Very excited to announce the launch of a new video series from me and Kat Murti. Putting out a podcast or video series has been on our agenda since we founded Feminists for Liberty together five years ago—though it’s taken us a while to figure out quite what that should look like. Originally, we toyed with bringing on new guests each week to chat about things in the news and culture. But we quickly came to realize that with such a small team—it’s just been Kat & me until recently, and last month we welcomed Addyson Garner as our first part-time staffer—putting out something so time sensitive and with such a short shelf-life didn’t make sense. And while it’s cool getting a panel of guests together to discuss topics of interest to libertarian feminists, we’d rather do that through our monthly panel series (F4LChats, launched last August) to let a live audience ask them questions, too. What we were missing (and what this new video series is meant to accomplish) is a way to discuss evergreen libertarian and/or feminist issues—the kinds of questions Kat & I get asked about all the time, like… well, what is libertarian feminism, for starters? Isn’t feminism an inherently collectivist ideology? (No.) Isn’t capitalism bad for women? (No.) How do libertarian feminists view things like reproductive choice? Sexual consent? Gender norms? Free speech? Et cetera.
So!, that’s what this latest video project is going to be: a no-frills series of short videos featuring Kat and me, talking to each other about different aspects of contemporary libertarianism and feminism. We’ve got a wide variety of discussions in the works, but we thought we should start with talking about just what we’re doing here — how each of us came to these philosophies, why we launched Feminists for Liberty, what this organization is and what we want it to be.
And here we go…
Transcript:
Liz: So, once upon a time, way back in the Bush era, I started reading blogs about libertarianism and I started reading blogs about feminism, and I was like, cool, I’m a libertarian, I’m a feminist, they’re both philosophies that are rooted in equal rights and respect for the individual. Nobody should have a problem with this, right?
Kat: Yeah, so how did that go?
Liz: Not like I thought!
Kat (00:24): So let me guess the libertarians were like, feminists are all Marxist communists who hate liberty and the feminists were like, libertarians are evil, anti-Woman misogynists and women can’t even be libertarians anyway. Right?
Liz: Yeah, pretty much. That’s when I first thought, okay, we need to work on this
Kat: Flash forward a decade or two—
Liz: You and I meet—
Kat: And here we are.
Liz: Here we are!
Kat (00:56): And we’re filming the very first in a series of videos for Feminists for Liberty.
Liz: We should probably start by telling them a bit about who we are, yeah?
Kat (01:06): That makes sense. So I’m Kat Murti and I’m a libertarian and a feminist and I’ve probably always been a feminist because, you know, I was born a woman and always thought that I should be able to have all the same rights and opportunities as anyone else, regardless of my sex or gender. And that was actually probably also always a libertarian, but I didn’t actually know what that was for a long time.
And so I was sort of on the internet and reading books and trying to find out different ideas for, and trying to find people who thought like me, right. And I kind of came to this conclusion that I was the only one. And then one day I was on a weed messaging board and I was in an argument because that’s what one does on the internet where I was telling someone, ‘Hey, so cannabis should totally be legal because it’s your body and it’s your right. And the drug war is terrible, but I’m worried about what will happen once it’s legalized in terms of taxation and regulation.’ And I was about 15 at the time, and this person comes back to me with, ‘Hey, I think you’re a libertarian.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ So they sent me the four way political quiz and I took it and I was a libertarian. So I Googled that up and I found actually the Cato Institute online and I started reading their stuff. And for the first time in my life, I was like, ‘Hey, these people agree with me!’
And then basically since then, I’ve been involved in a bunch of different libertarian orgs and causes and you know, just trying to spread liberty around the world. And now I’m executive director of Feminists for Liberty.
Liz (02:58): I’m Elizabeth Nolan Brown—or Liz as most people call me in person. I’m the president of feminists for Liberty, and I’m also a journalist. I’ve been a journalist for a long time, for about the same amount of time that I’ve been a libertarian. I discovered libertarianism right after college—I was not lucky enough to realize that it was even a thing when I was in college. I just knew I wasn’t a Republican but, you know, I didn’t agree with the Democrats about a lot of things either, and I didn’t agree with a lot of people in my college who were involved in progressive or leftist organizations. So I just thought I was an independent and sort of politically homeless.
Then I went to a thing—an Institute for Humane Studies summer seminar for students and young, recent graduates—and I was like, wow, this is, this is exactly what I think. This is kind of what I’ve been thinking all along—I just didn’t know there was a cohesive philosophy behind it. So, you know, yeah. They gave me the books on Hayek and a Reason magazine subscription, and books by Cato Institute writers and all sorts of stuff. And I started reading up on that, and I also started working at a newspaper at that time. I was living in Ohio, and I ended up moving to DC.
I’ve had a lot of different journalism jobs. I was writing about health and nutrition for a while. I worked for the AARP—I was like the youngest person working in their journalism department for awhile. But I always wanted to work at Reason. And luckily that worked out starting in 2014. That’s when I moved back to DC from New York and I started at Reason. I’ve now been, I’m in my seventh year this year. And I love it there, and I’m really glad to be able to cover all sorts of things from a libertarian perspective. But also I wanted to do more sort of direct organizing and outreach and that’s, that’s where Feminists Liberty comes in.
I met Kat back around when I first started at Reason, around when I first moved back to DC in 2014—I think it was at a Ladies of Liberty Alliance event?
Kat (05:10): No, no. So it actually wasn’t, it was when you first started working at Reason and my husband, who was then my boyfriend, was working at the foundation at that point. And you came over to my house with some Four Loko that you stole from the Reason fridge.
Liz: No, not from the reason fridge—this was, this was the contraband Four Loko that had both the caffeine and alcohol in it! We kept it in a special place. That’s right. Oh my gosh. There’s still some contraband Four Loko somewhere in the Reason office—but I am, I’m not here talking to you guys as a representative for Reason. I’m here talking for Feminists for Liberty; I should make that clear right now. Yeah, but we were—I knew her husband through Reason. And we were both involved in Ladies of Liberty Alliance. We were both involved in a group called the Association of Libertarian Feminists, too, involved in their Facebook group. It’s a group that was founded in the 1970s. Libertarianism feminism has a long tradition within the movement, but by the time Kat and I were met, ALF was not very active anymore. It doesn’t do a lot of things other than sort of exist as an online sphere on Facebook. So we started talking about launching Feminists for Liberty back in around 2016.
Kat (06:34): So I think we should talk about what was happening in 2016 first.
Liz: Well not the libertarian moment, first of all.
Kat: Oh, definitely not the libertarian feminist moment
Liz: People had been saying that it was going to come and then like, poof— then, Donald Trump and everything.
Kat (06:51): Yeah not so much, right? So what actually happened was this was around the time of the rise of the alt-right. And unfortunately there was some pretty heinous rhetoric about ‘feminism is cancer’ that was sort of bleeding into the Liberty movement a little bit at that time. And which of course, like we were both talking about how that was completely antithetical to the ideas of Liberty and how much libertarianism and feminism had been linked kind of from the beginning. And so there’s all that going on. And then of course there was the feminist movement….
Liz: At that point in time, it was very much like… if you were not 100% onboard with Hillary Clinton, then you know, you must be alt-right, you must be a Nazi if you didn’t support everything Hillary Clinton did. Or you know, Kamala Harris was starting to rise at that time, and if you didn’t support that, support this very very anti-sex worker thing that—it’s still going on, but was, you know, going on then with the start of talk about FOSTA and things like that. So it was just not at all a very libertarian time in the feminist movement at all either … or within, you know, the broader sort of liberal/left/Democratic/progressive movement at large, you know. Like, more people were turning against free speech and more people started turning against civil liberties, or just at least not really thinking that they were very important.
So it seemed like libertarians and libertarian feminists had less and less in common with either the right or the left broadly conceived. We were more politically homeless than ever at that point.
Kat: Yeah, and the primaries were really just starting up and it looked like Hillary Clinton was the presumptive nominee. And we were just having this conversation about how we were expecting the campaign to start pushing the idea that if you were a feminist, you had to vote for Hillary Clinton. And in fact, they actually went worse than that. The big campaign ran this whole thing about how, if you donated to Hillary Clinton, you could get your woman card. Yes—there’s heavy scare quotes around that. Which goes against this feminist ideal of a women being individuals with their own ideas and choices and, you know, thinking for themselves
Liz (09:05): The woman card thing was a jab at Donald Trump, because he said something about like, ‘Oh, you’re playing a woman card.’ But yeah, it goes back to, like, those were the two options you had—
Kat: Right, we weren’t even expecting that when we first had the conversation. And then you have Donald Trump who gets elected, after his whole grab them by the pussy moment,
Liz (09:24): I guess, long story short, we really wanted to see more libertarian feminist ideas in the political conversation out there that was happening and promote the very many people that were libertarians that were not at all like the stereotypes out there. And promote the very many feminists we knew who were not at all like the stereotypes out there. We realized that there was no group really filling this space, at least that was not just for women—that was for people regardless of sex or gender—and that was not just talking within the libertarian movement or the liberty movement, not just talking to other libertarians. And also not just focused on feminist circles and outreach within the feminist community, either. We wanted to sort of do all three of those things: be very outward facing, be not for just women, and be very explicitly political—which some of the other groups that are really great, like LOLA, they’re more concerned with networking and helping people get ahead in their careers—and we wanted to be more just talking directly about ideas and policy and things like that.
Kat (10:26): Yeah. And so it took us a while to get through the formal paperwork. Oh, there’s so much paperwork. As someone who’s a philosophical anarchist. I never thought that I would spend so much of my life dedicated to jumping government hurdles. But back in 2018, we officially incorporated Feminists for Liberty officially incorporated. And a little bit later, the IRS gave us our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Yay. Which essentially means that we talk about policy. We talk about libertarian feminist ideas. But what we don’t do is lobby or attempt to influence elections.
Liz: We are not a PAC or anything like that. We don’t support candidates, although we might talk about candidates. We might talk about their ideas and things like that, but we’re not out there trying to say like, ‘vote for this person,’ ‘vote for this policy or initiative or proposition on the ballot’ or anything like that. We definitely talk about policy, though we’re more focused on broader sort of ideas about underlying issues too.
But anyway, the nonprofit thing, the 501(c)(3) thing—the important thing that means is that you can donate to us and it’s tax deductible.
Kat: Yes. Because taxation is theft.
Liz: So that’s our backstory. What are our goals going forward? In the broadest sense, we want to promote the values and voices of libertarian feminism.
Kat: Yes. At Feminists for Liberty, we are anti sexism and anti-statism, pro markets and pro choice— in everything. And we promote the idea that consent applies to all things.
Liz (12:10): How we do this is sort of an ever evolving strategy. We’ve tried to have a three-prong approach, as we sort of mentioned earlier.
First, outreach in injecting our views and libertarian feminist views into the general political conversation, wherever that is, you know, whatever’s happening in the news, sort of meeting the news where it is, meeting people where they are and commenting on that, whether that’s in the media, on our social media or, or through panels that we organize and things like that.
The second is outreach within the libertarian movement or within the libertarian community about issues that—you know, it’s not that people are hostile to them. It’s just that they often got overlooked historically, a lot of issues that are maybe, you know, considered more women’s issues or gender issues.
And then third, outreach within the feminist community and within different feminist circles, and trying to get libertarian feminism as sort of part of the conversation in that way.
Kat (13:02): So from the start we’ve been focused on media outreach and social media. We really wanted to get the word out there. So you should follow us. We are @FeministLiberty on Twitter and we’re Feminists for Liberty on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. And you can sometimes hear us on TV or the radio, or you can see us quoted in newspapers and magazine articles
Liz: Before the pandemic started, we were much more focused on in-person events—showing up at protests, showing at conferences. We were doing a Salon and Social series at Exiles bar in DC, where we had a little flash talks followed by a happy hour. Then, like everyone else, we’ve had to switch gears a lot in the past year. But that’s given us an opportunity to do new things. We started launching a private working group, which we’re going to continue. We’ve started doing a lot of zoom conferences, which has been a really cool chance to get to bring on people who aren’t necessarily within our geographical vicinity in DC. We did one to celebrate the anniversary of women’s suffrage last August. We did one on what it means to say libertarianism is consent culture. We did one about communicating ideas of liberty through video. And we’ve got a lot of them planned for this upcoming year, starting in January and going through most of the months of the year. So we’re really excited about those.
Kat: Yes, and we also launched a swag shop, where you can get really cool stuff like Liz’s mug, my mug, this shirt right here, “girls just want to have fundamental rights.”
Liz: Yeah, it’s not all our logo. There are some sort of general libertarian feminist slogans and things.
Kat: Yeah, definitely. So we have a lot of really cool stuff and you can buy it and it’ll help support us in the work that we’re doing.
Liz: Towards the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we started trying to branch out to other avenues—the swag shop is one of them. We also just kept hearing from people asking about how they could be involved with us when we weren’t actually doing any events and, you know, right away we didn’t, we didn’t know. Then we decided to launch a video contest, which would give us a chance to harness all the great ideas and creativity of other people who are were also just stuck at home and locked down. So we launched that in the spring. Kat, you want to tell them a little bit about that?
Kat (15:20): Yeah, so it was really cool. So we gave folks to late spring, early summer to submit videos, either responding to a series of prompts that we gave them, or just on general libertarian feminist topics. And we actually got way more videos than we were expecting to get. They were all just really different and cool and interesting. And you can watch some of them on our YouTube channel actually.
And we had this awesome panel of judges who watched them all, including Remy Munasifi, who makes videos for reason TV and also is pretty well known on YouTube. I think he’s got the Go Remy channel where he does parody videos, which I find very funny. And then we also had Terry Kibby who is the co-founder and chief executive officer Free the People, which is an organization that she runs with her husband, Matt Kibbe, and they have a bunch of awesome viral videos about libertarianism and liberty ideas, and they do interviews with folks and things like that. And we also had Jo Jensen, who’s currently an impact producer with the production company Just Add Firewater. And she actually holds the, I think 2012 Guinness world record for having the most people who showed up at a premiere for a movie. She’s also, she’s done a lot of award winning films and lots of cool stuff like that. And we also had two members of the Feminists for Liberty Board of Directors, including Avens O’Brien, who runs the Not That Kind of Feminist group on Facebook which is pretty cool, you guys should check it out. And Avens also known for her speaking engagements and for taking photos at liberty conferences and events all around the world. And Jaclyn Boudreau, who used to produce videos for learn Liberty and is now at the Pacific Legal Foundation where she’s helped create a bunch of award-winning films that really humanize Supreme court cases—and these are good. I know I said, Supreme court, it makes it sound boring, but these are like actually good films. Yeah.
Liz: Seeing all of [the video contest entries] really inspired us to start this video series because, you know, there are a lot of people that were just sort of talking directly to their camera and it was like, okay, if other people can do this, we can do this, which is something we’ve been putting off doing for a long time.
Kat: Definitely. And we’re going to try to keep all these videos short and focused, which admittedly, we’re both not so great at, especially when we get together and we get giggly and we get off topic and we talk about 10 different things and leap from point A to point C and we forget what we’re talking about and everyone else who’s around us is like, what? what?… so we’re going to try not to do that. But the idea for these Kat and Liz Talk About videos is that we’re just going to give you bite-sized answers to libertarian feminist questions. And it’s gonna be everything from why capitalism and markets help women to how sex and gender impact society or impact policy.
Liz: Country music!
Kat: We’ve both got a lot of thoughts about country music, good and bad
Liz: Sex work, the internet criminal justice reform, relationships—
Kat: Yeah, so, this is going to be fun
Liz: Uh, sexual harassment in the liberty movement, trad culture, 90 feminism. We’ve got a lot of good stuff planned you guys.
Kat: So much. So please like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on social media and share this with your friends.
Liz: And tell what you think and what you talk about.
Kat: Yeah. And so we’re just really excited to keep talking to you guys. Thank you for watching.
