Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean The Myth of Aspasia, Woman, Politician, Philosopher, Wh*re About this episode Aspasia was an intelligent, independent and influential woman at the heart of Classical Athenian politics. She was also a sex worker. This is the instagram reel this episode is 'responding' to https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCH0bmUBsrG/?igsh=ZDAzZDFhcno3dDY4. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby, and learn more about the Memory Collective collectivemem.com.
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Sources: Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and her Biographical Tradition by Madeleine Mary Henry; "Wise and Devoted or Shrewd and Shameless? The True Face of Aspasia of Miletus" by Agata Ciempiel from Scripta Classica.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.
Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand).
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So, check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.
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1:39 Liv Albert? Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! And I am your host, Liv, here with another... I don't even know what to... A woman's history episode. And by that, I really mean, I'm going to tear apart some stuff that a man said about a woman. Let's get into it. There is an Instagram video that listeners have sent me a handful of times. It's most popular from this page called "The Female Quotient", but it's shared far beyond there by now. It's a guy talking, a professor giving a lecture. He's a white man, so by nature of sounding confident,
2:24 Liv Albert? he's giving us the illusion that he knows what he's talking about. He's speaking with certainty, saying things he knows will sound shocking, subversive. And so clearly, he is speaking truth to power. He tells his audience that when philosophy as a discipline reached Athens, they fell in love with it. Then he moves on to the juicy part. He says that "a woman named Aspasia taught Socrates." Then he says, "That got left out of your stories, didn't it?" Then he says it again, "A woman named Aspasia taught Socrates."
3:06 Liv Albert? But he goes on, he explains why we're not taught that a woman named Aspasia taught philosophy to one of the most famous philosophers in human history. He says that it's because, quote, "Once we became Christian, we didn't like the idea that women were teachers and leaders. And so there was a systematic attempt to delete these women from the history books." Then he says that when you look this up, you'll find the idea that Aspasia maybe wasn't even real. But, he goes on, "Why would Socrates tell us that a mythical person taught him philosophy? What's the point in making up the story?"
3:50 Liv Albert? The original video has nearly 8 million views, but it's been reshared as this "history of Aspasia" in countless other posts, a lot of which seem to be just that man again or another man who's learned this. And so this "history of Aspasia", as told by a man, has reached millions of people who otherwise never would have heard of her. The problem is... It's not really true. Instead, it seems to me an example of a man, a man trying to capitalize on women's history.
4:30 Liv Albert? A man presenting an exaggerated, decontextualized story of a very real woman as historical fact disappeared by the Christian patriarchy. He's speaking with certainty, with confidence, and so we believe him. And it's easy enough to believe that the story of Aspasia would have been ignored, even removed, by those patriarchal powers. The problem is, Aspasia was a real woman. She lived an incredibly unique and interesting life in ancient Athens. Her story was bastardized by the patriarchy, and she was nearly lost from the histories entirely.
5:12 Liv Albert? It just wasn't for the reasons this guy names and the things he said about Socrates. Those claims also do a disservice not only to Aspasia, but to Socrates, and generally just understanding Greek history. One of the most important aspects of Aspasia's life was her career. She wasn't a teacher, she was a sex worker. But you won't hear the man in the clip say that, because it wouldn't go along with his goals of presenting this flawless, brilliant woman erased by history. Mind you, this is a flawless, brilliant woman, as seen through the eyes of a man. Because Aspasia wasn't flawless, she wasn't lauded as some kind of philosophical icon
5:56 Liv Albert? of the ancient world. She was not lauded in ancient Greece as a teacher of Socrates. Or at least, she wasn't in the way that he means. Aspasia was a sex worker. She was a woman who fought and achieved independence through her own hard work, in a field that would have seen her marginalized by society at large. She was a woman who partnered with one of the most famous men in Western history, despite being a sex worker, and without having to give up her independence. She was a woman who did not fit the ideal of a perfect Athenian woman, the type of
6:37 Liv Albert? woman that a man would lecture to a room of other men about. And that is what makes her story, her actual story, important.
6:49 Liv Albert? Aspasia was a smart, independent, cunning, influential, and powerful whore. And I say that with all of the love in the world.
7:16 Liv Albert? Whose stories are worth preserving? The Myth of Aspasia: Woman, Politician, Philosopher, Whore.
7:38 Liv Albert? The argument for gender equality is not helped by stories from history that present a kind of subversive, anti-patriarchal idea, but which still manipulate and decontextualize the very real history of a woman in the ancient world in order to support a man's idea of what a powerful and intelligent woman should look like. Aspasia's legacy isn't helped when we make these big, outlandish, and unsupported claims about her life without acknowledging the context from where those claims come from. The best way of fighting against the patriarchal order, the best way of arguing for gender
8:20 Liv Albert? equality through historical stories is to present the details, the context, the background that defines those stories. Aspasia, and women in the ancient world more broadly, weren't erased by the Christian patriarchy, they were shuttered and hidden away by the patriarchy of their very own contemporary society.
8:46 Liv Albert? This is worst in Athens. This entire podcast is dedicated to how it's worst in Athens. Aspasia wasn't written out of Athenian history by Christians. Aspasia was written out of Athenian history by the Athenian men who lived alongside her, who witnessed her impact and chose not to record it as such if they recorded it at all. That's not to say they didn't say some nice things about her, but it's not what this white guy wants us to believe. So let's fucking talk about it. Now, first up, apologies in advance, like I might pronounce her name in two different ways throughout this episode. The generally accepted English pronunciation of Aspasia is, well, Aspasia, but as I understand it, the modern Greek pronunciation is more like Aspasia.
9:31 Liv Albert? And yes, I did learn that from Assassin's Creed Odyssey, but every pronunciation that I've learned from that game has served me very well in actual Greece, so I trust them. Regardless, I'll probably end up saying it both ways, and now you know why.
9:43 Liv Albert? Today's episode is only a brief, brief, brief history of this woman and her legacy. I would love to do more. I would love to find a guest to speak to her history and her legacy, but for now, I have seen this goddamn Instagram reel far too many times to let another Women's History Month slide without addressing it.
10:02 Liv Albert? Videos like this, and I have linked to it in the episode's description, are particularly troubling because they present these ideas as being subversive and explicitly as being anti-patriarchal. And so, we angry feminists are more likely to believe this man telling us a story about a woman. It makes it harder to deny the facts that he's gotten wrong. It makes it seem like we're being unkind to Aspasia or women broadly by lessening the impact that this man has given her with his exaggerated ideas. But he's wrong. He's wrong in loads of ways. And even though he may make Aspasia seem more interesting to our modern sensibilities,
10:41 Liv Albert? more impactful to the historical record than she actually is in that record, not in reality, he's also just whitewashing her story to make her more palatable, not only to modern audiences generally, but specifically men.
10:56 Liv Albert? The video is shared by a feminist page, it's shared by feminists all over the place, and certainly even in my own listenership and family members, actually, if I remember correctly. But it's a man spouting bullshit about a woman and erasing the details of her story that are evidence-based, but which, again, make her less palatable to modern men learning philosophy. Because that's what this lecture appears to be taken from, or rather, what this clip appears to be taken from, is a lecture about philosophy. And maybe I'm making a broad generalization, but I think it is pretty safe to say that if a man is lecturing about philosophy, that audience is at least half-men, and that might be being kind.
11:35 Liv Albert? But remember, the important thing about Aspasia is, she was a whore. And I'm using that word so intentionally, because it makes the difference here. Her sex worker pass, which is absolutely vital to her importance, is erased when we speak about her, like this man does. And it's on purpose. Men learning the wonders of ancient Greek philosophy do not want to hear that one of the most influential women in Athenian politics and philosophy during the height of Athenian democracy was a whore.
12:08 Liv Albert? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's look at what we do and don't know about Aspasia. And again, very surface level, I want to get deeper really soon, but here we are for now. And then we'll get into why everything he said about her in Socrates is a mixture of bullshit and complete removal of context.
12:35 Liv Albert? Aspasia was from Myletis, an eastern Greek city in what is now Turkey. She lived in the 5th century BCE. One of my sources, this article by Agata Kiempiel, I'm saying that absolutely horribly, I believe she's Polish. She says it beautifully, though, when speaking about whether or not there was anything new to write about Aspasia at the time she was writing this article. A woman who, Aspasia, this woman who exists in sources, not as someone to be written about, but as someone who just happened to be around for the foundations of Athenian democracy and its most important leader, Pericles.
13:10 Liv Albert? I'm gonna say this author's first name, not for disrespectful reasons, but actually for respectful reasons, in that I believe I can pronounce it better than I can pronounce the last name, but everything is mentioned in the episode's description. But Agatha says, quote, "She is worthy of remembrance, she who was the most important and most controversial woman of the second half of the fifth century before Christ, a woman of personality quite unusual."
13:39 Liv Albert? So first and foremost, like I said, we do not have sources explicitly meant to be about Aspasia. There are no biographies, no texts dedicated to her story or her accomplishments. She was a woman, and women were not meant to have things written about them. It wasn't the Christians who came in and erased them later. This was happening in Athens, like newsflash for anyone who's been listening to me forever, but like Athens didn't like women. They were meant to be tucked away in their women's rooms, hidden from the outside world. So even though Aspasia achieved a life that went far, far beyond those limitations, the men certainly weren't particularly interested in recognizing that fact, or when they had to, they were also going to insult her along the way.
14:22 Liv Albert? Now, as my other source, a book about her that is brilliantly titled Prisoner of History, states very clearly, quote, "Our ignorance of Aspasia's life course is emblematic of our ignorance of the lives of all women in fifth century Hellas." Now, this author, Madeleine Mary Henry, goes on to note that this only shocks people because Aspasia's reputation has made her of interest, but really, quote, "To ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity."
14:56 Liv Albert? You nerds won't be surprised to hear things like this, but it's really important in our understanding of what we do and don't know about Aspasia and why. We know about her because she was in the orbit of powerful, important men whose stories have been painstakingly preserved. It's only for this reason that we know she existed, and thank fuck for that, but still, it is the vital context needed to understand not only her story, but why all the things that man in the viral reel said are pretty egregiously wrong, or at least really egregiously lacking in context.
15:30 Liv Albert? Aspasia was a woman from Miletus who ended up in 5th century Athens as the romantic partner of Pericles, the so-called father of democracy. Pericles had been married before, but he divorced his first wife and ended up spending the rest of his life with Aspasia. They weren't officially married, but this doesn't seem to be because they weren't devoted to each other and maybe even like really loved each other, only that Aspasia was not only a foreigner, a medic, but also a hetera, a sex worker. And so she couldn't legally marry an Athenian citizen like Pericles. And most of what we, and this is in air quotes, know about Aspasia is from Plutarch's life of Pericles.
16:12 Liv Albert? Now, he was writing hundreds of years later in Rome with the explicit intention of comparing Greek leaders with Roman. You remember, he also wrote an entire biography of Theseus, even when there is absolutely no evidence that he ever existed. So we take what Plutarch says with a grain of salt. And now as Henry states in this book, Plutarch, quote, "reports that she modeled herself on Thargalia, the Ionian courtesan who attempted to capture the affections of the most powerful men of the day and to influence them politically, but there is no conclusive contemporary evidence." In other words, Plutarch wrote a biography of a man who'd been dead for 500 or so years.
16:53 Liv Albert? He saw that a former sex worker was one of that man's most influential advisors and companions, and so felt comfortable in assuming that this was something that she schemed for. And so here we are with one of the first examples of her story being bastardized by history, her importance written off as something negative. But that's not to say that's how all the men saw her, only that it directly impacted her relationship with Pericles and certainly how both ancient and modern historians interpret her importance. We wouldn't know a goddamn thing about her if it wasn't for Pericles.
17:29 Liv Albert? To say nothing of her being Socrates's quote unquote "teacher." Now, back to the article, as Agatha says, Plato wrote about her as quote "a woman of exceptional rhetoric talent." She's mentioned in other philosophical works of the time and later, but specifically from Greece, and is more than once lauded for being talented in those types of skills that were otherwise reserved for men. This is super cool. There are men who acknowledge that she was really intelligent and that she was really good at rhetoric, which was basically the most important thing like an intellectual male could be good at. So this is incredibly impactful that we know this. But meanwhile, at the exact same time, she was regularly being featured in comedies, which were,
18:15 Liv Albert? if you can believe it, a bit less complimentary.
18:19 Liv Albert? Quoting the same article, Plutarch says that comedies called Aspasia the new "umfoli" and "dianera," as well as "hera," "dog-eyed whore," and "bastard's mother." Aristophanes in the Achaemenians mentions Aspasia's whores. So the men of her time and after did not know what the fuck to make of a woman who was by trade a sex worker, but who was in practice intellectual, independent, and most importantly, public. Because Aspasia was a hetera and a medic, a foreigner, and partnered domestically with Pericles, she, unlike all of her Athenian women contemporaries, was allowed to participate in society.
19:04 Liv Albert? She was allowed to attend symposia and talk to philosophers. She was, quite simply and yet so importantly, allowed to live a life among the men of the city.
19:22 Liv Albert? And so returning to those comparisons in comedy, like, let's remember what it means to call Aspasia the new Amphale or Dionera. Now here, Heracles is playing the role of Heracles, hero of democracy and all that. And so referring to Aspasia as either of these women is inherently hinting at the relationships they had with that most famous of Greek heroes. Because again, everything we know about Aspasia revolves around her relationships with men. Dionera, remember, was Heracles's last wife, the one who inadvertently kills him out of jealousy. And Amphale, well, she was the eastern queen who is most famous for emasculating that same hero.
20:03 Liv Albert? Amphale wore Heracles's lion skin while he wore her women's clothes. Amphale, while awesome to us now, represented one of the biggest male fears of the ancient Greek world. She represented the feminization of the most masculine hero. So you get the idea.
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23:09 Liv Albert? Now, like I said earlier, I absolutely am going to revisit Espasia because I'm only scratching the surface of these sources, let alone the woman herself. But today I mostly want to look at why it is damaging to speak about her in the way the man in this video does, even though it seems incredibly empowering and like a great fun fact ruined by the patriarchy. Those things exist. This is not, I mean, it is one of them, but not in the way he's saying. It's one of these instances, like I said, where it really feels empowering. It feels like a man standing up for women, for feminism. It feels like a man being an ally and spreading the word of this great woman lost to time.
23:50 Liv Albert? But the great woman lost to time, or at least the version that he tells, is equally this male invention. Aspasia, as we know her, is almost entirely a male invention. And that's not to say she didn't exist, but everything we know about her was based in the men around her. She was real, absolutely. But because every single thing we know, I'm repeating myself, but because every single thing we know or don't know about her is coming from men writing about her relationship with Pericles, and we'll get to it, but Socrates, it means that every single thing we know about her is colored not only by that relationship, but by countless other implications that come along with that.
24:36 Liv Albert? Like everything I've gone over so far. The way she was satirized in contemporary comedies for being this kind of manipulator of Pericles. The way she was referred to as this conniving woman who partnered with him out of some devious desire to control the father of democracy and thus all the men of Athens who were permitted into that democracy.
25:00 Liv Albert? Let's remind ourselves just briefly, what exactly is claimed in this viral video? This man, and I'm deliberately not naming him, but you can see his name quite clearly in the video that I have linked, tells his audience that when philosophy as a discipline reaches Athens, the Athenians fall in love with it. And that it was a woman named Aspasia who taught Socrates. "Back all left out of your stories, didn't it?" he says, as though he's gotcha. Then, remember, he says it again. He really wants to hammer this in. "A woman named Aspasia taught Socrates." But he goes on, he says that the reason we're not taught that this woman named Aspasia taught philosophy to one of the most famous philosophers in human history is because, quote, "Once we became Christian, we didn't like the idea that women were teachers and leaders.
25:44 Liv Albert? And so there was a systemic attempt to delete these women from the history books."
25:50 Liv Albert? Then he says that when you look this up, you will find the idea that Aspasia maybe wasn't even real. But he goes on to say, "Why would Socrates tell us that a mythical person taught him philosophy? Like, what is the point in making up that story?"
26:03 Liv Albert? The more I listen to it and retell it to you, the more nefarious it feels, so let's break this shit apart. The simplest, most important evidence that I have to tear this argument into shreds is, there's no evidence for what he's saying! Socrates did not tell us that his teacher was a woman, and not because of misogyny, or even the patriarchal structure of Athens that absolutely and very importantly existed long, long, long before Christianity, thank you very much, but for the simple fact that Socrates didn't tell us anything, guys.
26:32 Liv Albert? Honestly, it's hard to argue with this video because it's just so silly on its face to say that Socrates said anything, because he didn't. Not a single word of Socrates survives for us today.
26:43 Liv Albert? Socrates tells us, you know, he didn't say rights, and that's because nothing, nothing written by Socrates exists today. Whoops.
26:51 Liv Albert? Now, has an ancient person said that Aspasia was Socrates's teacher? Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't Socrates. And the source that survives is from a comfortable 600-plus years after Aspasia lived. Could she have been Socrates's teacher? I mean, it depends on how we're defining teacher. Could she have taught Socrates? Absolutely! But to say it with complete certainty, as this kind of gotcha to the patriarchy, is to completely ignore the context of ancient Greek history and the way that sources survive, and why.
27:24 Liv Albert? Plato wrote thousands, thousands of things about Socrates. He was fucking obsessed! But do we believe everything Plato wrote about Socrates? No, because Socrates was dead for most of Plato's life, and the purpose of philosophy was to present ideas through experiments, and the traditional means of doing that was by connecting these ideas and experiments to important people of the time and earlier. Plato also wrote that Socrates was fucking Alcibiades pretty regularly, but would the men who talk about philosophy like this guy believe that without question?
27:56 Liv Albert? I'm willing to bet nah. And it doesn't lessen Aspasia's importance to point this out. To believe that she without question was this teacher of Socrates is to ignore the society of classical Athens. It is to rewrite their political and societal structure into something that it wasn't. What is unkind to Aspasia and her legacy and the legacy of all the women who ever lived in classical Athens is to suggest that she would have been permitted to teach a man like Socrates. Would that have been cool? How, like, obviously, it would have been cool. It would have been really great if we, that happened and we know it. But to present this as fact is to ignore the fact that women were not seen as citizens,
28:41 Liv Albert? that they were not easily able to be educated, that they, unless the woman was a medic or a hetero like Aspasia, were not even permitted to be out in the public.
28:55 Liv Albert? What Aspasia achieved was not something that was achievable for the majority of women. That is the reality. The context for why we know so little of Aspasia, or why she is this sort of ghost in the historical record, is not that she was erased by this Christian patriarchy that came around a millennia later. It's because she was not considered relevant enough to be recorded or lauded by the Athenian patriarchy in which she lived.
29:40 Liv Albert? Now, I showed this video to a good friend of mine before recording this, and she's not in this world at all. She just is forced to listen to me. And so I think that was the perfect kind of test case for what is the problem here? Because she watched the video and she watched this man talking and she was like, this sounds great, I want to believe him. Like, what's the problem? And the problem is...
30:06 Liv Albert? That when we talk about history in this way that ignores all of the context, all of the background as to why Aspasia does survive in the history books at all, or what it was like to be her and all of the different things that contributed to her being able to become so rhetorically brilliant, to educate herself in a way that allowed her to be on a level where men listened to her, to ignore all of the context for how she achieved
30:49 Liv Albert? that in a world where she would have been considered nothing at all, is to ignore the struggle of all of those women in the ancient world. To suggest that in the ancient Greek world, particularly in Athens, that women were teachers and leaders and that it was the Christian patriarchy that came in and erased that is to ignore all, all of the patriarchal history that comes from ancient Greece and which then led and paved the way for the Christian
31:30 Liv Albert? patriarchy. It is to ignore the way that we know for a fact that women in Athens were not permitted to be teachers and leaders. And now, does that mean that Aspasia couldn't have taught anything to Socrates? No. Do I believe that these references that other philosophers made well after the fact that she was a teacher of Socrates? Like, does that mean those comments are not believable or don't deserve any kind of critical analysis or acceptance of them as
32:12 Liv Albert? fact? Like, no. She absolutely could have taught Socrates, but there is an incredibly, incredibly big difference between being his teacher and having had conversations with him, which taught him something. That happened, the latter happened if it happened, but it would have happened because Aspasia almost certainly fought tooth and nail to be granted any, any kind of intellectual respect among the men. The reason she was allowed to speak with philosophers and any man in the Athenian political
32:57 Liv Albert? class was not even just because she was the domestic partner of Pericles, but because she was a hetera. Women were not permitted to be in symposia. These are the drinking parties where men would go talk about intelligent shit and get shitfaced. Women, as the Athenians saw women, were not permitted at those symposia. They were not permitted to be intellectual in any way. Hetera? Sex workers? Whores? They were allowed to attend symposia. And do you want to guess why?
33:40 Liv Albert? It's not because the men were welcoming their intellectual prowess. It's because they were there for sex work. And that a sex worker parlayed that into not only a domestic partnership with the most important man in classical Athens, but also into an intellectual career which was then written about by philosophers and even satirized by comedians? That is her achievement. That is what has been lost to history because of the patriarchal society in which she lived at the time and in which we are all still being forced to deal with.
34:22 Liv Albert? That is what makes her interesting and someone worthy of history books and being taught in any way. That is what makes her someone.
34:36 Liv Albert? To to revere in this way, it's that she achieved all of that because she did not fit into the Athenian world. If she had been an Athenian woman, she never would have been allowed out of that house, she never would have been let allowed into a symposia, she never would have been allowed to be educated, to hone her intelligence and her rhetorical skills, she never would have been permitted any of that. And so it is so exciting and so cool that she was all of these things and that maybe
35:18 Liv Albert? she taught Socrates, which we cannot say with certainty because we're not even 110% certain that fucking Socrates existed, and here he is calling out the people who say maybe Aspasia didn't exist, maybe they didn't all exist, not everyone, but like definitely all of these people whose work does not survive and who other people just wrote about them like kinda weirdly. There is just so much context that is missing, and maybe this guy goes into it in this larger lecture, credit to him if he does, but the way that this is presented in this viral meme does an enormous disservice to not only Aspasia, but women of the Athenian world and women
35:56 Liv Albert? of today, because honestly, I need us all to stop letting a confident white man just say things and then because it seems like he's an ally, we automatically are like believing it. Aspasia was so interesting, so cool, but she was so fucking cool because she was a politically savvy whore. And that's fucking awesome.
36:41 Liv Albert? This was a weird episode to record. I really want to like find a way to, I'm really technologically challenged. I really want to like more directly reply to this. It's been around forever now, but like honestly, search the word aspasia on Instagram and it's literally just that in like so many different forms. And I am just so tired of us having to learn about women through the eyes of men. The aspasia that he presents is this manic pixie dream girl. She is not the real aspasia. The real aspasia achieved everything because she was a fucking whore. And how awesome was that? She clawed power because she was not given any.
37:25 Liv Albert? That is what makes her interesting. That is why we don't talk about her in history and to suggest that she was just this intellectual, smart woman who taught Socrates and then was erased by the Christian patriarchy is to ignore
37:41 Liv Albert? all of the context that exists in the fucking human history of Greece and the way that particularly the Athenian patriarchy laid the groundwork for the most repressive of all patriarchy. Athenian patriarchy was the problem. Aspasia was this really, really interesting woman who was just trying to exist within it. And who fortunately was able to become lauded
38:19 Liv Albert? for all of these things and was able to achieve this political power that would be otherwise unimaginable.
38:29 Liv Albert? All of that is why we should be talking about her. And we need to know that context. Anyway, context and the way we are so often presented with these kinds of historical quote unquote facts without any of the context that explains how we got here and fucking why is why I am doing this entire podcast, but also why I'm working on on this memory collective project, uh, which again, more soon as I figure it out. But I, my goal is to bring together everyone who is doing this work, the contextual work, the looking at why people say these things
39:13 Liv Albert? about women, why a woman like Aspasia has become this mythologized form where she is either insulted for being a whore and and treated like, like she manipulated her way into power because she was a whore, or the fact that she was a Hetera is completely ignored in favor of her being this ideal woman.
39:43 Liv Albert? I don't even know where that sentence started, but like that, that, that is what is missing and what I am so interested in. Like, women are both. The, the, the video just screams to me of a woman written by a man, this, this idea of what makes a woman palatable, about the things that she has to be in order to be presented in the way that this man presented Aspasia. Because he couldn't have started that sentence, she was a whore, and that's why she was allowed to become Socrates' teacher.
40:26 Liv Albert? Let's Talk About Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangowish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of my own goddamn podcast network, The Memory Collective, where we plan to bring you contextualized history in all of its forms, because it's fucking interesting to know the context and to be able to understand why this man, speaking so confidently about an ancient woman, is incredibly reductive to women and the struggle against the patriarchy.
41:09 Liv Albert? A woman does not need to be a Penelope in order for her to be respected and for her to be as intelligent and rhetorically brilliant as Aspasia seems to have been. She does not need to be a perfect moral specimen. She just needs to be fucking human.
41:34 Liv Albert? I don't know how I'm wrapping this up. I just needed, I needed to talk about her. Sign up for the newsletter, mythsbaby.com/newsletter. I'm really working on releasing a big one, because there are so many announcements coming, like, it's wild. At the time of this episode coming out, tomorrow, tomorrow on Wednesday, March 12th, oh, there's gonna be a fun announcement, and then I can finally explain everything that has been going on behind the scenes. But in the meantime, The Memory Collective is gonna be fucking awesome as soon as I find the time to put everything together. Thank you all so fucking much for listening. I am Liv, and I will fight to the ends of the earth to tell the stories of women who were problematic as much as they were fucking brilliant.
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Previous Conversations: Othering Women in the Origins of Western Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Part 1) Next Conversations: Women's Patience/Patients & Hippocratic Medicine w/ Dr Christie Vogler (Part 2) Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated