435 – Dorothy Littell Greco – Misogyny in America
The Desert Sanctuary
Feb 25
435 – Dorothy Littell Greco – Misogyny in America
435 – Dorothy Littell Greco – Misogyny in America

The Desert Sanctuary
Feb 25
This episode features author and photojournalist Dorothy Littell Greco, who draws on deep research, personal experience, and theological reflection to trace how misogyny persists—not as isolated prejudice, but as a shape-shifting system embedded in institutions, relationships, and everyday design.
Greco’s analysis reveals misogyny as a structural force that distorts healthcare, government, the workplace, media, the church, and intimate relationships—not through overt hostility alone, but through normalized biases, historical legacies like coverture, and contemporary failures like misdiagnosed heart attacks in women or the systemic underfunding of endometriosis. She highlights how evangelical leadership sometimes enables abuse through charisma-over-character standards, how rape culture thrives amid legal indifference and victim-blaming, and how even physical objects—from crash-test dummies to piano keyboards—are built for male bodies. Crucially, she shows how misogyny harms everyone: limiting men’s emotional capacity, distorting theology, and eroding trust in marriage. Her work insists that recognizing these patterns is the first step toward collective healing—and that real change requires both rigorous self-examination and institutional accountability.
00:00
00:00
Asking good questions and learning from women's stories is essential to confronting misogyny
03:09
03:09
Misogyny is the belief that men's ideas are more important than women's, influencing culture's laws and systems
06:03
06:03
The early New Testament church was innovative in its treatment of women, but over time reverted to male-dominated practices
09:26
09:26
Misogyny in church leadership manifests as dismissal of women’s questions and punitive responses to their assertiveness
15:46
15:46
Misogyny exists in six spheres: healthcare, workplace, government, entertainment and media, intimate relationships, and the church
21:51
21:51
Endometriosis remains severely under-researched and under-treated compared to male-related conditions like erectile dysfunction
25:07
25:07
Women with heart-attack symptoms are often sent for psych evals instead of blood tests
30:41
30:41
An MIT professor's baseless claim was used to keep women from voting
33:39
33:39
Only about 2–4% of rape cases are prosecuted while 95% of survivors tell the truth
42:47
42:47
Fewer than 50% of Academy Award winners pass the Bechdel test
45:45
45:45
Complementarian church teachings led to the woman feeling used and diminished intimacy, as true intimacy requires trust, honesty, and mutuality, contrary to the idea of men having a 'right' to sex