Naming is never neutral. The words we use determine what becomes visible, what becomes normalized, and what disappears from view.

Take incest, for example. For a long time, sexual violence has been hidden behind a load of gender-neutral and anodyne terms such as child sexual abuse (CSA) and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). These terms can be useful in some contexts, but euphemistic language can also do important cultural work: it can make violence sound more clinical, abstract, and impersonal, separating the act from the relationships and structures of power in which it occurs—and from the perpetrators responsible for it.

Think of the phrase “date rape,” for example, a term coined in 1987 by psychologist Mary Koss to describe acquaintance rape. As Gloria Steinem once quipped, before we had Koss’s term, we called acquaintance rape “just life.” Life is not prosecutable; date rape is.

So language is not simply a matter of vocabulary. The terms we use help determine what a society is able to recognize, discuss, and act upon. They can clarify responsibility, or they can obscure it. They can make certain experiences legible, or they can render them invisible.

That is one of the larger questions I explore in the book: how language, institutional authority, and systems of knowledge interact to shape what societies recognize as truth.

I wanted to examine the ways institutions and systems of authority shape what we understand to be true about sexual violence, how that knowledge is produced, and whose voices are included or excluded from it.

By following the history of suppression of incest, we can see how medical, legal, psychological, and cultural institutions have defined the ways sexual violence is recognized and understood. We can also see how institutional interests can influence what becomes accepted as evidence and whose testimony is treated as credible.

Calling the book a manifesto acknowledges 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 differently about how knowledge is constructed—and about what happens when the institutions charged with responding to sexual violence become part of the problem.
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.

We tend to think of knowledge as something that simply accumulates—that facts are discovered, evidence is evaluated, and eventually we arrive at the truth. But institutions play an enormous role in determining what gets recognized as evidence in the first place, whose testimony is considered credible, and which interpretations become authoritative.

When I began researching the history behind the book, I was struck by the extent to which medical, legal, psychological, and cultural institutions have had the authority to determine what counts as evidence, whose testimony is considered credible, and which explanations become accepted as truth.

A notable instance is Sigmund Freud. As a young, ambitious physician, Freud spent his early career listening to young upper- and middle-class white women tell him about incestuous attacks by their fathers or father surrogates. Freud recognized the psychic impact of these experiences and presented his findings at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Vienna. But when his ideas were met with silence—and especially after the head of the Department of Psychiatry warned him against publishing “fairy tales”—Freud was mortified.

In the face of this rebuke, Freud renounced his “erroneous” ideas, revised his theory, renamed it the “seduction theory,” and eventually blamed daughters for lying about their innocent fathers. Instead of being rejected by the professional society he longed to be part of, Freud’s revised ideas helped secure his place within the emerging field of psychoanalysis.

For me, the significance of this history is not simply Freud. It reveals how institutional authority can determine which accounts become knowledge and which are dismissed. Incest makes that process particularly visible, but the implications extend to how we understand sexual violence more broadly.

We tend to think of medical, legal, psychological, and other institutions as neutral arbiters—as systems whose job is to discover facts, evaluate evidence, and respond appropriately to harm. But institutions are also systems of power. They have histories, assumptions, professional interests, and established ways of determining what counts as legitimate knowledge.

The medical establishment, for example, has often interpreted the distress and anger experienced by girls subjected to sexual violence as a disease or disorder. First, it was hysteria. The psychic distress presented by girls who experienced incestuous and other forms of sexual 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 sexual violence does—it can destroy a victim’s lifeworld. But what we need to recognize is that interpretive frameworks are not neutral. They can shift attention away from the social and political context in which violence occurs and make the work of remediation the victim’s responsibility.

This is one of the larger questions I explore in the book: how do systems of knowledge shape what we see and what we fail to see? When we make the person who experiences violence the focus of the problem, we can eclipse the perpetrator and the larger structures of power that make the violence possible.

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 historical willingness to do harm, even when very young girls are involved.
• The legal establishment’s willingness to protect established authority and institutional interests, sometimes at enormous cost to those who report violence.
• The system’s brazen, calculated drive to preserve its own version of the truth; its determination to control the narrative and define what counts as credible knowledge.
• The way shame functions as a tool of systemic control over girls and 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.

Institutional trust depends, in part, on how institutions produce and evaluate knowledge.

We tend to assume that if information exists, it will eventually produce understanding and, ultimately, change. History suggests otherwise. What matters is not only what information exists, but who has the authority to interpret it, whose testimony is believed, what counts as evidence, and which institutions have the power to establish the dominant narrative.

That is one reason I use the history of incest as a case study. It makes these dynamics unusually visible. We can trace how medical, legal, psychological, and cultural institutions have shaped what sexual violence means, how it is recognized, and how people who experience it are understood.

And those questions extend far beyond sexual violence. Any society concerned with justice has to ask who gets to produce knowledge, who gets believed, whose experiences count, and what happens when institutions lose the trust of the people they are supposed to serve.

Actually, yes. We talk a lot about female shame, but we rarely examine how it 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 father’s tacit sexual ownership of his 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 of the politics of shame is essential to exposing the suppression of incest and reducing all forms of sexual violence against girls and women.