RTL Episode 68: The Reframing Revolution with Michelle Kennedy

On this episode of Responding to Life, I am joined by Michelle Kennedy. Michelle is the founder and CEO of Peanut, one of the fastest-growing apps for women. Peanut is the first online community to connect women throughout all stages of womanhood from trying to conceive, pregnancy, motherhood and into menopause.

Having worked in social discovery for ten years, Michelle has unprecedented experience and understanding of the safety and growth components of building a social network for women and continues to execute on her mission to make Peanut the leading network to connect women when they need each other most.

Tune in to hear us discuss:

The mission of Peanut and how the app connects women throughout all stages of womanhoodHow Peanut creates a safespace for women to find friendship, support and connectionPeanut's new initiative, The Reframing Revolution, and why it's important.

@michellekennedylon
@peanut
https://www.peanut-app.io/

Episode 68 Transcript

Josephine Atluri (00:08):

Welcome to the show, Michelle. I am so excited to finally be speaking with you.

Michelle Kennedy (00:13):

Thank you so much for having me. So happy to be here.

Josephine Atluri (00:16):

So as an intro to all of our listeners, Michelle began her career as an M&A lawyer at leading international firm Mishcon de Reya, and later joined the dating app Badoo, where she rose to deputy CEO During her tenure at Badoo, she was integral to an inaugural board member of Bumble. From here you started to see some issues on mainstream social media that inspired you to create Peanut. So Michelle, please tell us about your inspiration and the concerns that you found looking on social media.

Michelle Kennedy (00:47):

So Peanut is really about having a safe space for women to find friendship and support and connection. And so what we decided to do was build this really around key life stages of womanhood. So whether that is women who are trying to conceive who are pregnant who are thinking just generally about their fertile health and fertility options, whether they're new moms moms or more recently we've included for women who are going through peri or postmenopausal. It's really about how do women have conversations, have a safe space, feel uninhibited about what they're saying and sharing in a way that means that they don't have to be living their best life - hope you are - but if you are, there is another platform where you can share all those beautiful pictures. What we are about is a bit more honest talk, women being completely real and supportive and that was just really driven from my own personal experience of not having that place. But for Peanut, where do you go to have these conversations? It's not that you're having it on your Instagram you're not looking at this kind of content on TikTok certainly not going on Twitter to kind of bear your soul to the world. So where are you meant to have and find these connections and have this support? So that was peanut.

Josephine Atluri (02:12):

Well, as I was telling you before we began to record that, I have hosted a number of conversations on the app about my mindfulness journal for parents booked last year. And I have to say it was such a beautiful place to connect with women and it was during the heart of the pandemic so it was especially even more so in a girl to people being able to stay connected to one another. And it was wonderful to be able to answer all of these great questions that they had. And you're right, I don't think half of the questions that I was asked would've been something I would've fielded on my social media account. It was too personal, but this created that safe space and so that was what was achieved there.

Michelle Kennedy (03:00):

I think if you take out some kind of the dynamics that exist on other social platforms, if you take out some of the dynamics which exist around trying to show the life that you live or trying to be a certain person who you might be, but we are multifaceted as women, right? We wake up one morning, it's very different to the woman that we woke up the day before and we might wake up tomorrow. We have different views, we have different moods. And being able to be honest and speak frankly about that encourages other women to be candid. And that candor, I think lends itself to really beautiful is the word beautiful conversations and it's women being vulnerable and being funny and being sarcastic and all of those wonderful facets of our personality that we don't necessarily share with everyone and we don't necessarily share on all types of social media. I think we see the full spectrum on peanut. You can be vulnerable, you can be assertive, you can feel crappy, you can feel incredible and everything in between, it's all supported on Peanut. And I think that's quite a unique take.

Josephine Atluri (04:19):

It really is. And it was such a beautiful place to discover. So as you were saying, it's a place where users can ask questions and find support, a safe space to find and meet women nearby, which back in the day, I have kids ranging in ages from 11 months up to 15. So with the older set, I would have these mom groups that I would go to. But when you're in a new, we moved out to LA and it was hard to really find my footing and find my group as it was. Peanut is a wonderful way to connect. And I saw that not only do you have those group chat functions, those talks, but then there was also this other component where it was matching me up with local moms who shared the same interests. And I would love for you to just talk a little bit about that because I thought that was so unique and so interesting to be able to meet other moms in that way.

Michelle Kennedy (05:20):

When I had my son, I have two children and my son is eight, but my daughter's two. So it's a big age gap also. And when I had my son, none of my girlfriends were having babies. That was just not anything. They weren't even in serious relationships, they were dating and I was kind of living a completely different life. And that in itself is quite isolating and lonely. It's 2:00 AM you're looking on other social media, your girlfriends are in the club and you're like, What am I doing? How did my life change so much? And you know, feel very lonely and vulnerable at that moment. Similarly, middle of the afternoon, midweek, your girlfriends are working and you're like, where is everyone and what am I meant to do with this tiny person who doesn't give a tremendous amount back at that point in their life?

(06:09):

And you're not going to the playground cuz what are you going to the playground with a newborn for? And there's all these other factors at play. And then even if you do get to go to the mom groups it's very kind of baby dependent. My son, you wouldn't know it now cause he's obviously perfect, but at the time he would be the baby who would wa and you would have to dash out, you would have to make a mad run from that mom group because he'd vomited or he'd done a poop and the diaper was everywhere. There was always one of those moments where I was like, how do I get that woman's number because she looks cool and I wanna hang out with her, but how do I even get to that point? It's awkward and you don't wanna get rejected and all of those things.

(06:52):

So I'd been working in the dating industry, it was kind of a beautiful moment of being able to say, okay, what if I take the algorithms which connect people romantically and just use it for platonic friendship for women who really have that need. And now that applies to women who are trying to conceive, If you've been going through IVF for five years, the chances of being able to find someone else who understands that journey. And it's very specific journey. It are really hard. But if we can help you find that, similarly, if you've got a two year old and you just moved to the area, you don't know anyone, what do you do? How do you find those friends? So peanut much really been about breaking barriers. It's really fun. It's a bit, you know, can swipe to find friends and it's gamified and that's one part of the app. And then the other part is the kind of groups and functions. So live audio, talking to women, real time, live conversations, and then groups.

Josephine Atluri (07:52):

Well I'm glad that you touched upon the topic of IVF because the app, it goes from trying to conceive into pregnancy, into parenthood and then into menopause. And myself, part of the conversation on Responding to Life podcast is also centered around trying to conceive in IVF as that is part of my background and what I like to help people with. And so I did actually do a number of talks on IVF as well. And so that brings me to what about other sensitive topics that peanut covers? And one of the things that was noted was that peanut also will go in and open up conversation about sensitive issues such as stillbirth, birth defects and other medical complications. So I'd love for you to touch upon that and how peanut creates this safe space to be able to discuss these topics that historically have been taboo to even mention or to even acknowledge that you went through.

Michelle Kennedy (09:03):

I think that there is so much mystery in taboo shrouded around women's health and women's lives that when you start to unpick it, it's actually maddening If you think about these things that happen to so many women, and I'll push deep underground so we don't talk about it. And that might be miscarriage, that might be fertility challenges, that might be as you said, birth defects. There is such a huge gambit. And then another layer on top of that is our sexuality and being able to be empowered and talk about our sex lives and enjoying sex or not enjoying sex. And that's another layer. And then there's another layer on top of that, which is around how we describe our bodies and how we talk about them and how others talk about our bodies and describe them. So there's so much to unpick that I really feel we have permission from the women that use peanuts talk about anything.

(09:56):

And I take that privilege very, very seriously because who else can say the stuff that we can say, I'm not sure that other platforms can go out there and say, Do you know what, we disagree. It's not okay that women don't have a place to talk about one in four women having a miscarriage and no one really talking about it. It's not okay for women to talk about to not have a place to talk about the fact that they're going through perimenopause age 35 plus and people are putting it down to early onset dementia. That's not okay. And we are here to say it's not okay and we can give women a platform to talk about it. So there's nothing that we won't talk about. And insofar as it's empowering to women and it gives them a platform and a voice and a way to talk about things that matter to them and are concerning to them. And I think we can only do that because the women who use peanut are so brave that they'll talk about it and then we can give them the mic and amplify their voices to say, Look, we hear you. We know that's an issue. Let us talk about it more widely.

Josephine Atluri (11:01):

I love that. I love how you are providing that platform for people to be able to feel comfortable and normalize that conversation and destigmatize it because it can be an extremely lonely place and you name it any part of your female life. And so it's beautiful that you can, I think one of the things that I thought was really cool was that Peanut was hoping to have three generations of women in the same household using the app, but for different reasons and different aspects of their life. And that to me is amazing because I find with a lot of my friends one of the common things that we talk about when we start a new season of life is I wish that my mom or my aunts would've told me that. Or about marriage, about pregnancy, about labor and delivery. I mean all the things that just weren't talked about. And so now this is just this amazing place that I and myself and other people finally get to talk about this stuff. And so it's just so great

Michelle Kennedy (12:11):

100% even when I think about menopause. And the only reason we really built for that was cause we could see women talking about it on peanut. They were like, I'm having night sweats or I'm, I've got memory loss and I think I've got Alzheimer's, dementia, all of the, and other women coming in and being like, Girl, you've got perimenopause. Go and get your hormones checked. So it's the fact that we don't even know what the symptoms are to look out for it. It's just to me it's so crazy that we are living in a world where we are controlled by how little we don't know about our bodies. And being given the freedom to talk about it, knowledge is freedom and being able to identify what's happening in your body gives you control but it gives you control, not other people control over you. And I think that's really important.

(13:03):

So yeah, absolutely. The wider vision of Peanut is that any woman, regardless of your life stage can all come to Peanut. And that might be a ENT girl, that adolescence that might be menopause, that might be later life. But you should all have a place where you can come and have those conversations that women need to have. Cuz we need to have it. Otherwise we end up Googling weird shit at 2:00 AM and reading some deep dark forum that we would never use in any other part of our life. But all of a sudden, cuz it's about us, we'll do it cuz we don't wanna talk about it openly. So I wanna drive all of that conversation above ground. None of that should be happening on shameful 2:00 AM Google searches.

Josephine Atluri (13:48):

Absolutely. And really what that all screams to me is empowerment. I mean that's what it's providing when every time I hop onto the app. And another thing that you mentioned is just, it provides you with agency as well because you don't know what to ask if you don't know. So you can't certainly go to your gys office and ask about hormones and hormone imbalances if you didn't even know it was a thing, if it didn't even feel applicable to you at the time. And I think that's the great thing about just popping into seeing the different titles of conversations that are coming up because it's kind of like I'll look through there and I'll see, oh, I didn't know that was a thing. I should pop in and see what that's all about. And lo and behold, it's something that wasn't even on my radar that maybe needs to to be on my radar. <laugh>.

Michelle Kennedy (14:44):

Exactly. And you know what? We are curious. Humans are curious women, we are the most curious. We wanna know stuff. It's just that it's many on many levels. It's been kept for us, from us because we didn't have a seat at the table before. And now we gradually are starting to have the seat at the table and we're starting to uncover all the things that we didn't know about everything, about how drugs have been manufactured and not tested on women and all of these different crazy things. As you start to unpick it, you're like, wait, agency is exactly the word I would use. You want to know these things. But we're also curious, I wanna hear what other women are doing in their sex life or how they're navigating their relationship now that they're part of partners Change, job, whatever it is, we're curious and you learn by osmosis and hearing the conversations and sometimes it's escapism as well.

(15:40):

And that's like I'm all here for it. It doesn't have to be serious all the time. It can be bit of fun, bit of gossip. All of that stuff is very, very welcome. It's just about you might not always what you read by the way, and that's fine too. Move along move on to the next. You have agency that in that respect too. It's just about knowing that when you're on peanut, women are there for the same purpose. We're all there with the same goal, which is discuss, support, care, all of those things. And in whatever that might mean to you.

Josephine Atluri (16:14):

Yeah, absolutely. And so last year Peanut introduced the renaming revolution, which I just loved because it addressed the stigma of terminology that was associated with things like fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood. And there were definitely some words in there that I wish people knew to say, especially when it came to infertility or fertility and pregnancy loss and miscarriage. That as I was going through that in my own life, really would've appreciated people to have known that, You know what, maybe change it to this phrase or change it to that. And this year Peanut is also coming out with a new initiative in honor of Mother's Day. You're on this mission to celebrate all forms of motherhood and how it is represented. And you're introducing this initiative called the Reframing Revolution. So Michelle, please tell us all about it.

Michelle Kennedy (17:14):

So as you said, last year was about the renaming revolution. So changing words that are commonly used kind of against us words and phrases, medical words and phrases that we didn't even create but are shrouded in shame and not representative. The reframing revolution is the next kind of frontier in terms of how often have you been to a doctor's office and you've looked at something, an image, and the image of the woman who is pregnant or trying or whatever, doesn't look anything like you either from an ethnicity perspective, from a body shape perspective, just from how your body is perspective how often have you looked at your own body and wondered whether it's normal because the only image that you've ever seen in some textbook from the 1970s at school looks like a certain way and your body doesn't really look like that. So what if we recreated all of that imagery that is associated with women's bodies And we showed women all normal, by the way, all forms normal.

(18:21):

And yes, this is what bruising from IVF injections looks like on every skin tone. This is what a C-section scar looks like on all different body shapes. From a scar perspective, this is what all women's LABA looks like in every skin tone. And by the way, some have different LABA to us, we're all different. And so it's really about making sure that you see images and you are like, I see myself represented there. And we're very used to seeing a lot of this stuff insofar as it's related to beauty campaigns or even clothing and apparel. Now we are seeing a lot more diversity in that respect. But what about when it actually comes to what matters in terms of our bodies and how that's represented, particularly in a medical setting. It's kind of frightening that we've never seen this. What about a woman who's about to breastfeed and she's never seen her breast in her skin tone represented in anything that she's been provided by her ob g yn. I mean, it's unacceptable, really. And again, it's another layer of pushing us down, control making us not speak out so we don't question these things. So I feel I'm so proud of what we've done. I'm so proud of the work, I'm so grateful to all of the women who gave us input to do it. And I really hope we have a massive change as a result in the way that we saw people adopting new language from the reframing reaming revolution. I hope the reframing revolution does the same thing.

Josephine Atluri (20:02):

Well, I have to say it was very profound to go through the images because you're right. And it's even something that you don't even realize when you go into a doctor's office that I am not as an Asian woman, I'm not represented in these pictures. And maybe we've just become so numb to it that you know, don't really realize how it's affecting you. But it does by not having that representation. And in terms of people of color here in America we represent four out of 10 Americans are people of color, and yet we're not represented in those images. And in that discussion of how we all look different and how our bodies are different. And it's funny, I will be very candor about how I reacted to more so body images. And this just is very telling of what just media in general can do to one's perspective in mind. It was a little shocking for me, but also refreshing. But also there was a moment of judgment, but then also just all these crazy emotions coming out when I would see the different body images. But it was great because it made me question why did I have these thoughts?

Michelle Kennedy (21:36):

Yeah, absolutely. So I have to say that when I saw the final images, I was really emotional. I cried because and obviously it's not a surprise for me, I, we've been working on it for a while, so I've been seeing it as it's been evolving. But I still had that reaction because it does make you question, why am I shocked that I've just seen the laba? Why am I shocked that I'm seeing that image? Why am I having that moment? And the reason that we are is cuz we are not shown it. And the only reason we're not it is because it hasn't suited a narrative or it hasn't suited the majority. Well, that's not acceptable. So I feel really proud of it. It is shocking in part by the way, you will see things you haven't seen before, but it's not shocking in an obscene way. It's shocking because you haven't seen that image before and we haven't been presented with that. And that is a shame. And I'm really, I'm delighted to hear that kind of rollercoaster of emotions. Cause I've had the same myself every time I look at it.

Josephine Atluri (22:38):

Yeah, no, it's definitely a moment of a realization for myself, and I definitely believe that people will walk away with that. And so the hope is that you will be able to provide this to medical practitioners and other media outlets and just people in general so that it becomes more mainstream to see these images and see the representation out there.

Michelle Kennedy (23:04):

I really want someone to Google IVF injection bruising, or is my labia normal or any of these, and I want them to see an image that looks like them and it doesn't look like something that we all saw in those early textbooks. It looks like them. And I think if we achieve that, if we achieve medical professionals questioning those pamphlets that we've all taken home and looked at and just accepted blindly and it makes 'em think, hang on, should we choose a different image that will be success?

Josephine Atluri (23:45):

That definitely will be. And I can't wait to share it with the wider audience once it becomes available, because it's definitely worth the conversation. It's definitely great to amplify this messaging and these images of what is just outside of what we're used to seeing as normal. Yeah, right. Yeah. I could keep speaking with you forever, Michelle, I think. I love what you're doing, but I'd love to end our show with you letting the listeners out there who are interested in finding a community via the peanut app, what would be some quick ways for them to get started and make the most out of the opportunities you've created on Peanut?

Michelle Kennedy (24:30):

So it depends what you're looking for. If you wanna find a friend, come to peanut, join, make an account and just see other women around you. Choose a life stage and you'll see other women at a similar life stage to you. The algorithms are very smart, so you'll always find someone who is kind of in your proximity, who is around the same stage as you. You're there for community. Go and listen to one of the live pods. There are so many that are happening every day. Some of them are led by experts, some of them are led by users. They're just real time conversation. Women are on there talking about true crime podcasts. They listen to right through to their relationships, whatever it is. You can go there. And then there are groups and there are groups for everything. And that might be life stage specific, that might be geography specific, that might be interest based. We've got Game Iams, we've got everything you can think of. It's all on Peanut. It's really just about if you are looking for a place to find your crew, they're probably on peanut

Josephine Atluri (25:28):

Wonderful

Michelle Kennedy (25:29):

Sales pitch. I love it. I'm gonna steal that myself.

Josephine Atluri (25:33):

Well, I definitely encourage everyone to give it peanut app a shot. It is a wonderful place for conversation and to meet new people, and I always end my interviews, Michelle, with asking my guests to list one gratitude for today.

Michelle Kennedy (25:50):

The gratitude I have actually is that as I was talking to you, my son stuck his head around the corner and showed me that he's just got a little award at Karate and slowly dipped away again. So it's probably firstly the most considerate and quiet he's been in entering when I'm doing something for work. But secondly that I'm fortunate enough that my boy can do something like karate. It's amazing, and have the privilege to go to those kinda clubs.

Josephine Atluri (26:19):

Well, that is beautiful. I love his consideration. Definitely <laugh>,

Michelle Kennedy (26:24):

Very grateful.

Josephine Atluri (26:26):

Well, they, I am grateful for today's conversation and all that Peanut is doing to revolutionize the way we look at womanhood and the way we speak about womanhood. So it was a pleasure for everyone listening, I will definitely have links to peanut app as well as the reframing revolution once it becomes available. Thank you again, Michelle. It is such a pleasure.

Michelle Kennedy (26:49):

Thank you so much.

Josephine Atluri (26:51):

Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Responding to Life podcast. For more info on today's guest, check out the episode summary. I'd love to connect with you more, so be sure to check out my website, responding to live podcast.com for links to previous episodes, articles I've written and interviews I've done on mindfulness, meditation, infertility, and parenting. You'll also find free video meditations on my site and on my YouTube channel, Josephine Atluri Meditation. If you'd like to book a one-on-one session with me, you can do so on the website. You can also follow me on Instagram @josephineratluri for daily inspiration and mindfulness tips. Finally, I'd love for you to join my Facebook groups to connect with a supportive community and receive greater insight on how to incorporate mindfulness into your life. Check out the Mindful Parenting Group with Josephine Atluri, or the Empowering Your Fertility Group. Thanks again for tuning in today. I look forward to sharing more conversations with you on how to respond to life in a more mindful way.