LitHERacy: An Australian Podcast for Young Women

Here’s what school never told you: the clitoris is ten centimetres long, has 10,000 nerve endings — more than double the penis — keeps growing your whole life, and exists purely for pleasure. Sexologist and Sexual Health and LGBTIQA+ Educator Steph Andrews talks to Maddie about everything that one fact should change: why pleasure gets left out of sex ed entirely, why knowing your own body is a safety skill nobody frames as one, the orgasm gap (95% of straight men usually or always orgasm, 65%...

No qualified experts this time, just Maddie, Kerry and the topic neither of them knows a single woman who hasn’t struggled with: self-worth. They talk about becoming a different version of yourself depending on who’s in the room, and what that costs you. They cover playing small, and why “you’re just being sensitive” lands like a verdict on who you are. They try to say one thing they like about themselves out loud, and find out how hard it is to take a compliment, as Kerry’s friend puts it: “...

Nobody actually teaches you how sex works. School covers bodies, bugs and babies; the internet covers everything else, badly. The real questions go unanswered: what does it actually feel like, who puts what where, how do you say what you want, how do you say not yet? Sexologist Jordina Quain has spent over a decade giving young people the sex education they actually deserve, and she talks to Maddie about all of it: why virginity is a made-up idea you can put down (“I didn’t lose my virginity,...

Exercise was sold to girls as a punishment. Punishment for what you ate, for what your body looks like, for not being smaller. This one hands it back as something else entirely: movement, and it's yours. Exercise physiologist and former Australian pole vaulter Amanda Bisk made the 2010 Commonwealth Games, lost her Olympic dream to chronic fatigue, and is back on the runway at 40, this time entirely on her own terms. She talks to Maddie about what movement does for your mind and your sleep, ho...

Your mind is not the enemy, even when it's keeping you up at 10pm running the same conversation for the hundredth time. This one reframes the whole thing: anxiety isn't something wrong with you, it's a signal trying to tell you something. Psychologist Dr Marny Lishman talks to Maddie about what anxiety actually looks like in a teenage girl, often disguised as people-pleasing, overthinking, or just being really good at holding it together; why the mental load women carry starts years earlier t...

This one is honest, and some of it is hard. If today's not the day, that's okay, it will still be here when you are. Chanel Contos posted one question on Instagram at 22. It came back with more than 7,000 testimonies, changed the national curriculum, and drove consent law reform across the country. The founder of Teach Us Consent sits with Maddie for the conversation every other conversation has been building to: why the danger was never just the stranger, what sexual coercion actually is — ...

No qualified experts this time, just Maddie, Kerry and their life experience, on the thing every other conversation stands on: the people and places where you don't have to perform. They cover the person who let you be completely yourself and what they did right, why "be strong for your (insert adult care giver here)" is a terrible thing to say to a child, how familiar and safe can feel identical until suddenly they don't, and why your body works it out before your brain does - in a friendshi...

Somewhere along the way a girl learned her body was a project — something to shrink, to earn, to apologise for. This one takes all of that apart. Holly Moore sits with Maddie to talk about why food isn't a reward you have to earn, why "health has a look" is a lie someone's profiting from, and how to tell caring for your body apart from being at war with it. Plus a long-overdue public apology to carbs. GUEST LINKS: Website InstagramWANT TO CONTINUE THIS CONVERSATION WITH SOMEONE IN YOUR L...

No one sits a girl down and explains her first payslip. They just hand it to her — tax gone, super gone, a tax file number to go and find — and leave her to work it out. Maya Farah and Emily Barker, co-founders of Perth financial education company Finverity, sit with Maddie to cover the three things everything else rests on, then the part that actually lands: you can start investing with fifty cents. Ten dollars a week from fifteen is around $700,000 by sixty. Saved instead of invested, it's ...

What better way to launch than with a double episode on all things women's health — including the parts you were taught to be embarrassed about. In Part 1 Maddie and Dr Tamara Hunter get plain about vulvas, periods and discharge: what's actually normal, what's worth getting checked, and how to tell the difference. Part 2 asks the question- how much pain is too much pain? Then the part no one prepares you for — what to do when you finally work up the nerve to see a GP and they wa...

What better way to launch than with a double episode on all things women's health — including the parts you were taught to be embarrassed about. In Part 1 Maddie and Dr Tamara Hunter get plain about vulvas, periods and discharge: what's actually normal, what's worth getting checked, and how to tell the difference. Part 2 asks the question- how much pain is too much pain? Then the part no one prepares you for — what to do when you finally work up the nerve to see a GP and they wave...

LitHERacy is an Australian podcast for young women, and for the women who love them. LitHERacy exists because I got tired of pretending I had the answers. Somewhere between the caring adults and the conversation I actually needed, the real stuff got lost. So I made a promise to my daughter, and to daughters everywhere, because they deserve so much better than silence. Each week I ask the real questions, and get the real answers, from the people qualified to give them: a gynaecologist, a psych...