Welcome, friends, to the maiden episode of the Mona Charon Show. I am so delighted that you

joined us, and I'm particularly thrilled that for our first guest, we welcomed Pamela Paul.

She is now a New York Times columnist. For many years, she was the book editor at the New York

Times Book Review. I first encountered her because she wrote a book called Pornified about 20 years ago that was

horrifying to read, but I'm glad I did because it gave me a sense of what we're up against

and what's out there. But on this podcast, we dealt with less horrifying matters. We talked about

motherhood and womanhood because Pamela wrote a great column was titled

A Message to Girls About Womanhood in which she stressed the things that get short shrift in our

time. You know, we hear a lot about the obstacles in front of women and girls. We hear a lot about

sexism and discrimination and Me Too problems, and those are all very real. But it's also the case

that there's never been a better time to be a woman in America and that there are certain

aspects of femininity and motherhood and womanhood that are very positive.

She even calls some of them superpowers.

So we got into that and dwelled a little bit on the joys of being a woman.

I hope you'll enjoy that part of our conversation.

We also talked about men and about labeling masculinity as toxic, the struggles that men and boys are experiencing in our society, as well as certain female vulnerabilities that are exploited by social media.

And that ties in with the high levels of anxiety and depression that we're seeing among

teenage girls in particular.

I hope you enjoy this conversation, and I hope you'll join us next week for another

in-depth conversation.

Welcome to the Mona Charon podcast.

I am Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the bulwark, and I am delighted to welcome as my first guest, Pamela Paul,

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