This is a HeadGum podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Khan over. Thank you so much for joining me again on the show.

It's such a pleasure to do this show. It's the best part of my week every single week.

And I thank you for being here. As I talk to another amazing expert and have my mind blown,

hopefully your mind will be blown too. We're going to have a great time together.

Let's talk about this week's episode. I don't know if you've noticed, but Western culture,

or at least the version of Western culture I've grown up with here in the United States of America,

is built around the idea that men are the default human.

You know, you got man as in mankind, the name we use for the entire species.

And then you got wooman, which is like a man with something else added to it, right?

Like a man plus some kind of weird woe kind of thing. The woe, that's what makes a woman,

the man is the default. A woman is a man plus woe. It's even embedded in our origin myths

in the Judeo-Christian Bible. The first woman, Eve, was created from the rib of the first man,

Adam. Adam, of course, was created directly by God. But then God was like,

oh, I already got the default human here, but I kind of want a different one.

So let me just like grab part of this one's rib and I'll make a weirdo different kind of human,

called a wooman. Now, of course, both of these ideas are bullshit, but they're deeply,

deeply embedded in our culture. This idea that women are different from men and somehow

kind of other, like some weird thing that you have to work to understand. And nowhere is this

fucked up idea more obvious than in the history of medicine. For literal thousands of years, as much

as it has advanced, medicine has also fixated on the supposedly natural state of women as mothers

and wives, assumed that they're inferior to men, that their pain is not to be taken seriously,

...