HER VOICE: 42 Laws of Feminine Power Podcast

Nataliya Preiss

HER VOICEs is a global conversation about feminine leadership — where ancient wisdom meets business, visibility, and real life. History, psychology, spirituality, wealth, culture: all of it, in service of one question — what becomes possible when women lead from their authentic voice. Hosted by Nataliya Preiss. nataliya888.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Aug 23

    Five Sentences

    He wrote five sentences on a whiteboard, and by the fifth, the man who did the hitting had vanished. It was the early 1990s. Dr. Jackson Katz stood in front of a room full of college administrators, coaches, and student leaders. They’d braced themselves for the usual talk — be respectful, be a good guy, lend a hand with “women’s issues.” Katz picked up a marker. John beat Mary. Nothing complicated here. John is the subject. He commits the action. Mary receives it. The grammar leaves no confusion about responsibility. Then he wrote the second line: Mary was beaten by John. The event remained the same, yet our attention had moved. “Watch what just happened,” Katz said. “We slid into a passive voice. The camera swung off John and onto Mary. He’s drifting toward the edge of the sentence now — almost off the page entirely.” Third line: Mary was beaten. “John’s gone,” Katz said. “It’s all Mary now. We’ve stopped thinking about him completely.” Fourth line: Mary was battered. “We traded ‘beaten’ for ‘battered’ — the word an entire generation has used instead.” Fifth line: Mary is a battered woman. Katz stepped back and let the whiteboard speak for him. “Look at what her name has become. Mary’s identity is now built entirely from what John did to her. And John? He’s nowhere. The man who caused the harm was gone. He walked straight out of the sentence.” Silence held the room. Then Katz asked the question that would follow him for the next thirty years: “Calling gender violence a ‘women’s issue’ — isn’t that half the problem?” Katz did not originate this linguistic exercise. He has credited feminist linguist Julia Penelope for the analysis. What he did was carry it into spaces where conversations about gender violence desperately needed a different vocabulary: college campuses, athletic programs, locker rooms, leadership conferences, and eventually institutions far beyond academia. The exercise worked because you could watch responsibility migrate across the whiteboard. No theory was required. Start with a man doing something to a woman, change the grammar a few times, and eventually everyone is discussing the woman. Once Katz pointed this out, the pattern became difficult to miss: ”We talk about how many women were raped last year rather than asking how many men committed rape. We count girls who experienced harassment while the boys or men doing the harassing disappear from the statistics. We ask why she stayed, what she missed, whether she ignored warning signs, why she went back, and how she ended up with him in the first place. Entire conversations can develop around a woman’s decisions while the person whose behavior created the danger receives remarkably little curiosity. Even our labels carry the pattern. She’s a battered woman. Her identity absorbs his action. What happens if we keep the verb attached to the person responsible for it? He batters his partner. Now the question has somewhere useful to go. Who is he? Why does he do this? What does he believe he is entitled to do when he is angry, rejected, jealous, humiliated, or losing control? Which behaviors appeared before the violence became undeniable? What had people around him already witnessed? Language determines where we look. And where we look determines what we investigate. The Question Katz Changed Katz himself was an interesting messenger for this argument. He had played college football before moving into academic work, eventually earning graduate degrees from Harvard and UCLA. He understood male culture from inside spaces where masculinity, competition, loyalty, and status carried enormous weight. His argument was that gender violence had been framed incorrectly from the beginning. Calling it a women’s issue placed women at the center of a problem largely created by male perpetrators and, at the same time, allowed men who were not violent to imagine that the subject belonged to somebody else. Most men are not rapists. Most men do not beat their partners. Katz was interested in what everyone else does. What happens when your friend says something degrading about women and waits for the laugh? What happens when a teammate starts making excuses for another man’s behavior? What happens when everyone knows a woman is being harassed and nobody wants to become the person who makes the evening uncomfortable by saying so? This is where Katz moved the conversation from perpetration to bystanders. In 1993, he co-founded Mentors in Violence Prevention, known as MVP, at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. The program began working extensively within athletic culture and eventually expanded into other institutions, including military settings. Its premise was remarkably practical: people who would never commit violence themselves still participate in cultures that either challenge or tolerate the attitudes surrounding it. The intervention might happen long before anyone calls the police. It can happen during the joke. During the story about the drunk girl. During the conversation where somebody begins defending behavior everyone knows crossed a line. The question becomes less comfortable then. If you recognize what is happening and say nothing, what exactly is your silence doing? Katz framed this as leadership. That distinction matters. Sensitivity can sound optional, as though understanding gender violence is an elective course in becoming a nicer human being. Leadership carries responsibility. If you have influence over a team, company, institution, family, or group of friends, the culture around you is shaped partly by what you are willing to confront. That principle extends beyond gender. People with social power can challenge prejudice inside their own communities rather than leaving the people targeted by it to carry the entire burden of resistance. And that brings me back to voice. Who Gets a Voice in the Sentence? I have spent years thinking about women’s voices: how we lose access to them, how we learn to doubt what we know, and what happens when we begin speaking from our own authority again. Katz’s whiteboard made me consider another dimension. Sometimes voice is also grammatical. Who gets to be the subject, and who becomes the object? Whose actions receive verbs, and whose identity becomes permanently attached to what happened to her? A woman can technically have a voice while the language surrounding her story still places the burden on her. This happens every time we become fascinated with the survivor’s psychology before examining the perpetrator’s choices. Why didn’t she leave? Perhaps the more revealing question is why he made home dangerous. Why did she go back? We might also ask what financial, emotional, familial, or physical realities made leaving so difficult — and why the person harming her continued doing so. Before we interrogate her timing on anything else, we could stand to get a lot more curious about him. Those aren’t exercises in political correctness. They change the direction of attention. And attention is power. John beat Mary. Mary was beaten by John. Mary was beaten. Mary was battered. Mary is a battered woman. The five sentences on Katz’s whiteboard demonstrate how easily language can move that power without our noticing. By the end of them, we have learned a great deal about Mary’s condition and nothing about John’s character. That should bother us. Because if we genuinely want fewer Marys carrying these stories, our curiosity eventually has to turn toward John. And then it has to widen again. Who are the men around John? Who hears the joke, watches him humiliate his girlfriend, recognizes the possessiveness everyone keeps calling love — and decides none of it is his business? This is where conscious men matter enormously. Women cannot create cultural balance by speaking only to one another about what men should do. Men influence other men in spaces women will never enter and conversations women will never hear. A respected teammate challenging another man can reach a place that a hundred lectures about respecting women may never touch. That does not make men women’s rescuers. It makes them participants in the culture they already help create. And perhaps that is one of the deeper meanings of Her Voice. Women’s voices matter tremendously, yet the world we are trying to build cannot depend on women carrying every conversation about the harm done to women. We need men who are willing to use their voices too — especially when the woman isn’t present, and especially when silence would be easier. John beat Mary. Keep John in the sentence. Then ask the men standing beside him what they are going to say. HER VOICE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to HER VOICE: 42 Laws of Feminine Power at nataliya888.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Jul 24

    Modern Magdalene

    For fourteen hundred years, the Church called her a name that wasn’t hers. And it worked. Hi. I’m Nataliya, and this is HER VOICEs. If you’re new here — welcome. This is a place for women who were told early on who they were supposed to be, and spent decades trying to make that fit. I’m opening this podcast today, on Mary Magdalene Feast Day, with her story, because I don’t think you can find your way to a bigger story until you’ve watched exactly how a smaller one gets built. So let’s start with the record. She was the first witness to the Resurrection. Not a disciple. Not one of the men. Her. The Church itself calls her Apostle to the Apostles — a title it gave her with one hand and spent a millennium and a half taking back with the other. She financed the ministry out of her own money — she chose to spend what she had on something she believed in. And she stood at the cross when the men closest to him had already run. None of that is disputed. It’s the plain text. There’s a second thread I want to bring in here too, and I want to be honest about what it is before I say it. It’s not historical scholarship — it’s a channeled book called The Sophia Code, by Kaia Ra, and a lot of women in this space have found real resonance in it, including myself. In that account, Mary Magdalene isn’t a follower trailing behind Jesus. She’s described as his equal in spiritual authority — the two of them working side by side, sharing healing work together, not one leading and one assisting. The book tells it that Mother Mary is actually the one who introduced them, and that Mary Magdalene took her time, evaluating him from a distance, before she chose to walk beside him. And she’s remembered there as a woman who was never ashamed of her body or her beauty — she dressed the way she wanted, adorned herself the way she wanted, and none of it made her less spiritually powerful. I’m not asking you to take that as history. I’m asking you to notice how different it feels from the version most of us were handed. I want you to sit with all of that for a second, because what happens next only lands if you’re holding the actual record first. In the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great stood up and gave a sermon that took three separate women from the Gospels — Mary of Magdala, an unnamed woman the text calls a sinner, and Mary of Bethany — and folded them into one. One woman. One story. And the composite is the one that stuck. For fourteen centuries, that’s who she became in catechism, in painting, in stained glass: a repentant sinner, kneeling, grateful for a forgiveness she never actually needed. I don’t think that was an accident. I think it was a method. And it’s a pattern I’ve watched happen again and again — in board rooms, in kitchens, in my own mirror. When a woman has real power, it’s easier to rename her than to face her. Give her a smaller story instead. Let that smaller story stand for a few centuries, and people forget there was ever a bigger one. Now here’s the part that pulled me into researching this in the first place, and it’s the part most sermons skip entirely. Magdala. Migdal, in Hebrew. It means tower. A watch-place. The high point you build so you can see far, and be seen from far. That’s the actual, unglamorous meaning of a word that history spent fourteen hundred years turning into a synonym for shame. Someone took a tower and told the world it was something to be ashamed of. And in the mystical tradition — in Kabbalah, in the Zohar — that word keeps showing up in places that have nothing to do with sin and everything to do with revelation. The tradition speaks of a divine feminine presence, the Shekhinah, moving through the world under dozens of names — daughter, dove, rose, bride, queen — each one a different face of the same current. And Magdala is named among them. Not a building of stone. A place, a function — closer to a temple in the sense of the place where something finally gets revealed, than a temple in the sense of an address you visit on a holiday. I’m not asking you to take that as doctrine. I’m asking you to just sit with the coincidence, because I haven’t been able to stop sitting with it myself. The woman history flattened into one word for shame carries a name that, translated honestly, means the high place built for seeing clearly. Someone took the tower and called it a brothel. That’s not a mistranslation. That’s the same move, wearing a different collar, in a different century. Which is exactly why I wanted to open this podcast here. HER VOICEs is for women who’ve spent years living inside a story that got handed to them early — the way you’d break in a shoe a half size too small, because returning it felt like more trouble than it was worth. I don’t think that’s a personal failing. I think it’s the same mechanism Pope Gregory used in 591. It’s easier to hand a woman a smaller story than to make room for the real one. And people are patient. They’ll wait years, even generations, for you to just accept it. Mary of Magdala got her record back eventually. Centuries later. Long after the damage had already shaped how the story got told to little girls sitting in pews. I don’t want to wait that long for the women I’m writing to now. So here’s what this podcast actually is. It’s a place where we go back through the record — mythic, historical, personal — and take back whatever got renamed along the way. Not because the past needs correcting for its own sake, but because I don’t think you can fully stand in your own name today while some old, rented version of yourself is still doing the talking. That’s the whole intention of HER VOICEs, distilled into one woman’s feast day. Not a rescue. A correction of the record — hers, and if you’re honest with yourself right now, probably yours too. This newsletter is my contribution to something bigger than one story — a global movement of women reclaiming their power, on their own terms. If that’s a story you’re living too, subscribe. Let’s do it together. Subscribe for free to receive new posts, and support my work. Get full access to HER VOICE: 42 Laws of Feminine Power at nataliya888.substack.com/subscribe

  • 2 Episodes

About

HER VOICEs is a global conversation about feminine leadership — where ancient wisdom meets business, visibility, and real life. History, psychology, spirituality, wealth, culture: all of it, in service of one question — what becomes possible when women lead from their authentic voice. Hosted by Nataliya Preiss. nataliya888.substack.com

Information