Thanks for tuning into on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week was frankly nuts,

I mean from a production perspective here, because so much news broke on Thursday night and Friday,

which is when we spend the week's last few hours doing final cuts, last minute fixes, putting in the music,

and then mixing the

episode before sending it out by, you know, close of business. But then there was all this

extra stuff we had to fit in, so we had to go at everything with a hatchet. Especially the

interview we did with Jessa Crispin on her new book, What's Wrong with Men, Patriarchy, The Crisis of

of Masculinity, and how, of course, Michael Douglas films explain everything.

Anyway, we decided to give you a chance to hear the long version.

Jessa, welcome to the show.

I'm so happy to be here. So before we get to the list of

movies qua case studies that you dive into, you begin the book in a very different setting,

France's Petier-Salf Petrieff Hospital in the twilight of the 19th century. It was known then

as a neuropsychiatric teaching facility, focusing on women with

hysteria. Why did you start there? This was a moment we started to understand that women have a specific

political, psychological, social reality that is based in their gender, both a combination of how society

treats them and how they understand themselves and the clash they're in.

Because prior to that, it was merely seen as women's frailty and weakness.

Hysteria, the word, is related to the womb and the belief

that it was moving around all the time. So it ceases to become solely a problem of women

and becomes a broader problem of women and their unhappiness with the limited role that they're

asked to play. Yes. So much of the treatment for hysteria in the past was based on, well,

...