My guest today is a literature professor who writes a blog called Dating Tips For The Feminist Man, under the pen name "Nora Samaran". Last year, she wrote an article that went viral, changed my life, and transformed my marriage. It's called "The Opposite Of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture".

Just so we have a basic agreement of what is meant by “rape culture”, a quick Google brings up this definition: a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.

Wikipedia goes a little bit further:

Rape culture is a sociological concept used to describe a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.  Behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, slut shaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by some forms of sexual violence, or some combination of these. 

Nora's article does a beautiful job of summarizing attachment theory as it applies to adult relationships and then stepping back to look a the larger implications within a patriarchal culture.

We talk about how western culture shames men for feeling and nurturing, how it invisibilizes white supremacy and anti-black racism for white people.

In this episode, I give a brief summary of attachment theory and the four main attachment styles. You can read more here in the article where I dish about my own marriage.

Off the top, Nora mentions The Icarus Project, along with bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

We also mention Tada Hozumi and cite his work over at SelfishActivist.com.

Adrienne Maree Brown is quoted and she is definitely someone to learn from.

The book The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin, is described as well.