Episode 1.6 Taking Up Space & Feeling Safe with Leslie Allin
August 18, 2017
Hannah (Host): [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans] Hi, I'm Hannah McGregor and this is Secret Feminist Agenda. Hey babes, welcome back. I missed you. We've got what honestly feels like a real timely episode this week as I sit down with a dear friend to talk about punching people. That might not be how she would want what she does represented, but still I'm feeling in a really violent mood right now, but before we get into that, let me tell you what my secret feminist agenda is this week. [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans]
Hannah (Host): Note: A content warning for this week's episode. We're going to be talking about violence in a few different ways, racial violence as well as gender and sexual violence. If you are not in the place for these conversations right now, maybe give this one a miss. I know a lot of us are reeling right now at the events of the past weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, the openly white supremacist march, followed by the assault and murder of anti-racist protestors. As a white person living within white supremacy, I want to chat for a minute with my white listeners. All you beautiful Black, Indigenous, and person of color listeners, I empower you to skip this if you so choose. Of course, this is also a conversation that you're always welcome to join.
Okay. Let's talk about one of the super-duper important things you can do as a white person invested in working against white supremacist violence and that is educate yourself. If we want to actually dismantle whiteness as a violent system, we need to understand something about how it works. My sense of how a lot of anti-racist white people or white people who aspire to be anti-racist allies or accomplices understand whiteness is primarily in terms of how it functions today. A lot of us have done that unpacking the invisible backpack reading, um, or maybe just are familiar with the idea that living as a white person in a white supremacist world and a white dominated world means that you are born into a set of systemic privileges that are unearned in the sense that you have done nothing that makes you better or more important than people of color who don't experience those privileges. And privilege is an important piece of understanding how white supremacy works, but I think that we run up against a kind of wall in our conversations when we don't historicize whiteness, and where I see that happening for a lot of white people who are wanting to get involved in anti-racism is that in so far as you continued to understand whiteness as your identity, it becomes really hard to think about what you can actually do to abolish whiteness. That is, how do I abolish this thing that I am? Now that's always going to be a really messy and sticky situation to be in. It's not identical to, but I think it's comparable to, looking at men who are trying to be feminists, that when you are structurally positioned in a position of violence, it's really difficult to figure out what you can do without continuing to perpetuate violence. That desire to do anti-racist activism as a white person without perpetuating violence, I understand where it comes from. Of course, I share it, but it also comes from a place of wanting to be able to be the good guy. And this is part of the history that I think we need to understand, that is, what has the historical role of white women been in promoting white supremacy?
When we look at events like the Charlottesville rallies, we see angry white men and a lot of white women see that and experience fear. I am afraid of large groups of shouting men. I'm afraid because I know what happens to women when large groups of men get together and are angry about something. That fear can lead me to distance myself from the thing that I'm seeing. It can lead me to say, "That's not me," but I have to understand as a white woman that white women have always been deeply implicated in white supremacist violence. That includes, in many cases, the same kinds of overt and horrific violence that white men have also perpetrated. There's ample reading to be done, for example, about the involvement of white women in the abuse of enslaved people, for example, but the figure of the white woman as innocent and vulnerable has also been at the heart of white supremacy. And so when you position yourself as well-intentioned and distanced from violence and not responsible to those terrible things that are happening, you're actually participating in exactly the same systems that have been constructed by whiteness to perpetuate white supremacy. Look, for example, at the way that rhetoric of anti-Blackness has fixated on the vulnerability of white women at the hands of Black men. The sense that women have of our own heightened vulnerability in the world can't be detached from race. That's absolutely impossible. The fact that white women are much more likely to be seen as victims of sexual assault and violence is no coincidence. Our vulnerability to that violence is held up as more significant than the vulnerability of women, non-binary people and trans people of color, and that's for exactly the same reason that our lives are held up as being more valuable because that's how white supremacy works. So that was actually not exactly what I wanted to talk about. [laughter] That's just the, that's the beginning of it: Get rid of this idea that if you want to get involved in this activism, you have to remain un-implicated in this violence or that you need to maintain a sort of position of ethical purity, because not only is that going to be impossible, but it's actually just continuing to trade on the same image of yourself as a good person that is part of that white privilege, but back to that, that question of how it is that you be white and be anti-white at the same time? And that is, that I think if you want to get meaningfully involved in anti-racism, you need to understand something about the history of whiteness. You need to understand that race is a pseudoscientific category. It was invented in the late 18th century in Europe as a means of controlling a global population as imperialism was on the rise. That is, as European nations were gradually colonizing the world, they were also inventing new systems of organizing the world and organizing the populations of the world that would allow for both the sort of easy management of large populations, as well as for a sort of philosophical justification for why white people deserve to run everything. A lot of the Enlightenment philosophers who we hold up as these great rational thinkers, and I'm looking at you Kant, were also avowed white supremacists. The whole premise of humanism and rationality and Enlightenment thinking is built on a platform of white supremacy. That's a conversation for another day [laughter], but whiteness is not a natural category and it's not an identity so much as it is an explicit form of power.
Whiteness always has borders and those borders are used to police who counts and who doesn't. Those borders have been historically porous so that people can be kept out or allowed in. That is you can control populations by offering them sort of contingent access to whiteness; "If you do this, this, and this, then you get to count as white." We see that in the history of immigration in North America, in which some people had only sort of tentative access to whiteness. If you want to know the number one way, historically, that populations gained access to whiteness, it was through anti-Blackness, because whiteness as a category is fundamentally linked to anti-Blackness. This is why we can't talk about whiteness as an identity that one ought to feel proud of because whiteness was invented to kill Black people. That's why we can't talk about white pride. It's why we can't talk about white genocide because there is no whiteness outside of violence. Whiteness is only violence.
The thing to understand, the thing that we need to get better at holding in our minds at the same time is to at once say, "Yes, I am white because this is the world that I live in and this is the identity that I'm being read as and that I'm benefiting from every day" and at the same time, I'm not gonna hold my whiteness dear to me. I'm not going to value it as something that is an important part of my identity and if I want to do that, that involves 1. Finding other ways to identify myself, ways that feed me, ways that help me build communities that are founded in love and compassion and a vision of a better world, not founded in violence and hatred, but 2. It's also going to mean that, if I do not want to hold whiteness close to me, I have to push whiteness away from me and that means being a race traitor because in the context of white supremacy, there is no neutral stance on whiteness. If you aren't pushing back against white supremacy then you are sitting comfortably within it. Those are the only choices that we have and sitting comfortably within it means that tiki torches or not, you're participating in the same culture that those marching in Virginia were. That sucks. Those are, yeah, those are harsh words. It sucks. White supremacy fucking sucks.
Okay, so you want to educate yourself. Read, read about the history of whiteness, read about what anti-racist activism looks like. Read about how to be an ally or an accomplice. Educate yourself as frequently and as thoroughly as you can, and then take that education and use it to have conversations with people. Use it to talk to your classmates, your teachers, your students, your parents, your siblings, your children. This is how culture is changed, is that we keep having these conversations. We make it no longer acceptable for white people to sit comfortably within white supremacy and that's our job. That's white people's job to do so. I've linked through on the reading list a whole bunch of starting points. I'm going to particularly recommend the work of Ijeoma Oluo, her really excellent articles on The Establishment, as well as her forthcoming book called, So You Want to Talk about Race? Everyone go pre-order that right now. I'm going to recommend the work of Carol Anderson. I've linked to an op-ed of hers from 2014, but you should also absolutely go get her book White Rage. I'm going to recommend the work of Chelsea Vowel. Go buy her book Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada. I'm going to recommend that you follow all of these people on Twitter and that you learn to listen and to learn whenever those opportunities are available to you. There are so many resources out there you can use to educate yourself rather than asking for or demanding more education and more help from people of color. I really want to empower you to do that, to educate yourself and then use that education to have conversations with other white people. This needs to be our task. [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans]
Hannah (Host): Now let's meet Leslie. Leslie Allin is a scholar and athlete and a teacher. She holds a PhD in literature. We actually did our PhDs together, hair flip, and lectures on representations of empire, race and gender. She also teaches Wen-Do, a women's self defense technique that combines practice and theory, dismantling stereotypes surrounding violence against women, knowledge about self defense and naming women's experience. We got on Skype to catch up and talk about the feminist praxis of self defense. [Music: “Fuck You” by The Bug featuring Warrior Queen]
Hannah (Host): So far I haven't come into talking to people with, like, a specific topic that I wanted to talk about, but I do have a specific topic I want to talk to you about.
Leslie (Guest): Nice. I love specificity. Great.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. Yeah. And that is that I want to talk about women's martial arts and self defense with you.
Leslie (Guest): Right on. [laughter]
Hannah (Host): So, can you start off, why don't you tell people how you got into women's self defense and then maybe you can tell them a bit about what Wen-Do is.
Leslie (Guest): Okay, that sounds great. Um, so I got into women's self defense because I took a class because I was very curious. I had a martial arts background, but like self defense sounds awesome because it is a very different focus. Martial arts is, like, there's, you know, sparring and there's form and there's the tradition, but in Wen-Do it's, you know, it's very practical and it's very much built–like at least Wen-Do, specifically women's self defense, is built around women's bodies, how they work today without any adherence to "You have to do this thing exactly like this," right? We modify things to our needs. So I was super curious in a course like this and I took it and I was like, "This is the most amazing thing" because it was so revolutionary because I realized I didn't have to follow the same rules of the society that disadvantaged me because of my gender. Right? So, um, I took the class, I took continuing training with Wen-Do, I became an instructor and that said, I just been teaching as much as I possibly can right now.
Hannah (Host): So tell me more about this "not following rules" piece of it, because that sounds very exciting to me. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): [laughter] So, martial arts are, they're kind of sport in a sense, right? At least the way that they're practiced often times in North America. So, you know, you're kicking or striking and within certain areas on the body and everybody's allowed to follow the same sort of rules in a match. Right? But when we were talking about women being attacked, right, it's, you know, it's a different framework because it's not a sport at this point, if there's other stuff at stake, right? So I would use different skills than I wouldn't necessarily use in sort of a martial arts context.
Hannah (Host): You can, you can fight dirty.
Leslie (Guest): Yeah. If you want to call it that. I mean, it's, you know–
Hannah (Host): I do, I do want to call it that. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): [laughter] In martial arts I would not bite my opponent.
Hannah (Host): [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): But if someone is attacking me, watch out. I'm probably gonna bite your face, right? So yeah, I mean that's just one example of, you know, something that we might do, right?
Hannah (Host): Yeah.
Leslie (Guest): So in that sense it was very liberating because it's like, "Oh, right, of course, like I don't, again, I don't have to be constrained by this larger set of rules," you know? Yeah. I mean within that, right? You know, we, in our courses, we do talk about, you know, what the law says about defending ourselves in Canada and again, that's not given us as rules, it's given as information and we invite women to decide for themselves what works best for them in any given situation. Right? But when we can have more information, we're able to make more informed decisions about that.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. So, can you share any of that? Like, what the, what the laws are in self defense in Canada are?
Leslie (Guest): Yeah, I mean, the law says you have the right to defend yourself using the least amount of force necessary to get yourself to safety, based on the reasonable belief of what the attacker's going to try to do, right? So, you know, in a life-threatening situation, you know, we should be able to use what we call hard Wen-Do. So, that's something that could cause permanent damage to the attacker, including death, right? When our own lives are threatened.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. So, is part of what you learn, to learn how to assess threat level in certain situations?
Leslie (Guest): You know, [exhale] what I say to all of my students is trust your guts because every woman in any situation is going to know better than anybody else what's at stake there. And I think often times we're socialized to not listen to ourselves, right? I think many of us have been in a situation where we say, "Uh, I'm not sure this person is okay," but there were these narratives around, "Oh, you're being too sensitive or you're being paranoid." Right? And are trained to not listen to those voices. We're not, you know, we're not supposed to listen to that. So when we validate those voices and we're aware of a) we feel, b) some of the larger context around our situation, then we have more options. And I think for any woman, you know, yeah, like I said, she knows best how she feels, right? And I think how our bodies feel are a pretty good indication of how a situation is looking.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. I think sometimes about the ways in which we're sort of trained from a very young age to disregard our bad instincts, because the forms of violence and unsafety we experience are usually within families and households. So like, inappropriate behavior from relatives, friends of the family, school teachers, things that we're taught from an early stage that, like, you have to ignore that you have to–like, that's not actually a problem, you know, and that happens in sort of sometimes insidious and sometimes really overt ways in a lot of young people's lives. So that by the time you're an adult, that part of you that knows this isn't okay, I'm allowed to fight back, can be pretty off. Right? And an opportunity to rewire that and really tell yourself that you're actually pretty good at perceiving threats.
Leslie (Guest): Exactly.
Hannah (Host): Like, that just by itself seems like a really important kind of training.
Leslie (Guest): Yeah. It's a huge piece and I think, you know, what you just said is really well said, right? Like often times it is somebody we know. In fact, 80% of the time, attacks come from somebody who we know, right? And you know that narrative of it's a stranger in the bushes, right? And yes, that does happen, but I think when we ignore those voices that say, "This person that you know, that you're really close to you is not okay right now," that doesn't serve us. Right? And that mental shift of saying, "Well, hey, this is my boundary and what this person's doing is not okay," is a huge piece.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. So what in Wen-Do–how much of it is sort of training in particular physical moves and how much of it is this sort of larger framework of, like, you know, understanding the laws around self defense, learning how to perceive risk levels, learning, you know, those kinds of statistics you just gave about assault? Like, how much of it is that kind of context stuff?
Leslie (Guest): It's an intersection of both. And I think one of the reasons that the Wen-Do program is so powerful is it takes the physical techniques and it intersects with, hey, here are these larger systems of oppression that are working against women and here are some of the interests that they serve. And when we recognize that, as women, yes, we're all different, but we also share, many of us share, the experience of being targeted in specific ways because, you know, because of the way that we present, or because of the way that society sees us, and we recognize that, okay, it's okay to be big and powerful and take up space. Right? And intersecting the techniques with that realization is one of the things that just, [ah] it's that sort of liberating shift, right? When women recognize "I am powerful," "I can be loud if I choose to" right? One of the things that women struggle the most with is learning to yell in class, which is very telling, right? And I think it's, you know, that that is a product of our socialization and it's okay if, you know, if you want a sound, you know, soft and traditionally feminine in the day to day, but it is a really good tool to have to sound big and loud and fierce. So, and I think when women get that shift of "It's okay to be big and strong and maybe too much," right? That's a really important shift.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. Because there is, I mean there's something very overt in the act of self defense that is about, like, insisting on your right to space, right?
Leslie (Guest): Sure. Oh sure.
Hannah (Host): Like, taking back the space that you're allowed to have, like in a very sort of survival level. Like, actually you're not allowed to touch me. You're not allowed to do this thing.
Leslie (Guest): Sure.
Hannah (Host): And I don't think of myself at all as somebody who struggles to take up space. Like I am a loud and confident and outspoken woman.
Leslie (Guest): And I love that about you.
Hannah (Host): Right back at you. I think that's why we're friends. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): [laughter]
Hannah (Host): But when a strange man grabs me on the street at 2:00 AM, I have to remind myself that I am allowed to, like, shove him really hard and yell at him. Right? Like that, that's not my immediate instinct.
Leslie (Guest): Yeah. And I think you're absolutely not alone in that because most of the time, as women, we're told, maybe not overtly but sometimes overtly and sometimes as more insidious ways, you're not entitled to this space and you're not entitled to this–sometimes it's this physical space, sometimes it's, you know, somebody who's like close-talking us, right? Or just–
Hannah (Host): Ugh.
Leslie (Guest): –physically being too close with or like just staring, right?
Hannah (Host): Yeah.
Leslie (Guest): And all of those, all of those levels of aggression say "You are not entitled to your privacy, your own space." Right? And I think that when we can name that experience for what it is, somebody transgressing boundaries, then that is sort of the first step in recognizing that we are entitled to feel safe, right? And sometimes when somebody is transgressing those boundaries, sometimes it's to say "I'm in control here. I'm on the dominant one in the situation." And sometimes it is intended as a threat, right? So I think, I think, um, when we can name that, then that opens up more options for us, for how we're going to, how we're going to take up space in different ways.
Hannah (Host): So, um, let's take a step back. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of Wen-Do specifically as a practice?
Leslie (Guest): Yeah. Yeah. So Wen-Do as a program was developed in response to the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and in the States, and she was, you know, she was a server and she was walking home one night and she was attacked by a man with a knife and she screamed and she screamed for help. And she, she actually fought him off numerous times, but he kept coming back and there were, you know, a number of witnesses that, you know, the way it was reported at the time anyway, didn't call the police and didn't intervene, so she was killed and a family in Toronto called the Pages said, you know, "There must be a way for women to defend themselves that works for women's bodies," right? Where we may be facing a larger, stronger attacker. Um, yeah. So, they developed this system. So, everything we do is, you know, it's not strength against strength and as I was saying earlier, it's designed to be modified for our own bodies, how they're working today. So, um, yeah, it's 45 years old this year. It's an organization that is run by women for women and all of our classes are really cultivate a space where the environment is open, it's welcoming and it respects women's differences and the different choices that everybody has made.
Hannah (Host): Tell me more about this phrase you've used a couple of times now, "Is for your body the way it is today"?
Leslie (Guest): Yeah, sure. So like, everybody's got different bodies, right? Yeah. So some of us have tweak-y shoulders, right? Some of us can't use our legs. Right? So we give lots of modifications so that a technique can be used by a woman in her own body. Right?
Hannah (Host): Gotcha. So it can be inclusive of women living with disabilities, women of widely varied ages and fitness levels. That's awesome.
Leslie (Guest): Absolutely. Absolutely. The oldest woman on record to have completed her full 15 hour course is 93 and she did everything.
Hannah (Host): That just gave me full-body goosebumps. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): Right?
Hannah (Host): I'm like tearing up a little of the image of a 93 year old woman learning how to... [emotive sounds, indicating being emotionally moved]
Leslie (Guest): Yeah. And it is right? It's like, it's such a stereotype that, you know, senior women aren't capable of defending themselves and they so are, right? And it's not just senior women, it's women of all ages. Right? Saying, you're not strong enough and you're not fast enough and, you know, just even talking about speed, right? We're told by the media that running away is not a good idea because if we try to run away from an attacker, you know, we might get lost, we might run into a dead end or we might run to the arms of the second attacker or like–
New Speaker: I've seen that in so many horror movies.
New Speaker: So many horror movies, or we might just fall over, right? But that doesn't reflect statistical reality, right? In fact, when women run away, they're more likely than not to get away from the attacker and, you know, we don't have to run marathons. We might just have to like, you know, right around the corner to the corner store and, you know. So I think, I think that the other really important piece in the program is hearing success stories about what women have done to get away, right? To successfully defend themselves selves because we aren't, we aren't shared those stories enough in the media.
Hannah (Host): Yeah, that's true. We almost entirely seem to hear the stories of women who don't get away, such that it can often just feel hopeless. But when I think, when I actually sit down to talk about it, every woman I know has a story of getting assaulted in some way, right? And some like, whether it's a very sort of small something that feels like a day to day, like I was touching appropriately by my boss and here's what I did about it, to much more, sort of, overt acts of violence and women do have all of these, these strategies that they've accrued. So, that's a piece you've told me of Wen-Do, of sort of collecting those stories and sharing them as a practice as well.
Leslie (Guest): And sometimes it's about re-framing the experience, right? Because often times when women are assaulted and they respond to it, um, it doesn't always feel good, right? It's like, "Oh, this was really icky." Right? But I think here, when women share their stories in a room full of other women, you know, sometimes it's like, "Well, hey, wait a second, look what you did to protect yourself. Look what you did to get away." And it's like, that's the success, right? That in the face of this, we're so resourceful. We're so smart. We're so creative. Right? And we're so much stronger than then we're told that we are.
Hannah (Host): Yeah. Thinking back to the Jennifer Lopez movie Enough. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): I haven't seen it. I've not seen it.
Hannah (Host): It is about a woman who has been abused by her husband and she tries to leave him and he tracks her down and so she gets, like, super, super strong and beats the shit out of him. Spoiler alerts for a very old movie, but there is something about that narrative which is like the person she was at the beginning wasn't capable of caring for herself. She had to go off and become somebody who could do chin ups before she was able to fight off this abuser. And there's something in that narrative that implies that if you're not strong, you sort of... have it coming? Like, there's a victim blaming in that story of you have to go and get a lot of upper-body strength before you can protect yourself.
Leslie (Guest): Exactly. And the point is here you don't, you don't have to be able to do a pull up to be strong enough.
Hannah (Host): Yeah.
Leslie (Guest): You already have the strength required to break somebody's nose.
Hannah (Host): Thank God, because I'll never be able to do a pull up. [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): [laughter] You already have the stripe required to break a collarbone or kneecaps.
Hannah (Host): That's all I want to hear [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): [laughter] Right? And it's like, that's what we call mechanical failure, right? So when you stop the attacker's body from working in the way it's trying to work to hurt you, right? Then that, that is what's needed for you to then get away. Right? So, and again, if you break somebody's kneecap, you might not even have to sprint around the corner. You can just sort of move yourself your own pace away, right?
Hannah (Host): Yep.
Leslie (Guest): Yeah, exactly. It's a really good example that you gave because there are these narratives that you have to be buff and you have to be visibly strong, right? According to certain standards. And that's... that's a lie.
Hannah (Host): Years ago now, Marcelle and I were doing a live Witch, Please event and we were talking about a scene in the Harry Potter movies where Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange to defend her daughter with the great iconic line, "Not my daughter, you bitch." And Marcelle had the sort of aside where she was like, "Well, we all know that, you know, feminism isn't about violence." And I was like, "Ah, hold right up"
Leslie (Guest): [laughter] Hold the phone.
Hannah (Host): "–your feminism is not my feminism. My feminism has ample space for violence," [laughter] but obviously Wen-Do is not about violence. But can you talk a little bit about why you think of Wen-Do as a sort of feminist practice?
Leslie (Guest): Absolutely. I think, and I think I will just preface it by saying a lot of women who come to Wen-Do come with the idea that, "Oh, I could never be violent." Kind of feel uncomfortable about the idea of like breaking somebody's nose and fair enough, right? And we never want to have to do that.
Hannah (Host): [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): We never want to have to be in the position where it's like, I need to show you that I can break your collarbone and then do it, right? That's not the goal. [laughter]
Hannah (Host): [laughter] You don't come in like, "Let's all seek out opportunities in life to break people's noses." Like, this is worst case scenario.
Leslie (Guest): Exactly. And so like, I think some of us might think of it not as violence but as an entitlement to our own rights. So it's the attackers who were being violent; we are defending ourselves. Right? And so I think that's kind of an important part of the shift as well. We're not, [laughter] you know, we're not like trying to hurt somebody, but we are acknowledging that we are worth fighting for. Right? Yeah, you are. We are worth it. So, I mean, I think that that comes into, oh, you know, most of what we do, we work from a feminist anti-oppression analysis and we recognize that there are different feminisms at work in any classroom. And you know, I think at the base it is acknowledging that, you know, we have the right to feel valued, right? And we have the right to feel good about ourselves, right? You know, and that's in terms of like our day-to-day lives, our relationships, in ourselves. We deserve to be living with pride, right? As women. And I think acknowledging our own... our own boundaries and our own rights is a big part of that. And you know, I think there's, you know, um, I'm sure you've encountered this as well, there is a narrative existing in our society that feminism is now redundant
Hannah (Host): [laughter]
Leslie (Guest): Which is hilarious, I know, but there is that narrative and it's like, until women have equal access to safety and to feeling safe, we've got a lot of work to do. [Music: “Fuck You” by The Bug featuring Warrior Queen]
Hannah (Host): If you'd like to learn more about Wen-Do, you can go to WenDo.ca. That's W E N D O dot ca. If you're interested in organizing a Wen-Do course for you and your pals, you can contact Leslie at leslie@wendo.ca. That's L E S L I E @wendo.ca. As usual, you can find all the episodes and the weekly reading list on secretfeministagenda.com. You can follow me on Twitter @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #secretfeministagenda, and don't forget to subscribe and rate and review on whatever platform you use. It's the best way to pass this agenda on. The podcast theme song is "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans off their album, Chub Rub. You can download the entire album on freemusicarchive.org, or follow them on Facebook. Leslie's theme song is “Fuck You” by The Bug featuring Warrior Queen. That's it for this week, folks. This has been Secret Feminist Agenda. Pass it on. [Music: "Mesh Shirt" by Mom Jeans]