tl;dr Jaclyn Friedman on believing women, what happens when we disclose our trauma, and why our PERCEPTION of who is a victim impacts how we view all victims. We’re talking about her new book with Jessica Valenti, “Believe Me”.

Explore More Summit is happening NEXT WEEK. Grab your free ticket by registering today for this free, entirely online conference that happens April 20-29th featuring 28 delicious, timely, intimate talks. Head to exploremoresummit.com now!

Finally, Patrons who support at $3 and above, this week you get to hear a bonus chat between Jaclyn Friedman and I on Tina Horn’s fantastic essay speaking to why pleasure should not be the measure for sex work and porn performers. It’s SOOOO good and super important for folks who truly want to support those in the field. Hear it at patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

I love every time I get to be in conversation with Jaclyn, and this was no different.

We explore the difference between what it means to believe women versus what it means to believe ALL women, and why that distinction is important.

We dive into what it means that women, femmes, and feminized folks often have a different set of memories than cis men. The ways survivors are retraumatized by courts, lawyers, and our “justice” system.

So much of “Believe Me” demonstrates the ways we would all move closer to liberation if we centered Black women and trans women, and we explore all the ways so many of us are only trusted if we disclose the gory details of our trauma but in doing so we are also seen as discredited and no longer experts in anything except our trauma.

Jaclyn shares what social researchers have long demonstrated: that collectively we not only hold women to much higher standards, but as a woman’s credibility goes up, we like her less for it and actively punish her for that growing credibility.

So what can we do about it? Where do we go?

It’s such an important discussion about a very important book, and I hope you’ll get yourself a copy.

Be sure to send in your questions! I would love to hear from you. Use the contact form at dawnserra.com.

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About Jaclyn Friedman:

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, educator and activist, and creator of four books Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009), What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, and her latest, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Her podcast, also called Unscrewed, is paving new paths to sexual liberation, and was named one of the Best Sex Podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire.

As an undergraduate, Jaclyn thought she was too smart to become a victim of sexual assault – until another student proved her wrong. That experience eventually led her to become a student and instructor of IMPACT safety training. At IMPACT, she helped bring safety skills to the communities which most need them, including gang-involved high school students and women transitioning out of abusive relationships.

Friedman’s work has popularized the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent that is quickly becoming law on many US campuses. In her book, Unscrewed, she calls on the movement for women’s sexual liberation to move past individualistic “empowerment” messages (for which she coined the term “fauxpowerment”) to focus on collectively transforming the systems and institutions invested in keeping women sexually servile. Kirkus called it “a potent, convincing manifesto,” and Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, called it “the book we need right now.”

Friedman is a popular speaker on campuses and at conferences across the US and beyond. She has been a guest on the Today Show, Nightline, PBS News Hour, Call Your Girlfriend, and numerous other audio and TV shows, and her commentary has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Vox, Refinery 29, The Washington Post, Glamour, and The Guardian. Friedman is a founder and the former executive director of Women, Action & the Media, where she led the successful #FBrape campaign to apply Facebook’s hate-speech ban to content that promotes gender-based violence. More recently, she has been active in the Jews Against ICE movement, with whom she was arrested at a protest this summer. 

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I’m ridiculously excited because Jaclyn Friedman is here this week to talk about her new anthology with Jessica Valenti, “Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World.” I got a chance to read the book a little while back and it is extraordinary. It is such a good read. There are so many impressive essays in this book, you’re going to hear Jaclyn and I talk about a whole bunch of them. There are indigenous women and congresswomen and trans women and black women, and so many different kinds of folks in this book, talking about believing women, believing survivors. And it’s really nuanced and important and I’m ridiculously excited that Jaclyn had time to come on the show. 

Dawn Serra: We also recorded a Patreon bonus. So if you support the show at $3 a month and above, you get all kinds of exclusive bonus content. Jaclynand I spent the entire time, it’s about 15 or 20 minutes, talking all about porn and Tina Horn’s essay in Believe Me about the labor conditions of porn and the ways that conversations about porn often get derailed, and how dehumanizing it is to expect pleasure to be happening on porn sets and in porn, which is where feminist conversations about porn often go – that there needs to be pleasure and orgasms and… So we go really deep into that. So if you want to hear it, go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. 

Before we get to my conversation with Jaclyn, I just want to remind you – Explore More Summit, the sixth one – we’re doing it for the sixth time, is happening super soon. April 20th to the 29th. It’s 10 days. It’s kind of amazing that this conference, that we’re doing for the sixth time, is entirely online because it means it is physical isolation/quarantine friendly. The talks this year are extraordinary for the times that we’re in. I could not have planned this better. And I, in no way, planned for these conversations to happen during a global pandemic, but they are important. They are so important. 

Dawn Serra: We’ve got a conversation with Prentiss Hemphill, who’s one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter. We’re talking all about somatics and embodiment, healing the importance of pleasure in healing, and the violence that happens when we focus on our innocence. Kai Cheng Thom is speaking and it’s a beautiful conversation all about social justice and leading with our trauma versus leading with our healing. I’ve got Amber Rice, who’s hysterical, who’s a friend of mine and colleague of mine, who’s a therapist talking about our inner critic and self-compassion. We’ve got conversations about erotic touch and pleasure, about Body Trust, about grief, healing, soothing our nervous systems. Clementine Morrigan is there talking about trauma-informed polyamory and Disability Justice. 

Oh my gosh, it’s such a lineup. There’s 28 talks that are going to happen in those 10 days. If you attend it live April 20th to the 29th, again, all online – it’s free to attend. So whether you watch part of one talk or all 28 talks during those 10 days, it’s free and you get workbooks. Full of journal prompts and reflective questions that are free as well, access to our private Facebook community, which has been around for a number of years now. There have been some people there since the very first Explorer More Summit, which is such a gift. I would love to see you there. There’s conversations about relational responsibility and emotional labor, which is particularly important as so many of us are home with partners and with kids in ways that we normally wouldn’t be. There’s conversations about community accountability and care webs, which is also especially important in a time where it’s becoming so clear, the shortages of resources that so many people have, and the importance of pleasure, even when we’re experiencing trauma and harm, and trying to find our way towards healing. It’s all at the summit this year. 

Dawn Serra: So if you want to sign up and get your free ticket, exploremoresummit.com – you can see the lineup and the schedule. The way it works is each morning for those 10 days, I will email you a link to that day’s talks. There’s two to three talks per day. The talks are up for 24 hours. So in those 24 hours, you can watch and re-watch as many of those days’ talks as you want. Then they come down, the next day’s email goes out, more talks. And we do that for 10 days. It’s a deep, nourishing, challenging experience. It’s one of my most favorite things every year. So I hope you’ll join us – exploremoresummit.com. 

Also, if you are a sex educator, a therapist, and entrepreneur and you’ve got an audience, I’m also looking for affiliates. So if you want to help spread the word about Explore More Summit, I am offering people who become affiliates 50% of any attributed sale, so it can be a fun way to make some money. Some of my affiliates already have several hundred dollars racked up. So if you’d like to do that, go to exploremoresummit.com and you’ll see some information and get emails about it as well, so check that out. 

Dawn Serra: Okay, it’s time for my conversation with Jaclyn Friedman. Before I share the interview, I want to tell you just a little bit about Jaclyn. Jaclyn has been on the show a few times before and every time I get to talk to Jaclyn, I learned so much. So Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, educator, and activist, and creator of four books: “Yes Means Yes”, “Visions of Female Sexual Power in A World Without Rape”, which was one of Publishers Weeklies’ top 100 books of 2009, “What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girls Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety”, “Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting The System Screw Us All” – when that book came out, Jaclyn was on the show and it’s such a great conversation. Then her latest, which is what we’re talking about today, “Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World”. Her podcast, also called Unscrewed, is paving new paths to sexual liberation and was named one of the best sex podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire. 

There is so much more to say about Jaclyn but I will just let this interview speak for itself. We talked about Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black and we talked about Tina Horn in the Patreon bonus. Oh my god, I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation. So let’s just jump in now.

Dawn Serra: Welcome back to Sex Gets Real, Jaclyn. We get to talk about your new awesome book with Jessica Valenti today. 

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah! 

Dawn Serra: Yeah! So your new book that the two of you pulled together is, “Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World” and it’s an anthology of incredible essays. So, holy smokes.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yes, thank you. I mean, I feel that way about too– I don’t know if that’s self-aggrandizing, but just some of these essays came out and I was like, “Whoa!” It was an honor to work on these.

Dawn Serra: I’ve always wondered what the process is of actually doing the selection, because I imagine that there were either stories you received or pitches you received that were also awesome. But then you just didn’t have space to make it a 1000-paged book.

Jaclyn Friedman: Books are cruel that way, because their physical needs are very needy. Yeah, I mean, we did a hybrid approach, which is the same thing we did for Yes Means Yes, where there were certain people who we knew we wanted to hear from the subject or certain topics that we knew we wanted to cover, and we thought of people that would be amazing to cover them. And we reached out to them directly and said, “Will you write an essay for us for this book?” Or in some cases, “Will you write this particular essay for us for this book?” But then we also put out a call for pitches and we got hundreds of pitches, most of which were great. Honestly, the quality was higher overall than I expected. Often when you do an open call, it’s like a total mixed bag. But it was really painful. We probably could have constructed a whole second book out of the pitches we didn’t take. I’m a little bit haunted by some of them like, “I wrote that essay….”

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Okay, so here’s where I would love to start because it’s literally the title of the book. And the two of you address it early in the book. I think it’s a Jessica essay to open it, but there is a difference in your minds between believe women and believe all women.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yes. 

Dawn Serra: Can you speak to that a little bit, because I think some people get a little bi tense around the languaging that can sometimes happen with this. So for you, how do you see the difference unfolding between believe women and believe all women?

Jaclyn Friedman: People do get really tense around this stuff. Believe women and believe survivors, which are, of course, significantly overlapping but not identical ideas, is a really important idea and is the backbone of this book. I’ll talk more about what that means in a second. But what I want to say, in answer to your question, is that when people get made uncomfortable by the idea that we should treat women as credible and important. The conversation does this almost invisible slide, that Jessica really articulates very well and makes visible in her essay, to “You’re saying believe all women” and that sneaky little shift in argument is where the whole thing is off the rails. Because believe women and believe survivors doesn’t mean “No woman could ever not be telling the truth.” It doesn’t mean that, obviously, and we live in the world. 

It doesn’t mean if a woman says, “You raped her.” You immediately go to jail for the rest of your life and there’s no due process, right? It doesn’t mean any of that shit that the “Believe all women” people want you to think it means. What “Believe Women” means is we demand to be treated as de facto credible and important, until proven otherwise. Right? So it’s not that – it shouldn’t be that high a bar. We afford that to men reflexively without thinking about it. In fact, we allow men to remain socially credible and important long past the point where they have proven themselves otherwise, much of the time. And instead the reverse is true for women and I actually write it out in my essay how social science shows that as men’s credibility increases, their likability also increases. 

Jaclyn Friedman: We like men who we find credible. As women’s credibility increases, our likability decreases. We hate it when women are credible. We hate believing women. So it’s not even that we hold women to a higher standard of believability, which we do. But when we cross that bar, then we get socially punished for being credible. Because the entire culture is built on the idea that women can’t be believed. If we believe women, everything would have to be restructured. So “Believe Women” means that we are treated both as credible and as important, and that second part is really crucial, too. Credibility is crucial to the idea of belief, “May we have to treat women as de facto credible until proven otherwise.” But it’s not enough. The case that really exposes the need to add and important to that construction is Dr. Christine Blasi Ford.

She was absolutely perceived as credible by the vast majority of the country. The president of our United States tweeted after she testified that she seemed credible to him. But in the end, the people in power decided she wasn’t important enough, even though they believed her to do anything different than what they already wanted to do. So believing women really doesn’t just mean thinking what we say is true, although that is necessary. It also means acting as though what we say is important.

Dawn Serra: There was another piece of your essay around this bizarre cultural phenomenon, thank you patriarchy, in addition to as our credibility increases, our likability decreases. You also pointed out that it’s more perverse than that, that we prefer not finding women credible. And that when we do end up actually finding one credible, that we actively then penalize them.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, so I’m just going to say the words – Elizabeth Warren. Leave it there. Yeah, absolutely. We become shrill, ballbusting, aggressive – all these things. Whereas if men behave in literally the same way, they’re respectable and ambitious and go-getters and authoritative – all these positive words. Women who managed to prove themselves credible are socially punished on the regular.

Dawn Serra: I would love to know as you look at where we’re going, and I think what’s so tough about this is a lot of people will probably hear these things and feel this constriction, this attempt to become defensive, “But I’m not like that.” “The people I know aren’t like that.” But it’s not so much that it’s this chosen bias. We’re not choosing to do this in a lot of cases, in some cases, but there’s more of this implicit bias that we just get this dislike feelings; sometimes when we’re in a situation where there’s an older, powerful man speaking and then an older, powerful woman speaking, and there’s kind of like this– I’ve seen it happen in some of my family members this leaning towards the man. And that implicit bias, what do you think is going to need that happen in us in order for us to shift away from that, for us to really start experiencing less of that patriarchy and more of that truly equitable treatment regardless of gender?

Jaclyn Friedman: Well, it requires active work, right? All implicit bias requires our active attention to interrupt. We have to become aware of the fact that we have those implicit biases. So first, we have to overcome that defensive reaction that, “I’m a good person, you can’t possibly be describing me.” Then we have to start becoming aware of how we’re doing it unconsciously. Then we have to start learning other behaviors. There’s a great model that I learned ages ago, so long ago that I don’t know who to attribute it to, if you picture a semicircle, like the speed dial on a car – the speedometer. We all start off with unhealthy behavior as unconsciously incompetent, right? So that’s the state of implicit bias. We are not conscious, we’re doing it, but we are doing something, let’s say, wrong – not in a judgy way, but something that is harmful to ourselves or others, right? Then if we put our attention on it and we start to try and move that needle, the next tick up is consciously incompetent, which is the most uncomfortable part of trying to change a behavior or a set of beliefs, right? 

We become aware that we are in fact doing this thing that is harmful to ourselves or others, but we’re not able to change it yet. Oftentimes, that state is so uncomfortable to people that we just go back into unconscious incompetence. But if we stick with it and we can just sit with that discomfort, we can learn to become the next tick over which is consciously competent, where if we focus, we can replace that harmful behavior or belief with a positive one – with a non-harmful one, with a helpful one. Then if we do that often enough, we can ultimately become unconsciously competent, which is the ideal, right? We don’t even have to think about it. We’ve just replaced the harmful behavior or belief with a more positive, helpful, affirmative one. So that’s a whole process, right?

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Jaclyn Friedman: That’s a lot of emotional work. So the other thing that has to change is, we have to be motivated to do that work. We have to know what the stakes are. That’s why I wrote my essay about the costs that we’re all currently paying for disbelieving women. Because a lot of times, we only hear the, “Oh, they’ll be costs if you insist that we treat women as credible and important. What about these great men that we can’t take their work seriously anymore because they abused women?” Whatever, fill in the blank, right? Those costs get imagined to be weighed against zero – the state right now is zero cost and then there will be cost. But in fact, there are so many costs we’re paying right now. I opened the essay by talking about mass shootings and how almost every time when a man takes a gun and go shoots up a bunch of people, he has a history of harming women. And if those women, those initial women he harmed – his girlfriend, his mom, his sister – if their harm was treated as credible and important, we wouldn’t have a culture where this guy could get access to a gun anymore. We would have done something about that originally and all of these people who are now dead or injured or traumatized, would be fine. 

So the idea that it’s costless to have the system that we’re in now is just – it’s ludicrous. I mean, we have Donald Trump as president of the United States, here in the United States because of our disbelief of women. There are other factors as well. I don’t want to be reductive. But for sure, one of the big ones is disbelief of women – not treating women as credible, important. Both Hillary Clinton, potentially the most confident person to ever run for– Well, the most qualified person to ever run for president. But also disbelieving, treating the women – dozen plus women who came out and said he sexually assaulted them as not credible or important. So all the harms the Trump administration has done/doing, which I think about a lot in the middle of the fucking Corona virus. We’re paying this price partially down to our cultural refusal to treat women as credible and important. So we have to start making visible the costs we’re paying in order to motivate us to do that really difficult work of undoing our implicit bias.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. It also makes me think there was this line in Moira Donegan’s essay that I love. 

Jaclyn Friedman: That essay blew the roof of my mind off. 

Dawn Serra: So good. 

Jaclyn Friedman: It’s so good. It’s about Freud. I have to say, I studied psychology as an undergraduate. My undergraduate degree is in psychology and I did not know this. That Freud in his early career, understood initially that the women he was treating had PTSD. He didn’t call it that, but functionally, that’s what he was describing, due to the trauma they were experiencing at the hands of the men in their lives. And he came out and told his colleagues about it and they were like, “That can’t be true because then all these women were being abused by all these men, and all these men can’t be abusers. Come on.” He saw that he had to choose between what he already knew and believed in his career, and he chose his fucking career. And that’s where we get shit like women want to be raped and all these damaging ideas. Literally all came out of the fact that Freud had to bury something he believed, which is his belief in women – all fucked up shit comes from that backlash against Freud actually believing his female clients. I know you’re going to talk about this particular line, but I’m still – I read that essay two years ago originally. I’m still processing it and still angry about it and mind blown about it anyway.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. It’s enraging to think about and how different things could have been.

Jaclyn Friedman: Literally, another cost for paying is living in a world completely constructed around Freud’s bullshit theory.

Dawn Serra: Yep. Which he knew weren’t true, but he pushed forward so that he could maintain his access to power.

Jaclyn Friedman: Say the lovely line and we’re done. 

Dawn Serra: Okay, so the line I loved from Moira was, “I’ve been struck by the growing recognition that women are the keepers of different sets of memories.” 

Jaclyn Friedman: Oh, talk about that. What does that make you think about? 

Dawn Serra: When I think about it, not only within the context of my own life and story, but then when I think about the lineage going all the way back through ancestors that so many women – trans and cis women and feminized people – the memories that are being held in our bodies of the violence, the emotional labor, the ways that we have to shrink ourselves in order to survive the pain of trying to take up space – those are memories in our bones, that we are not only experiencing ourselves, but that all of the other women and feminized people that came before us felt too. There’s this intergenerational legacy of those memories being in our bones, and that people who get to move through the world as men have a very different experience of moving through the world in those memories that they have; and how we have such different perspectives because of patriarchy, because of gender violence, because of the gender binary. 

It just struck me so much that the memories I keep of so many of the relationships I’ve been in, of so many of the family events that I experienced, are fundamentally different than, say, the way my dad experienced them or ex boyfriends and things like that. It really was something that struck a chord in me of like, holy shit. I mean, the same can be said for so many other inequities like the memories that black folks hold about what it means to exist in the United States are vastly different than the memories white folks hold.

Jaclyn Friedman: Oh, sure. I mean, you just have to think about Make America Great Again. When was a great for whom? The people who are saying Make America Great Again, have a time they can look back to when they thought America was great for the. 

Dawn Serra: Yep. I think something about Moira saying that in this essay about Freud and this legacy of the violence of mental health. How long the white male theorists of modern mental health have pathologized so many things that are normal for people to be doing when they’re experiencing the world as women experience it.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. It’s a lot.

Dawn Serra: It is a lot and it also made me think there’s this other kind of piece that you’re highlighting in the book that I thought was illuminated really beautifully – that kind of speaks to this same space that Moira is articulating in Sady Doyle and then Jamil Smith’s essays, where Sady is talking about women confronting men in leftist and social justice spaces and how that’s a very different experience than confronting men that aren’t in those spaces. Then Jamil Smith is talking about how black women have to choose between disclosing their trauma and knowing that to disclose their trauma might mean then yet another black man becomes imprisoned and vilified, and kind of the choice between community and self and safety. It just illuminates for me so beautifully, that if we centered black women, all of us would win.

Jaclyn Friedman: Amen. Yeah. One of the reasons we wanted to include as many black women in this book, which we did, have so many powerful things to say. That Jamil Smith essay is one of my absolute faves for that exact reason.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. One of the things I wrote in my notes was “Trigger warning on this whole book.” I think one of the things I love so much about every time that I get to be in dialogue with you about anything, whether it’s for Explore More or for the podcast, is the breadth of what we’re talking about. This issue of the #MeToo Movement, and sexual assault and sexual violence – it feels big. But it’s a small piece of a much larger puzzle that is all of the dominant systems and you’re revealing the layers of that through all of these essays like the experience of black women, of trans women. I mean, Julia Serrano’s essay was fantastic. 

Jaclyn Friedman: It was so smart. 

Dawn Serra: It’s so fucking smart about who’s marked and who’s unmarked, and desirability politics, and ISIS and immigrations in here. I mean, literally these issues of violence and being believed tie to everything. 

Jaclyn Friedman: Literally everything. One of the things that I learned from both working on the book and then touring with it, I’ve discovered is that there’s this a secret theme in the book, which is about the connection between sexual violence and women’s leadership. Because I noticed, as Jessica and I were talking about the book, interviews and events that we would go seamlessly from talking about sexual violence to talking about women’s leadership, and the obstacles there too. And not even mark that we were talking about two different things or that we were changing the subject. Then I started noticing that a lot of the essays do the same thing and I just started thinking about it. And realize that, of course, those two ideas are, two phenomena, are inextricably linked both because, of course, the overwhelming experience of sexual violence. Dealing with PTSD means you’ve got fewer spoons to think about leading anything, just in a real mental health kind of way. But also in the very specific ways that sexual violence is used to police and to take down women who ascend to or aspire to power that threatens the status quo. 

I’m thinking about about a month ago now how this Canadian oil executive started circulating this image of Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, being violently raped. And how so often, women who are taking or attempting to take power that the status quo folks don’t want us to have. I say very carefully, my instinct there is to say, “Men don’t want us to have…” But lots of women police this too. Plenty of women participate in this. Sexual violence is so often the tool they use to threaten and undermine us. So, really, there are so many surprising connections, right? You wouldn’t expect necessarily an essay about female porn performers and the expectation that they have to also prove that they are authentically having pleasure with an essay about how destigmatizing rape makes it less effective as a weapon of war. But those things are intrinsically linked because it all is ultimately about whether or not we treat women as credible and important.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I think one of the things – so there was two quotes I pulled out from Katherine Cross’s essay – one of them hit me hard. I had to stop reading for a minute. But Katherine said, “We have the right to interpret what happened to us and for those interpretations to be part of a serious discussion about the larger social structures in which we’re in meshed.” So much of what happens when you’re thinking about, like that cartoon about Greta or being threatened with sexual violence, or even coming forward as someone who experienced sexual violence suddenly that becomes what you’re known for. 

Jaclyn Friedman: Yes. 

Dawn Serra: And that makes you not credible as a new source, as a leader, as someone who is influencing culture anymore because now you’re a victim or a survivor, and that becomes your identity.

Jaclyn Friedman: I made a decision a long time ago, I started doing college talks, that I would not lead with my own story, even though a lot of schools wanted me to do that. Because it does exactly that. Once the room sees you as a victim, then when you try to talk to them as an expert, it’s very difficult to get the audience to come along. I’ll talk about my story if people want me to, but I don’t lead with it for that exact reason.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I’ve been talking to Kai Cheng Thom a couple of times over the past couple of months for the podcast and for Explore More. One of the things Kai Cheng has been talking about is how in so many social justice spaces we’ve come to this place where we only really believe you if you disclose your trauma.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yes! The performance of trauma is…

Dawn Serra: Like it’s required in order for you to be believed and centered, and how they’re wanting it to be that we can show up without having to cut our veins open and bleed for everyone. I think that’s why this one Katherine Cross quote hit me so hard, she wrote, “Even so called feminists define other women by how we’ve been traumatized, ‘Prove that you are who you say you are by stripping off and doing a little spin to show us where the patriarchy touched you.’”

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, absolutely. Her essay is really great at exposing that dynamic and then the double bind of how you’re treated if you do do that, which we’re willing… She centers that conversation about GamerGate, but it’s about so many other things and about how maybe if you perform that spin well enough and you open that vein, you tell that story, you’ll get believed. But you’ll get then sidelined as someone who has something to say about what should be done. 

Dawn Serra: Right, because now the only thing we’re going to listen to you about is how it hurt and how broken you are and how awful it was. We don’t really want to hear from you on software patches or ideas for how to move the administration forward. 

Jaclyn Friedman: It’s a different kind of objectification. We’re objectifying you as a trauma.

Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. Which I think also was so beautifully highlighted in the opening for your– Okay. Well, first of all, you got to talk to Tatiana Maslany.

Jaclyn Friedman: I do sometimes get to talk to Tatiana Maslany. She is an excellent human.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I remember, too, when you posted on social media that you were backstage for her show. I think that’s when you ended up actually doing the interview that ended up in the book.

Jaclyn Friedman: No, I actually wound up doing the interview later. She was in her dressing room when she was performing on Broadway network. So we didn’t do it the same day as that. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. So which means amazing that you have gotten to spend multiple times with Tatiana. And I think that’s fantastic because she’s brilliant. But I really love…

Jaclyn Friedman: And Canadian!

Dawn Serra: And Canadian, I know! I loved what you wrote in the beginning of your chat because as you were talking to Tatiana, Tatiana was talking about the things that she would get cast for and the directions she would be given about some of those roles. You were talking about what does it tell us that a woman’s perceived youth or innocence, perceived youth or innocence, makes her especially believable as a rape victim? Because then that draws the question – who isn’t believable?

Jaclyn Friedman: Right. I mean, that quote actually originated when I interviewed her for the first time for my podcast, Unscrewed, a number of years ago. She said this thing in that original interview about how when she was coming up as an actor, she got cast a lot of rape victims because she was innocent in the face, which wound up being the name of both that episode of my podcast and also the essay. Believe me, because it just took my breath away. The implications of that – who we believe is a credible rape victim is basically a child – someone who can only be sexualized and cannot have their own sexual agency. It’s still breathtaking when I think about it. Then in the interview, and believe me, that I got to do with her in that conversation, she talks about how it affected her as a human person having to play all of that and having to learn all of that in her body. She was hired to enact those ideas as she was growing up and coming into her own sexual identity and the implications on the women who literally do the labor in Hollywood, of having to play out those Hollywood ideas.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s like such an important thing to speak to and make visible – that so many of the stories we have about what a victim looks like and who gets to be believable and who we doubt, is specifically chosen by a very small set of people in a very powerful place about who they think looks innocent. Then that gets coded in the cultural soup and our cultural memories of, “When I think innocence and victim and who’s believable, I’m going to draw on my experiences,” which might largely be pop culture.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. The snake eats its own tail. This is literally complicating itself. Yeah, absolutely.

Dawn Serra: It just blows my mind to think about how… I just imagine that if someone were to write a story that was somewhat mainstream and cast someone who was a little bit rough around the edges, and who wasn’t very likable, who was maybe a little older, who had some power, who was very sexually expressed and owned that. And if we were given a story about that person being victimized – the response. I can already imagine the reviews.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. If you want to have the audience on the side of the victim, you can’t cast her like that. And then it replicates itself.

Dawn Serra: Exactly, exactly.

Jaclyn Friedman: Which is why we wind up at the end of that conversation in the book with Tatiana with her talking about women needing to have control behind the camera. Women need to have control of what stories get told how. MeToo in Hollywood is not just about not getting sexually harassed and assaulted on the job. In order to actually change that, we need to have real actual power behind the camera.

Dawn Serra: Yes. And lots of different kinds of women. Right?

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. Lots of different kinds of women. So that we’re not looking to every single representation to be everything everybody ever means, which is never possible. 

Dawn Serra: Yep. I want to see fat women with power, and women who have known deep poverty, and trans women who have physically transitioned and who have not, and women of color from all different kinds of backgrounds.

Jaclyn Friedman: Because no white guy ever watches a movie about a white guy and thinks about whether the representation of that white guy is good or bad for white guys. Or they just don’t, because they’re 1 trillion movies about white guys. So it’s understood the totality of it creates a world in which white guys can be lots of different ways.

Dawn Serra: That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s true.

Jaclyn Friedman: That’s what the rest of us fucking want, too, okay? The rest of us fucking want.

Dawn Serra: Which does mean, and you’ve talked about this before, it does mean that in order for all of us collectively to have a wide variety of nuanced stories about us, whether we’re talking about black folks, indigenous folks, fat folks, poor folks, trans folks, non-binary folks – the white guys do get less screen time.

Jaclyn Friedman: There are real costs to people in power, to changing the social structure, which is what we’re talking about here. And when we pretend that’s not true, we actually do all of our selves, our movements a disservice. Yeah, it’s going to cost. Some people will go willingly and some people will not. And that’s why we need to do collective organizing so we have enough power together, that we are the majority and we act like it.

Dawn Serra: Oh, I’m so glad you said that. It makes me think of – there’s another essay in the book by Dahlia Lithwick.

Jaclyn Friedman: Oh, Dahlia. Oh, God. That essay gives me goosebumps from start to finish. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. I love so much how she says, “We’re all bystanders. We are all bystanders, me too, when we don’t take to the streets, when we don’t flood the courtrooms with calls with our outrage when things like what happened to Christine happened.” I mean the fact that we’re still willing to pay to go see movies that are still centering cis white guys, is all of us being bystanders.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yes. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to say we should never go pay to see a movie that stars a white guy.

Dawn Serra: No, but I do think being able to really be more conscious about the choices we’re making and the impact that has, because money speaks, time speaks. These are limited resources that when we aren’t consciously making choices– Yes, we’re allowed to go watch a fluffy film and have fun. But, am I consistently and always putting my money in this one place? 

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, that I totally agree with. So I liken it to junk food. This is sort of a weird analogy at a time when a lot of us can’t go to the grocery store. But usually it works, so work with me. If you go to the grocery store and you buy some potato chips along with your groceries, there’s no fucking big deal about it. But if you go to the grocery store and the only thing available is potato chips, then we have a problem, right? Or even if you go to the grocery store and the only thing you buy is potato chips, you’re probably gonna have some nutritional deficiencies. And if enough people did that, then there would be mostly potato chips in the grocery store, right? 

So it’s about systems. It’s about the systems you create for yourself and the systems you’re participating in. There’s nothing wrong with having potato chips sometimes. Potato chips are tasty. But they’re not the only thing and we have a right to have available to us a balanced and varied media diet and we also participate in the feedback loop about what is produced.

Dawn Serra: I think it also speaks to what Dahlia was saying, too, that when we don’t take those couple of extra minutes to send an email to an elected official to speak to the unfairness of what’s happening with indigenous people’s water or not believing women when they say something’s happened to them – we’re contributing to this status quo. I think what’s important is we can’t all be giving all of ourselves all of the time. We have limited resources and we need to care for ourselves. But when we really think about it, when we see something and think, “That’s not fair.” Are we then making a note to ourselves but moving on most of the time? Or are we actually taking those couple of extra minutes, it really only takes those couple extra minutes, to actually organize and actually take action and find other people taking action so that there can be multiple of us that send that email or sign that petition or speak out about the unfairness of the thing before we then go on and make dinner. It really does mean that those of us who have more unearned privilege and more power need to be doing the uncomfortable or the inconvenient thing way more often.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, I totally agree. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes and sometimes it takes a lot more than that. Actually trying to change the culture is hard. Again, which is why we have to stay clear about what the stakes are.

Dawn Serra: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it might mean marching for multiple days or shutting down intersections for weeks at a time like what happened here in Vancouver. 

Jaclyn Friedman: Amazing.

Dawn Serra: Amazing organizing and action. Yeah. But I just really appreciate how like Alia wasn’t shying away from saying, “We’re all bystanders when we don’t take to the streets about so many of these issues.” Because it’s effective.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, it is actually effective. It is. And I’m as guilty as the next person is like letting myself get swept up in my own stuff and my own day to day, and being like, “I really don’t feel like it.” It’s hard, it’s hard. It’s a lot harder to stay motivated than to stay a bystander, and that’s why we have to continue to make that decision.

Dawn Serra: The last thing I want to bring up before we wrap up is I also really appreciated that at multiple points in the book, what was spoken to was that even – and this is a quote directly from Stacey Malone – “Even when ‘justice’ is achieved in the criminal justice system, the victory may come at the expense of the victim.” I just attended a conference this past weekend – I’m one of the speakers. Marlee Liss, who runs an organization called Re-Humanize, was raped and started going through the criminal justice system. She was talking about how she was manipulated by the people representing her, by the prosecutors, the ways that they manipulated her in order to make her seem like a more credible victim.

Jaclyn Friedman: Sure, there that is again. Innocence in face. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly. And the ways that survivors are re-traumatized over and over and over and over and over again, by the courts, by the people representing them, by the justice system, and getting their names and faces and papers. I mean, there’s nothing particularly just about the process. I think it’s also so important for us to name that so many of us don’t report, because we know it will only serve to deepen our trauma and hurt us even further.

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, I mean, there aren’t any easy answers when it comes to what justice looks like for victims of sexual violence, because it’s personal to that person. My belief is we need to center survivors and what survivors need, and some survivors are going to choose to use the criminal justice system. And I can acknowledge that this criminal justice system is racist and violent, and also want to defend it as an option for survivors. I sometimes see survivors get shamed for using the criminal justice system and we don’t need any of that shit. But we need better options. I think that folks in transformative and restorative justice movements are doing fantastic work in producing new and different options. I think those options are flawed and have limits as well. So we need even more options. There are several of those essays. I’m thinking of the Stacy Malone essay and then also Tani’s beautiful essay that touch on – what does justice look like? And it’s a difficult question. It has not a lot of satisfying answers, but I’m glad that more and more people are engaging with it.

Dawn Serra: What is your hope for people who read the book? What is the thing that you most hope people take away?

Jaclyn Friedman: I want people to really feel that another world is possible. And that’s why we pushed every single one of these essays is not just describing a problem that’s in the way of women’s credibility and importance. But what the world would look like if we treated women as credible and important. So there’s a vision and each of them about how the world could be better if we could make this shift. That’s what I’d love for folks to focus on and see which one feels the most motivating to you and lean into that, and see if that makes you want to get more involved in making that vision come to pass. Because the world really does not have to be as it is.Societies are made of people and so we can make societies different, if enough of us want to. That’s what I want people to focus on, in the way that dancers when they’re doing spins, they do spotting so don’t get too dizzy. It can feel overwhelming to think about all of the ways that disbelief of women plays out in our culture. That’s why we wanted to have that touchstone in each one of those essays with – spot the future visions, spot the vision of how the world could be better, which one talks to you and then think about how you can work on that one a little.

Dawn Serra: Yeah, because it’s not a singular vision – that’s just going to recruit more violence down the road. There has to be multiple pathways, multiple visions, and we get to choose the ones that we think are right and change our minds later. And know that other people are working on other parts of the vision, and that that’s how we move down the field.

Jaclyn Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely.

Dawn Serra: So for people who want to stay in touch with you, hear your podcast, get the book, how can they stay in touch with you?

Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, they can stay in touch with me a lot of ways. I’m on Twitter @JaclynF – JACLYNF – as in Freedman and on Instagram at @Jaclynfable. My website is jaclynfriedman.com. My last name is FRIEDMAN and the contact form there if people want to reach out personally. My podcast is called Unscrewed and you can listen and subscribe wherever you are listening to this podcast probably. The book, “Believe Me” is available all over the place. Here’s a plea and this time, in particular, support your local indie bookstores. Order from indie bookstore. If you don’t have a local indie bookstore, order from an indie bookstore that’s not local. They’re all shipping for cheaper free right now. Amazon doesn’t need your money. Jeff Bezoz doesn’t need your money. Amazon workers are on strike. Don’t cross a picket line. Order “Believe Me” from an independent bookstore. You can also order from Libro FM, which is a great audio book company that supports independent bookstores or Kobo which is a great ereader platform that supports independent bookstores. However you like to read the book, but check it out. Also check my socials. I don’t know when this is airing but we’re putting together a virtual “Believe Me” event soon as well as I think there’s going to be a “Believe Me” book club, which I don’t have details on either of those yet, but I should have them soon.

Dawn Serra: Awesome. When you do get the details, let me know and I’ll put it on the air.

Jaclyn Friedman: Excellent. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, Jaclyn. You and I are going to go record a little bonus chat for Patreon supporters. So yay, make sure you head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to hear that and go get that book.

Dawn Serra: It’s so mutual. We will take our love fest offline now. So everybody who tuned in thank you so much for being here with us. Of course, I will be back next week. Talk to you soon. Bye.

A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them a vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses.

As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?