A Real Conversation About Sex, Autonomy & Reproductive Rights with Twanna Hines

In this episode of SHE Asked: Tools for Practical Hope, Anna McBride sits down with sexual health educator, author, and entrepreneur Twanna A. Hines for a powerful conversation about voice, bodily autonomy, and the cultural narratives that shape how we understand sex, relationships, and reproductive rights.

Together, they explore why storytelling is such a powerful tool for social change and what is truly at stake when women lose the right to make decisions about their own bodies. Twanna also shares insights from her advocacy and research on the real-life consequences of the post-Dobbs era, and why midlife women have a critical role to play in shaping the future of these conversations.

This episode is a thoughtful exploration of courage, identity, and reclaiming your voice in a world that often asks women to stay silent.

Resources
Twanna Hines website: https://twannahines.com

Harvard-published white paper on post-Dobbs reproductive rights impacts: https://funkybrownchick.com/roe-dobbs-white-paper/

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Voice Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to She Asks: Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I'm so excited that you're here. This podcast is a place where we explore identity, healing, and the courage it takes for women to reclaim their voice after life has asked some hard questions of us. And today's conversation is both deeply personal and cultural. We're talking about the true cost of women losing their voice when it comes to their reproductive rights. Not just the political cost, but the emotional, relational, and generational impact when women lose the ability to make decisions about their reproductive rights. Joining me today is someone who has spent her entire career exploring these issues through storytelling, advocacy, and education. Twana A. Hines is an award-winning sexual health educator, healthy relationships advocate, entrepreneur, and founder of the Funky Brown Chick. She has appeared on CNN, NPR, and international media outlets, and she made history as the first nationally syndicated African-American woman sex columnist in the United States. Her work blends media, pulp culture, and storytelling to spark meaningful conversation about sexual health, respect, and autonomy. Tuana, I am so excited that you're here. Thank you for joining us on She Asked.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited for the opportunity to have exactly these kinds of conversations.

Twana Hines’s Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Wonderful. Tuana, before we dive into reproductive rights, we like to begin, as we always do on She Ask, with a story, your story. You've worked across journalism, theater, advocacy, and media. What first drew you to this work around sexual health, healthy relationships, and reproductive autonomy? And was there a moment when you realize that storytelling could be a powerful tool for the social media change?

Blogging, New York, And Finding Audience

SPEAKER_01 2:30

I love these questions. I'll break them in two. The first one of like, how did I get started with all of this in the first place? And the second one being, and then given that, how did I realize storytelling would be a very important tool for that? So, first, how I got started with it. As all things started with sex, honestly. I grew up evangelical Christian and I was told not to have sex before marriage. I'd go to hell, literally, if I did. And I a lot of just harmful narratives about our own sexual reproductive education rights and our own bodies, really. So the first time that I had vaginal intercourse with the man, it really struck me that I knew nothing about my body as far as it goes to reproductive health. I didn't know when I can get pregnant. Like I knew I was supposed to use condoms and I did, but I didn't know is it like during your period, after your period, midway between the two, like when are you actually to get pregnant? Didn't know how long sperm lived in the body. There were so many just basic things they didn't know about my life when it came to my own sexual health. And that just struck me as baffled me, quite frankly, because I had gone to grad school and I'd studied so much and published. And when it came to my own body, there was so little that I knew. This is possible. Then I realized I know how to drive because I took drivers ed. And I know math because I was taught it. And sex ed in our school was so minimal, the very bare minimum. I'm Gen X and I'm from the Midwest. This was the era of Ryan White contracting HIV around the same age that I was. He was next door, a young child who had hemophilia and contracted an HIV infection through a blood transfusion in Indiana. I was growing up around the same time, around this age, in Illinois. And so schools in the Midwest got sex ed because they were like, oh, we need to start talking about this. But that was really it. I didn't really get more until I took human sexuality in college, and I was so embarrassed with all the pictures that they posted and talked about things. And it was like, no one's ever talked about this stuff in my girlfriend's night, sure, but not like that. So that's really how I got started. I thought adults deserve for our own sexual health very real, concrete spaces to talk about central reproductive health, rights, justice at an adult level in a way that's us. So that's really how I got started in it. And then the question about so, how did I go from like academia and publishing and writing to more of just the storytelling in general? I moved to New York and I had back then in 2005 an anonymous blog. This was the height of blogging. I was blogging about my dating life in New York, and it really caught fire. People were very interested in learning about what that was like. Maybe they were people who'd always wanted to live in New York City and never had, and they were getting a slice of it in a very real way, not edited in 4K from like sex in the city, but like an actual person just talking about their lives and what it was really like. And so some people just wanted that peak. Some people were black women just like me, but they lived in a different town and they were happy to see themselves and to hear voices of people who looked like them that were often represented in media, especially even less so 20 years ago. Or they were maybe a 58 or 63-year-old white man who had never actually had a real conversation with a black woman, but was now being able to be exposed to a world that he never saw. And so learning about what life was like through my eyes was very appealing to them. So I had a very wide swath of people that's following my work and still do it. I'm forever grateful for that. And I just thought about that of what people get from reading my work because they're all so different. I've met them in person, they sent me emails, I interact with my audiences. So they're also very different. And it made me think about the time storytelling has changed my life. The first time that I ever saw GayMen Kiss was on television watching MTV's Real World, which aired one of the first marriage commitment ceremonies when Pedro Zamora, who was HIV positive, was had a commitment ceremony with his later husband, Sean. The first time that I heard Italian spoken was watching movies on from my blockbuster video rentals, Italian movies. And so there's so much of the world that I got induced to just from listening to and experiencing and witnessing the stories of others.

Why Stories Beat Pure Policy

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Okay, wow. I love that. You're right. I think storytelling opens us up or can to parts of the world that we wouldn't know otherwise. And that's great. And particularly when you blend it with the topics of, let's say, reproductive rights, it can be very powerful. One of the things that stands out about your work is this storytelling, that it's intentional. You've written, performed, and built platforms around narrative. So here's some questions around that I have for you. Why do stories matter so much when we're talking about issues like sexual health and reproductive rights?

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Oh, that's a big one. The first thing that came to my mind is that we need our own positive stories about sexual health because we live in a very sex-negative culture. And one of the examples that I always give is if you tell someone, oh, if you ask someone at work, so you're in a workplace environment, and someone says, What did you do this weekend? And they say, Oh, my college buddies came in town and it was so wild. It was like we were remaking the hangover, we reverted to when we were in our 20s, and everyone was drunk, and one woman was supposed to get in the Uber with us, but she ended up going somewhere else and just a crazy night, and I'm not drinking again for the rest of this week because I need my liver to recover. No one's gonna say that's so inappropriate. Like it's a funny story, and it's the way that people share about their weekends. Rewind, someone says, How was your weekend? And you say, you know, my partner and I have really not been connecting, and it's felt like we're really roommates, just sharing the bills and sharing responsibilities for taking care of our kids. And like this past weekend, we had a date night and I felt seen. Like we sat at dinner and we were talking, which we don't always do, but we really spoke to each other. And like I felt emotionally pressed, I felt emotionally safe, I felt heard. We went home and we just had the most amazing physical and physically intimate time that we could have had, and I just felt cared for in a way that I hadn't been cared for before. All of a sudden it's like, oh, T Lar! Why are they talking about all of this like personal stuff? And arguably, that's extremely healthy living, and the other could be extremely unhealthy really.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, very vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Exactly. As they say, intimacy is the new porn, right? Being vulnerable with each other and opening up with each other is a very hard thing to do at times. So I think storytelling factors into that because that is how we share and build our own personal, just happy, healthy, kind, vulnerable stories with others. That's how we feel seen in her. Wow. And we need that as political and social landscapes become more sex negative, we need more sex positivity thrown into that space.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

I love that. I love that. And so, what can stories do that statistics and policy debates cannot?

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Absolutely. Stories can tell what's happening with humans. If I say to you, one in four Americans, and fill in a blank with everything, you remember number one in four Americans. If I tell you the story about Jane who was shot in her elementary school when she was only six years old, you remember Jane. You remember that she was a child, you remember the actual story. And so there's so many more levels of humanity that we're able to connect with others when we actually share our personal stories. That's one of the reasons things like what you're doing, podcasting, are so incredibly important of finding microphones, screens, books, all of the ways in which we can share stories. That's not to say that stats and facts don't matter. We definitely live in a world of misinformation and disinformation. So those go hand in hand. We want stories to be about things concrete, things right into the yeah, things real, concrete, and that can move us forward in a way or make sure that we're seen and able to develop in a way that's helpful.

What Society Loses Without Choice

SPEAKER_00 11:34

I just had an aha because I hadn't thought about it that way before. That to be able to show up and tell a story, it puts a face to the name, to the situation, and it makes it more real. Wow, that's incredible. So on this podcast, we often talk about the moment when women realize they lost their voice, sometimes in relationships, sometimes in families, sometimes culturally. And reproductive rights brings that conversation into an even larger arena. So, Twana, when women lose the right to make decisions about their own bodies, what are we really losing as a society?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

We're losing our actual society itself. But 50% of the world are women or gender nonconforming people, at least half of the people on this planet, are people who are not men. And when you shut out that voice, when you shut out that lived experience, when you shut out that knowledge and way of seeing the world, you start to lose your society, you start to lose your humanity. There's only so much that you can do when you shut out half of the world. And so that's really what's at stake. We owe it to ourselves and those around us to share our stories and to show up as our full selves.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yes, that is so true. Wow. Now you've encountered so many stories through your work. I'm curious, what has stayed with you most about the real life consequences when women don't have the autonomy when in regards to their reproductive rights?

Autonomy, Consent, And Defining Sex

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Oh, there's so much. We list literally partnered with Harvard to publish an entire paper on women losing rights in the United States, what that means, and like literally looked at a deep dive two years after Roe was overturned by Dobbs and looked at those two-year periods and said, what exactly was at stake? What are the real consequences? What happened? And we published that. So I'll share a link if you'd like to share it with your so they have that too, because I think it's reporting deep on that. So I think there are very concrete losses that we suffer for that. I also think that there's this sense of aloneness and a sense of isolation. We don't speak up about the things that we go through. It can feel like we're alone in this world because no one knows exactly what it's like to be us. No one knows the narratives that we hold in our head and the stories that we tell ourselves. No one knows all of these things. And so when someone opens up, so whether we're talking about the Oscars and something you see on film, and you're like, oh, I relate that to that so much, even though it's not you personally. But the grand reason you hear a song, and there's a song that just reminds you of what heartbreak actually feels like. When we open up, it's not just our autonomy, as if we're away from the rest of the world, it's also our ability to live in community with each other. And to hear a song sang in Spanish by Benito singing something about dance that we need to dance to feel alive and we need to move our bodies and things like that. I love that, Bunny. And so, like, yeah, and I don't speak Spanish fluently, and I'm not from Puerto Rico, and I'm not a man, and there's so many things in which like I hear his story and his songs and his way of relating to the world, and I see myself reflected in that. Just like people who read my work or have seen me in theater shows have come up and said, I see so much of what I went through and what you're saying. And so I also think that when we silence ourselves, we don't give ourselves the grace and the healing that we need to connect in community with others. There's so much, I think we went from women not having rights over our own bodies to like autonomy, we need rights and we need this to like the shift now is much less about just autonomy and more about how we can show up for each other and how when we forcibly sterilize, for example, Puerto Rican women, or when we force-breed formerly enslaved black women, or when we tell women that you're literally the property of a man, there's so much that we as women experience that when we don't do that in community, there's a lot that's lost.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Wow. There is a lot there. You're also a healthy relationships advocate. How do reproductive rights intersect with relationship dynamics?

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Absolutely. The most important relationship that you will ever have in your life is with yourself. From that, all else flows. And so when we start talking about reproductive justice, reproductive rights, and what all of that means as far as how we want to engage in our own personal sexuality, separate and apart from other people, what we desire, what we find sexy, what we masturbate, if we masturbate, how we masturbate, what we think about, what our fantasies are. There's a whole entire sexual world that does not involve other people. So we've got that. And then you've got once you talk about reproductive justice and rights and education, and now taking that into this more public world that involves another person or your government's policies, all of that flows out of what starts with ourselves. So I'm very much an advocate of making sure people understand that relationships with ourselves and others, not just our sexual partners, our neighbors, our coworkers, our family members. When we think of healthy relationships, we need to think of what does it take to make sure those are healthy across the board?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Okay. Yeah, it is important to not lose yourself in a relationship. Mostly, I would imagine, losing your relationship sexually to yourself in a relationship. How does autonomy within the body influence autonomy within relationships?

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Oh, that's I was watching, I'm such a pop culture junkie. I'm watching a show called Age of Attraction on Netflix, where everyone's a dating, they're out there together to date. The only rule is you can't talk about age. So you don't know if the man you're speaking to is 27 or 37 or 43, and you might be 51. So you have no clue, kind of everyone's adult and consult consenting, obviously, but like you don't know if they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and they have that entire range there. And so I've it's like, what a fascinating concept. I've been watching the show. One of the couples, I won't say who, just one of the couples, the one person who's a man is in his 60s. The partner he's chosen is in her 20s. She's a devout Christian who says, I don't want to have sex with somebody married. Celibacy is very important to me, so I need you to hold that. They end up fighting. And what they fight about is he says to her, he's basically upset because they were orally intimate, is the way that she describes it. But she doesn't want to have sex with him, and he just can't understand what that's about. And she's saying that she's celibate and she's not, and all of these things. And I just watch that, I'm like, that's just the most fascinating thing. The argument is about seemingly he's upset that he's not able to describe her what celibacy means for her body and her sexual health and her decisions about what she does or does not want to do with the partner that she's with. And so I think when we think of like autonomy in our own bodies, traditionally that's the ability to do, not do what we wish and without forcible or influence of other beings, whether that's government, your religion, your partner, what have you, but you in and of yourself can autonomously decide what you want your sexual life to be like. We don't really live in a world where that exists fully, right? Because we can't be oblivious to the fact that so many people, predominantly women and girls, not to say not men and boys too, women and girls, their first encounter with someone touching their genitals or hearing sexual wasn't consensual. There's a shit ton of abuse that women and girls experience in this world. Even if we look at the stats of what those are, it's high. And that's for the people who admit it. That's for the brain souls who talk about it. That's for the ones that we're aware of. And so talk about this autonomy, we have to back that way up and say, who told us what sex actually is? Some of my trainings actually ask that question. What is sex? People give, you know, tell me, what is it? And they're like, oh, it's like when two people are in bed, and when you like do up and explain it, yes, explain it to me. Tell me what it is. Okay, so if I put my penis inside of her vagina, oh, so sex is only something that a cishat man does with a cishat woman. No, it could be like two women, two women can be together, and okay, what's sex? What's like when you like are you doing productive things or touching each other? So when you masturbate, you're not having sex with yourself. So nobody knows. There's no actual defined this is what sex is. You can look it up in a dictionary and it can challenge it a million times, no matter how many dictionaries you give me. Wow. Yeah. And so there's so much about your question about autonomy. We're never an autonomous being, as far as what we were even told what sex is plays into what reproductive justice means for all of us. We were told what and who is an appropriate partner, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, culture, gender. Gender expression, what people actually express. Like I am very expressing, like a cishat woman, and I also very visibly appear in a very traditionally feminine way in which we express what gender is, gender expression, right? And so what we're told we're supposed to be attracted to, who we're supposed to do, all of these things, we're formed so much by that. And that's before we even talk about who does what to our body, nonsense, actually. And you go through all of that till you get to the point where you talk about like reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. We've had a whole world exist before that, right? So I think we have to really think about what all of those things mean.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Wow. Who knew? I was opening up that conversation just by asking about autonomy. Because I think about the fact that so much of our beliefs that we inherited obviously affect our definition of both autonomy and sex. Absolutely because we take the autonomy out of it, basically, when we apply our belief system that we inherited.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Yes. And what and our responsibility, and I use that word very intentionally to others because it should saw this in COVID, right? Bottom autonomy, people would say, if I don't want to wear a mask, I shouldn't have to wear a mask. If I don't get vaccinated, I shouldn't have to be vaccinated. And then you have people with young children or people with compromised immune systems. Don't just think of yourself, asshole, right? So it's think of how we want to show up for ourselves and community and what our values are. We have to really challenge what this idea of autonomy means. Like it led up to pregnancy prevention initiatives from parenthood. A lot of the schools, the parent can send a note and say, we send and say, hey, this happens all over the United States. They send a note, we're going to be teaching sex ed on this day. So if you don't want your kid, you know, to be this, just so that parental notification, they call it, right? Nobody tells you how they're going to teach history to your kid and whether or not they'll talk about slavery and what that's going to look like. No one tells you how they're going to talk about colonization to your kid and what that's going to look like. No one tells you what they'll cover in science and whether or not they'll talk about how religion factors into that and what that's what sex is all of a sudden. Autonomy. My child should be able to decide whether or not that. Not to say anything of your child needs to know what sex, your child needs to know how to keep their own body safe and what parts should and shouldn't be touched by strangers. All these kinds of things. That's in community.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah. I think be very Wouldn't that be great if we could be autonomous across the board in education? No. No. Would we get educated? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that's called homeschooling.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Um we all have our views on that. Mine is that information matters, science matters, facts matter, and in reality, that nobody needs to adhere to any standards of what actual truth is. I think that it's all kinds of negative patience. It's actually illegal in countries like Germany, for example, to homeschool your kids because you know the exact outcome of when you could tell anyone anything if facts don't matter. Like what happens.

Midlife Women And Generational Memory

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Okay. Yeah. Many women, many of the women rather who listen to this podcast are navigating identity transitions in midlife, divorce, recovery, rediscovering themselves after years of caregiving. Often they grew up in environments where their conversation simply didn't happen. What role do you think midlife women play in shaping the future of conversations about reproductive rights?

SPEAKER_01 25:53

I love midlife women. I am a midlife woman. And what I love about us is because of sexism and patriarchy and how we raise girls in our world, worldwide, and not just the United States. There's no country where that has achieved gender parity rates. So as we think about what that means, what permissions we have, how we move to this space, where we see ourselves represented and where we don't, and all of these things as we find our way through this world as girls, actual girls and young women, and then coming into ourselves, by the time we reach midline, we and of course I'm biased because I said I am a woman in my middle-aged life. We just have so much more perspective. I didn't realize how powerful I was when I was younger. I didn't realize how beautiful I was when I was younger. There's so many things that we just don't realize until we've just had the experience and just have gone through it, right? So know so much more. And so I think once we get to the point where we are in our 40s, 50s, low 60s, any of these things in this age, which we tend to call like middle age, like midlife, assuming people live to their like 80s and beyond, right? Then you've got the perspective of looking back, right? And you've got all the lessons learned with that. And then for so many of us, we've also been caretakers. Uh, for I'm happily child-free, but that doesn't mean that my sister doesn't have children and that I'm an aunt, right? Like even children are still caring for others, family members, friends, and others. And so we've had this life of caretaking. And by our age, some people are actually taking care of the parents who took care of them or didn't take care of them the way they should have. We're also doing that sandwich where we're taking care of both. And I think that as with anything, if you're not including the voices of the people who actually have the experience andor affected by it, you don't really know how the thing functions. So when I talk about a curing society or what it means to care for each other in society, or any type of way in which how do we live in this world without all killing each other, right? Stop sign, somebody has to stop. We have like literally the very basic level of like, how do we navigate a world in which we have to at some degree work together for things, right? Like someone has to scan the groceries, even if you're scanning it yourself, someone had to put that machine that made it possible for that. Or if you're like, you know what, I don't even want mercy stories, we should all be living off the grid. Okay. You had to learn how to read and write. Somebody had to teach you that. And so all of these things, right? So as we start thinking of that, we have to include the voice women who the major do the majority of care throughout the world. We have to include those voices and perspectives and leadership. It's not enough to just say, oh, you know, go on. No, we have to be part of actually shaping what the future looks like, and we are.

Media Narratives That Still Need Change

SPEAKER_00 28:58

And I would imagine there's at least a segment of that midlife women who remember what it was like when the reproductive rights were won the first time around in all that led to that. I myself was a young girl, was watching women my mother's age get out and protest and really get the votes that were needed for women's right to for Roe v. Wade, for example. And it was something that we talked about quite a bit in our family amongst my sisters. So I think about that. No one from who's currently around of the younger generations remembers that they weren't here. And I think that's also a part of the conversation. I think you're suggesting that. Like those that were involved all through the process can give a perspective that towards the voice that's really necessary. Oh wow. Okay. Now I want to talk about culture and media. So you've spent years examining how pop culture shapes social change. When you look at the ways women's bodies and reproductive rights are portrayed in media, film, television, news, what narratives do you think we still need to change?

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Oh, there's so many. One, we need to be way more inclusive. I want to see many more lesbian love stories on television. Even if she's not a lesbian, I still think we need representation. Like we need to show humanity in and of its few entirety. We need to show what the lives of undocumented women who do the majority of labor and we talked about caring for families, or a lot of undocumented women uh who are doing caregiving in homes and in hospitals and all of these kinds of things, documented and documented, migrants play a huge portion of all of this as well. And so I think there are just so much more representation, I would say, that's needed. And so if you were to like look up the stats of, and which is why facts and stories go together, right? What percent of Americans are married? What percent of Americans are straight? What percent of Americans are migrants, what percent of Americans are in an interracial relationship, like anything, and say what's the actual snapshot of America? It's extremely more diverse than what the stories that were given on television. And so I think that, or film for that matter. So I think that we definitely need more representation is the first thing. And then not representation, but we also need to make sure that like we have the support of that. So often, if it's like a woman makes a film and it doesn't make a lot of money, like her ability to fundraise to make a second film is diminished. And so we need to make sure that it's not just representation, but actual support and backing up culture and TV shows. I also watched industry, which was one of HBO's lowest rating shows. It's first season. Nobody was watching that show. They kept it for a second one and it caught fire and got a much a lot more attention. It's now one of the highest rating shows, and everyone is talking about industry, right? And so there needs to be representation and there needs to be support for the people that are there, voting for them and Oscars and Grammys, watching their things that they produce, writing reviews, all of these kinds of ways in which we have to have representation and the actual support and non-hostile interactions with people that are there. We've only recently started having intimacy coordinators, for example, and films. There are films, Last Hang on Paris being one of them, where sexual assault is part of the thing, like actual sexual assault, filmed, aired for the world to see. And that's just part of the film. Wow. There's so much in which it's not just representation, it's sport that we need for women and everyone else in the world.

Fear, Safety, And Speaking Up

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Wow, that's such a powerful statement in terms of just being able to get the stories to come forward. And as you said, so much of it gets lost the first time around. It doesn't have time to resonate. It does take time to settle in. So when we're talking about finding courage for women who feel afraid to speak up about these issues, maybe because of family, community, or faith traditions, what would you want them to know?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

I would want them to know that fear is a gift. I think often people say, just go out there and do it anyway. You might be afraid to do this. It's like humans are mammals. Mammals are animals. We're part of the natural world. We often think that we're separate apart from the environment, separate and apart from animals. Humans are part of the natural world, no more or less than flowers and butterflies and lions, tigers and bees and everything else. Oh my! Like we're part of that world. We live in that world. We breathe that world, we eat the plants that come out of the ground in that world. And so I think often when it comes to fear, we're we tell women in particular that we need to put that aside and we need to go for it anyway. I think what we could do a better job of is having women listen to where does that fear stem from? Why are you afraid? If we were to speak out, like what would that mean for you? What would that mean about you? Why would it make sense to not speak out and literally have people live in that space and just be intentional about why this has not been happening anyway? I find that's very helpful because there are all kinds of truths that come forward that will make speaking out even more authentic and powerful. The thing I'm thinking about now is especially when it came to domestic violence and intimate partner violence, a lot of people would just be so mad at those women and you just need to leave, and why aren't they leaving? They knew before science caught up and before the space that works around them, the case workers, social workers, police, all of this. Those women knew if I leave, he will kill me. The fact is, for women who are an intimate partner, domestic violence situations, they are most likely to be mortally harmed when they try to leave. They know that and they've known that forever. But they were being bullied and being told, just leave. Why isn't she leaving? Why isn't she leaving? And now people are like, oh, okay, I understand it a little bit more. What we need to feel safe to leave? What do you not have? And actually listening to the truths that are inside. That's an extreme example as far as physical abuse, and people understand that more uh intellectually and cognitively than we think of the emotional thing and just having courage. And so I do think that same level of authenticity and honesty about what we are afraid of. Maybe it's things like, oh, if I speak out, my financial situation will be jeopardized because of this. Or if I speak out, my family will think differently of me. And I care a lot about what my family thinks. Or if I speak out, maybe I'm the only ex person in my community and I feel like I'll be shunned and I don't really have any other supports and I really need that. And so none of that is to say those people shouldn't speak out. It is to say that I think in doing the work to really dig up what is the fear there, what's the honesty, what's the truth? I think you have to address that first before you get to what's next. And I believe that for anything. Even if it's, oh, I don't go to the gym as much as I want to, I need to go to the gym. Just saying, oh, go to the gym. It's it could be it's too far from my house. Okay, get a gym that's closer to your house. There are all kinds of troubleshooting that can happen before that.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Okay. On this podcast, we our tagline is Tools for Practical Hope. So, what are a couple tools that we could offer to our listeners on ways to really start taking action towards courage for regaining their voice?

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Yes, I love this. Therapy. I am a huge supporter of therapy. People often face therapy or consider therapy in a way that they're like, it's not that bad. If it got that bad, I would go to therapy. But again, going back to the difference between physical and emotional, no one says, if I get morbidly obese and I have a stroke, then I'll go to the gym. No, it's maintenance. You're supposed to be moving your body to the American Heart of Socialist, at least 30 minutes a day. You're supposed to be like moving our bodies. That's just normal and healthy for this living, breathing thing, right? Same with therapy. I see it more as like literally yoga for the brain. You go in and you just talk about what you're going through and all of those things. So I think finding a therapist, it's changed my life. And I feel like it's such a good way of getting to know how we feel, especially for women who felt like I haven't really been able to use my voice, or I felt like I would be stigmatized or pushed out, like I just haven't felt like the safety and security and courage to speak out. If that's the case, and that's been the case for a long time, sometimes you may not even know how you feel. Like you may need time to process or think of that. If someone says, What do you think? Honest answer might be, I don't know yet. Let me sit with that for a while. Therapy can be great for like digging more of it out of the honesty's and the truth of like, where did that voice go? And when did it leave? All kinds of things. So therapy is amazing. I highly recommend that. Other thing, I am an avid girl trekker, hiker, outdoors woman, so much, just because great for the mind. There's so much that, like, just moving your body does what all the science says that no one is gonna tell you actually, moving your body is awful for you. It does great cardiovascular, great respiratory, all of these things. And I once went to a yoga retreat, like out in Utah. And I remember this woman saying to the group, she's you know, the most important thing that you could do for any of your problems is breathe. Breathing solves everything. And I was like, I don't know who this chick is, but my problems need more than air. It just seems so and like later I thought about that, and it was like, it's true, because no matter what you're facing, if you're stressed on your buttons, how many times have you heard someone tell you you're like losing your shit? And they tell you, breathe, like literally, like stop. It's like taking a beat and like reconnecting with yourself and literally oxygenating your body and figuring out what you feel what you need, all of that. So, also in addition to therapy, physical activity, going for a walk, getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, all of these things we need. If you had a plant and you never watered enough and you died, you would say, Oh, you know, that's what a plant died. But we don't pay attention to how much water we drink, how much we move out. We are part of the natural world, and we need to move in a way that reflects that, right? What we eat, what we put on our skin, what we drink, all of these things. So we'd say that as well. Another tool I'd say is find someone whose life you admire. Write down five women of they're doing way better than me in this way, or they've achieved this and I'd like to do that, or I want to do these things, right? Find those people. It's not really about them. Find what are the qualities or aspects in particular that you admire? Uh is it the way that they carry themselves? Is it their success? Is it the partner they've attracted? Is it the way they move the world? Whatever it is, right? Like those things, because it's not that person, it's the thing. And think what would it mean for you to achieve that in a way that is real for you? We are our most authentic selves. So often we're like, oh, I'm told that's what success is. I need to do that. And it's like, no, take that and look and see what are the specific aspects and qualities that I find valuable, and what would it look like for me to do that? One example is when I started writing sex columns, people would say, including agents, here's what really works. You need to really do more of the formula, right? And I'll tell you agents will tell you that, all agents will tell you basically everything's in a formula. And so the typical formula for a sex column is I am the expert, right? The sex pert, those sex invite, like I am this, you need help. You are broken, and you come to me the expert, so that I can tell you what you need to do right. And so the attempt, dear Abby, dear whoever, they almost always start with this idea, you broken, confused person, send your thing to me, and I'll tell you how you fucked up or what you didn't get right or what you need to understand. That was never her my way of moving in the world. It was all this, we're all we're children at some point, and that worked or didn't work for us in whichever way that they did. And we became the humans, flawed in some ways, and not the ways in which we did. And we're all trying to figure this out. I am no more perfect or no more inflawed than anyone else, right? This happens to be my field and my area of expertise and the things that I've studied and I'm happy to share with others in ways that are helpful and in sharing. I often learn too. Some of the best teachers are learners of some of the best learners teach, right? Like those things aren't mutually exclusive, right? Right. That there's so much of just recognizing the humanity and others and ourselves. I've never put myself forward to be a person who's got everything all figured out and all of this. I'm really a serial monogamous, so I don't need to be married and I go from relationship for years to the next one and that's being single in between, and it's that works for me. And someone who really wants to thrive in a marriage might say, That's not why I want to be married. There's nothing wrong with either of those two things. So it's just finding what works for us and finding ways in which we're able to pursue those lives.

Where To Find Twana And Closing

SPEAKER_00 43:27

I love the thought about that is the idea of learn from others, but make it your own because we're here to be our own expression of whatever that ought to be. And I think that's a really great encouragement. It's almost like a permission slip, right? Do your research yet personalize it. So that's really important. Twana, I am really just like overwhelmed with this conversation. This is so amazing. I'm so glad that you really stayed true to yourself. And became the version that you are because clearly the world needs women like you that are helping us continue this conversation. And this conversation today is ultimately about something deeper than legislation, right? It's about voice. And it's about whether women are trusted to tell the truth about their own lives, their own bodies, and their choices. And that's something every woman listening today can relate to. All right. So for our listeners who are definitely going to want to get a hold of you, Tuana, please tell our listeners how to do that.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Yeah, absolutely. Website is the easiest, TuanaHines.com. My name. So if you're listening to this podcast, you probably see my name written in the description of wherever you may be listening to this. So you Google my name. I'm the only one with this name in the United States. So Twana A. Heinz, and you'll find my website, my social media channels, my substaff, things like that. So I'm always trying to find ways to share valuable information and resources that help people improve their lives. So stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Thank you so much for the work that you do and for sharing your voice with our audience. If this conversation resonated with you, our listeners, with because there's someone in your life who you believe could benefit from hearing something more about agency, about dignity, about what it takes to come back to your own bodies, your own story. Please share this episode with them. And thank you for listening to She Ask where Healing Meets Practical Hope. I've been your host, Anna McBride, and I am so glad that you were here today with us. And until soon, be well.