Episode 39: Lady Science Livestream!
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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We’re releasing the livestream event that we did back in April for our annual spring pledge drive. The pledge drive is over, but you can still pledge at any time, visit www.patreon.com/ladyscience. The hosts get silly talking about bonkers things men have said about women’s bodies, do a Q&A with the audience, and play a game of Balderdash: Bonkers Things Men Have Said About Women’s Bodies Edition!
Show Notes
“For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English
Evidence to suggest that women’s sexual behavior is influenced by hip width rather than waist-to-hip ratio by Victoria Simpson, Gayle Brewer, and Colin A Hendrie
“The Diseases of Females: Including Those of Pregnancy and Childbed” by Fleetwood Churchill
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Leila: Hey, y'all. Leila here. We don't have a regular episode for you this month of May, but we are bringing you the live show that we did back in April for our annual spring pledge drive on Patreon. The pledge drive is over, but you can pledge anytime. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate and click Pledge Now.
Leila: If you missed the opportunity to be part of the live show or you listened to this and you like it, be sure you let us know. Tweet us at @ladyxscience or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and let us know that you want us to do another one, and we'll do one in the future. Hope you enjoy.
Leila: Welcome to the Lady Science livestream. We've already done this because I thought we were live and we weren't. Welcome to the inside of our homes, where all the Lady Science magic happens. We're really happy to be doing this, and we're really excited.
Leila: To introduce ourselves, I am Leila McNeill. I am one of the co-founders and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser. I'm the other co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: I am Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: As promised, we will be talking about the bonkers things that men have said about women's bodies throughout history. Historians don't like when we say this, but from the beginning of time—
Anna: The dawn of time.
Leila: Cis men have ceaselessly investigated the mystery of women's bodies instead of maybe asking women about what's going on in there or just looking at one. Each of us has picked a weird thing that we're going to talk about. Then after that we're gonna do a Q & A. This is part of a fundraiser, so we will certainly be asking you for your money at some point.
Anna: But we're not gonna tell you when. It's just gonna happen.
Leila: We're not gonna tell you when.
Rebecca: Gonna be a surprise. It's like when you're listening to This American Life and suddenly your local NPR station is telling you to give you money, but it's us.
Leila: Yeah. That way you don't know when to leave the livestream. If you do have questions for us that you want us to answer during the Q & A, you can ask us about the fundraiser, transparency about how we spend our money. You can ask us about us. If it's too personal, we just will not answer it. You can ask us about Lady Science more generally, whatever. You can go ahead and drop those into the YouTube chat box in the right-hand corner of YouTube.
Leila: And then after that we'll end the show with a game of Balderdash. I'm going to be running that for you guys, and you all have to decide if the factoid that I give you is balderdash or if it's true.
Leila: And if you want to tweet about the show during the livestream and rub it in everyone else's faces that they're not here, you can use the hashtag #ladyscipodlive.
Leila: We're gonna get started. Rebecca is gonna tell us about some bonkers evo psych shit from something that sounds like it would have been said a long time ago but was actually said in recent memory. So go ahead, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Yeah. Startin' us off with some fairly contemporary bullshit, which that's fun. So the things that we are talking about today were submitted by our readers and listeners. And this one was submitted to us by Holly Dunsworth, who along with being a Lady Science listener is a professor of anthropology. So I say thank you, Holly, for reminding us that this kind of stupidity continues to the present day 'cause we always gotta remember people were not just stupid in the past, people are stupid now.
Leila: And will be in the future.
Rebecca: And will be in the future.
Rebecca: Anyway, so 2014, there was a study published in the journal The Archives of Sexual Behavior. The study had this title: "Evidence suggests that women's sexual behavior is influenced by hip width rather than hip-to-waist ratio." At this point warning bells should be going off in your head 'cause they were certainly in mine. But before we get too judgy, I try to give people benefit of the doubt. It often lands me in a terrible place.
Leila: That's nice.
Rebecca: But let's see what this study was actually about. They're laughing because they know that I'm the one who's like, "No, we should be nice to this person," and then it turns out that we shouldn't have been nice to this person.
Anna: You're too nice, Rebecca.
Rebecca: So the authors of the study surveyed 148 women between the ages of 18 and 26 about their sexual habits. And then they also measured these women's hips and their waists. They found that women who reported having more sexual partners and who took part in more, quote, "one night stands"—which, by the way, they actually use that phrase in this journal article—they were more likely to have wider hips if they had had more sexual partners and more one night stands. They also found that the hip-to-waist ratio of the women had no relation to the number of sexual partners they had had. And this supposedly refutes an earlier weird evo psych theory that women with a higher hip-to-waist ratio have more sex because they're considered more attractive.
Rebecca: I have a lot of questions about that, like the fact that they were starting from there. I have so many questions. Basically, the idea is "Well, since the dawn of time, men have preferred women with hourglass figures," which I feel like is refutable on about 500 levels. But anyway, so they were like, "No, no, no. We're proving it has nothing to do with having an hourglass figure. It just has to do with the hip width." And you know what? Frankly, I don't care that much. I will believe them. I will take their word that in this group of women, most of the women with larger hips had had more sexual partners. You know what? I don't care. That's fine.
Leila: You do you, wide-hipped women.
Rebecca: But you know what? I have no problem with that, and maybe that's true. But as always, it's when they start to interpret the data that things go way off the rails. So the paper starts with an analysis of what's called the obstetrical dilemma. Basically, the idea is that when humans started walking upright, because of how their pelvises changed to be able to walk upright, it made it more difficult to give birth than other mammals.
Rebecca: And this has, I guess, led to the popular idea that certainly I have heard in my life and I'm sure many of you have that if a woman has wider hips, childbirth is easier. I feel like I was hearing jokes about that way younger than I should have. It's one of those weird things where looking back you were like, "Why were people joking about this when I was seven?"
Rebecca: But yeah. So the theory put forth in this paper then is that this correlation between hip width and number of sexual partners is because large-hipped women are more comfortable being sexually promiscuous. And that—again, this is where we get fun evo psych bullshit—is because they subconsciously know that childbirth will be less dangerous, and therefore they are more comfortable seeking out and consenting to sex. And this is what these guys decided.
Rebecca: And actually, this paper was written by, or at least the authors listed on this paper were one man and two women, so women have also perpetuated a lot of weird crap in the sciences to this day. But this just seems like such a classic case of first of all correlation does not equal causation. So many preexisting ideas about how women operate, how human beings operate then being placed on data in this very, very obvious, weird way.
Rebecca: For the record, it's also not clear physiologically if at least the way that they measured women's hips has anything to do with the size of the birth canal. So they were even just taking data. So they measured from, and I wrote down the name of it 'cause I knew I was gonna forget this, they measured between the ilac crests, which are basically the pointy bits. It's the pointy bits on your hips. Y'all know what I'm talking about.
Anna: Iliac.
Rebecca: And so they measured the width between those. That has no relation to the size of the birth canal, so they just made that up. Yeah.
Leila: What gets me about this one is that it pointed out one night stands specifically. Not how much sex you had with a single partner, but how much sex you have with many partners. That seems like such a slut-shamey type of thing to pull out for this study.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. If there really was some kind of subconscious biological imperative or feeling that "Oh, I can have more sex because childbirth will be easier," the number of people you had sex with would have nothing to do with that, right?
Anna: Well, we all know that promiscuous women are just tryin' to get pregnant. That's why they have so many one night stands. That's the aim, right?
Rebecca: Right. Right. I don't know. Yeah. We're deciding that if there's also some kind of subconscious thing that we're all just not even noticing that says that women who are having a lot of sex with one partner are also safer and therefore more comfortable. That seems to be a whole thing embedded in this. Yeah. It's got so many things.
Anna: Also this idea that women subconsciously know something. You can say that about anything, and it doesn't have anything to do with the data they collected.
Leila: Yeah. I mean, it's just this continued idea that women's bodies and their sexual drives and desires and their reproductive organs or whatever are just this mysterious thing that we just can't fuckin' figure out. So if we can't figure it out, then it must be subconscious.
Anna: And it must be biological, too, and it must be an evolutionary thing that has an explanation that we can divine this way even though it's ludicrous to try to infer a subconscious thing that you have not observed from some observations you've made that also don't have anything to do with what you're saying.
Leila: Well, and I'm assuming that this data also relied on self-reporting. Yeah. And that's not always gonna be 100% true, especially if you do have social pressures that does slut-shame women and stuff like that. So is there some downplaying of the one night stands or having sex outside of monogamous relationships with one partner? So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that also goes into the data itself that, brought on by culture and social expectations, might influence self-reporting on the part of the women that make up the data set.
Leila: And one thing also that you wrote down here, Rebecca, is that the authors weirdly tied this into C-sections and that women get C-sections if they have smaller hips because the baby can't fit through the hips. Which again has nothing to do with the actual birth canal.
Rebecca: Right. Right. And is not the main reason that either women have had traumatic births or have had C-sections or have had other kinds of necessary interventions either now or historically. It's not like it never happens.
Rebecca: We originally found out about this—again, Holly Dunsworth had shared this with us, and she had been interviewed for an article about this study in Live Science. And she and a couple of other people interviewed for it note that while, yes, that does happen, that is a reason why people have C-sections when they're giving birth, but it's not even the main reason.
Leila: It's not the reason. Yeah. Yeah.
Leila: Well, and I think that also a lot of these types of studies that deal specifically with women's sexual habits or sexual behaviors or sexual lifestyle, that they do slip this in under the guise of women's empowerment. And I think that's really problematic as well, that this could be spun as a sex-positive type of finding or something along those lines. But at the end of the day, we're still just pushing this idea of women's sexual drive is geared towards maternity and being mothers. You know what I mean?
Anna: "Don't worry, women, you evolved to be sluts. It's okay."
Rebecca: Yep. Yep. And as part of that, so they literally spell this out. Part of the study is they say, "Well, this previous idea about hip-to-waist ratio is sexist because it's saying that what men find attractive is central to women's sexual behavior. And we are making it not sexist by saying that it's about just hip width."
Rebecca: Width is a hard word to say. Hip width. "And therefore it's about women's drive and not about male wishes." They're like, "Yeah, and that means that it's all women are in the driver's seat. Isn't that cool?"
Anna: I just wanna note that I hate evolutionary psychology just generally speaking and that it all is pretty bullshit and I've never really understood even the point of the field of evolutionary psychology. What are we hoping to get out of—I mean, we're historians. How can we be on board with trying to interpret human behavior this way? But I just don't understand the point.
Rebecca: I mean, I think part of it is that "Well, we can do the thing that historians are doing but make it more sciencey." I think that there's a little bit of that in it.
Anna: Bitch, no you can't. You got history envy.
Leila: Oh, that's never a term we're ever gonna hear in a serious context. No one's jealous of historians. Nobody.
Anna: That's true. You're right.
Rebecca: Before we go on, I do have to give a plug for our last podcast episode for anyone who hasn't listened to it. If you wanna hear us yell even more about evo psych and weird ideas about women's sexual behavior, we had a whole podcast episode about it.
Leila: And we went on a tangent about Jordan Peterson eating nothing but meat in that context. I really refrained myself from mentioning him while we were talking about evo psych just a second ago, but I had to do it now.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. I set you up for that.
Leila: You did. You did.
Leila: Well, we of course couldn't do an episode on this topic without talking about the Victorians, our favorite class of middle-class white men of the 19th century. And so during the 19th century in Europe and the United States—Jesus Christ. Were we the United States?
Rebecca: Yes.
Anna: In the Victorian period?
Rebecca: Yes. Yes, Leila.
Anna: Leila! "I'm a historian." Do, do, do, do, do. Oh, my goodness.
Leila: So yeah. So in the United States and Europe, most medical men, they believed that the uterus was the thing that controlled everything about the women. But you had some profiles in courage who believed that it was the ovaries that did that.
Rebecca: They moved a couple inches or something.
Leila: There was one man—his name was Dr. GL Austin—who wrote in an 1883 advice book for the, quote, "maiden, wife and mother." Which, as we've discussed on this podcast before, are the only three types of women there are. He wrote that, quote, "The ovaries give women all her characteristics of mind and body." End quote.
Leila: You all will have to forgive me for reading this somewhat long passage from Dr. WW Bliss because it's just so hyperbolic and it's so over the top and really encapsulates what the Victorians were doing over there. Quote, "Accepting then these views of the gigantic power and influence of the ovaries over the whole animal economy of woman, that they are powerful agents in the commotions of the system that on—"
Anna: Wait. Leila. Infinite cosmic power, itty-bitty living space. Okay, sorry.
Rebecca: Itty-bitty living space.
Leila: "And that on these ovaries rest her intellectual standing in society, her physical perfection, and all that lends beauty to all that is great and noble and beautiful and all that is voluptuous and tender and endearing—"
Anna: Nope. Go to horny jail. Straight to horny jail.
Leila: I can't believe that people talked this way.
Anna: Get out of here. You're gross.
Leila: "That her fidelity, her devotedness, her perpetual vigilance forecast in all those qualities of mind and disposition which inspire in love and fit her as the safest counselor and friend of man spring from the ovaries, what must be their influence and power over the great vocation of woman and the august purposes of her existence when these organs have become compromised through disease." This was one sentence. So these brave men who thought the ovaries controlled the woman instead of the uterus.
Anna: They're not in the pocket of Big Uterus, these guys. They're not sheep.
Leila: And, yeah, I mean, the ovaries needed to be regulated as Big Pharma does. So the woman's entire personality was controlled by the ovaries, as was all other physical ailments. So this included issues with the stomach, the liver, the lungs, the heart. Everything was something wrong with the ovaries, even contractible diseases like tuberculosis. And that was different for men. So it was understood that men got tuberculosis from contracting it or from a social situation or environmental situation, whereas for women it came from her ovaries.
Anna: So there's a man-berculosis.
Leila: And so this naturally led to "Well, so how do we cure all of these different ailments when they go wrong with women?" So it could be a physical ailment, like something wrong with your stomach, tuberculosis, or it could be our old friend hysteria, women who just deviated from the accepted social norms of the time. Sometimes husbands would bring their wives in and be like, "My wife needs to have her ovaries removed. She's insane." And doctors would remove the ovaries to cure this wide variety of ailments.
Leila: And the thought was that that would cure whatever ailed her. And if it was an issue of her not wanting to perform wifely duties like domestic duties or stuff like that, once her ovaries were removed, that she would return to domestic bliss and be calmed and just once again take up her mantle as wife and mother and the domestic goddess and resume that life. So the psychology of the ovaries was a 19th century thing, which I'm sure if we looked hard enough we'd find some shit from 2020, but yeah.
Anna: I'm sure you can find that on Reddit right now.
Leila: Oh, probably. Absolutely. So much of that stuff came from For Her Own Good, the book. A classic for this type of stuff. But, yeah, we could not escape this podcast episode without talking about the Victorians.
Anna: So if you take out the ovaries, does all the voluptuousness and delicate contours and stuff go away? What happens?
Leila: I think what we need to understand is that this isn't some sort of good science.
Rebecca: It doesn't have to make sense, Anna.
Anna: I see.
Leila: Not something that's something existentially consistent or anything like that.
Rebecca: It's just I do enjoy that it's not even internally consistent here.
Anna: Can we talk about perpetual vigilance? Sorry. I didn't mean to run you over with this. Yeah. Is that something ladies have?
Leila: I mean, we could probably spend a whole podcast episode unpacking this really long sentence.
Anna: You could spend a whole episode diagramming it.
Leila: Man, when I was in school, I loved diagramming sentences. That's another thing.
Rebecca: So did I.
Anna: Of course you did. Oh, no. Nerds.
Leila: Someone just typed into the chat "I'm def part of Big Uterus."
Anna: Yes. Yeah. I'm firmly in the pocket of Big Uterus.
Leila: Excellent. Also, you guys, if you wanna just dump whatever the hell you want to in the live chat while we're doing this, please do that.
Rebecca: Yeah. You can also leave absurd commentary for us.
Leila: I will read them.
Rebecca: So we joked earlier about "Oh, we could probably find something like this in 2020." But in some ways the contemporary popular vestige of this is "Oh, she's hormonal 'cause she's on her period." That's the same sea that folks are swimming in.
Leila: No. I'm hormonal all the time, okay?
Anna: And so are you, man, because you're a human being who needs hormones to survive.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. What was I gonna say? Fuck, I was gonna say something. Anyway, go on.
Rebecca: That was all I was gonna say, was just the stuff comes back in different forms, but one of the reasons we harp on the Victorians so much is that they just laid so much groundwork for—
Leila: Because they wrote it all down! That's the thing.
Rebecca: I mean, yes, they wrote it all down.
Leila: They wrote it all down. They would write it once in their personal notes and then in letters to their friends. And then they would publish it, so we have it in three different places. They really wanted us to know.
Rebecca: And when they wrote letters to their friends, they wrote it four times so their penmanship looked right. I mean, I'm a little bit joking, but I'm not. This is why there are multiple copies of the same letter.
Leila: Yeah. Well, and we didn't have carbon copies and stuff, so they had to make their own copy of their letter that they were going to send. So we have it in multiple places.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. They're very literate.
Leila: And we did say at some point in previous episodes that we're all just suffering from some 19th century Victorian hangover when it comes to sex and medicine, so here we are again.
Rebecca: And most things. Economics.
Anna: The climate.
Leila: We cannot get rid of Adam Smith!
Rebecca: I mean, I don't know. Adam Smith was not even as bad as—
Anna: Shoot Adam Smith into the Sun Challenge 2021.
Leila: I think there's a gnat in my beer. Yep. I got it. I'm gonna drink it.
Anna: As my dad would say, he won't drink much.
Anna: And on that note, it's my turn. Yeah. We're gonna stay with the Victorians for this one. I picked this as my thing to talk about because it's metal as fuck.
Anna: So there was a very persistent belief—this actually stems from antiquity, but the Victorians just really have a way of spicing things up, don't they?—about suppressed menstruation, that if for some reason you didn't have your period or it was late or it was irregular in some ways, that your menstrual blood would build up inside your body and do terrible things to you.
Anna: There are all kinds of reasons why you might miss your period, like poor nutrition or you're pregnant. Or I guess that is your menstruation building up into you and turnin' into a baby. Gross. All right. So we carry on our tradition of just letting these guys tell you exactly what they think I would like to introduce you to The Diseases of Females, Including Those of Pregnancy and Childbirth by Fleetwood Churchill. Excellent name. Super good.
Leila: Okay. These are all the names of men that we should definitely take advice from. Dr. Bliss, Dr. Churchill. Sorry, Dr. Fleetwood Churchill.
Rebecca: Fleetwood Churchill. That is some A-plus Victorian weirdness names.
Anna: I think it's excellent. I'm gonna name my kids Fleetwood and Churchill. I'm not having kids.
Anna: All right. So I'll just read a little bit of Dr. Churchill's thoughts on what happens when your menstruation is suppressed. Quote, "In many cases, especially of suppressed menstruation where the system generally is suffering from irregular distribution of blood, an attempt is made by the natural powers to afford relief by a discharge of blood from some other part, generally one which is already enfeebled."
Anna: So that means if you don't have your period, it will come out somewhere else because of the natural powers. So the places it could come out include nostrils, eyes, ears, gums, lungs, stomach, arms, bladder, nipples, the ends of the fingers and toes. Just imagine blood shooting out of your fingers like Super Soakers. That'd be metal.
Leila: Finger guns. Pew-pew, pew-pew-pew.
Anna: From your joints and of course from the surface of the skin generally could just ooze out of there, I guess. If your lungs are bleeding, you need to go to the hospital immediately.
Leila: But not one of these hospitals of this time. Definitely not. They'll just remove your uterus or something.
Anna: I love this idea of from different joints as though there's a seam here that can just open up and start oozing a little bit.
Anna: So lest you think this is just this guy's idea, this section of the book has a lot of citations where he's referring you to other medical writers who have observed this phenomenon. This is not just his own idea here.
Anna: And one of the case studies that he described is one in which a woman missed her period and then blood began pouring out of her ears and she began vomiting blood and none of her blood coagulated or clotted. And the citation says that ounces of blood came out of this girl's ears. And again, if this is happening to you and you are throwing up blood and it is pouring out of your ears, you need to go to the hospital. That is not period blood. No. It's not menstrual blood.
Rebecca: That is very different blood. That is a entirely separate issue that should be looked into.
Anna: You are having a serious medical episode, and you need to be taken care of. Anyway, it's just a lot to take in. There's lots of these studies in the footnote.
Leila: Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark style.
Anna: That's basically what it describes.
Rebecca: Yeah. Again, there are other issues happening when someone is bleeding from all your orifices, it turns out.
Anna: You're bleeding from your ears. That could be your brain. Go to the hospital. It's not your uterus, I promise.
Anna: Of course this is all tied to the idea that menstrual blood is itself a bad thing. That's why it is forcefully expelled from whatever part of your body it has access to once a month, because it's bad. And if it builds up in your body, all kinds of really bad things will start to happen.
Anna: And I think this just ties into lots of things that we've talked about on previous iterations of this episode we're doing, just about there's bad stuff in there, and it's doin' bad things, and parts of it are roaming around, and your uterus is making poison for you every month, and if you don't get rid of it, you'll die. And obviously the Victorians, they loved that shit. They're just combing all the translated texts from antiquity being like, "Oh, yeah, this is the stuff. I'm gonna science-ify this and I'm gonna get a publication from the Royal Society. Hell, yeah." Or whatever.
Leila: I also like, seeing as how you started your section with saying this was metal as fuck, Bleeding Nipples as a metal band name.
Rebecca: I did not know where that sentence was going, Leila, and I am delighted.
Leila: I will say if your nipples bleed, as a woman, you need to go to the doctor. Or unless you're running on a cold day. That can happen, and they make special lubricant to put.
Rebecca: They're like pasties.
Leila: It looks like deodorant, but you put it on your nipples, and it keeps it from rubbing 'til it bleeds. I used to do triathlons a long time ago before I just became a trash witch, and after the open-water swims early in the morning when it was cold, by the end of the triathlon, there were lots of men and women with bleeding nipples coming out of their running shirts. Just so you know, that is not a woman problem, and that was mostly men, to be honest with you.
Rebecca: To bring it all back, as I am famous for doing—
Leila: Sorry. I really went off there about bleeding nipples.
Rebecca: No. I am glad you share your disgusting story about running.
Leila: I didn't. I didn't get bleeding nipples.
Rebecca: 'Cause you prepared.
Leila: I prepared. I knew it could happen, and I prepared.
Anna: That'll be the best out-of-context quote from this. "I did not get bleeding nipples. You hear me?"
Rebecca: I also do appreciate—favorite pregnancy factoid. Pregnant women actually have 20 to 100% more blood volume in their bodies, and the average is about 45%.
Anna: That's too much blood.
Rebecca: I mean, I guess you have another alien growing in you.
Leila: Yeah. This is Kristin Everett bringin' the goods in the live chat right now.
Anna: Yep. Yep. Thank you, Kristin. She's one of my friends.
Leila: No. I have two men in here saying that they have had bleeding nipples. Yeah.
Anna: Thank you for recognizing.
Rebecca: But I will say, speaking of weird stuff that happens to women after they've given birth, so often historically if women are nursing, they did not have their periods. Also often both historically and contemporaneously, women end up with very unhappy nipples when they are breastfeeding. And so I do feel like there is a thing where I can see some stupid-ass Victorian doctor being like, "Well, you haven't had your period, and your nipples are bleeding, and these things are connected clearly." And it's like, "Yeah, they kind of are."
Anna: And you're like, "No, my baby is biting my boobs. He's very strong."
Leila: "He's teething."
Anna: "He has the bite [unclear 00:38:01] of an alligator."
Leila: All right. So we've got some honorable mentions.
Anna: Oh, I had one more thing on mine.
Leila: Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. Do it. I interrupted us about bleeding nipples. Go on.
Anna: Yeah. You really just derailed my whole segment. No, actually, it's fine. Let's move on 'cause we spent a lotta time on this.
Leila: Sorry. So in a regular episode, I edit them before we publish them.
Rebecca: Thank God.
Leila: If we didn't, it would be clown shit wall to wall for five hours. And Rebecca constantly has to say, "All right. To bring it back."
Anna: "Bring it in."
Rebecca: It's my classic line.
Leila: So we do have some honorable mentions that were sent in by people that we didn't have time to go into like we just did. So the first one that we have for honorable mention has been submitted by Robert Davis. And he said that Plato said women had hungry animals in their wombs. If the animal wasn't fed with a baby, it would get angry and wander all over their bodies and block their breathing. And that comes from Plato's Timaeus.
Leila: And he says that they do, in the mothering places, have, quote, "an animal within them eager for conception, which whenever it goes without issue for a long time beyond its proper season blocks the outlets for air and prevents respiration, causing extreme helplessness and bringing on all sorts of other diseases."
Anna: The Mothering Places is an excellent black metal band name. It's so good. I have to write this.
Leila: Can any of y'all play an instrument? Can we start a band, or no? No. Okay. And then we've got Hippocrates. These fathers of Western thought here bringin' the goods.
Rebecca: I know. It wouldn't be one of these if we didn't also rag on Plato and Hippocrates. Let's be real.
Leila: So he said from the writing Hysteria in Virgins that if a woman stays a virgin for too long, then her menstrual blood won't come out. And it will get backed up into her heart and lungs, making her go insane. This was also submitted by Robert Davis, which I guess by the 19th century we were bleeding out of our orifices. I guess we'd evolved to release the blood through other orifices.
Rebecca: Thank goodness.
Anna: We're doing so much better now. We're not going insane because we're bleeding out of our nipples.
Leila: And so the quote from this is, quote, "Virgins who do not take a husband at the appropriate time for marriage experiences these visions more frequently, especially at that time of their first monthly period, although previously they had had no such bad dreams of this sort." And then it goes talking about how the blood pools in the lungs and the heart becomes sluggish. We get numb and dumb and insanity, blah, blah, blah.
Anna: Ooh. I almost said something wildly inappropriate. Okay. Go on.
Leila: I can't edit this one.
Anna: I know. That's why I caught myself. And the excuse for it came out, like backed-up menstrual blood, but the bad thing didn't, so that's good. We're good.
Leila: Okay. That's good. Then the last honorable mention we have comes from Chloe-Rose Crabtree. Since women's vaginas are just literally inverted penises, their vaginas could fall out and turn into actual penises during physical labor, and then they would just be men. So this unsexing would happen during things like hard labor, working in the fields, things like that. So I guess it would just go [blows raspberry] and then we'd have a—I don't know. But, yeah, this was how a woman would unsex herself and literally just become a man.
Anna: Again, if you have a vaginal prolapse, you should go to the hospital. You don't then just become a man. You have to go to the doctor.
Rebecca: But not these doctors.
Anna: Again, do not time travel to the past to see a doctor. You think you were born in the wrong century and you wish you'd grown up in the Middle Ages or whatever? No. You don't.
Rebecca: You really don't. You really, really don't.
Leila: Yeah, no. So this is the part of the show where we do ask for your money. Keep going. We have more fun bullshit after this part. And if you wanna ask us questions, you want us to do the Q & A, go ahead and start dumping those into the chat, and we'll get to those in a minute. We're not gonna ask for your money for the rest of the show.
Leila: So every spring we do do a pledge drive on Patreon. And the pledge drive is basically our bread and butter for the rest of the year. It's what keeps us going. It's what allows us to pay writers and editors and all of those noodley monthly expenses to keep a website up and do the podcast and things like that.
Leila: So and we do once in a while do a one-time donation fundraiser in the spring, but the Patreon, the monthly pledges, it allows us, and Anna is our—we don't use these terms at all. Our CFO. We don't actually say stuff like that to each other, but she's the one who sets our financial budget for the year. And we're able to do that if we can see that we have some sort of stability and sustainability on Patreon.
Anna: Yeah. So the Patreon is basically our entire operating budget. We get some one-time donations and we do some sponsorship type of things, but we don't run ads and we don't paywall anything. And so what you see on the Patreon total is basically the money we have to work with at any given time.
Anna: And so we set a really ambitious goal for this one, which we know it's a weird time, but the aim with that is we really want to get our rates for writers into a more competitive echelon, I guess. We started out not paying anybody, and now we pay $150 per piece, which is pretty remarkable. We did that all through fundraising, and we've been able to consistently every year raise our rates.
Anna: And so that's always gonna be our biggest goal, is being able to pay writers more because their work is so excellent and we really believe in paying writers what they're worth, especially in the, frankly, really shitty landscape for media right now. It's important to us that we are able to do that as well as we can for as long as we can. That's the big thing.
Anna: I also wanna make sure that everybody who works for Lady Science gets a fair compensation. So we wanna raise rates for editors. That's super important to me because everybody works incredibly hard to make all of this happen. We have amazing writers, but we also have really excellent editors. We have to have our social media editor, who is amazing. Rebecca's our managing editor. We would not get anything done without her. So I wanna make sure that everybody is getting compensated fairly for that because it's a lot of work to put this kind of thing together.
Anna: So our goal is $2,600 a month on Patreon, and that's gonna put us in a really, really good spot. We'll be able to raise our rates. We'll be able to raise our rates probably by I think it says $200 on the Patreon right now, but I think if we had $2,600 I think we can raise it even more. So there's a real opportunity here for us to make a difference for our writers and our editors, and we need your help to do it. Yeah.
Anna: Oh, and what I was also just gonna say. I said that our total budget is what you see on Patreon. Most of that goes to writing and editing. The rest of it just goes directly into overhead and stuff. It's the hosting on the website, paying for transcriptions for the podcast. Sometimes we have to buy microphones because we buy one kinda microphone, and then they all blow up at the same time and we have to buy new ones. Things like that that are regular business stuff. But all the money goes into Lady Science. And, yeah, that's it. We have a really low overhead, so the more money we get, the more money we can spend on writers.
Rebecca: So hopefully some of that inspired you guys, if you aren't already a patron, to become one. And lucky for those of you who would like to now become one, it is pretty easy. If you go to patreon.com/ladyscience, you will get sent to a page that will then let you select a membership level. And if you happen to be someone who's totally new to Patreon, you'll be asked to set up an account at that point, but that just takes a second.
Rebecca: And then from there you'll be sent to confirm the payment details. And at that point, so when you go to our Patreon page, you'll have some membership level choices. If you don't like any of those choices and you wanna give seven dollars a month or $12 a month and you don't like our nice round five, $10, $20 a month amounts there, once you go in to confirm your payment details, you can also change however much you wanna give per month and adjust that in there for people who are feeling ornery.
Rebecca: And you will also see at that point—oh, and this is a new thing that's pretty cool, which you have now the option to pay annually instead of monthly. And so then you would essentially pay the whole year's worth at once when you sign up and then at the same time each year. The really cool thing about that is that when you pledge annually, you get a 10% discount. That's awesome for you.
Rebecca: And pledging annually is also awesome for us because that gives us even more information about what our budget will look like for the entire year because for often understandable reasons, people will change their pledges partway through the year. And then that will sometimes throw off our budget, and we'll have to go on social media and beg for money again. But if we know that someone has already given their annual amount all at once, then that lets us not have to worry about adjustments like those, which is nice.
Leila: All right. Well, enough of that. Go give us money.
Anna: Please?
Leila: Please.
Anna: We will spend it on good stuff. All right. Before we do this Q & A, I have to get another drink.
Leila: Okay. Go do that. Okay.
Anna: I'll be listening. I'll be right back.
Leila: Okay. We don't have any questions yet, so does anyone wanna ask about anything?
Rebecca: People have to ask things. While we're waiting, I will also tell folks because, I don't know, I have feelings about this. Anna and Leila also work insanely hard, and for a long time they did not pay themselves through our Lady Science budget. It was quite a while when all the money was going to me and other editors and our writers and they were not taking any kinda stipend. We now make enough that they feel comfortable also taking money for themselves, which is good because they work so frickin' hard. So yay for them. And yeah.
Anna: Aw. Thanks.
Rebecca: I had to say nice things about you guys.
Leila: See, the thing is I've tricked Rebecca into thinking that I work hard because we work remotely through Slack.
Anna: Just get in the Slack and be like, "Oh, I'm doin' all this stuff."
Rebecca: "I'm doin' stuff."
Leila: And I'm really just sitting there watching TV, eating jalapeno potato chips.
Anna: It's all Star Trek and snacks.
Rebecca: I mean, I believe that you're sitting there watching TV eating jalapeno potato chips, but I also believe you are simultaneously having 20 conversations with people about fancy Lady Science things and editing stuff and yelling at Squarespace to make the website work.
Leila: Yeah. And sometimes I [unclear 00:51:33] stuff.
Rebecca: And in Anna's case yelling about finances.
Anna: Yeah. I can't believe you used the word CFO to describe me.
Leila: I didn't know what else to say.
Anna: I don't know how to do math. It's awful.
Rebecca: Well, the rest of us continue to get paid every month, so I'm assuming it's going okay over there.
Anna: I can manage PayPal.
Leila: All right. Okay. I'm not seeing any questions, which means no one's interested.
Rebecca: We just lay out so much of ourselves.
Anna: We should have talked more about nipples.
Leila: Yeah. Then let's go ahead and move on to our last little bit here. Not little bit. I mean, this is probably gonna take a [unclear 00:52:25].
Anna: I'm gonna be so bad at this. I'm not gonna be able to figure it out. I just [unclear 00:52:29] already know.
Rebecca: I am very excited.
Leila: Yeah. So we're gonna play a game of Balderdash. And me and our social media editor KJ came up with this game. So some of the things I'm going to say are true and some of the things that I'm going to say are made up. Oh. Okay, we've got a question.
Anna: Everybody stop.
Leila: Everybody stop. Favorite lady underdog scientist.
Rebecca: So I will say one woman scientist that I like to talk up a lot. She was very successful but is not thought of as a scientist, and I think she should be. And that is Madam CJ Walker, who was born Sarah Breedlove. Certainly an underdog in the sense that she grew up desperately poor in the South in the mid-19th century as a Black woman and did other women's hair. Was able to, through experimenting in her kitchen, develop hair products for Black women, especially to help combat alopecia, which she herself suffered from.
Rebecca: And she went on to then start a company, and she became nearly a millionaire by the time she died and became part of New York high society. She had a giant fuck-you house in the Hudson Valley. She built her house next door to the Rockefellers, and you can't tell me that that wasn't a little bit of a fuck-you.
Anna: That's iconic.
Rebecca: Literally her next-door neighbor were the Rockefellers. And was a really great businesswoman, and I think that she is often seen in that category. And also was an activist. She gave tons of money to the NAACP and to a lot of social justice causes. But I think that in some ways she was also a chemist in this way that many women were and are, even if they don't categorize themselves that way.
Anna: Yeah. Yeah. Well, since Rebecca opened the door for the annoying historian answer of "I see your question, and I'm going to answer it a different way," I will say that my favorite lady underdog scientists are all of the secretaries and clerical workers who worked at NASA in the 1960s 'cause I think we often think of, like Rebecca said, we think of them in one way and not as scientists. But a lot of them learned a lot about space science to do their jobs. They had top secret security clearances. And they managed all of the information flow of the agency, and that's a huge job. And they worked at NASA, so they were space workers there. Those are my favorite, and that's an annoying historian answer right there.
Leila: So one of my favorites. I don't really know if she's an underdog anymore, but I just really like this story. This gives me a chance to talk about it to other people. Madame Lavoisier, who was a chemist. She helped her husband Antoine Lavoisier, whatever. This is the part I wanna tell about her life.
Leila: So her husband Lavoisier got killed during the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, and then she remarried another dude who when they were courting or whatever thought that she was intelligent and loved that she was interested in science and whatever but then when they got married just was not interested in that part of her anymore. And not only was she interested in science and very good at being a chemist, she also played the role of an aristocrat's wife of hosting parties and all of that thing that goes along with the powdered wig and whatnot.
Leila: And so she wanted to have a party. Her husband locked the gates so her guests could not come in. And she was so mad that she boiled pot after pot after pot after pot of water and poured it over his roses. I mean, just mad respect for this woman who just boiled all of these pots of water over a campfire and then lugged that bucket out to the rose garden and was like, "Pfft."
Leila: You have to really—you wanna feel that anger when you do something like that. So mad fuckin' respect to Madame Lavoisier. Spiteful horticulture.
Anna: Yeah. That takes a lot of endurance, both physically and just emotionally. Yeah.
Leila: Any other questions? All right. I'm doing it. I'm moving on to the game. All right. I'm going to read you some little factoids and quotes, and you have to decide if it's true or if it's balderdash. And you guys in the livestream, you can help out Anna and Rebecca by putting your answers into the chat.
Rebecca: We're gonna need it.
Anna: Is this a competition between me and Rebecca?
Leila: I swear some of these aren't real. Some of these are made up. And it's gonna be real hard considering it's been a free game of what men can say about women's bodies from the beginning of time.
Anna: I have a question first before we begin.
Leila: Yes, ma'am.
Anna: Is this a competition between me and Rebecca? And if I win, what do I win?
Leila: I'm coming to see you in two days.
Anna: Oh, okay. I [unclear 00:58:56].
Rebecca: You've already won.
Leila: If you don't win, I'm not coming on Friday.
Anna: You're not coming.
Leila: I'm canceling my flight, and I'm not coming to see you on Friday.
Anna: Rebecca, you have to throw this one.
Rebecca: Wait. But is it a competition, though? Because if so, who are the people in the comments helping?
Anna: Yeah. Do we get points? Yeah. Ooh. This could get ugly.
Leila: It is a competition against me, the game master. All of you against me.
Anna: So do Rebecca and I have to come to a consensus and then we get an answer together?
Leila: Sure. And these people can help you.
Anna: "These people."
Leila: These people. You people can help them.
Anna: You people [unclear 00:59:42] out there on the Internet.
Leila: Phone a Friend is the option, the only one. Yeah.
Anna: All right. All right. Let's do it.
Leila: So the first one was sent in by Misha Griffith. Women have less teeth.
Anna: This is gonna be so hard. I feel like I've heard that.
Rebecca: I mean, obviously there's the whole thing about men having one less rib or whatever thing, Adam, blah, blah, blah.
Leila: Women have one less rib because God—I went to Jesus school. He took a rib from Eve and gave it to Adam.
Rebecca: I was gonna say someone who was not raised a godless heathen needs to correct my Bible knowledge. Oh, we've got a vote for false.
Leila: You've got a Phone for Friend. We've got a false. Anybody else?
Anna: Wait. So just to be clear, what we are ascertaining here is whether or not this is a thing someone has said. Not whether or not it is true that women have fewer teeth.
Leila: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So this is something that somebody has actually said that we have documentation of or if it's balderdash, we made this up.
Anna: I'm gonna say this one is real. I'm gonna wanna say they're all real. I feel like I heard this when I was a kid. I don't know.
Leila: Rebecca, what do you think?
Rebecca: I can 100% believe that people—see, this is me overthinking it.
Anna: Someone said [unclear 01:01:29].
Rebecca: This is me overthinking it potentially.
Anna: We're never gonna get it.
Rebecca: But I feel like it feels like such a normal thing that someone would say that I think it is not a thing that someone said.
Leila: Okay. So what's your consensus in the end?
Anna: We do not agree.
Leila: You do not agree. All right.
Anna: There is no consensus. I said it's real, Rebecca said it's not.
Leila: Okay. It is real.
Anna: Nathan said it has been said.
Leila: It is real. It has been said, and it has been said by Aristotle.
Rebecca: Oh. Of course.
Leila: Which, like, just open your mouth.
Anna: One, two, three, four.
Leila: Anyway, yes. This one was said, and it was said by Aristotle, yet another one of the Western world's fathers.
Anna: Yep. Yep. This was greatest hits.
Leila: The next one is Canadian scientists initially cautioned women against watching more than an hour of color television per day, believing women's optical nerves could not handle the shift away from black and white broadcasts as well as men.
Anna: This is so hard.
Rebecca: I know.
Leila: You guys have to help out Anna and Rebecca here.
Rebecca: Seriously. Now I'm leaning towards true now, but this is your time period, Anna.
Anna: I don't study Canada. I don't know anything about that. I also feel that I'm trying to metagame this and be like, "What would KJ make up?" Okay. I'm gonna say this one's made up. I'm gonna say KJ made this up.
Leila: Okay. We've got a vote for truth in the live chat. Rebecca, what do you think?
Rebecca: I think we're gonna again split the vote. I'm gonna say this one is true.
Leila: This one is actually balderdash.
Anna: It sounds real, though. They all sound real. That's the problem.
Rebecca: Well, if this was a competition, Anna would be winning.
Anna: [Unclear 01:03:55] Canada doesn't exist.
Leila: All right. The next one. Ancient Greek philosophers believed women always had their humors in imbalance and as such could not be trusted with serious decision-making as their uncontrolled yellow bile and spleen would lead to rash and vengeful choices.
Anna: Is this one of those where it's like you have to say which part of it's not true? Is it a different humor than yellow bile and spleen?
Leila: No. It's not that complicated. You gotta take the whole thing. Yeah.
Rebecca: I gotta say I love rash and vengeful choices, and I think that that is a good reason to give women power. But that's just me.
Anna: Rash and Vengeful Choices is the first album of my band [unclear 01:04:44].
Leila: Canada doesn't exist.
Anna: I think this one is balderdash because I think it's true, but I really think it's different. You know what I mean?
Rebecca: No. I know what you mean. I think am gonna agree with you on this one, that it is balderdash. And also, well, we have some split votes. [Unclear 01:05:15] what you're talking about.
Leila: Something I just learned in 1993. All right. This one is balderdash.
Anna: Yes! Cool.
Leila: But it does sound like something ancient Greeks would say. Okay. Next one. Old women begin to resemble men and as such represent an advance in the female gender.
Anna: This one's tricky 'cause I wanna say it's balderdash because men would never say that women were advancing in any way.
Rebecca: Yeah. I was almost gonna agree with it, especially based on our menopause episode and all the weirdness about women are no longer women once they enter menopause. But that would not be seen as an advance, so I'm gonna say false as well.
Leila: This one is real.
Anna: Aw, man!
Leila: So this one comes from Johns Hopkins, and it's that Johns Hopkins who wrote in The Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology that "The female, failing to develop into the full characteristics of the race—" which meant a beard 'cause men were the race, so a beard "—was an arrested male. For the human race, then, possession of a beard must be regarded as a general characteristic of our race. When a female, from disease, mutilation, or old age, assumes resemblance to the male, the change is an advance."
Anna: Wait, what?
Rebecca: Wait. So it's not even just that women—it's specifically because women are more likely to grow hair on their face.
Leila: As they get older.
Rebecca: As they get older.
Anna: But so it's an advance for women if they have some kind of disease that causes this to happen?
Leila: Yeah because now they look like men. So the bearded lady from the freak shows of old was actually considered an advancement.
Anna: [Unclear 01:07:28].
Leila: And that was, like I said, that Johns Hopkins.
Rebecca: The fathers of modern medicine.
Leila: Yeah. So the next one is early modern surgeons believes that periodic bloodletting would expand a woman's childbearing period, leading many noblewomen to undertake annual, quote, "lettings for the bloom."
Anna: Lettings for the Bloom is the other [unclear 01:07:59] album.
Leila: Are you Googling that?
Anna: No. I'm writing down album names for my cool band. Lettings for the Bloom? That's fucking rad.
Rebecca: Wait, the bloom or the womb?
Leila: The bloom. Like a flower.
Rebecca: Okay, 'cause the blooming of—
Leila: Lettings of the bloom.
Rebecca: Got it. Thank you for making that gesture. God, I feel like early modern doctors wanted any reason to bleed people. So I'm gonna go with true.
Anna: Sure. That's a real one.
Leila: It's balderdash. I just wanna say so KJ—
Anna: Did KJ come up with lettings for the bloom?
Leila: Yeah. So KJ came up with all the balderdash ones, and I found the true ones. And yeah. They did an amazing job.
Anna: Oh, my God. That's so good.
Leila: So the next one. Physicians warned, quote, "any spasmodic convulsion" during sex—sorry, warned against, quote, "any spasmodic convulsion" during sex because it would interfere with conception. So basically women should not move around during sex because it will interfere with—
Anna: Oh, that's real.
Leila: So basically good ol' missionary style.
Anna: And then put your feet up on a pillow afterwards so it don't come out. Can I get a yee-haw?
Leila: Yee-haw!
Anna: That's real.
Leila: Rebecca, what do you think?
Leila: No! Rebecca!
Anna: Oh, no. What have we done?
Leila: All right. What do you think, Anna?
Anna: I think it's real.
Leila: Yeah. It is real. So, yes, hygiene manuals stated that more cultured women, the more is the sensual refined in her nature.
Anna: Oh. So the deader the fish.
Leila: The deader the fish. Warned against any spasmodic convulsion on a woman's part during intercourse lest it interfere with conception. No. That question was too hard. Rebecca!
Rebecca: Yay! Technical difficulties.
Anna: It all was about to get rowdy without you.
Leila: So to catch you up, that one was true.
Rebecca: I didn't even hear what it was. I cut out just as you were saying.
Leila: Oh. Women need to be dead fish in sex, or else they're not gonna have babies.
Rebecca: Oh, yeah. Of course.
Leila: All right. The next one. Sensing the dangers of letting women participate in the automotive age, physicians encouraged women to consume phosphate water spiked with bourbon or rye before getting behind the wheel in order to, quote, "quell the feminine nerves."
Anna: This one's balderdash. It's really good, though.
Leila: Rebecca?
Rebecca: Yeah. No.
Leila: Yeah. That one's balderdash.
Anna: It's so good, though. Phosphate waters? Damn, KJ.
Leila: 'Cause it's not just water. It's phosphate water. Again, all these could be real.
Anna: That sounds right. It's so good.
Leila: All right. So this is the last one. Concerned that microwaves would cause sterility, a group of American scientists in 1970s advised women to wear special laboratory-grade aprons when reheating leftovers in the new kitchen gadgets.
Anna: I've never heard this. But I just keep thinking about that scene in—what's that movie with Jennifer Lawrence where she yells at the microwave? The science oven.
Leila: I don't know. The science oven.
Rebecca: I don't know.
Leila: We've got a vote for true.
Rebecca: Whiskey and phosphate water sounds like some cure for COVID.
Leila: It was in this house.
Anna: You put that shit in a neti pot, rinse it around in there, you're not gonna get the 'rona. Don't worry.
Rebecca: I mean, I was just gonna say, again, because this is even more Anna's wheelhouse, and if she hasn't heard of it. I also feel like at this time period people are very unconcerned about the side effects of various kinds of chemical and stuff.
Anna: Add a bleach chaser. That's true.
Rebecca: And therefore, I mean, they weren't concerned about people who were testing nuclear bombs, for God's sake. So yeah.
Leila: All right. So what are we goin' with?
Anna: Balderdash?
Rebecca: I'm gonna go balderdash, too.
Leila: It's balderdash.
Rebecca: Woo!
Anna: Ooh, that was fun.
Rebecca: That was good.
Anna: Oh, my God. Thank you, KJ, for doing such a good job on that.
Leila: Yeah. KJ did a great job on that. And we're ending a little early 'cause you guys didn't have questions for us, but we're fine. That's fine.
Anna: So this is your fault.
Leila: You don't wanna know about us?
Rebecca: Last chance. Last chance.
Leila: But no, this was super fun. And thank you guys for joining us. And if we do this again in the future, we hope that all of you will come back. But yeah. This was super fun. Thanks, everybody, for joining and good night.
Anna: Thank you.
Rebecca: And don't forget. Go to patreon.com/ladyscience and pledge.
Leila: Finger guns with blood. Good bye.
Image credit: Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a hypnotised patient at the Salpetriere. Etching by A Lurat, 1888 after P.A.A. Brouillet, 1887 (Wellcome Collection | CC BY 4.0)
