Feminist author Elissa Bassist on how warping our voices leads to physical pain & longing

Episode 27 Feminist author Elissa Bassist discusses her experiences with longing while warping her voice in academia, relationships, and medical settings. She shares her two-year journey with physical pain misunderstood and dismissed by many doctors and how it highlights the internalized patriarchy that leads women to suppress their voices.

Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and author of Hysterical, a semifinalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. Her next book, INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers, is coming in 2026. Learn more about Elissa's writing and courses she teaches at www.elissabassist.com

 In this episode, (in order) we talked about: 

*How patriarchy has taught women to suppress their voice

*Her journey trying to find a diagnosis for her physical pain

*How medical community makes it difficult to acknowledge sexual violence

*Learning to love her voice 

*Why she is learning to ditch men who think she’s asking for too much 

*Her new book, Inside Jokes, with Caitlin Kunkel

*Advice she has for women on reclaiming their voice

Quotes

"Longing is obsessive liking that feels like love but isn’t because it’s one sided. It feels like this encompassing feeling that completely hijacks every other feeling and thought. It feels like a virus."

“I was further diagnosed with an obsessive fear of saying the wrong thing that made me compulsively edit, censor and silence myself, and that had manifested into physical pain. And I was like, 'That sounds like magic!' And then the more research I did, the more I saw that repressed emotional pain can become physical pain. We can make ourselves sick. So, in getting my voice back, I was in less and less pain.”

“I first actively remember suppressing and warping my voice to get this one particular boy to love me back. And with your voice goes your personality, your identity, your sense of self, your agency, your independence. There's so much wrapped up in voice…It seemed like just something easy to do that would get him to love me, and it did not work. It just ended up making myself sick, ultimately."

“Longing is so generative. And one of my students just told me recently, a crush makes you creative. And I was like, oh yes! That's why I feel like it lights me up. It makes me feel alive. It's my best writing. I learned to write because of this person. I also learned to lose my voice because of this person.”

“I just wanted to play this game, to never have the game end, but I still wanted to win the game, and I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else, and to him especially, that I could win him. But at the same time, he was this unwinnable object.” 

“Pain makes you so desperate for definition that you'll take any definition. When I got this definition of 'shredded cervix…like you have given vaginal birth,' I was like, 'Oh my God! …. I can now tell people what had happened to me.'”

“It got to a point where, when nobody else believes you, you stop believing yourself. So I finally had this acknowledgement, which was also proof.”

“I feel like when you're longing, you're hoping someone's gonna make you whole… And once you win, you can finally accept yourself. And you're never going to get that from longing…There's no reward. There's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow because there is no end.”

“I just want people to be crazy, be dramatic, be emotional, be too much. I feel like the lie that we have been fed just benefits people who aren't us, and that we have to stop shrinking ourselves, making ours