First, I want to make clear that it was important for me to use the word incest in the title and throughout the text. Why? For a long time, we have hidden incest behind a load of gender-neutral and anodyne terms such as child sexual abuse (CSA) and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). But incest is a word that speaks truth to power. Unlike the euphemisms and less offensive terms so often used, incest points directly at what is being described: a sexual violence crime that indicts fathers, and The Father, the patriarchal system that grants fathers (and father surrogates) license to commit sexual violence against their daughters.

Second, you simply can’t address a concern without naming it. Take the phrase “date rape,” coined in 1987 by psychologist Mary Koss to describe acquaintance rape. As Gloria Steinem once quipped, before we had language for date rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual violence, such behavior was often called “just life.” Life is not prosecutable; date rape is.

Finally, for some, the word incest still evokes latent fears inculcated for millennia by those who wish to keep incest taboo. Fears about social dissolution and such. As anthropologists have shown, outrageous fears such as these are typically deployed to maintain social order through silence. But if we want to get anywhere with this fight, we need to de-sensitize ourselves to the word and start naming fathers’ sexual violence committed against their daughters for what it is: incest.

Also, I wanted to write something that doesn’t just ask for awareness or incremental change, but invites a collective re-examination of the institutional power that has engineered—and has a stake in—the eclipsing of incest from our collective consciousness. Calling the book a manifesto is my way of acknowledging its intent to provoke thought, raise difficult questions, and encourage meaningful engagement. My decision to use “manifesto” doesn’t mean that the book is definitive or dogmatic. It’s not. My goal, instead, is for the book to spark conversation, unsettle assumptions, and invite people to think about incest—and other forms of sexual violence—differently.

I’ve already mentioned how the euphemistic language we so often encounter today neutralizes incest. But there are many other ways that we distort the reality of incest; I’ll mention just one here.

Throughout history, our culture’s epistemological stakeholders, by which I refer primarily to those in the medical and legal professions, have worked overtime to create interpretative language that deflects attention away from the perpetrators. The medical establishment, for example, has done this by interpreting the distress and anger incestuously exploited girls experience as a disease. First, it was hysteria. The psychic distress presented by girls who experienced incestuous violence originated in their unruly and disordered uteruses. Now, we generally talk about girls’ disordered amygdalae, which mainstream traumatologists tell us are likewise confused and malfunctioning. I am not denying the harm that incestuous violence does—it can destroy girls’ lifeworlds. But what we need to realize is that the disease model shifts attention away from the misogynistic and sexist social and political context in which incest occurs and makes the work of remediating incest the daughter’s responsibility. In other words, when we make the girl the focus of the crime, we eclipse the father from our view and deflect attention away the patriarchal society that grants fathers license to commit sexual violence against their daughters. Using this model, the stigma of incest falls on the daughters, not the system that permits the violence.

There are so many things that surprised me that it would be impossible to list them all here, so let me just mention the first four that come to mind.

The medical establishment’s callous willingness to do harm, even when very young girls are involved.

The legal establishment’s willingness to protect fathers, no matter the cost to anyone else.

The system’s brazen, calculated drive to preserve its own version of the truth; its ruthless determination to do whatever it takes to control the narrative.

The way shame functions as a tool of systemic control over all women.

First, as a feminist writer and teacher, my purpose has always been to educate, advocate, and, hopefully, at least in some small way, liberate. I hope I’ve done the same in She’s Such a Liar.

Second, although I love research, I hate jargon. Academic jargon creates barriers to understanding and excludes non-experts. So one of my goals for She’s Such a Liar was to keep it free of jargon and accessible.

Finally, I am one of the few lucky women in the world—my degrees are exceptional, not because of what they are but because so few girls and women have access to education. Most of the world’s illiterate people are girls and women. I write and teach in full knowledge that the majority of female voices in the world will never be heard. Because I can write at all—and right now I think of all the ways women have been silenced and prevented from writing and continue to be silenced—because my words are read and taken seriously, my work is part of something larger than my own life. That I can write and teach is a responsibility and a privilege.

One last note: when I read from my work or conduct a class, I am always searching for teachers in those listeners who can broaden my scope, help me widen and deepen my understanding of my concerns and myself, the ego that always speaks through the words. For political correctness? In part, I suppose. But more to keep me from becoming ignorant, solipsistic, lazy, and dishonest.

I think the response that has most surprised me is that some, even in the face of factual evidence, insist that we’ve evolved beyond incest—as if it’s a relic of some primitive past, something that no longer happens in “civilized” society. But the data tell a very different story.

As for what this says about the cultural moment we’re in—I think we’re living in a time of profound contradiction. On one hand, we have unprecedented access to information, growing awareness of sexual violence against girls and women, and more language to talk about the harm it does than we did even 10 years ago. On the other hand, we still see people in power facing serious allegations of sexual violence who continue to be embraced by large parts of the public. That dissonance suggests that understanding and acknowledgment are not the same as change. We may be more aware, but we’re still struggling to figure out what to do about what we know.

Actually, yes. We talk a lot about female shame, but we rarely examine how it actually works—how the entire patriarchal system depends on it, how it’s foundational to the material and institutional arrangements that uphold sexism and reproduce entrenched patterns of domination and subordination. But as I note in She’s Such a Liar, shame is a powerful tool for enforcing and reinforcing social norms; it operates as a systemic form of control that predates any individual experience of sexual violence. Shame’s silencing effect prevents girls and women from recognizing that the violence they have endured is not isolated, but part of a larger pattern. For example, in incest situations, by discouraging disclosure and solidarity, shame helps maintain a fathers’ tacit sexual ownership of their daughters and gender stratification. As such, the shaming of girls and women who have experienced incest and other forms of sexual violence relentlessly reinstates and legitimizes social injustice. I’ve argued that the shaming of girls and women makes male supremacy resilient beyond its ability to secure its own formal institutionalization in law and policy. If this is true, then a better understanding the politics of shame is essential to exposing the suppression of incest and reducing all forms of sexual violence against girls and women.