Note: This episode contains adult language and covers mature topics. Listener discretion is advised.
In this special episode, host Gwyneth Shaw hands the mic to the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at Berkeley Law, Professor Khiara M. Bridges. She interviews Savala Nolan ’11 — a law school alum, executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, and the author of Good Woman: A Reckoning. It was published March 3 and is drawing rave reviews.
Nolan’s debut book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, & the Body, was published in 2021 to wide acclaim.
Bridges, who has a J.D. and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia, joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2019. Her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans, will be published March 31.
Both Good Woman and Expecting Inequity made Ms. magazine’s “Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026” list.
About:
“Berkeley Law Voices Carry” is a podcast hosted by Gwyneth Shaw about how the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
Production by Yellow Armadillo Studios
Episode Transcript
One note before we get started: This episode contains adult language and covers mature topics. Listener discretion is advised.
[music playing]
GWYNETH SHAW:
Hi listeners. I’m Gwyneth Shaw, and this is Berkeley Law Voices Carry, a podcast about how our faculty, students and staff are making an impact through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training and advocacy. This is a very special episode because I’m handing the mic over to one of our amazing Berkeley law professors, Khiara M. Bridges, she’s interviewing Savala Nolan, a Law School alum, the executive director of our Thelton E.Henderson Center for Social Justice, and the author of Good Woman: A Reckoning. It was published March 3, and it’s getting rave reviews. Nolan’s debut book, Don’t Let it Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, was published in 2021 to wide acclaim. Bridges, who has a JD and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, joined the Berkeley Law Faculty in 2019. Her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans, will be published March 31. Both Good Woman and Expecting Inequity made Ms. Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026” list earlier this year. Khiara, take it away.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Thank you so much for that introduction, Gwyneth, and Savala, thank you for making the time to talk to me about your incredible book. I read it cover to cover, and I have to actually also tell you that I’ve already loaned it out because a student was struggling with some of the material that we were covering in class, and a passage from the book popped into my head, and I told her, You have to read this. And I gave it to her. I told her, give it back. And she returned the book, and she said that it really helped her make sense of something. So please know that the book is already making an important impact in people’s work, in women’s and women’s lives. So thank you for writing it. So let me actually just start by asking you, How would you describe this book? What is this book about?
SAVALA NOLAN:
Well, before I answer that question, and I’m very happy to say what the book is about, let me thank you, Professor Bridges, for making the time and your competitive calendar my fellow ms magazine baller, this is, this is a lovely opportunity for me, and thank you for helping us set this up so Good Woman: A Reckoning in which I turn a skeptical eye to the way that women and girls are socialized to be good in this culture that we live in. And when I say that we live in the culture I’m talking about is America of the now, I was born in 1980 and I’m from the United States, and obviously the way people are socialized is cultural and varies by place and time, but in this country, women and girls are sold a kind of a bargain. They’re enrolled into a bargain when they’re very young.
And the gist of the bargain is that if you can just be good enough, you’ll have a happy life. Good enough means something particular for women and girls. You know, being a good girl and a good woman is different than being a good man. Good women and good girls are compliant, obedient, helpful, service oriented, male-centric. They’re pretty, they’re often thin and sort of in control of their looks in a certain way, while being content to not be in control of, oh, their reproductive rights or other things tied to their bodies.
Like many, many women, I hit midlife, and I began to take a look at how I’d been conditioned to be good and that bargain, right? I’d spent, oh, 40 years, trying to be as good as possible, and yet wasn’t happy and fulfilled in the ways that you know I was told I would be. So when you realize something that you’ve been investing in your entire life is effectively a bill of goods, right? You were kind of sold a bottle of snake oil. There is a reckoning that you have to undertake. I came to realize that every single aspect of my life was drenched in this socialization. There was really no part of my life where I hadn’t been trying to be good on the theory that if I could be good enough, I would find meaning. This socialization impacted how I showed up in my marriage, maybe the fact that I got married, it impacted how I mothered, how I was a daughter, who I was at work, the kind of art that I made, my relationship with my higher power, what I did with my money, how I had sex. I mean, it was literally omnipresent. So the book is an attempt to bear witness to the socialization process. Do a little bit of destroying and de-socializing.
And very importantly, I engage my imagination and my lived experience of late. So it’s not just trying to break something down, it’s also trying to build a new map and imagine what’s possible for us outside of being good.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
In your response to that question, I was getting the sense that this book wasn’t exactly like a choice for you to write. It sort of felt like it seems like it felt like you were compelled to write it because you felt compelled to rid yourself of some of the things that we are taught to believe as women and girls and so is that sort of a correct reading of like, What drove you to write write the book, or was it something else?
SAVALA NOLAN:
No, that is a spot on reading. And I would expect no less from Professor Bridges. Somebody in another interview asked me, why did you decide to write this book? And my very first thought was, although I don’t think that might have been actually what I said, the only way that I can describe the process of writing this book, for me is like giving birth.
It’s like, once you’re in labor, are you actually deciding to have the baby, or are you just submitting to a process that is underway and that you’re part of? Of course, there’s a certain amount of discipline, and you have to choose the discipline that goes into putting anything together and putting it out in the world. But the imperative was utterly irresistible, and I’ll tell you what I mean.
When I started this book, my daughter was five years old, and some of the imperative came from her existence. You know, here I am in my 40s, my early 40s, and like so many women, just starting to understand that there is an entire realm of freedom that I never even knew was available to me. But then, if I can let go of being so good, if it’s available to me, right, for the second half of my life? Well, I’m looking at my five year old daughter who is so not self-conscious, so wonderfully embodied, so joyful, you know, because she hasn’t yet felt the hammer of the socialization as intensely as she will, and because I’ve sought to raise her in a way where that hammer is not in the room, but it’s coming. It’s coming.
So I was looking at this precious child thinking if her life follows the typical trajectory of a woman or girl, she too is going to have her life half over before she reckons with this and rejects the bill of goods. So that put a real sense of urgency, you know, in my fingertips, at the keyboard, absolutely yeah.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
The book certainly reads as a love letter to your daughter as well. So what a profound what a profound gift I would say that you’ve given her.
SAVALA NOLAN:
I hope so.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
So as you can tell, I was able to read your mind on that last question as to why you wrote the book. But that’s only because the book is so incredibly personal, like it really, it really does read in many ways like a diary. Of course, a very informed and rigorous and well-read diary, but a diary nonetheless.
And actually, when I was reading the book, it got me to thinking about my own self and my own writings and my own kind of presentation to the world, and so part of the way that I deal with being a public facing intellectual is to protect myself. It’s to not reveal very much about myself, because people think they know me in and out based on, you know, the things that they read about me, or see the five minute clip that’s making the five minute clips, or, you know, or even a law review article, or even, you know, my one of my books where I talk about maternal mortality, for example.
So people think they know me, but I take comfort in knowing that they don’t know me. However, your book is so vulnerable, it’s so personal. Were you scared to be vulnerable? And I think the other side of that question is, do you think your vulnerability is like a political act? And by that, I mean, you know your book, your book is very much about race and gender and black women, we’re just supposed to be like strong and resilient and impervious. And so we’re not allowed to be vulnerable. And so in other times, when reading the book, I said, No, this vulnerability is, of course, intentional, but it’s like intentionally political. It’s a political act. Am I right or wrong here?
SAVALA NOLAN:
Once again, two for two, you’re so right. And it’s funny, because when people tell you your writing is brave, that is a funny thing to hear, because it’s like, let’s say you were going to the Oscars, and you step out in your gown, and the people in the room say, Wow, that’s a brave choice.
You know what? I mean. It’s never a good thing. I hate being told that that was courageous, right? That, wow, what an act of courage, right? You’re kind of like, uh, you know, let me see what else is in the closet that I could put on here.
But, you know, kidding aside, it’s like, on the one hand, if you’re going to ask people to spend eight hours with you, you got to tell them the truth, right? If you’re going to write about social conditioning of women and girls, that is some intimate stuff, there’s no way around the body. There’s no way around hunger and appetite. There’s no way around violence. There’s no way around profound crucibles of transformation, like menopause, puberty, childbirth, if you bear a child, you know, so if you’re unwilling to be vulnerable, I don’t know how you do what I wanted to do, which was explore the ways that we are compressed out of our kind of inborn birthright as human beings into the roles that we are told to play as women and girls race absolutely is a layer of this.
You know, I think of the writing that I’m doing here as maybe not pure counter-narrative in the CRT sense, but you know, dancing on the same dance floor as counter-narrative. You know different steps, but like the same rhythm. I don’t know where that what the metaphor is there, but you know what I mean, right? And in some ways, it was like this entire enterprise that I was undertaking when I wasn’t even sure if it was going to work as a book. You know, you sell a book proposal in nonfiction, you tell the publisher, I have an idea, and then you have to present it, right? So I think for most nonfiction writers, and maybe for fiction writers too, you absolutely have tides come in where you’re like, I’m gonna have to give the money back. You know, the I’m gonna have to give the advance back.
But this entire project, for me, it was kind of like an experiment in taking my own medicine. I hope that people finish this book, especially women and girls, with real curiosity about their appetites and their desires, and curiosity about what those appetites and desires might be if they weren’t mediated by gender hierarchy, and if they didn’t have to experience them through the fog of misogyny and patriarchy. And what would it mean to respect those unmediated, unmodified appetites the way you respect the appetite of a lion, right? Like, what would it mean to consider the wisdom of what you want as a sort of apex predator, but in a good way. So I had to take my own medicine. You know what I mean?
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Yes.
SAVALA NOLAN:
There’s a chapter about the end of my marriage. Just to give a concrete example, my daughter is only 10 right now, but someday she’ll want to read it. I’ve told her of late high school, and maybe by then, she’ll be like, I’m not reading your book. But you know, I have to assume maybe someday she’ll read it, in addition to all the pressures that women face as moms and partners around keeping relationships intact and tidy and making choices that are based on the comfort of other people in those relationships. It’s like times 1000 for moms. Maybe it should be, maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is because we’re caretakers for our children, and children don’t necessarily need to know every detail of why their parents got divorced. You know what I mean? Yeah, so I was judicious, and I had to use discernment about what I needed to say to tell the story and what she didn’t need to ever hear. You know you have to make those choices. But ultimately, the gamble I took is that it is better for me to model speaking than it is for me to model silencing myself when I wanted to speak. So the whole book was kind of like that now as to like, what feels vulnerable? Well, there’s a lot of sex in this book. And like I, you know, I work at a law school, so that’s a little nerve wracking. But on the other hand, we’re all in bodies, and either you’re gonna go for it or you’re not, so it’s a big swing, and if people don’t like that part, they can skip those pages.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Your meditations on sex and desire were so profound to me because it, I mean, it caused self reflection, right? And what you argue in the book is our desires and the way that we have sex are all products of this socialization to be good girls, and so we have to put our own what you I love the way you put it, your un like the unmediated appetite. What would that look like? And we have to put whatever that unmediated appetite is. We put that to the side. In order to be who we think we need to be for our partners and for our families. And yeah, no, I think that even those of us in the law school will greatly appreciate your writings. Now you’ve already said CRT and you’ve talked about how you feel quite at home thinking of your personal writing as legal, and you’ve talked about how this book is in dancing with critical race theory. So how exactly do, how do those two things come together for you?
SAVALA NOLAN:
Well, I think that as a black woman who wants to create, and create anything, right. Over the course of this country’s history, black women have been really systematically divorced from the fruit of our right to create. And you could take that, you know, in any number of directions. You could think about chattel slavery and the lack of reproductive freedom that black women experienced, and the way our reproductive freedom was enlisted into this economic, you know, massive project, carceral project of chattel slavery, and you could take it like all the way up to the present.
There’s an essay where I talk about Picasso, who I love and adore, and Nicki Minaj, who I you know, how do I say this? Her recent forays into MAGA politics do not appeal to me and turn my stomach. Nevertheless, she made a very good point a few years ago that kind of sums up what I’m talking about. The cover image for her song Anaconda was basically her in a thong, her body is facing away from the camera, and it was met with such a profound paternalistic uproar online. Kind of, this is too much. It’s too raunchy. She doesn’t know what’s good for her. She’s gone too far, you know, these very compressive, paternalistic attempts to constrain her creative appetite, right? And her creative output. And she, this is, you know, where I like, kind of take my hat off to her. It’s like even a broken clock is right twice a day. As my mom would say, she rightly observed like, uh, this is no different than a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover, and nobody is getting all upset about that.
What she didn’t say is that she is black with brown skin and a rotund bottom, you know, unlike the models who tend to be white or white presenting and very, very slim, you know that, I think that was unsaid but obviously audible to any knowing audience. So whether you’re talking about kind of pop culture, or the most serious, entangled, meshed part of our history as a country, black women have to push a little harder, I think, to create. And creation creates culture, and then culture creates creation. So it’s all woven together. They co-create each other. And from that perspective, the connection between what black women want to do with their creative appetite, how they want to show up in the world, how they want to express themselves, and the way people respond to it is really important to me and worth investigating.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
I have to say that where you put Picasso and Nicki Minaj in conversation, I think it was one of my favorites. There’s so many moments in the book that I dog eared as my favorite, but that was really well done having to talk about a demonstration of patriarchy and white male dominance to think that Picasso can represent black people and black women, particularly better than black women can represent ourselves.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Yes, and thank you for like fleshing that out, because that is how Picasso comes into this is looking at some of his paintings, like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which are it’s a painting of sex workers who are nude and have it’s unclear whether he intended to have them look like they were wearing African masks, or whether he was painting their faces in the style of African masks. But there’s a blackness to the women through how their faces are portrayed. And you know this, it’s a naked brown woman, and everybody considers that piece to be an integral part of the canon, you know? And it’s like, just like you said. So he has more right to do this than Nicki Minaj has a right to, like, take a selfie, right? There something is very wrong. Yeah,
KHIARA M. BRIDGES: So I actually did want to ask you about Nicki Minaj.I did. I wanted to, I wanted to be again. It was hard. Maybe it’s because I’m a narcissist, but it was hard to read this book without thinking about my own writing, and I have been, I wouldn’t say worried, but I definitely think about how the things that I say might be received in five years, 10 years, 25 years, right? The sort we’re writing, what we think, or at least what I let me, let me say. I write things that I think are timeless, like this will always be true, but of course, it’s a function of our time period. And so when times change, the things that I might say might appear to be anachronistic, or at least a product of the time of a particular time period. And so when I was reading the chapter and the reading the book, and I saw Nicki Minaj and your defense of her, and I wouldn’t even call it a defense, this was written before. So that’s the question.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Yes. I mean, she’s had her moments that are kind of like, you know, but her full on descent into MAGA and transphobia, I’m trying to think exactly when I handed in the manuscript, like, two years ago, or something, you know. And I am someone who, well, let me say two things. This is why I write essays and not law review. You know? What I love about the form of the essay is that it is meant to open a question right or open a set of questions. And I think the best essays point to some answers, but they don’t close the question down all the way. So as someone who likes to play in the question more than nail down the answer, I really love that aspect of the form, you know, they can and as they can, be sort of prescriptive, and in some and there’s a way in which some of these are a bit prescriptive, because I’m advocating for some sort of revolution, but the pressure to, like, get it right, you know, for history is a little different. I think. The other thing I would say here is that for better or worse, because I don’t know if there is a right way, and I’m just I’m missing it. So I say for better or for worse, I personally am not someone who throws away everything anyone says because they say things I don’t like. There’s a spectrum. There’s a series of facets. There’s a context. And is it like having a stain on a tablecloth, as some people say, for sure. You know the stain is there. You can’t ignore it. But I mean, if anything is going to get me like canceled, it’s probably this and I don’t know if it’s because I’m an artist. I don’t know if it’s because my own thinking is dynamic and full of contestation. I don’t know if it’s because I was trained to see multiple sides to any story in law school, which can be great, but can also muddy the moral, you know, water. But I just don’t tend to throw anyone’s entire body of work or thought out when a lot of it has good meaning, and there’s also some objectionable stuff. I’m just a more like a come as you are, learn as you go, kind of a person, and I fully understand that for some people, that’s kind of unacceptable, but that’s just how I am. I mean, I am so full of areas that need development and evolution, and I’m also full of areas where I have really intelligent things to say. So I kind of tend to hold most people in that same way, and that would include, you know, feeling like Nicki Minaj is doing a lot of harm, if I may say, you know, with her MAGA affiliation, while also being able to be interested in the things that she has said that I find interesting. I mean, I don’t know, what do you think of that? I know some people would say, you know, no, that’s not the way. That’s just the way that I am.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
As you were talking I was thinking about this moment of my career as a legal academic where I delighted in finding moments in Clarence Thomas’s opinions that I agreed with. And I have, I think I have, like, at least two entire law review articles in which I read. I wouldn’t even call it rehabilitate, but I it is precisely what you said, like a broken clock is right two times a day. Clarence Thomas and I start from many of the same premises. It’s just that we go in different directions. And so, of course, Clarence Thomas and Nicki Minaj are not analogous in the sense that Nicki Minaj has only recently made a turn towards transphobia and anti-blackness and fascism, yeah, whereas Clarence Thomas has sort of built his career around being having conservative politics. But no, I do. I do think that there’s a value in finding value in people, in every, in everyone. Yeah, I think throwing people away because they’ve done a bad thing, is precisely what the abolitionist you know, movement is all about, what the anticarceral movement is all about. It’s like, no, there’s good in everyone.
SAVALA NOLAN:
And, yeah, yeah, it’s complicated, it’s tricky, it’s not comfortable, but I don’t know of a better way to handle the human experience. And again, for the record, to the best of my knowledge, I completed this piece, which, you know, it’s not really in defense of Nicki Minaj, she’s the jumping off point. And it’s much more in defense of women’s appetite more broadly, and black women’s appetite broadly speaking, you know, I also talk about Josephine Baker and Sarah Bartman and, you know, Lil Kim and Beyonce and Cardi B, So to the best of my knowledge, it predates her descent, shall we say.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
And I think that even if it didn’t, it would be, it would be fine. Well, thank you.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Well, thank you. I have texts between me and my editor, I was like, my editor’s name is Rakia, and I would be like, Rakia, she better sit down.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
And she stood right on up right after you said.
SAVALA NOLAN:
I know. I was like, if my book tanks because of Nikki fucking Minaj at Mar a Lago in a Chanel suit holding Trump’s hand like I am marching up to God, saying, What the actual fuck? Can you swear?
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
I don’t know. They’ll cut it if you can’t.
I think the book is brilliant, and I don’t, and I actually don’t think that is distracting at all the appearance of Nikki, and also, who knows what she’ll do next. It’s true.
We’ve touched on a lot of things, and, you know, we’ve already touched on the fact that you work in a law school and you work with a whole bunch of budding lawyers. Is there something in this book that you were writing to your students who are going to go out and have these careers in the law, or were they ancillary to the project?
SAVALA NOLAN:
Well, this feels like a trick question.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Just answer and you’ll see what my motives are.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Seriously, no, I would say neither exactly you know or yes and no, I did not. I don’t write for an audience. For one thing, you know, I write what has to be said, and then the audience finds it, or it finds its audience. You know what I mean, as opposed to, like, if you’re writing a brief there’s a clear audience, or if you’re writing a law review article, you know, there’s a clear audience. So I don’t, but I don’t generally approach my writing thinking about who I’m writing for, except insofar as I want women and girls to have a new kind of relationship with their desire and their appetites and their voices, you know, and there’s plenty of students at the law school who are women and girls, and I also want men and boys to respect that appetite.
And I am using binary language here, and I don’t know exactly how someone who is non binary or rejects the gender binary would read this text, I suppose they could feel that it speaks to them in any number of ways, or that it doesn’t, you know. So I want to acknowledge that not everyone fits into that category, or wants to fit into that category, that binary, but women and girls who are at the law school are under unique pressures, because even as they are endeavoring to excel in this space that is purportedly welcoming and that perhaps wants to have everyone kind of feel equal and no one to have an extra burden inevitably cannot fully do that, because the law school, like every other institution, is part of this culture, you know? So it’s yes and no, I wasn’t writing to my law students, but to the extent that female law students in particular feel these pressures, then I would very, very, very much love it to speak to them.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
You were saying that you want women and girls to read this book and to be curious and accepting about their desires. I also want men and boys to read it your “Which Men” chapter. Mind blowing for the listener. Let me just give you what’s like the short and dirty of the “Which Men” chapter. So I just actually taught the unit on sexual assault in my criminal law class. And you know, I talk about the statistics showing what is essentially a crisis of sexual violence. It’s we talk about rape culture. We talk about these norms of male sexual aggression and female sexual passivity, right? We talk about all those things, and we play around with identifying who the survivors of this violence are, but we never toy around with identifying who the perpetrators of the violence, who those people are, and in your chapter, which men. Do you say these are our brothers? These are our fathers, these are our uncles, these are our friends, these are our best friends. So yeah, I want, I want men and boys to read the book, because I want them to see themselves in an unflattering light. I think that it is a powerful invitation for self reflection, for men and boys.
SAVALA NOLAN:
I hope they read it too. And I mean, I’ve heard from many, many readers, most of them are not men, but the few that I’ve heard from have mentioned “Which Men” and “Wyoming,” another essay, and said, I’m trying to hear this. You know, the thing about “Which Men,” and this is where the title comes from, it’s like we know not all men commit sexual violence, or, you know, we assume, we hope, we believe, I think we know, but we don’t know which men do. And so it’s funny, I was driving home, well, I was, I was coming home from campus today in a Lyft, and it was a male driver, and it was like a sedan, so that, you know, I could have easily handed him something like through the space between the two seats in the front, or he could have reached back to hand me something, and I was very tired and wanted to close my eyes and just kind of rest a little bit. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t let myself, because I could easily imagine, sort of my eyes popping open because his hand was on my leg or something, wow, you know, wow. Just a little costs here and there, accruing and accruing. That is which men I don’t know, which men you know, and some of them drove me home. I might have dated some of them, you know. And the burden of that unknowing is its own very heavy weight. And then there’s an additional weight, which I think comes from why we don’t know. It’s like, the not knowing is its own problem. But then it’s like, Well, why don’t we know? Part of it is because we’re socialized not to make men uncomfortable. We’re socialized not to push them, press them, ask them questions that will make them mad or irritated. We’re socialized to do that, to be polite, and we’re socialized to do that, because it can be dangerous to upset a guy, you know, additionally, and I talk about this in the essay, there is the distinct possibility that a man does not know whether he has ever sexually assaulted someone right like he could say, No, I haven’t, when actually he has, and he could be telling the truth from his own perspective, because I think that there is a serious kind of pit of despair that is right in the middle of our collective grammar and and vocabulary when we talk about what constitutes sexual violence and assault. Where is the line between seduction and coercion? You know now there, there are. There is someone who could tell you where the line is, and that’s the person it happened to, right? But the perpetrator possibly can’t, especially when women and girls are socialized to keep the peace, to be quiet, to be pleasant, to consider others feelings and men and boys are not right. And you know, it’s important for me to mention that anyone can commit sexual violence, and anyone can can be on the receiving end of that, but it is an extremely gendered crime, where it’s almost always men and boys committing it against women and girls, even though there are exceptions to that. You know, I cite a survey that asked teenage girls what they most wanted to know about pregnancy prevention, and more than 80% of them said how to say no without hurting his feelings, right? So when you have a group of people who are engaged in sexual activity with each other that runs a spectrum from sort of pleasurable and consensual to violent. And half that group, let’s say, is told to not say no and to keep. Uncomfortable, and the other half is taught to kind of get it, and you don’t have vocabulary to really get into the nuance, and you’re not allowed to ask questions, and you’re not allowed to even voice the question without asking it, right? You’re not even allowed to kind of say to your date. I’m not even asking you this. I’m just thinking about the fact that you know you can’t even voice the question, let alone try to demand an answer that is a difficult spot to be in, and we’re all in it.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Yeah, I will say something that has given me a little bit of optimism, which actually leads me to my last question. This conversation has been so fascinating, and I could talk, of course, I could talk to you forever. I think we’ve already 234, and five. What has given me some optimism is that I just taught the unit on sexual assault to my criminal law class, and I was, I was, like, blown away by the men in my class. Oh, I was, I mean, their sensitivity to not just, I mean, and I don’t think it was performative. I don’t think they were like, No means no men need to understand that. But rather, they also seem to understand, like I call it, this cage of gender norms women are in where we have to make everybody happy. We have to make sure, I’m talking about everybody is comfortable and walks away from the interaction feeling like their best. But at the same time, we’re supposed to protect our bodily integrity and our autonomy, and so it’s just this, like these things that are in tension with one another that it’s impossible to resolve, and also we’re supposed to resolve it in the blink of an eye, right when the guy puts his hand on your thigh. And so you’re like, okay, hold on a second. If I leave it there, he’s going to be happy, but then he might think that I want something else. And so like in a blink of an eye, you’re supposed to resolve all these things, God forbid that violence is actually committed against you. Now you have to decide what to do with that. Yeah, so it’s so and I say all of that to say the men in my class, many of the men, the men who were speaking, I got the sense that they got it, and that gave me a sense of optimism, because I’ve been teaching the law of sexual assault for 15 years, and many, for many years of my teaching, I did not get the sense that men were getting it. That whole “Men Are From Venus, and Women Mars,” whatever that nonsense. I was like, Well, yes, that shows up in my sexual assault unit. Thanks. So things are all that to say things are changing.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Yeah, that is incredible.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
Which leads to my final question, which is about, I think that the takeaway from this book, from Good Woman, is that women, girls, will not have full lives, radically full lives, until the patriarchy is dismantled. And so my question for you is about your optimism, if it exists, are you optimistic that we will see the end of patriarchal dominance, or will we see a shift in it? When we started talking, you mentioned your girl, your daughter, and you said your daughter hasn’t been sort of dominated by gender yet, but it’s coming. Yeah, I think that’s a direct quote. It’s coming. Does it necessarily have to come? Are you optimistic that your daughter will be able to be free in her lifetime?
SAVALA NOLAN:
This is an interesting question. I’m not someone who runs on optimism or hope. I like optimism and hope, and I have like an upbeat disposition. I’m generally, I guess you could say kind of an optimistic person, but it’s not the fuel that I need in the tank. The fuel that I need in the tank is a commitment to the process of excavating and clawing my own sovereignty out of the mess and that commitment from every you know, woman and girl to calling her own sovereignty now I know, I mean, it’s immediately obvious where that falls short, right? It’s like not. Systemic analysis, it doesn’t run the risk of kind of putting the burden on the person who is marginalized to fix their marginalization. I am
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
It seems like you have read critical race theory. [laughter]
SAVALA NOLAN:
I’m well aware, right? And the risks of asking women to just kind of like pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you know. But at the same time, I know from my own life experience that there are sites in our lives where we can cultivate a very deep freedom, and we can borrow that freedom and apply it to other parts of our lives. I realized I’m not answering your question, probably the way you wanted me to, but it’s because I don’t like the grammar of optimism. It just I don’t I don’t really speak it. I except to say that I know that women can do this in their lives, and the danger of waiting for patriarchy to fall as a system is that it might not. You know, it’s like, what can I do, even if not a single motherfucker outside of me changes, what is the soil that I can cultivate until in my own interior that will yield some kind of benefit to me and I’m a systems person at the same time, you know, but on this particular and within the contours of this particular book, I’m not a systems person as much as I would be when I have my lawyer hat on, if that makes sense, you know, I’m much more interested in trying to express to women and girls that here’s what the cost is if you wait until your life is half over to reckon with the bill of goods. And what I want to communicate to them is this, I mean, I love being a woman. Yeah, it’s a social category, and I’m down to critique it.
Also, I love being a woman. I love womanhood, my experience of it. But the true joy of womanhood for me is getting to experience it free from, or partly free from, more free from the cage of misogyny and patriarchy, right? It’s like when you’re in the city and you look at the night sky, it’s gorgeous, it’s cosmic, it’s breathtaking. But when you’re in the middle of nowhere and the light pollution is not mediating your experience of the sky. That will blow your mind. That’s the kind of experience of self that I want women and girls to have the night sky in the wilderness. You feel me ?
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
I do. I do. We are living some good lives in this urban landscape looking up at the sky, our lives
are pretty cool, like we see some pretty cool, you know, stars at night. But yes, I would like to see the sky in Wyoming.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Yeah, and I think, I think you can, I think there are ways to cultivate that, and there’s a million entry points into that cultivation. And I think as much as there’s value in the system’s work, there is value in work that doesn’t require systems work to succeed. You feel me?
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
I am so excited to see this book move through the world.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Thank you. Tell your friends.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
I will, I will, I will. I am going to share it, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. So thank you for writing it.
SAVALA NOLAN:
Thank you. Thank you for reading it. Thank you for the love and support. It means the world. I feel very lucky, very blessed. Thank you, Khiara.
KHIARA M. BRIDGES:
And I’ll hand it back over to Gwyneth to close us out.
GWYNETH K. SHAW:
Well, thank both of you for this amazing conversation. It was lively, it was fun, and it was really deep and moving. I couldn’t have asked for better guests in my stead here. And thank you listeners. To learn more about Savala Nolan, Khiara Bridges, their current work, their past work, their future work, please check out the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to subscribe to Voices Carry wherever you get your podcasts until next time. I’m Gwyneth Shaw.
[music playing]