Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. This is the 17th edition of this podcast. It's not an especially ceremonious number, but I thought I'd do something a little bit different this week. Instead of speaking with a guest,

I thought I'd speak to you directly, not just about the podcast and what I've learned from talking

with all these guests these last few months, but what I'm thinking about the nature of talking

in general. I'm recording this on Monday, November 9th, just about 48 hours since the presidential election

was called for Joe Biden. At least a week will have passed before most of you hear this,

and I can imagine that some of the contours of this moment will have changed a bit by then,

both in terms of media framing and in many of our own minds. But I wanted to reflect a bit on the last four

years and share with you some of my thoughts about where we are now, or at least where I am.

I'm trying not to use the Royal Wee quite as much, though no big promises there.

I want to talk about what I'm hoping can maybe start to be different when

it comes to the way important subjects, and even not so important subjects, get talked about,

and in turn, listened to, and understood and engaged with. So I'm going to start by telling you

where I was exactly four years ago. I was here in New York City, where I'd moved about a year

earlier from Los Angeles after my marriage broke up. I was supposed to be writing a book.

That book was going to be about the current state of feminist expression and certain generational

divides therein. Its initial title was, you are not a badass. It was a sort of manifesto

slash self-interrogation about, let's just say, some of the more performative qualities of third and

fourth wave feminism, especially as it was filtered through social media. Now, the Me Too movement

wouldn't come along for another year, but I would

have said that by 2014, we'd seen increasing traction coming from a message that said that the world,

even the industrialized Western world, had never harbored more misogyny. The actual facts, of course,

showed that the opposite was true.

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