LitHERacy: An Australian Podcast for Young Women

Online, a predator doesn’t look like a stranger, they look like a friend your age who finally gets you. Kayelene Kerr spent 21 years as a WA Police detective investigating sexual crimes against children, and the number she wants every family to know is this: in a gaming chat, the average time from first hello to high-risk grooming is 45 minutes. She walks Maddie through exactly how it happens — the compliments, the gift cards, the slide into private chat — and exactly what to do the moment so...

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...