Tia Levings chronicled her narrow escape from extreme Christian patriarchy, and an abusive husband, in her best-selling memoir A Well-Trained Life (2024). This year, she published I Belong To Me, walking us through how she regained a voice silenced by men for decades. These powerful cautionary tales help others flee the same dangerous oppression she faced, and explain the religious fundamentalism shaping US politics. Tia is strong as hell, has a great laugh and curses like a sailor – my favorite kind of guest.

Tracy DeTomasi, national gender violence expert, offers great, simple guidance on the best sex ed to teach kids, how to respond to "It's not all men," what we can all learn from beaches, and so much more. Always with a ready laugh and a magical ability to call out problematic thinking on the spot, without ever alienating the thinker.

Award-winning NPR and PBS journalist and host Khalil Ekulona shares his experiences and reflections on how myths about sexuality often remove humanity from one of our most human acts. We also discuss his honor system (and my honor-ish system), what his sisters taught him about women, and what Ella Fitzgerald, Wayne Newton and Tony Bennett taught him about relationships

Kate Downey explains how living with menstrual “death cramps” for decades led her to pick up a mic and record her journey to a successful diagnosis, in the investigative podcast CRAMPED. As well as some of the new science she’s learned about the female reproductive systems, our problematic medical system, and sexist crash test dummies and countertops.

As walking sociologists, who better than our trans peers can teach us just how much of a cultural construct gender is? That’s exactly what my friend Professor Queerstrokes does here, with one of the world’s greatest laughs to boot. We discuss how gender tropes constrict, confuse and hurt us all; how to be the best ally to trans people; and how men supported his transition much more than the women in his life.

Of all the myths we're busting, virginity is among the biggest, and most persistent. It’s a social construct with no biological or medical definitions, yet heavy religious, personal and social baggage. Historian Anke Bernau and sociologist Laura Carpenter help us unpack the millennia-old obsession with female (yet rarely ever male) sexual purity and its consequences.

Of all the myths we're busting, virginity is among the biggest, and most persistent, of all. It’s a social construct with no biological or medical definitions, yet heavy religious, personal and social baggage. Historian Anke Bernau and sociologist Laura Carpenter help us unpack the millennia-old obsession with female–and rarely ever male–sexual purity, and its consequences.

What do cabbage and Stalin’s mustache have in common? How did the

Mesopotamians view sex? Were the Victorians even more repressed than we

think? Award-winning author, historian and podcaster Dr. Kate Lister

answers these questions and more with crackling wit and insight, and an

enviable Yorkshire brogue.

Gender violence expert Tiffany Brec and I discuss how accurate, inclusive sex ed reduces harm; why she’s now teaching leadership skills too; what to do when someone calls a man a girl in your presence; and what Tiffany’s wife does to ward off shady men.

Despite being told that women don't, or shouldn't like sex much (or as much as men), asexuality in women isn't exactly welcome either.