Dr. Ford Debrief: Glennon & Amanda are Fired Up!
March 20, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today we decided we were going to jump on and do what we’re calling a bonus episode because the interview with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford just exploded our brains and hearts and we wanted to come back and unpack a bunch of it with and for you. And we also wanted to loop in Abby Wambach, because Abby wasn’t on the pod yesterday and she was really disappointed about that because she was so looking forward to talking to Dr. Ford, but I think a lot of you might relate to this.
We looked at Abby two seconds before the interview started and we just said, honey, you have to let yourself go lay down. So Abby lost her brother over the holidays, and I think we’re going to get into that in a little more detail about what grief has felt like for you in the future, but today is just to say that it just hit you in your body. It was in your brain and you were doing all the things for so many weeks, and then suddenly you just-
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you want to say anything about that or wait till another time?
Abby Wambach:
Well, I’ll just say to Dr. Ford that I just feel so sad that I missed it, and I just have been churning and doing all the things and work, family, all of the stuff, and I shut down yesterday. I mean, I sat in front of you guys and I just had tears in my eyes and I just knew that I couldn’t do the actual interview, so here I am. I’m so grateful to be back today and yeah, this grief thing, man, it’s up and down and all around and it finally it’s settling down. It’s no longer a logic issue. I’ve been trying to understand it in my head. It’s now settling into my cells a little, and I guess with my professional sports background, I’ve just mind over mattered so much of the way that my body has felt that any kind of grief or heartbreak or whatever is actually probably the most important work of my life, and so I’m really trying to honor that now.
Glennon Doyle:
Good for you. To the pod squatters who are going through grief, wow, when it hits your body, it’s unfightable.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And also, I just want to say that I love so much that you got up and left yesterday. I feel like that is the new revolution of … We are always talking about how wonderful it is to show up, show up, show up. I think it’s also equally brave and necessary and wonderful to be tapping out, no, not overriding what your body and spirit are telling you and knowing that your people and your work and all of that are going to be fine.
Abby Wambach:
It’s been a mindfuck though, because I have this thing going on in my head. I got to get my work done, and I got to show up for the family, and I got to make dinner, and I’ve got to make sure everybody’s off to school. I still have that running thing and I keep looking at you and you just keep going. I got it. You just lay here, and I’ve never done that. I’ve never in my whole life just laid here.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I haven’t talked a lot about it. I think in the coming weeks I am planning on coming on here and really getting into it. I do think it’s important to talk about it and talk about my brother and talk about this experience of doing it because this is the first time I’ve done grief sober.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, which means it’s the first time you’ve done grief.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly, and in fact, I think what’s happened is I’m doing grief for the whole of my life.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Just say something real quick about how that happens.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I reached for booze every time I went into any kind of grief, when I lost grandparents, when I lost people in my life, when I had heartbreak, when I was sad, whatever it was, any kind of sadness, and it’s been a profound observation. I never knew that until now. And so walking through this sober, it’s like, oh, I have the mind to be like, oh no, you’re supposed to stay here, and I didn’t have that ability before. So it’s like this sobriety has brought me this superpower to be able to actually walk with grief instead of shut it out.
Glennon Doyle:
The idea that grief is love with nowhere to go anymore, it’s really a shame that we don’t all talk about it more when we’re in it because it is actually a very sacred place to be and we grieve alone, but there’s something about … It actually reminds me a little bit of the interview yesterday. I think Dr. Blasey Ford said she was grieving a breakup with her nation, and the grief felt less sad when we three were talking to each other about it, because if you’re grieving something collectively, that means you love something collectively. If you’re touching each other’s grief and you’re feeling it and you can … then that means that you all hold something sacred together, and it’s like a meeting place, the ache.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, if grief is usually over losing something, and when you connect with other people who are also grieving it, you’ve found something.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
You’ve lost something you can never get back, but then you’ve found something you didn’t think existed. So I think it’s not a replacement, but it is a new life.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s an affinity group.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
When you’re together in grief, you’re like, oh, we have all loved deeply and lost, and you’re suddenly so bound to those people.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you.
Abby Wambach:
Well, I felt so much. I mean, this is going to make me cry a little. I just felt so loved by you too, because I just was like, Nope, we have an interview. It doesn’t matter how I feel. Sit in the chair and do this. And I just sat here and you two just looked at me and you were like, go, leave, get out. You just protected me and my grief. You didn’t let me jump out because honestly, work is a distraction.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
So I’m feeling a little better today, which is nice, but I just am grateful to you too for giving me that. I feel so sad about this because what Dr. Ford taught me during the times that she was doing the hearings, and since, I just was really looking forward to speaking with her.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, you should know that as soon as the interview was over, I explained to her why you weren’t there. I told her about your brother, and you could see in her face that she knew exactly where you were. She was so beautifully empathic about it, and she said that she’s going to text you to go surfing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So I thought you would be really excited about that.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
What are your thoughts to see about yesterday?
Abby Wambach:
Yes, tell us everything.
Amanda Doyle:
I have so many thoughts. So we recorded it yesterday and then last night at dinner, when we do our highs, lows, cheers, best thing, worst thing that happened the day and then somebody that you feel really showed up in that day for somebody. And so my high was speaking with Dr. Ford, and so I told the family at dinner about that, and the kids, of course, who were two and four when that happened, didn’t know about it. So I was just trying to explain in very elementary terms who she was and what she did.
So I start to explain, and I say, Dr. Ford is a brilliant scientist and very brave woman who, when she realized that President Trump had appointed someone to be on the Supreme Court who had done something really terrible to her, she wanted the people who were voting and deciding on that to have that information. They were like, what did he do to her? And so I explained sexual assault, and it was so interesting because my son’s first reaction, he said, “Why would you tell anyone that?”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
He was embarrassed, and that is the whole thing, right? His two questions were like, why would you tell anyone that, and then why would she tell them that, the people who were voting? And it was fascinating because yes, that is the revolution of it. It’s deeply uncomfortable when you take something so private and put it in the public sphere, and I think that that is precisely what was so powerful both about Professor Hill and Dr. Ford doing is like, no, it is not private. This thing that happened to me so deeply affected my private life, and it belongs squarely in the public sphere. It belongs here because these people are here and because it is relevant. And then he was like, why would they tell them that? And it was a little bit like touche.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, exactly. That’s where we got with our interview. They were the wrong them.
Amanda Doyle:
Right, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
But sister, isn’t that how the oppression of women stays so prevalent? You’ve talked to me about this in terms of not using the word domestic abuse.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Isn’t it the case that women continually are abused in places where society says, oh, that’s your private business, that’s your dirty laundry? Isn’t that how all of this continues, is that abusers do this in places that are deemed outside of the jurisdiction of citizenship?
Amanda Doyle:
Correct, and even more so, the perception of those things as private and the false binary of public and private then gets reinforced by legal definitions, political structures that define those things as irrelevant to each other, so the Violence Against Women Act, which is that federal law that gave survivors of interpersonal violence a civil rights remedy. So if someone punches you in the face outside of your home, a stranger does that, the local authorities can prosecute that as a crime because only authorities can prosecute as a crime. Or whether they choose to do that or not, you have a civil remedy to say, I want to sue you regardless of what those people do for what you did. That seems like a no freaking brainer. Anyone else can do that for anything, but we didn’t have a federal civil rights remedy for interpersonal violence.
I’m just bringing this up to say the Supreme Court could not get their heads around … They struck down the civil rights remedy, and they said, that makes no sense because in order to have a federal law about that, it has to affect interstate commerce, basically money, and there’s no way that something that happens in people’s houses could possibly affect money, which is absolutely insane because just on the face of it, the number of people who are out of work every year because of interpersonal violence, the impact on the medical system because of interpersonal violence, all of that to mean that it doesn’t allow us to see things that exist because we set it up that way.
But I think also, it bleeds into everything. When we were talking about this yesterday in the conversation where you said everyone believed you, and I just wanted to follow up on that because the stats on that were the fact that a third more voters believed her than him. That’s a very big margin, and the follow-up on that stat is that even though a third more believed her than believed Kavanaugh, two thirds of voters believed that even if everything she said was true, it was not enough to end Kavanaugh’s consideration for the Supreme Court, or to genuinely look into the other 4,000 tips that came in about him. Not even that it was an indicator of other behavior that could have happened in the future. But it wouldn’t matter if all 4,000 of those tips corroborated exactly what she said. The voters said, we believe her.
Abby Wambach:
Yep. We believe them. It doesn’t matter.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, and two out of three of us, even assuming everything she said was true, and everything those corroborators would say was true, that’s not relevant to the question of being in the Supreme Court. Just like when Trump was running for office and all of those sexual allegations came through, 62% of Americans believed against him. They just said that they weren’t deal breakers on becoming president. So what does that say? That’s the same exact thing about things that happen in the home don’t affect money. Things that men do to women don’t affect their ability to wield power, which is un-fucking-believable. It’s precisely the wielding of power and the misuse of power that instigated that violence to begin with. And this is what I think when we were talking about having hope, what is so interesting to me right now is that it’s been, what, 40 years since Anita Hill? 1991. So what is that?
Abby Wambach:
30 years.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a long time since she testified, but the same exact thing was true there. That’s not relevant to his ability to be on the court. And in the time since then, now there are these innumerable allegations and admissions by Justice Thomas of these lavish secret trips that he’s taken. And for the first time in the Supreme Court’s 235-year history, they have adopted their first code of conduct. Why? Because of the lack of integrity that is revealed by that human, which, if we connected, if we refuse to compartmentalize ethics and integrity from public to private, and we just said integrity is integrity and ethics are ethics, then A equals B. We would already have known.
Abby Wambach:
We knew.
Amanda Doyle:
We knew, right. So it’s like because private means something different for men and women. Private spheres for men means you can do what you want here. Private for women means anything can happen to you here. For men, it means you can abuse whoever you want in the private sphere, and there will be no consequences. And for women, it means you can be abused at any time in the private sphere and nothing will happen for you, right? And also when you’re saying that about Thomas and the unbelievable lack of integrity and morals and ethics that he has lived his life by and his work that are completely connected, Kavanaugh, it’s like, oh, how could we have known that he would hold women down and take away all of their bodily autonomy? I don’t know. Dr. Ford sat there and said, “He held me down. He took away all my bodily autonomy,” and then that’s exactly what he fucking did to all of us.
And I think what I’m saying is I’m not saying that all those tips … I don’t believe that all 4,000 of those tips were just corroborating Christine’s story. I believe that other women saying that happened to me from him in college, that happened to me afterwards, I was his whatever, we know that dudes that are dudes like that. So I don’t think that people are just saying, okay, I think that Kavanaugh did that in high school, but I think he’s a standup guy now. So I think they’re saying, we know that a Kavanaugh is a Kavanaugh. We know that he probably does that the whole way through, and it’s still okay, like a Thomas is a Thomas. He’s still misusing his power. He’s still-
Abby Wambach:
Can I ask just what might sound like a really stupid question? The Supreme Court justices, how are they elected into office?
Amanda Doyle:
So the sitting president when there’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court has the right to recommend/appoint someone to the Supreme Court. The Senate has the “advice and consent right.” So whoever gets presented, there’s a very large vetting process. There’s a whole team at the White House who all they do is vet lower courts, higher courts, whatever. The Supreme Court is the Super Bowl of that. So they go through and it’s like FBI investigation times 1,000. They interview all of these people who knew the person, et cetera, et cetera. They find who are the top five people that the president might be interested in? One rises to the top.
Now, Dr. Ford went to her congressperson during that process because she did not want to be testifying. What she hoped was that with access to this information about what he did to her, they would look at four equally conservative, equally likely to strike down Roe because we know that’s what you want, and they would say, we’re choosing another one of these four, not this person. It did not work. So Trump selects Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh goes before the Senate. The Senate then has to decide whether they are going to bless his recommendation through a vote and put him on a lifetime appointment or whether they’re going to say, our advice and consent is no to this person, send us someone else.
Abby Wambach:
Got it. Thank you. That’s super helpful.
Glennon Doyle:
I’ve been thinking nonstop about the duty and the patriot of it all. I would love to talk about that a little bit because I think it would be an interesting conversation between the three of us just because what I wonder is my feeling is like it’s right. That feeling that we have that wells up inside of us about something bigger than us is transcendent. It’s what heals the world. But I just sometimes feel like, is it misplaced inside of patriotism?
And I know I’m going to get in big trouble for this. So when Abby joined our family, one of my kids came to me one day, and this is the only time that any of them revealed to me any direct concern about Abby’s character, okay? And one of the kids, I won’t tell you which, but you can probably guess, walked into my room and she said, “Mom, we have to talk about something.” And I said, “What?” She goes, “It’s about Abby.” And I said, “What?” She said, “I think Abby is patriotic.” Okay, I come from a very patriotic family. Our family is patri-fucking-otic. We would sit on our boat and we would sing Lee Greenwood (singing).
Amanda Doyle:
Everywhere you go, you’re walking on graves.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, battlefield, all Anthems, flags, all this stuff. Okay, here’s how I felt. You know how there’s this meme out that’s like I used to think that I loved Jesus so much because every time at my church they would sing praise songs and I would have the swelling of my chest. And I was like, that’s Jesus. But then I went to a U2 concert and I got the exact same feeling, so I think what I love is just collective music, right? What I will tell you is I feel a deep, welling, moving duty, higher calling inside of myself that I feel when I’m with usually a group of people who have this dream for how things should be and are working towards it.
Or the last time I felt as I watched this ritual thing that Adrian Marie Brown did with a bunch of people that was about peace and healing and it was all women and a lot of them were survivors, and I felt like I wanted to stand and salute. But what I don’t understand is feeling that duty to a flag. Are people respecting and honoring what America should and could and one day will stand for and do? Or are we actually … When we say I pledge allegiance to the flag, that one under God we’re all equal, but we’re not. I just feel like I’m constantly being gaslit by dogma.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, and you’ll have to listen to yesterday’s episode that what we’re referring to and was really fascinating is in Dr. Ford’s book and in the way she talks about it, she talks about that she came forward at great, great risk to herself and her family because of her duty as a civilian, to make sure that the people who were confirming this person knew who he was. And she talked about it as a patriotic duty and in terms very parallel to the kind of sacrifices, the way that people have given up their lives for fidelity to what they believed was good for the nation. That is the way she framed her need. It was just the right thing to do as a citizen, and that was the end of the analysis at the end of the day.
And I think what you’re talking about is what is the right thing and for whom that you can have a conviction that is unreasonable in the best way? You can be so passionately devoted to a promise, to a possibility, to a duty. And is it that we just have these particular buckets where that’s allowed? Country is one of them, but that passion, that ability to be so moved as to do something irrational is only valid if it’s to nation, if it’s to God. There’s areas where this is sanctioned and areas where it just looks like irrational behavior.
Glennon Doyle:
Or you’re told it’s one thing. I think it’s so honorable, I mean, the people who sacrifice everything for country, but it feels to me after low so many years of listening to people talk is that oftentimes what they’re sacrificing for is not the motive of the people who are sending them in. And I’ve experienced this so much in the church because I know so many evangelical people who truly believe that they have been radicalized to save lives, and they don’t even know that the reason they were radicalized was to create a block of voters to get certain conservative politicians elected. It’s like what we’re honoring or what we think we’re honoring, these ideals, are never what we’re actually being sent in for. But the idea of it, I understand that wanting to stand and salute, the wanting to kneel and kiss the ground, that’s how I feel. I feel the vibe of church and the vibe of duty when I am around people who are actually living up to the ideals that these other people are telling us we should sacrifice our lives for while they collect all their monies.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened in Vietnam. It’s exactly what happened since then. It’s like if the motives of the people who are going to serve are so true, but what they’re being told they’re going for is not? So same with Dr. Ford. Theoretically, she was sacrificing her family’s safety, her reputation, her identity for the rest of time, which she had toiled for decades to develop a reputation as a scientist, as a professor, as a mentor, and now she will forever be known as a woman who had a terrible thing happen to her, sacrificing that because we purport to want to hear whether these people are qualified, but that’s bullshit because we don’t want to hear whether they’re qualified. We just want them on because the president said so and we’re not going to piss off the president.
So it’s what Anita Hill said. She said, “The reason I know why they believe, but they’re not willing to do anything about it is if you say to those same people, if this were true, what would you do about it, they have no answer, because it’s not relevant if it’s true. So yeah, I think humans are made with that duty, with that loyalty, with that willingness to sacrifice, and that is exploited by people who know that that exists in humans, two ends that are their own selfish ends. And so to the duty thing, I have a real conflict with that. I think it’s duty to yourself. If I know I need to go testify because I need to look at my own self and that’s what that takes, maybe I do it. If I do it because it’s my obligation to anyone else, fuck all the way off.
Glennon Doyle:
But isn’t that the whole idea of all these pledges and anthems? I pledge allegiance? I know I’m a bit of a word overthinker, but I’m like, whoa, wait, we’re pledging allegiance to whom? To the people that run this country, who forever have only protected the rights of a very smidgen group of us?
Abby Wambach:
I get it. I really, really get it, and I think that coming into this family has been a really interesting exercise for me because I truly love this country, and I love it for all of its imperfections. I like to think about my patriotism as a call for hope of something new and progressive and different, and so many people think the opposite. Their form of patriotism is the same. I want the same old … Right? But the beauty of this country and the fucking makes you want to pull your hair out is that we have the choice to feel one way or another about how you want things to go, and it’s a popularity game, right? If you get the numbers, you get the power.
But the fact that we get to have this conversation and to try to break down what we believe patriotism is and what we would do under these circumstances if we were in Dr. Ford’s shoes, I like to think about this country as a country that tries to do the right thing. It’s not always true because when you put in all of the factors that the leaders of our country factor into making decisions, it’s not always true that it’s going to be the best thing for me personally or the best thing for you personally, but for the masses, and it’s impossible,
Glennon Doyle:
The masses, but the masses are not who they serve. The masses are not at all who they serve. They protect Kavanaughs.
Abby Wambach:
That is what they tell themselves. They are trying to protect … And here’s the thing, you get enough people in power who don’t believe in progress and they want to keep things the same, you get situations like this one where the people who are in power only want to stay in power, and so they will do anything in order to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Abby Wambach:
Does that mean that I don’t like or love my country? No. It means that it’s complicated and I’m just glad that we, at some point, … because I have to also believe in progress as in the legislative branch in creating different ways at maybe let’s not having lifetime seats for these supreme court members. Like-
Glennon Doyle:
Jesus Christ. Yes. Just let them get elected once and then everybody get out, all of the people.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, that’s complicated too because the reason they’re elected for life is because they’re not supposed to be on the whim of the people. Had the Supreme Court not been elected for life, there is no desegregation because that was so contrary to the will of the people.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, right. Okay. I need to clear up one thing that I said before I get … I also love my country, but I don’t see my country as the very few people who are in power who are trying to keep us in the old ways that have been so painful for so many.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
I do not pledge allegiance to power. I just don’t. I pledge allegiance to the struggle to one day perhaps live up to the ideals we purport that we tell our kids all the time they’re pledging allegiance to. I pledge allegiance to them. To the rest of us, I do not pledge allegiance to the status quo and the way things are, and I feel like we’re telling people, we’re training little children to say, I pledge allegiance so that they don’t think for themselves, so that they don’t do what you just said, sister, like I need to be able to look into my own eyes. That’s what loyalty is. That’s what allegiance. It’s, oh, no, no, no, this idea that these other people are telling me is more important than me looking at myself. And who do I owe everything to? I do. I feel it. I feel an amazingly strong sense of duty. It’s just not to a room like that with a seal and the people that we know how they’re going to take it at the other side. It’s to the rest of us.
Amanda Doyle:
Powerful people have figured out that humans have an instinct to sacrifice for the collective and to believe in something bigger themselves, and it’s a beautiful thing and they have distorted it for their own ends. So I think sacrifice needs to be a reciprocal relationship, and the way we live right now, there is no reciprocity in sacrifice. There is no reciprocity in loyalty. There is no reciprocity in integrity. So we are asking people to apply their highest ideals and sacrifices for causes for which the people who are making the decisions are willing to make zero sacrifices. You have to look closer. If you are appealing to my sense of sacrifice, show me where you’re making yours, show me where you’re willing to put anything on the line. But not one of those people was willing to sacrifice their own reelection in an office to do the right thing, but they were requiring, for the functioning of the system, for Dr. Ford to put everything on the line. And so there is no right thing when only one side of the equation is required to do it. There is just exploitation.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And so that is, if we’re bringing it down from the Blasey Ford level to the average person in your workplace, what I never, ever, ever want anyone to hear from us is do the right thing because the right thing in that situation for you in your office place, if you are supporting a family, if something happens to you, you do not owe. It is just like Blasey Ford’s attorneys told her, we cannot advise you to stand in front of a moving train. And she said, what about the future generations? And they said, we can’t represent future generations. We’re looking out for your best interests. You are not obliged to take care of anyone or sacrifice what you need, what your family needs for anybody else because you are submitting to a system that is not willing to make any sacrifices on your behalf. And so whether that’s the legal system, whether that’s your HR system, whatever it is, you need to be damn well sure that they have as much skin in the game as you do or else you’re just putting it in for no good reason. That is what I feel.
I say, you have to take care of yourself because guess what? The whole reason you’re in this situation is because you’re were minding your God damn business and somebody else chose to exercise violence or wield power against you. Why is the onus to do the right thing always on the survivor? You know how when we talk about the right thing, what the survivor should do in that situation? For future generations, for all the other people that work in that business, we are never asking the question, why aren’t we asking this whole other group of people to do the right thing? Why is the onus not on them? Why is the onus not on all my other coworkers who absolutely know this is happening? But me? I’m the survivor and I’m the one who bears the onus to do the right thing? Fuck you.
Abby Wambach:
It’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
Fuck you is exactly right. That is our official statement, but also, to all the other thems, we love you. I just think that part of the reason we keep going back to the firing squad is because hope is easier to live in than grief, and the grief that we have nowhere to go, that so many of us have nowhere to go and no system that exists to protect us is too much. So we just keep saying, it’s broken, it’s broken. It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fixed.
Amanda Doyle:
It isn’t no other systems. You can share this information with people in your office, people who are trusted, people who might be in that person’s office late at night. We don’t need to submit to the same systems of authority that are victimizing us.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
We can create our own systems of authority and safety, and that is called communities of mutual care.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
We can make those ourselves and submit ourselves and sacrifice ourselves to trusted people who we can trust and they can trust us.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
But why are we going to place our highest human value of sacrifice and community in the very systems that made all of this possible to begin with, the very systems that make a cost higher to report an offense than to commit the offense?
Glennon Doyle:
Yep.
Amanda Doyle:
Those are not worthy of our trust and they’re certainly not worthy of our sacrifice.
Glennon Doyle:
No, and it goes to what we learn in personal relationships. We teach people, if you keep going to someone, if you keep going to someone over and over again and they do not value you, they do not care, stop it. People have to earn our vulnerability.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, but I just want to say that Dr. Ford’s heroicism … because I really feel like the only way that this conversation ever actually changes, even though we have Professor Hill and Dr. Ford’s example, I think that the only way we actually come to some sort of resolution or have some sort of solution to these problems is by there being a few people who step into the fire like they both did.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s an and, both.
Abby Wambach:
I understand that there is no fix here, but I think what they did, the choice that they made feels so impossible, but it’s the most honorable thing in the world that they chose to do that, knowing full well that their lives probably would be completely altered as they knew it. I just think that that is the kind of patriot that I am, and that is why this country is something that I can wholeheartedly say that I love, even though it’s complicated as fuck, the fact that we have the ability to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
And again, I just always am going back to on whom is the onus lying. That is a very convenient structure to say things will only get better when women put themselves in front of the firing squad. Professor Hill said, “I reject the idea that things will change when more women step up and come forward. More things will change when people provide systems and processes so that people can come forward and be heard.” We can’t possibly know what to do with this. We can’t possibly know what to do with the epidemic of sexual harassment and sexual violence. We just need more women to come and sacrifice their lives and their families and their futures. Bullshit. You know exactly what needs to be done. That’s an easy way to put it back on them.
So until we have more women in power who know these things, until we have more allies in power who are like, not only am I not going to just say it’s going to take more women laying their lives down for this, I am not even going to ask a woman to come forward unless prior to that we have the systems and the processes in place to be able to receive her testimony, to be able to protect that testimony, to be able to protect the integrity of the process we’re trying to do. And we will value her life as much as we value the abuser’s life. We will value her wellbeing and her future equally, and not just the perpetrator. If I am sitting in this place of authority, I am only in this place of authority and power precisely because I am willing to sacrifice as much as I am asking anyone else to sacrifice to make this thing run. And if you are not doing that, you should not be in power.
Please pod squatters, if you know any politicians, just send this shit to them. But I just feel like we need vigilante underground systems that we create that somehow over time threaten the safety of men in their places. If they were going to stop this shit because it was the right thing, they would’ve already done it.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, it starts in high school.
Glennon Doyle:
Boys will be boys.
Abby Wambach:
We get all of these stories from our girls. The shit is still happening.
Amanda Doyle:
I think it’s more complicated than that. I think that the same reason that it was so awkward to explain what rape is at the family table yesterday at dinner and the way that I saw my son’s face when he said, why would she tell anyone that, and had this smile on his face, and it was alarming, and that wasn’t a smile of a kid who has been indoctrinated into rape culture. It was the smile of someone where it was, this is so awkward. People don’t talk about this. I don’t know what to do about this. I’m nervous talking about it, and to be able to say, let’s talk all about it. This is everything that we need to talk about. This is the posture that we take towards this. These are things that you will see. This is the way you need to handle it, and there’s nothing funny about this.
When we leave kids to themselves to figure this stuff out because we’re too scared to have the conversation, what we get is a bunch of kids giggling about it because it’s too fucking much for them to process on their own. They need us to be brave enough to talk to them and to explain it to them so they know how to go through the world. If not, we end up with what we’ve always had.
Abby Wambach:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
All right. I’m going to say that’s at least as good of an idea as my vigilante groups, but I still want both on the table.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, I think we can enlist the young boys into our vigilante groups.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Okay. All right, but I just want to keep it open because I just like the idea.
Abby Wambach:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
I love vigilantes, equality vigilantes. Pod Squad, God help you if you’ve made it through that. We love you so much. Maybe we’ll pick a later topic next time, but listen to Dr. Ford’s episode yesterday. It was much more eloquent and poised than whatever rage fest we just had.
Amanda Doyle:
I don’t know. I thought that was eloquent as shit.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Bye, Pod Sqaud, we love you.
Abby Wambach:
See you next time.