Diane Rosenfeld 00:00
We always think about equality, sex equality in terms of men versus women. How do women compare to men? Are we gender equal to men? Do we have the same rights as men? And I think something magical is going to happen when women start to ask among ourselves, how are we equal? When we turn that lens and say, All women are created equal. We are all endowed by our creator with inviolable rights and nobody has the right to pimp exploit, rape, harm, gaslight, etc... my sister, and everybody's my sister. So much is going to flow from that.
Omkari Williams 01:05
Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where I talk with people about how we all get free. I'm your host, Omkari Williams, and I'm very happy that you're here with me today. One of the reasons I love doing this podcast so much is that I get to speak with people making a difference in their corner of the world, people who saw a problem and decided to do what they can do to make things right. Today, I get to talk with someone who has taken on the issue of gender based violence with a fascinating approach to how we could make this a thing of the past.
Omkari Williams 01:39
Diane L. Rosenfeld is an attorney, a lecturer in law and the founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 2004. Rosenfeld has appeared in major media outlets, including ABC, Nightline, Katie with Katie Couric, CNN Headline News, Fox and Friends, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. She is featured in the award winning documentaries, The Hunting Ground: It Could Happen Here, and Rape Is. Rosenfeld served as the first senior counsel to the Office of Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as an executive assistant attorney general in Illinois. She is the recipient of multiple awards for her teaching, mentoring and change making legal policy work. She is also the author of the new book, The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliances, and I am truly thrilled to have her here for this conversation. Hi, Diane, how are you?
Diane Rosenfeld 02:48
I'm doing great. Thank you. How are you?
Omkari Williams 02:50
I am really well, I have to tell you that I found your book absolutely fascinating. And my copy is so marked up that it is now completely useless for lending it to anyone because they won't be able to enjoy reading it through all of my scribbles and scrawls and I want to start by having you set the scene because your book goes through three sections. You have the problem, the pivot and the promise. And I'd love for you to start by setting the scene. So in Africa, you have the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is a country with a lot of problems. But one of the things that is true about the Democratic Republic of Congo is that bonobo apes live there. And they are very closely evolutionarily related to humans. But there are some significant differences between human societies and bonobo societies. So let's start there.
Diane Rosenfeld 03:46
Okay, it's true that in the Congo, there are these two very different society structures going on, because you have what's been called the rape capital of the world. And then you have the City of Joy, which was created by V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, and some colleagues in Africa, Dennis Mukwege and Mama C. And it's for rape survivors, who have formed a community of all women, where they have built what is really essentially a bonobo sisterhood, where they support one another in growth and in sisterhood and in survivorship. And that it's also in the backyard of the bonobos is very coincidental and moving to set the scene for the book.
Diane Rosenfeld 04:37
You're right, I have the problem, the pivot and the promise. And I'll start with the promise because I think it's important to keep hope in mind throughout this whole book. And it's not always easy to be hopeful when you're confronting the extent of sexual violence throughout the world. What this book does is actually break down patriarchy into different segments that give you a new frame and a new look at how that society might be built differently. We don't question that we live in a patriarchy. But patriarchy is not inevitable. And bonobos who, as you say, are closely related to humans, so they are our evolutionary cousin and share 98.7% of the same DNA as do humans. Same with chimpanzees. We know a lot less about bonobos, if anything. Most people don't know what bonobos are, but they certainly know what chimpanzees are. And bonobos are just this lesser known relative, that have a different social structure. And their social structure is not a patriarchy, patriarchy really boils down to a social structure of male male alliances. And if I may explain just a little bit about the bonobos.
Omkari Williams 04:53
Yeah, please do.
Diane Rosenfeld 06:06
If a bonobo female is aggressed upon by a male, she lets out a special cry, and all the other female bonobo those who are within earshot, whether they know her, like her, or are related to her, come immediately to her aid. They descend from the trees, they form an instantaneous coalition and they fend off the male, and sometimes send him into isolation. And then he comes back and everybody makes up and they have a peaceful society. Evolutionarily, the bonobos have eliminated male sexual coercion,
Omkari Williams 06:42
Which is almost impossible to imagine, for a human, you know.
Diane Rosenfeld 06:50
It is not any longer impossible to imagine, this book will give you the invitation and the roadmap to imagine exactly that thing. We think that it's impossible because we are so steeped in patriarchy, we're brought up in patriarchy, we know nothing else besides patriarchy,
Omkari Williams 07:10
We can't create something that we can't imagine. It all starts in our imagination first, and then we build it out from there. So actually having a framework for a structure that isn't patriarchy, it is a very hopeful feeling. I mean, it makes me excited when I think about it, just for the possibilities and the potential that would be unleashed for change and contribution if we didn't have this incredibly inequitable, often violent structure in place, it's kind of thrilling actually,
Diane Rosenfeld 07:48
That's a beautiful way for you to put it, that we can't imagine what we don't think about or we can't visualize what we don't think about and this book gives us a space for the reader to just take it and think about it in the privacy of their own head. You know, how does this compare? Does this ring true? Is this a truth telling to you? This is a truth telling, and consider the injustice of it, and then consider how we could flip it. So the bonobos does show us that through this coalition, they can shut down male sexual coercion. I think that in a patriarchal structure, societal structure, male sexual coercion, and it's toleration and non interference by men in one anothers sexual coercion of quote their unquote women is like the scaffolding, the support system, for the patriarchal structure of male male alliances. And when you take that out, you see this bonobo society, and it has all these things that would promise a happier life for everyone.
Omkari Williams 09:00
I think that that is actually a really interesting point. Partly because we live in a world where things are often structured in a win lose situation. And I think for a lot of men in particular, the idea of living in a non patriarchal society means they're losing, rather than them being able to envision this as a potential benefit for them. And I have to say, honestly, I sort of struggle with that concept. Intellectually. I understand it, but there is this emotional piece where I go, Oh, yeah, no, that's never going to happen. And I think that that's exactly part of the challenge, is sort of overcoming that. And you say very specifically in your book, that we are a society in which female sexuality has developed within patriarchal constraints, which is I think the reason in my head I go, Oh, no, that'll never happen. Even though I actually know it is possible. I know intellectually, it's possible. But having grown up in this world where this was how things have always been, it can be really hard to imagine something different.
Diane Rosenfeld 10:13
I agree. So that's what I talk about, and hope to inspire some dialogue on in chapter five about compliance sex. The idea that how could we answer the question of what female sexuality would look like outside of a patriarchy, if we've never really been outside of a patriarchy? And female sexuality has always been defined within those really significant constraints, and not at all according to what women want, individually and collectively and in their lives. So interestingly, bonobos, to the extent that they're known at all, are known for being quite sexually active, they defuse tension through sex, they have sexual interactions all the time. And males initiate and females initiate and males succeed in their initiation 70% of the time, which is a very high percentage, here's the most important part. If a female does not reciprocate his interest and his overtures, he walks away. It's done. He doesn't coerce or he doesn't harass her. And that is exceptional within primates.
Chimpanzees, batter their female reproductive partners, like consistently. They harass them, even weeks in advance of mating to make mating more likely, and resistance less likely. And it's among many other primates too. But the point is that's so interesting is that bonobos have eliminated this. So when a bonobo female says no, it means no and the male walks away. But they do have lots of mutual, apparently pleasurable, sexual encounters, and they have them between females, and males and males, and males and females. So it's not the end of sex. It's the end of unwanted sex, right. And that's what's really exciting. But it also brings up the problem of how patriarchy also harms men,.Men will do much better outside of patriarchal constraints as well, when they can be more human, more fully human and have more social permission to express themselves as fully human.
Omkari Williams 12:34
I think that that is completely true. And it rubs up against our idea of what a fully human man is, because our idea of a fully human man is very, very specific. And it has a lot to do with dominance. And it has a lot to do with being at the top of whatever pyramid whether it's a sexual pyramid or your work pyramid. And I think that shifting that understanding, and having men themselves understand that there is potential here for them to live a life that is far less stressful than the lives that most men lead, because competition is enormously stressful, as we all know, I think that doing that piece of the work is really going to be the challenging piece in all of this. Because, as someone once said, No man who was sane or sober, ever gave up power willingly. And this is what that's going to feel like, right?
So if this is what that's going to feel like, then there's got to be real incentive for men to do this, to let go of that structure. And I actually found myself thinking as I was reading your book, that there was incentive in there, because wouldn't you rather have a sexual partner who wanted to be intimate with you? Wouldn't you rather have a relationship that felt like it was safe for everyone, so there wasn't that tension, and that underlying anger and hostility? And something that you have been working on is the situation of sexual assaults on campuses. And I always feel like, here's a point where we can make a shift because the men we're talking about are still young men. And they haven't gotten as entrenched in those habits as they will be 10 years down the road. Would you talk about how that dynamic of just breaking the cycle of campus assaults might play into a bonobo sisterhood and also the place of a bonobo sisterhood in preventing campus assaults?
Diane Rosenfeld 14:50
Exactly. You were an excellent reader.
Omkari Williams 14:53
Oh, thank you.
Diane Rosenfeld 14:53
Thank you, thank you for taking the idea so seriously. I am not framing it as a takedown of patriarchy and as men willingly giving up power, as much as I'm interested in building a bonobo sisterhood based on this not just critique of patriarchy, but a collective refusal to participate in a system that is built on their submission. That is built on their subordination that is built on our subordination. You raise a lot of things. So I wanted to talk about our ideas of power and competition and equality, and really flipping those. We always think about equality, sex equality, in terms of men versus women. How do women compared to men? Are we gender equal to men? Do we have the same rights as men? And I think something magical is going to happen when women start to ask among ourselves, how are we equal? When we turn that lens and say, All women are created equal? We are all endowed by our creator with inviolable rights, and nobody has the right to pimp exploit, rape, harm, gaslight, etc... my sister, and everybody's my sister. So much is going to flow from that.
It's just a whole different lens. It's a whole different framework that we are free to adopt, and that we must adopt. And that the bonobos offer us all these behavioral clues, like food sharing, and identifying resources among each other and just thinking of new systems of sharing that will take care of our needs, and rise us all up together. So that's an answer to the first part of your question. Obviously, I teach on a college campus, I've taught at the college and taught at the law school for the last two decades. And colleges are the best laboratories to do this work in. So in 2016, I taught a freshman seminar at Harvard, called Creating Cultures of Sexual Respect on Campus. And it's all about replacing the current sexual culture which results in one in four women being raped by the time she graduates. In one study, it was one in three at Harvard. That's an astounding figure.
Omkari Williams 17:29
It's horrifying.
Diane Rosenfeld 17:30
It's completely horrifying. And it's like we accommodate it and we accept it. And instead, we can see that the way that men commit sexual assault on campus is very socially ingrained. And it's very much part of the party system, and who has the social currency, and who has the parties with alcohol and it's formulaic. And you can break down that formula, and have women protecting each other, looking out for each other, and very much knowing that each of them has a self worth defending, and enabling them to enact that in the real world. So the pivot of the book is a self worth defending. And it captures so many things. So the initial thing that it captures is just the psychological detrimental effects, that being a woman or a girl in this society has. To know that you have to get a leg up in order to have any chance to be equal to a boy or a man. That they're going to have a ticket to participate in the things that are socially valued, like sports. That they determine social value, and we can just rewrite that whole thing. We really just need to rethink it. Like think it, think it all again, because bonobos didn't need a constitution. They didn't need laws. This is behavioral, they protect each other.
Omkari Williams 18:59
And yet, in this society, women are really taught to compete with one another. We're not taught to protect our sisters, we're taught to compete with them. We compete with them for boys, we compete with them for a place on the cheerleading team, we compete with them for everything, which also reinforces the structure. Especially the competing with them for boys reinforces that structure of inequality and reinforces the structure of men being the ultimate prize and protectors. And you actually talk about how we have a society where men are both the protectors and the abusers at the same time, and you call it the male protection racket. And I found that so interesting, because I hadn't thought about it that way, honestly. And yet, when I was reading it, my head was nodding. I was like, Yup, that's true, that's true. And this would shift that. So if you could just talk about what the male protection racket is, and how, if women decided, and girls, women and girls decided, you are my sister, and I will protect you. That you have a self that is worth protecting, and I have a self that is worth protecting, how we could dismantle that male protection racket.
Diane Rosenfeld 20:24
So the male protection racket is the idea that you need a man to protect you. And then when you think about it, what you need that man to protect you from is other men. But actually, the irony is that the man who's supposed to be your protector is most often the most dangerous man to you. You know, intimate partner violence is much, much, much more common than stranger violence. Acquaintance rape is 80 to 90% of all rape, and we're taught, you know, even in self defense class, we're taught to fear the stranger. And we're not at all ever taught to fear the guy who's, you know, spiking our drink.
Omkari Williams 21:08
Yeah.
Diane Rosenfeld 21:08
So kind of taking the lid off of that is a really important thing. And you're ready to talk about that. I was inspired by seeing this ad for a male, white blow up doll called Safety Man. And I saw it on a SkyMall magazine on an airplane. And it was marketed towards women, as you know, "Don't travel without Safety Man as your bodyguard, and he'll keep vigil over your well being", and I'm laughing on the plane to myself. And then I'm thinking, wait a second, this is really serious. And it just like stuck with me for a long time. But it's very artificial, that women hate each other actually.
Omkari Williams 21:08
I think so.
Diane Rosenfeld 21:09
Our best friends are women, we know that. I mean, we also of course can have best friends who are men or nonconforming, I'm not saying that. But women were taught that we're competition for each other. And we're taught to judge each other. And that all starts with ourselves, we also are taught to obsess about and judge ourselves first. And that's one of the takeaways that I tried to teach in all of my classes, and also through the book, that start with a space in between your ears and stop judging yourself, and start thinking about all the positive things about yourself and like that you have a self worth defending, and that she has a self worth defending it, it spreads. And the hope is that this will spread from girl to girl, woman to woman and when girls stand up for each other, it changes the whole dynamic. When boys and men can't divide women, in terms of who's worthy of protection, we all win.
Omkari Williams 22:51
It's so true. And it's so interesting when you talk about how we judge ourselves. A friend once challenged a whole bunch of people, she did this, put a social media, post out challenging people to not discuss a woman's appearance, her age, or anything like that for just a day. And just notice how hard that was. And, you know, I consider myself reasonably evolved, and definitely a feminist. And still, I could hear that voice in my head judging women, for what they were wearing, I was like, Oh, she shouldn't have worn that.
Diane Rosenfeld 23:32
It's hard to just stop a behavior. And it's easier if you can replace it with something else. So when one finds oneself, judging someone else, as we are socially conditioned to do, we just need to replace that voice. So instead of saying, Wow, she's really dressed like a, whatever fill in the word, you know, I would never wear that. Instead say, that is not my fashion choice. She has the absolute right to make whatever fashion choice she wants. Good for her.
Omkari Williams 24:05
That's even better. Because it trains us to celebrate other women in a different way and say, you know, that let her make her choice, because we all want to make our choices. We want to be able to do that for ourselves. And doing that for someone else reinforces our ability to do that for ourselves and say this is my choice as well.
Diane Rosenfeld 24:26
Right. It's a way of building respect among ourselves.
Omkari Williams 24:30
Yeah, I really like that because it is not easy. I'm just gonna say, it is not easy. The training starts at birth, and it is very, very, very focused. And that's what we're up against right now. I want to ask you something very specific about this because, you know, in the same way in which we will judge other women harshly for what they're wearing, or what they're doing or you know, whatever the thing is, we also judge women because of their race or their economic status. And especially in this society, as we look at the need for bonobo sisterhoods we can't ignore the intersections of race and economic status, and how those things really play into what is often. I'm not gonna say, it's not sanctioned violence, but it's violence that gets ignored by entities such as the police or district attorneys. Can you talk about how having a bonobo sisterhood would make us more intersectional and also create a structure where we might be able to apply more pressure to the entities that are supposed to be protecting us, but in fact, are often not doing that?
Diane Rosenfeld 25:59
Yes, this is an area where we really have to intentionally pick up the work. And when I say we, I mean white women really need to do work on our own racism, and our own privilege that we claim, that we enjoy from living in a racist society. So I can give you an example of a case that keeps me up at night. Although now it's going fairly well. So it might turn out okay, fingers crossed. I talked about the case of Chrystul Kizer, who was a 16 year old African American sex trafficking victim in Milwaukee, who is standing trial for killing her trafficker who was a white man more than twice her age. And it turned out that in Kenosha, Wisconsin, there was evidence, and there is evidence that he was trafficking around a dozen other young African American girls.
And in the two months that the police had evidence, including hundreds of videos that this man had in his house, in the two months that they had those videos, they did nothing, and he was murdered, after they had done nothing. And Chrystul is standing trial for his murder. And there are all kinds of questions about it. But how can I as a white woman with privilege help in that case? How can I help like expose the racism and sexism? And absolutely what my student Brianna banks who just graduated called in a brilliant law review article that she wrote the devaluation of Black women's bodies? You know, how do we call attention to that? And it is incumbent upon white women to use whatever power they have to challenge racism, and not to ask our sisters to solve it, you know, but to really like, offer whatever we can to change systems of power.
Omkari Williams 28:11
I've spoken with white women about this many times. And often what I hear from them is, "we don't know what to do". That's what they will say. And, you know, it's a bit frustrating truth be told, because if nothing else, there's Google. Ask Google, it'll come up with something right. But I think that what sometimes white women don't acknowledge is, even though they are not at the top of the power pyramid, because they are women, they are the next adjacent circle of power in those circles. And that if a white woman, or 10 white women went to the police department in Kenosha, and said, "We understand that you have hundreds of videos of this man, trafficking young, Black girls, what are you doing about it?", they would get a very different response than if then if I went with 10 of my Black sisters, right, and had the same conversation. And I think that it's important for white women to start to acknowledge both their power and the responsibility that goes with that power.
Diane Rosenfeld 29:30
I completely endorse that. And I really hope that the book inspires action along those lines. I know I will be doing that. And there are a lot of actions we can take in concert with the book to build on its ideas and premises. And this is a really, really, really important one. And I remember being very jarred once in class when one of my African American female students, we were talking about police, and she said that when she gets stopped for speeding, when she just gets stopped by a police officer, it's a life threatening occurrence for her. And that's so tragic. I mean, we need our own police force, really. I mean, and we can help protect each other is what I'm thinking. We just need a whole bonobo system where we can call each other when we need we have to be admit the call of the other bonobo has come and help us. But that was really, that's a huge difference. Like if I get stopped by a cop being a, you know, white privileged person, I don't perceive it as a life threatening.
Omkari Williams 30:38
And I can tell you that the one time I was stopped by a cop, and I wasn't even driving, and I was in a car with two white women. I was literally vibrating with fear. I was rehearsing in my head, you know, answers to questions that he might ask. I wasn't even driving. And that's how incredibly horrifying that experience is. The adrenaline in my body was just off the charts. And I think that, I think that that's something that's important for people who do not have that experience to understand. Because I walk through the world with a fair amount of privilege. I do. And yet, in that circumstance, I was absolutely terrified.
Diane Rosenfeld 31:25
One of the biggest hopes for the book is that we can really effectively challenge and eliminate racism and sexism. And that might seem to be a big claim, but it's actually at hand. I think it's, it's quite achievable. And it starts with knowing that we have a self worth defending and embodying the what I call bonobo principle, cause it seems like the bonobos act upon this principle that, like, if it can happen to her, it could happen to me. And I don't, I don't want it, it just shouldn't happen. So nobody has the right to pimp my sister, nobody had the right to pimp Chrystul. And everybody's my sister.
Omkari Williams 32:05
I think it's the “and everybody's my sister” piece.
Diane Rosenfeld 32:08
We definitely need to work on that.
Omkari Williams 32:10
That's the essential piece.
Diane Rosenfeld 32:11
Yeah.
Omkari Williams 32:12
Everybody's my sister. If we break down those walls, and say, everybody's my sister, and it doesn't not mean you have to like everybody.
Diane Rosenfeld 32:22
Right.
Omkari Williams 32:23
Not at all. I mean, cause here's the thing is, there are people I do not like. Women, I do not like, I would come to their defense No. Matter. What.
Diane Rosenfeld 32:34
Great.
Omkari Williams 32:35
That's just, that's a hard line. I've defended strangers on the street, no matter what. And that that experience of solidarity with other women is incredibly empowering. It's not, you know, it's yes, it's a nice thing to do, it's the right thing to do. But it's not just a one way street, there is an experience that we get back when we do that. And it is of, oh, okay, I have more power than I may have realized and together, we are actually collectively really powerful. And that's the piece of the bonobo sisterhood that is so enticing is to actually live into that experience of women being powerful, not in the way that men are. But just women being powerful as sisters and defenders and protectors of ourselves and other women.
Diane Rosenfeld 33:32
Exactly, exactly. To just stand in ourselves and in our own power. We're not taking power from anyone. Power comes from within us. And we just have to act on our power.
Omkari Williams 33:47
I think that, you know, if we lived those words, no one pimps my sister, everyone is my sister if we lived those words, both individually and collectively each day, it would shift things really quickly, because I don't think that there are many adult women or even many young women who have not been in a position where they had to defend another girl or another woman, whether it's a playground bully, or some creep on the subway or something. We've all had that experience we've been on one end or the other or probably both. And if we can make that shift, things will change fast. But I think the challenge is how do we get women to understand that making that shift is actually not just a pipe dream?
Diane Rosenfeld 34:37
I think if if the book, as I hope it does, speaks to people's experience helping other people, you know that that's going to resonate with each of the readers. So it won't be as as hard to imagine. And that people will say, will already recognize, Yeah, that felt really good when that happened. Or they decide to get involved in some injustice by supporting other women and that they feel good, that they feel like a growing desire to form coalitions with other women.
Omkari Williams 35:13
You mentioned something that I think is interesting in that context, because you talk about and you referenced this earlier, you talk about women having systems where they share food. And I just think that the whole concept of mutual aid is very natural for most women, you know, we watch each other's kids, we, you know, all of those kinds of things, we make lunch for someone and take it to a neighbor. And yet mutual aid is a concept that's kind of having a resurgence in our society now. But it had been something we did as sort of as a matter of course, you know, 100 years ago, when we lived in small towns, everybody sort of pitched in, that was the way it was. Why did you choose to focus on food as a particular form of mutual aid that women provide one another because I think that that choice is important.
Diane Rosenfeld 36:07
I think it rings so true, and it was so easy to find examples of it. And the bonobos food sharing is something that distinguishes them quite sharply from chimpanzees. So chimpanzees won't share their food. And bonobos readily share their food and make sure that the other bonobo eats, like that a stranger will eat before they do. So, bonobos are xenophilic, which is one of my favorite words, whereas chimpanzees are xenophobic, just saying. So it's fear of stranger versus love of stranger. It's scarcity versus abundance, we have enough food in this country to feed the world over twice, there is no child that should be hungry in this country. And if women were in charge of making the systems and determining the value of resources, I think everything would be different. We don't set economic terms in our capitalist society. It wasn't women in powerful positions, who decided that kindergarten teachers should be paid, barely livable wages while traders on the stock exchange, you know, are millionaires before they're 30. And that kind of resource analysis and questioning and sharing is something that will happen in a bonobo sisterhood. We can just make new currency, we can ascribe value to what we do, and share it among each other. There's no reason that we have to accept that kindergarten teachers get paid nothing.
Omkari Williams 37:51
I think that's the most radical thing in your book, is the idea that we can just decide to do it differently. Someone decided to do it this way. And we've all sort of fallen in line and said, Oh, okay, well, that's the way it's done. But it was just a choice, because it worked for some person. But it doesn't work for most of us. It doesn't work for the society as a whole, this is not a healthy society, we can see that there's no arguing that. So if it's not a healthy society, then you know, if you're, if you were an unhealthy person in your body, you'd go to a doctor who would say do things differently. So maybe it's time for us to do things differently.
Diane Rosenfeld 38:37
I think it is.
Omkari Williams 38:38
And I think there's an opportunity, I feel like, partly as a result of the pandemic, and how much that really revealed the inequities and the rifts and the places where our society does not work for everyone, that we have an opportunity to rethink things. And part of that, for me is certainly what if women were just there at the table in a different way than we have been in the past? What if we got to use our voices in the same way that men get to use their voices? And we got to say, you know, that kindergarten teacher is taking care of 10 kids. So maybe she should be making more than my 15 year old who's babysitting for two.
Diane Rosenfeld 39:26
You're not kidding. Right?
Omkari Williams 39:28
So I think that is something to really think about.
Diane Rosenfeld 39:32
It's new tables, is that we don't have to get a seat at the table, we can create new tables that are circular, and where we like actually listen to one another and ascribe value to what we're doing and thinking and saying and to our lives.
Omkari Williams 39:48
I like the idea of new tables, because the ones that are there just not you know, they're not big enough, clearly and they're not thinking broadly enough and with enough, joy and generosity. I mean, the thing that strikes me about the bonobo sisterhoods is how much generosity there is in those coalitions. And they're just, they're, it's beautiful, they're really beautiful.
Omkari Williams 40:14
We're about out of time and I do want to be sure I ask you to give the listeners three actions that they can take, if this is something that feels real and powerful to them as I really hope it does, because it feels powerful and real to me.
Diane Rosenfeld 40:35
Okay, well, first, thank you for this interview.
Omkari Williams 40:38
Oh, you're welcome.
Diane Rosenfeld 40:39
It's been such a pleasure. And thank you for bringing so much light onto the topic and for reading the book with so much care.
Omkari Williams 40:47
Oh, it really it's a wonderful book, I can't wait till it's out so people can get it,
Diane Rosenfeld 40:52
Thank you and I will send you a fresh copy.
Omkari Williams 40:55
Thank you!
Diane Rosenfeld 40:58
The first thing is what we talked about to stop judging yourself. Just start with yourself, stop judging yourself. And really take the book as an invitation to to be in an intimate space with yourself and the ideas in the book and see what resonates and what you feel, if anything, that you want to change and how you want to change it. I don't have a lot of prescription in the book for change. I have a lot of ideas. And I'm hoping that it inspires a lot of different actions. But I don't really have a formula. But the first thing is really to stop judging harshly yourself, and to open space for your sisters. To really believe in the bonobo principle and that you have a self worth defending.
So learn self defense learn, self defense that's inspired by the bonobo sisterhood. You could even start by going on YouTube and watching a 15 minute video, a lot of self defense is, is being ready to verbally shut down any aggression that's aimed toward you. But learn self defense. And then once you learn self defense, the third thing is that that enables you to imagine defending your sisters. And it pisses you off. And you learn from the outside in and from the inside out that you have a self worth defending. And then you really want to do it. And you really want to defend your sisters. So it's a physical embodiment of the ideas. And that's what will change because that's what will stop male sexual coercion.
Omkari Williams 42:40
Yeah, the idea of physically being able to defend oneself is such a critical piece. Just having that knowledge in your body moves you through the world very differently.
Diane Rosenfeld 42:56
I agree.
Omkari Williams 42:56
Just very differently. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so very much. I can't even tell you how glad I am that we got to talk and how important I think your book is. So thank you. I hope you have the best of luck with it. And I look forward to hopefully seeing you on the road at some point as you're promoting this wonderful book.
Diane Rosenfeld 43:20
Me too. And I've already subscribed to your newsletter and you are absolutely part of the bonobo sisterhood. So welcome to the bonobo sisterhood, my sister, and I look forward to working with you. Onward.
Omkari Williams 43:34
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Diane Rosenfeld 43:37
Thank you.
Omkari Williams 43:37
The structural problems that Diane laid out for us in her book aren't going away overnight. But what we can change right away is how we look at these problems. And the powerful solution that Diane is offering us. Bonobo sisterhoods that gives us a framework to reduce and eventually eliminate male sexual violence through the force of our commitment to our sisters and their well being and they to ours. As Diane reminds us, change starts with each of us. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with another episode of stepping into truth very soon. And until then, remember, that change does start with story. So keep sharing yours.