happened that day.

Original description:

The girls are back! This time with a multi-part series about what happened on September 11, 2001. The upside: You won't have to wait for the rest of the series, because it all drops today! The downside: We're covering the historical event that looked at Pearl Harbor and was all, "hold my beer."

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Sources:

102 Minutes byJim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

Fall and Rise by Marcus Zuckoff