Transcript | Ep. 93: How to Live Single, Pt. 3: Sexpectations

Angela Chen: We were in Chinatown, in New York, on a bench along the East River. And he just, you know, kind of puts an arm around me, you know, nothing pushy or grabby. Very, very normal. And I was like, I look him straight in the eye and I'm like, "You know I'm not going have sex with you, right?"

[Theme music]

Cristen: Caroline, at the very beginning of our How to Live Single series, you mentioned how much you hate getting the cringey question, how are you still single?!

Caroline: I truly hate it

Cristen: We've now reached our third and and final installment in the series, and it’s time for another loaded question that often comes up in singlehood convos — when was the last time you had sex??

Caroline: Yeah, it seems like once we hit our 20s, whether you're having quote-unquote "enough" sex becomes some sort of measuring stick for happiness. Like, if you aren't doing it often or ever, then there must be a problem, whether it's not having anyone to fool around with, or being uninterested in fooling around with whomever is around.

Cristen: But today’s guest Angela Chen is here to snap that measuring stick in two and reassess what many of us take for granted about the sexual side of singlehood and partnership.

Caroline: Angela is a science journalist and author of the upcoming book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. And the whole reason you and I got hyped on Angela and her book is thanks to our How to Live Single part 1 guest, Aminatou Sow.

Aminatou: Like it's such a, such a good book. And I think especially if you are, you know, like cis hetero, hetero person in every way that you've been made to understand love, like ends with like sleeping with somebody. Like it just like it's almost like there's just a cloud on your brain that makes you not see the full picture of what love and romance can be. You know, and so having just Angela, have this book. It's such a generous body of work because it helps you to really decouple all of these things, you know, be like, OK. Like, what is love? What is sex? What is romantic desire?

Caroline: To be clear, we’re spending this episode with Angela NOT because asexual people — also known as aces — are especially single. In fact, it’s a myth that asexual folks are wallflowers and uninterested in dating, and Angela herself is in a long-term relationship. Instead, we’re looking through an ace lens today because asexuality challenges a lot of stereotypes projected onto single people and the sexpectations we take into relationships.

Angela: And so, in a way, the book is the answer to if you've wanted to want more when it comes to sexual desire, romantic desire and you felt bad because you felt like you were kind of a dried up person or just not as not as interesting, not as passionate because of these things. Then this book is for you.

Cristen: Yeah, Caroline Angela’s book Ace kinda blew my mind??? Besides the fact that Angela is a fantastic writer, the book broadened my understanding of asexuality as a sexual orientation and really made me think deeper about why romance is often conflated with sex.

Caroline: Oh, totally. So today, Angela’s going to share the extensive reporting she’s done on what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sex as well as her personal story of why she identifies as ace.

Cristen: It’s all to find out: How do society’s rules about sex shape our expectations for romance, relationships, and singlehood?

[Stinger]

Angela: I can't remember the exact place where I learned about the words asexuality, but I was 14, around that age, and I remember reading the right definition. which is that an asexual person is a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. There's people out there who don't experience sexual attraction. Next.

Caroline: Asexuality didn’t ring any bells for tween Angela. Until her early 20s, she just assumed she was straight.

Angela: And it wouldn't be until 10 years later that I was really thinking about what those words mean. Like, what is sexual attraction? What does it mean to lack sexual attraction? Because even though the words were right, the meanings were so nuanced that it wasn't something that I think I was equipped to understand at that point.

Cristen: So for instance, while heterosexuality means you’re sexually attracted to people of the opposite gender, and pansexuality means you’re sexually attracted to folks of all gender identities, as Angela describes in Ace, asexuality means you’re “sexually attracted to no one.”

Caroline: As a teenager, Angela was curious about sex because of how fantastic she assumed it must feel. But she didn’t get any erotic charge from touching or being touched. It was emotional intimacy and romantic desire that Angela longed for. So at 24 years old, after breaking up with her first serious boyfriend who had a far more casual outlook on sex, Angela began worrying that something might be wrong with her.

Cristen: So one day, over lunch at a Burmese restaurant, she decided to get out of her own head and ask her close friend Jane about it.

Angela: And so, you know, we sit down. We're eating our food and then I say to Jane, you know, I have a question for you. And my question is, "What does sexual attraction feel like?" And I think that Jane was confused at that point. It wasn't like I had a history of, you know, sexual anxiety or anything like that. In fact, I thought I was lucky to, as far as I know, not have that much cultural baggage attached to sex, which is something that I think many women do have. Jane, on the other hand, she was still a virgin. She'd never had a boyfriend. And, but she was very interested in it. And it was interesting to me because in all those conversations we had about libido and lust, she clearly had more experience with that, even if she never actually had sex, whereas I had.

Caroline: So what do you mean when you say that Jane had more experience with libido and lust?

Angela: Like, Jane would often talk about being attracted to someone or we would talk about masturbation or she would talk about basically being horny. Like, she would talk about those experiences very openly with me. And those were just not experiences that I'd had. But it was clear that for her, like, there was a drive, there was some kind of physical component for her. It wasn't just like, "Oh, I have a crush on this guy. Wouldn't it be nice?" sex was like, kind of part of her environment, part of the way that she saw the world in a way that clearly wasn't true for me.

Cristen: And how did it feel, do you remember, to even hear yourself asking that question out loud?

Angela: I think I felt naive. Jane is lovely and would never judge me and, you know, I felt very safe saying that, but I think, but I think I felt, like, infantilized and I think I felt – I just, I think I just kind of felt stupid. It's almost like if someone was like, "What is it like to taste food?" Like, what? Why don't you know? You're a grown woman.

Cristen: At the time, Angela was in her second serious relationship. Both had started as non-physical friendships that gradually evolved into dating and, eventually, having sex.

Caroline: But even so, Angela didn’t experience the physical impulse to have sex with either partner — she wasn’t horny like her friend Jane.

Angela: To me, I only wanted to have sex with someone when I was already ready to change my life for them. It was this really overwhelming, really suffocating feeling. And I think for many other people, that's not the case. You know, other people feel a sexual attraction for a lot of people and they deal with it and it's not this big deal. It's not this intense, suffocating love. But I didn't know that.

Caroline: So tell us more about then what attraction feels like for you

Angela: Mhm. I think attraction for me, I definitely experience aesthetic attraction. I think that's part of the reason why I didn't realize I was asexual for a long time is because I so clearly had a physical type. And I could say, "Oh, that person is cute. Oh, that person's not cute." Like, I'm definitely more romantically attracted to people that I find aesthetically attractive. I don't experience sexual attraction, but that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily repulsed by sex or that I hate sex. It's more like, it's I really only want to have sex for emotional reasons, or to feel close. There's almost never any kind of physical, physical drive for me. In my normal life, I never think about sex. Other, you know, I talk to my friends and they say, "Oh, I have intrusive thoughts about sex all the time," or "When I'm around attractive people," you know, "I get jittery or I notice them more," and that just is not part of my experience whatsoever. I could probably be celibate for life with little trouble. And, you know, so even though I'm not repulsed by sex, it's just not really a component of my life in the way I think, in the way that I relate to others.

Caroline: Asexuality attracts a lot of negative stereotypes. Like, it’s often misunderstood as meaning you must be frigid or too uptight.

Cristen: Yeah, in retrospect, Angela is surprised she stumbled across the right definition of asexuality back when she was 14 considering just how many myths are out there about it…

Angela: One, probably the most common one is the idea that asexualiy is the same as celibacy. It's not. Celibacy is about behavior. Asexuality is about attraction. Plenty of people have sex with people they're not attracted to. Another myth is that asexual's the same as aromantic. Aromantic meaning you don't experience romantic attraction. So there's a lot of aces who still want romantic relationships. There's also aces and non-aces who don't want romantic relationships. People always like to ask about masturbation. Like, do aces masturbate? Do they not? The answer is some of them do.

Caroline: Another big myth Angela confronts about aces is that being asexual means you’re abnormal.

Angela: And I think that I just reject that idea. I think sexual variation exists. I take it for granted that sexual variation is natural and normal.

Cristen: In addition to sexual variation, the ace community also recognizes romantic variation. Like, imagine an x-y axis from algebra class. The vertical axis is sexual attraction, and the horizontal axis is romantic attraction. So rather than a one-dimensional spectrum, that ace framework opens up all sorts of possibilities …

Angela: So, you know, there's people who are sex averse and, to them, to them I think the quote that someone told me is to them, the idea of having sex is like if you told a straight person you're into bestiality. It just doesn't appeal to them. It's, like, very viscerally upsetting. There's people who are kind of sex indifferent, which is probably where I am. You know, I'm definitely not sex repusled. I have no problem with sexual material, you know, talking about it. But, like I said, I don't have that drive. If I have sex, it's mostly an emotional thing. There's no physical component. And there are people who are sex favorable and I think that even though they don't feel sexually attracted to particular people, uh maybe they have a high sex drive and they feel the desire for sexual release, and so it's kind of to them, I think it's kind of like, like masturbation, but superior, like a better form of masturbation.

Caroline: As Angela notes in her book, some folks criticize the asexuality model as unnecessary and overly specific … basically suggesting that aces are just making up fake identities to feel better about themselves. But as Angela’s own personal experience underscores, all those newfangled labels are a lot more practical than we might assume

Cristen: So tell us about why and how you decided to begin identifying as asexual.

Angela: I think that once I learned about the concept of asexuality, there was this choice in front of me. I could identify as an asexual woman, or I could identify as an allosexual, which means non-asexual woman who apparently might have a sexual dysfunction disorder. And for me, I think that it's partly political for me because I don't think that these kinds of variations in sexual desire, sexual attraction, I don't think that they’re dysfunctions…

Caroline: To clarify, allosexual is the inverse of asexual, meaning you DO experience sexual attraction. So for Angela, the asexual label normalizes her feelings — rather than pathologizing her libido a disorder.

Cristen: Right. In the medical community, low or no sex drive often gets pathologized as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and women are far more commonly diagnosed with it than men. That's also why pharmaceutical companies have poured piles of money into developing drugs like Addyi - aka 'female Viagra' - to supposedly treat it. And I say supposedly because there's no scientific consensus of what a "normal" sex drive is.

Caroline: Yep! So for Angela, claiming the ace label is a way to push back on the ancient and persistent idea that female sex drive is a problem to solve — just like singlehood is something to fix.

Angela: If I were the only asexual person in the world, I don't know if there'd be any point in using the term, right? It would just be a string of words. But because it connected to me to a community, a community that I think really thinks deeply about different types of attraction, and what's the difference between romantic and platonic attraction when you don't have the sexual component, and how do you really create intimacy, all that was fascinating to me and I wanted to be part of that and part of that lineage.

Caroline: We should note that cis women, trans and nonbinary people make up the majority of the self-identified asexual community. Cisgender men are far less likely to identify as ace, and researchers suspect that gender norms might have something to do with it because masculinity is so closely associated with a high sex drive.

Cristen: That doesn’t mean Angela never grapples with the label of asexuality.

Angela: It's just this weird mind game where it's like, "Oh, I'm asexual. I don't experience sexual attraction." And of course, someone is like, "Oh, what is it like to not experience sexual attraction?" And then it's like, "I don't know, I haven't experienced it." You know, it's like you're trying to, like, describe around, it's like you're trying to describe, like, something that's not there. And you can only tell them, well, it's not this, it's not that, and therefore, I think I don't have it. But it's actually very hard for people who've never experienced sexual attraction to know whether they've experienced it. ... On some level, I don't like the idea of this identity being around us lacking something. You know, it feels kind of almost inherently a little bit pejorative, you know. And I think there's these discussions like how can we think about asexuality in a way that's other than not experiencing something. Like, what is the opposite of that? Or is there a way that we can think of asexuality in a in a way that doesn't use the language of lack?

Caroline: Cristen, the idea of being defined by a lack resonates so strongly with the singlehood stigma we talked about with Shani Silver in our first episode of this series. Shani and Angela both want the world to recognize that who they are and how they feel are no less valid just because they defy societal expectations of what kinds of relationships women should aspire to.

Cristen: And Caroline, you and I want that, too! We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Angela introduces us to the underlying force behind so much of our society’s sexual hangups.

Caroline: Don’t go away!

[Midroll ad 1]

Cristen: We’re back with author Angela Chen. In her book, Ace, Angela explores why sex and romance are assumed to go together in relationships and why it can feel daunting and even risky to pursue only one and not the other. ....

Caroline: Right. Like, happily single unladies often have to deal with the stigma that something must be wrong them for not wanting to seek out relationships. Meanwhile, happily asexual unladies are viewed with suspicion if they do want to date and partner up

Angela: I think maybe there's a myth that asexual people are never interested and can't get partners. I think on the more serious side, for a lot of asexual people it's less a myth and more of a real fear, especially if you are sex repulsed or know that you're not that interested in having sex, most people do and so there is that fear of where can I find someone? It's less a myth than what seems like a threat to something that you want very much if you want a romantic relationship

Caroline: As Angela discovered while writing Ace, there’s a term that helps explain why asexuality seems like an inherent threat to romance.

Cristen: Could you tell us what compulsory sexuality is?

Angela: Yeah, Basically, it's the idea that all normal people want sex and want socially sanctioned sex and that to feel otherwise is to be broken. It's the idea that every normal person has this baseline of sexual desire. And if you don't have this baseline, then something went wrong. ..But the key thing to me is that it isn't just an ace thing. Even if you're not ace, even if you do experience sexual attraction, there's all this pressure to experience enough of it, or in the right way, or have a great sex life, to be down. And so compulsory sexuality affects a lot of people who aren't ace and I think that's part of the reason why I think that kind of ace lens is so important.

Cristen: Compulsory sexuality is so insidious that it shows up in sex-postive feminism, too. Basically, the idea that to be a feminist is to be sexually active and adventurous. And if you’re not...

Angela: you're brainwashed and you're a victim of the patriarchy and you need to try harder and masturbate more and do kinkier sex until you discover that truly deep down you love sex...I think this message is pretty pervasive. It's a feeling in the air, you know. You're cooler, you're bolder, you’re more enlightened if you have sex like a man, if you have sex like you don't care. If you are otherwise and you're kind of old fashioned, your dainty, or chaste, there's there's so much moral language that's applied to it. And I think that of course, some people are naturally going to have a more voracious libido. And so, quote unquote, "liberated sexuality," by which I mean sexuality that's free of this negative social pressure and conditioning, that doesn't necessarily mean that women have to have a lot of sex. Like, liberated sexuality can look like having a lot of sex, or it can look like being celibate.

Caroline: Cristen, I think Angela makes a great point! Sex positivity is fantastic, as long as it leaves room for folks to have as much — or as little — sex as they wish.

Cristen: Yes! And Caroline, compulsory sexuality has a significant other that also gets stuck in our heads and helps explain soooo much of the driving conflict throughout our entire How to Live Single series. It’s a term coined by philosopher Elizabeth Brake called amatonormativity...

Angela: Which is this idea that a central, you know, exclusive romantic relationship is preferable for all humans. And it's something that we all should have. And so you see it as a line, the stigma against single people. And I think that one of the ways in which compulsory sexuality intersects with that is that there's this idea, first of all, that you need a romantic relationship, but that second of all, that a relationship isn't romantic unless there's sex in it. And so I think that's the way in which they combine.

Cristen: Why do you think that compulsory sexuality still seems to reign supreme in society and why not wanting and thinking about sex constantly is abnormal and a problem to be fixed?

Angela: You know, we use sex to reproduce. And so there's this idea that sex is how we continue on and therefore, sex must be completely natural. There's all of this, all of this language and this thought around kind of biological and evolutionary necessity of sex. And I think the other part of it is just all the messages that we get in the media. And I think it just, that reproduces in its own way. You know, we pretty much only see sexual romantic relationships and then so when people are thinking of new TV show characters or book characters, anything that, they just copy what they see and it just continues on.

Caroline: So you also note just how little research there is on single people, because social scientists and researchers kind of just assume that everybody wants to partner up, especially, like, romantically slash sexually. So in your mind, like, why do you think the idea of being single and loving it, or just, you know, like, OK being single, why is that so deeply suspect?

Angela: I think most of us have been conditioned so that we want romantic relationships. And then so when we see someone else that doesn't, it's like, oh, wait, what? What do they know that I know, that I don't know. Or, you know, what's wrong with them? Like, are they lacking emotional receptors that, you know, everyone else has? You know, I think everywhere, like, the smallest ways of talking to people, obviously books and movies, we see this idea that if you, not only if you're single, but if you don't want relationships, that you can't connect to other people as if romantic relationships are the only way of connecting other people. And so we just absorb that and look askance at our friends who have never been interested or aren’t interested in romantic relationships.

Cristen: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Angela shares what it’s like managing sexpectations as an ace and asking for what you want when you don’t want sex

Caroline: Stick around!

[Midroll ad 2]

Caroline: We’re back with author Angela Chen, whose relationship with her current partner, Noah, got off to a very matter-of-fact start.

Cristen: Yeah, at the tip-top of the show, we heard what she told him on their second date...

Angela: I look him straight in the eye and I'm like, "You know I'm not going have sex with you, right?" And it's not like I thought he was trying to get me to bed with him right there. It's not that I thought that, you know, I was so attractive that people were just dying to seduce me. It's more like I was very aware that the way that I dated and the way that I related to sexuality was kind of incompatible with the way that most people of my demographic, which is liberal, upper middle-class women, feminist women. It was pretty incompatible with that sort of dating structure.

Cristen: But since Angela has no interest in one-night stands or second-date sex, she wanted to make it known to Noah from the jump.

Angela: In every one of my relationships, I had known them for at least a year before we ever slept together and we'd been, we'd been friends. And so what was going through my mind then was I wanted to be clear, you know, don't try to make a – more passes at me. Like, that physical stuff, I'm not into. So it was partly for me, but it was also partly for him. I guess I saw it as a way of setting boundaries and expectations.

Cristen: And how did he respond when you said that to him?

Angela: He just laughed. I mean, we're dating now and we do sleep together, so in a way, I mean, he gets the last laugh, sort of.

Caroline: As it should be in any sexual relationship, whether it lasts for an hour a lifetime, Angela’s boundaries are an ongoing negotiation, rather than just a one and done. She’s ace. He’s allosexual, meaning he DOES experience sexual attraction. So setting boundaries and expectations is something that Angela thinks a lot about.

Angela: It's much harder to say no to a partner, especially if you're monogamous, and keep saying no to them than it is to say no to that one guy at the bar that you're never going to see again. He can just go find someone else. And so I think it's very hard to stand up for yourself in these relationships and to really interrogate all of these beliefs about why your partner is entitled to sex with you. And to be clear, like, I think people get to decide what their own boundaries are. I think it's justifiable if you want to break up with someone because sex is really important to you and it's a deal breaker. I think that's fine. But I think what's really common is that in relationships, you get all of these unspoken assumptions, like the needs of the person who wants sex are so much more important than the needs of the person who doesn't want sex. You know, there's so many books that are like how to want sex, wanting sex again, you know, that kind of thing. But there's very few books about, you know, maybe the other person, the higher desire partner should try to tamp down their desire. But why is that true? You know, there's two people in the relationship. Why does one person have more moral standing?

Cristen: Well, and it resonates with what you were saying earlier about the trap of asexuality, like, the defining it as a lack of because – I'm thinking of terms like, you know, the partner who is withholding sex or sexless relationships and all of the trend pieces about how millennials are so sexless. Like, it's so negative.

Angela: Yeah. It's absolutely so negative. Absolute – this idea that a sexless relationship is definitely a bad relationship and that if millennials are having less sex, then, you know, it's because they spend too much time on Twitter. You know, there's always kind of a derogatory, pejorative tone to it instead of thinking, you know, what, if people actually like something that's, like something more than sex. And even that phrase, you know, when people say, like, "I like this more than sex," even that I think often sounds kind of embarrassing and kind of like a satire. Like, there really is this idea that sex has to be the most exciting thing and if you like anything else more, that's weird.

Cristen: Yeah, it feels like in in that context and also in the context you were talking about earlier of dating and the kind of boundary negotiation that – at least what I'm hearing a lot is this undercurrent of kind of radical communication.

Angela: Yeah, absolutely. And I think about that a lot, because, you know, a lot, one chapter of the book is about how ace and non-ace couples work together? And when I was reporting it I was like, I'm going to talk to a bunch of therapists and they're going to give me one weird trick, you know, something like that, and then everyone was like, "Well, you just, you just gotta talk to them." And I'm like, OK, I've known that since I was 3. That's what people keep saying, use your words. But, you know, the more I reported, I think the more true that is. And I also think it's not fair because I think that, you know, there's all these power dynamics in which one person might find it easier to speak up than the other person. I don't think any of us, regardless of any orientation, will have a meaningful life unless we have these awkward conversations. I think with ace people and with anyone who finds it harder to fit into these scripts, we'd often have to deal with it earlier and advocate for it more because we can't just kind of float along. If we try to float along, we'd be even – we'd just be sad.

Cristen: So through all of this reporting that you've done and also just your personal journey, how has your understanding and identification with asexuality changed, or shaped, how you approach partnership today?

Angela: You know, I think it's something that I still struggle with. There was a period of about a year when all this stuff was happening and I just was not interested in sex. And I – it was freaking me out. And the thing is, I knew better. I identified as asexual. I was writing this book. Of course, I know that no partner's entitled to sex. There's nothing wrong. There’s gonna be sexual variation. I knew every talking point that I'm saying to you now, but there was still a part of me that was ashamed and I felt upset about it. And for me, it wasn't even about, you know, relationship maintenance because my partner was totally understanding about it. To me, like, even though I know all of this and have been really immersed in this reporting and all of that, deep down it's hard for me to get rid of kind of a compulsory sexuality that I myself have absorbed and ingested. I think it helps because – so I think all of the reporting and research that I did, it helps because at least there is that level of knowledge that helps me stand up for myself a little bit. I think there's a lot of people out there who might have experiences we could call ace and they don't know anything about asexuality and so when their partners say, "You're broken. You need to fix this. This is your problem," you know, "Go do something about it," they internalize all of that. And even though I felt that shame, I at least didn't have to deal with that because I learned about asexuality and all of these ideas.

Caroline: Is it possible for, for us in general to kind of culturally disentangle romance and partnership? Or romance and/or sex and partnership?

Angela: I think so. I think all of us maybe kind of dream of having that perfect, you know, package. But if we could separate all of these and think beyond, you know, this binary where one person has to fulfill all those needs, then I think that first, it would be good for codependent, you know, for avoiding codependency, and it would put a lot less pressure on everyone to be everything to, you know, everyone else and I think it could just democratize relationships.

Caroline: Cristen, I was truly surprised at how much I needed to hear all this. Not just Angela’s take on communication and boundary-setting, but really hearing from everyone in our series. Because as fine as I am on my own, I’m still swimming through the same cultural bullshit that everybody else is, you know? Like feeling like I’m behind, or not fully a grown up somehow because I’m single, because I’m not married. And it was just, for me, really powerful to hear from women who value themselves so strongly and can help us all envision a world where our relationships with ourselves and our friends are just as important, if not more so, than our romantic partnerships

Cristen: Caroline, my one regret, though, is that this three-part series was not out when I was, I don’t know, 16, when I was first trying to really un-single myself.

Caroline: Yeah, I could’ve used it in high school. I could’ve used it in college. I could’ve used it five years ago. But hey, we’re here now.

Cristen: We are here now. Thank god.

Caroline: All right, unladies … did our conversation with Angela resonate with you? How do you feel about your relationship status negotiations? Let us know! You can email us at hello@unladylike.co, find us on social @unladylikemedia or join our private facebook group and jump into the thread for this episode. If you haven’t heard parts one and two of our How to Live Single series, be sure to give them a listen.

Cristen: Angela’s book comes out this September, and you can find links to pre-order it on her website, angelachen dot org. If you’d like to get Extra Unladylike and enjoy some delightful bonus episodes on Mrs. America, Flo Jo and more, head over to patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Janaris Perez helped with transcriptions for this episode. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford. Executive producers are Chris Bannon, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week…

Maya Schenwar: I don't believe that prisons and policing should exist in our society. And I think that we need to build all kinds of different possibilities, which people are doing right now. But we need to build more and more of them and build the kind of society that actually cares for people and that keeps people safe and that nurtures, you know, humanity instead of instead of just operating around this philosophy of punishment.

Caroline: We’re talking with prison abolitionist Maya Schenwar about how to do #MeToo, minus police.

Cristen: You won’t want to miss this episode! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get unladylike.