Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee Allabest. Today's book is called The Gender Not,

Unravelling Our Patriarchal Legacy. And it's the first text we've read that was written by a man

since we read John Stuart Mills, The Subjection of Women, Several Months ago. I have loved reading

all of these books by women, but as I read

this book, it hit me for the first time really how important it was that a man had written it.

And here's why. One of the biggest lessons that I've realized in my education on racism recently is that society often places the burden

of changing racist structures onto people of color, when the responsibility should be on the people

who benefit from and uphold those racist structures. And so racism is a problem for white people to solve.

White people need to own it.

And likewise, I realized as I was kind of finishing reading this book and reflecting on, you know, that this was written by a man, I thought, this is really powerful because sexism, which exists in all cultures in various

ways, is often treated as a quote-unquote women's issue. So there's a TED talk on this by Jackson

Katz that's really excellent, and I highly recommend people to watch it. And Jackson Katz points out that men often

kind of tune out and they don't pay attention when something is presented as a women's issue.

And so I really love and appreciate that Dr. Allen G. Johnson, who was a sociologist and a college

professor, he was a man. And he took on patriarchy as his life's work to educate people about the system of patriarchy. So I was really, really gratified also to see a lot of online reviews of this book were written by men. And these men said that this book helped them

see things that they had never considered before and really changed their lives. So I love this

book and I would invite listeners who are women, share this episode and share this book with the

men in your lives. And men who are listening, thank you for listening. Thank you for doing

this work. And this might be a book that you want to get and read. So I'm super excited to discuss

the book today. And I want to welcome my reading partner today, Casey Cruz. Thank you so much for

being here, Casey. Hi, Amy. I'm excited to be here. So Casey and I met a few years ago. It feels like we've known you forever, actually, but it's not been that long, honestly. But Casey became a part of our family's little bubble of safe people during the COVID lockdown and was our family's fitness coach when all the gyms were closed down. And sometimes we had

such bad wildfire smoke that we couldn't run outside. And so we would quickly like shut the doors

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