Subject To Power: Recent Episodes
Elle Kamihira
How did women of the world end up subjugated, exploited and at the bottom of all social orders? What is universal male domination doing to humanity and our planet? Host Elle Kamihira investigates with an international lineup of guests.
40 years ago, Jane Caputi wrote a brilliant book about serial sex killers - The Age of Sex Crime - which is as relevant today as it was in 1987. In the book, Jane analyzes the histories of well-known, individual serial sex killers, from Jack The Ripper to The Boston Strangler to Son of Sam to Ted Bundy and many more - and answers fundamental questions about how and why they came to be - and how they fit into our cultural narratives. Jane argues that far from being monstrous aberrations, serial sex murderers occupy a role in our patriarchal culture that is both accommodated and endorsed.
In this hour Elle talks with Jane about all aspects of serial sex killing; the folk hero appeal of serial sex killers, how sexual terror is used to preserve male power, how the serial killers, police and media co-create “monster genius mastermind" narratives and how these narratives fit hand in glove with a common collective male fantasy of hurting women.
We also talk about the real silencing of victims and how women everywhere are invited to identify with the serial killer’s victims, both in the real-life cases, then in the true crime media that retells the gruesome details, and then finally in the fictional movies, books and television that serves up an endless buffet of dead women, bloody sacrifices to male power.
EPISODE LINKS
Professor Jane Caputi
The Age Of Sex Crime
Are Women Human? by Catharine MacKinnon
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Abuse and systematic cruelty against women and children is common across the world, but the term torture is still reserved mostly for men - think political prisoners, prisoners of war, victims of evil regimes.
But guests on today’s episode, retired-community-nurses-turned-global-human-rights-activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have a plan - a 60-year plan - to broaden our understanding of torture to include women and children, and to get non-state torture recognized as a crime everywhere.
Jeanne and Linda spent their whole working lives as public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, providing womb-to-tomb care throughout their province. As nurses they came into contact with a lot of family violence and abuse of women and children - and advocating for and counseling victims were an essential part of their job and their personal mission.
But in 1993, Linda and Jeanne had a fateful encounter with a woman who reported being a victim of life-long systematic torture, and they soon realized that they were dealing with a very different category of harm - and this set their careers and their lives in a whole new direction.
The story of how Jeanne and Linda helped and cared for this torture victim, what they discovered about organized torture networks and perpetrators, how they created the model for understanding non-state torture as a phenomenon and as a crime - and how they became global activists in the process - is chronicled in their book Women Unsilenced.
In this hour Elle talks with Linda and Jeanne about their story, their decades of research and founding the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture - and how they used nursing science and an unshakable ethic of care to help victims break out of silence, to tell of their victimization, to escape, and to heal from their traumas.
EPISODE LINKS
Persons Against Non-State Torture website
Women Unsilenced
Healing
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
No matter how much the “family values” crowd wishes for women to “return home where they belong”, Linda Scott, renown expert on women’s economy and author of The Double X Economy, knows women’s economic empowerment has traversed past the point of no return. It is - in every way - too late. It is too late to force women out of the market economy and back into the private, domestic sphere - without widespread damage to all of society. Notably, a fact that is not stopping patriarchs from trying to shove women backwards.
In founding the concept of The Double X Economy, Linda revealed how women have been economically subjugated across the world and throughout history, demonstrating through extensive data and on-the-ground research how women have been systematically excluded from the entire financial order. Linda opens our eyes to the economic injustices women are subjected to around the globe, from corporate offices to rural farms, far beyond being denied paid work or being exploited for unpaid labor.
In this episode, Elle talks to Linda about patriarchy’s most powerful and enduring tool used to keep women out of power and away from agency - economic exclusion - and why it is that gender inequality is such a bad economic strategy, and gender equality is a perfect recipe for success - regardless of culture.
We talk about the far-reaching consequences of shutting women out, as well as the equally far-reaching positive impacts of lifting the constraints on women, also about our Chimpanzee-Bonobo deep past, our very dark present, and the exciting new project Linda is working on.
EPISODE LINKS
The Double X Economy
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
In 2026 the global surrogacy industry will grow to over 30 billion dollars. The manufacturing plants and raw materials that make this massive business possible are women's bodies, and the products being bought and sold are human babies.
This hugely profitable industry can only exist if a subset of women offer themselves up for highly invasive, completely unnatural, risky, and life-altering medical procedures resulting in pregnancy and birth, or alternatively “egg-harvesting” - all with little to no legal protection or oversight.
What motivates women to become surrogate mothers? What motivates women to have their eggs extracted for other women to “use”? What and who are the drivers behind the normalization of surrogacy?
We know that money plays a big part, both for the surrogate mothers and to the chain of people who profit from this human trade - the surrogacy agencies, doctors, clinics, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry - what we might call Big Fertility - but there are other factors at play besides money.
Guest on this episode, founder of Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Lexi Ellingsworth, has been investigating surrogacy and campaigned against surrogacy law reform in the UK for 7 years, where commercial surrogacy is still illegal but "altruistic" surrogacy is getting more and more common.
In her work to raise awareness around the mountains of ethical questions surrounding the practice of surrogacy in the UK and internationally, Lexi works closely with survivors of surrogacy and in this episode we get an inside view of the world of surrogate motherhood and the dangerously murky morality that surrogate mothers navigate on their often harrowing “journeys”.
We talk about how toxic empathy, low self-esteem and needing to prove you are a good person can lead some women to offer up their bodies for use. We talk about so-called reproductive privilege, the idea that “aren't you lucky you can do this without any help, you don't have to go to an IVF clinic, and you really should help other people who don't have the same luck as you”, as well as the use of human rights language such as Wombs Without Borders, “humanitarian surrogacy” and “fertility refugees”. We talk about the dehumanizing and highly manipulative language that is now being used to trivialize the whole biological act of becoming a mother into terms like “extreme babysitting” and “easy-bake oven” and what it means for women everywhere that we are creating a subclass of women who are used or useful for breeding for other people.
EPISODE LINKS
Stop Surrogacy Now UK
The Critic: Surrogacy Is Not a Human Right by Lexi Ellingsworth
The International Coalition Against Surrogate Motherhood
The Casablanca Declaration
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Much of today’s rise of violent misogyny can find its cultural traces in the witch hunts of old Europe and North America. And while many of us are casually aware of these historical events, our two guests on this episode, novelist Zoe Venditozzi and human rights attorney Claire Mitchell, spent the last seven years digging deep into their own country of Scotland’s prolific history of witch trials and executions - a history that was up to now virtually unknown.
Gifted storytellers and viciously funny, Claire and Zoe document their journey into this dark past in their fascinating new book How To Kill A Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women as well as on their hit podcast Witches of Scotland. Through a sharply feminist lens, Claire and Zoe unravel exactly how the witch craze kicked off, spread across Scotland, and was kept going for centuries, resulting in the torture and execution of over 4000 innocent people, most of whom were women.
In this episode we talk about all of their projects, including their legal campaign to bring justice to those accused, convicted, and executed under the The Witchcraft Act of 1563, about the creation of their Clan Witches of Scotland tartan (for sale on their website), the importance of remembering and memorializing, and also about making connections between those grim events and our present time - as the forces that were at play hundreds of years ago are very much alive today.
EPISODE LINKS
Witches of Scotland website
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Male-run totalitarian governments copy paste each other’s oppressive tactics; one aspiring dictator looks at what another tyrant is up to and adopts similar methods - and all seem to be different variations on the same theme - mainly to keep women vulnerable and under men’s control, and away from self-determination and any political power.
Guest on this episode, Li Wen, started out as a journalist and policy analyst in China and now lives in Germany where she hosts a wildly popular Chinese podcast called Seahorse Planet. Banned in China but globally popular, Seahorse Planet features critical and inspirational feminism, the type of women’s rights talk male-run totalitarian governments despise and forbid.
In this episode we talk about China’s u-turn on gender equality, the many social pressures women are subjected to now, including beauty duty, the marriage trap, discrimination in education and jobs market, and what its latest MeToo movement is accomplishing.
We talk about the huge ripple effects of China’s 35-year-long one child policy and compare notes between the US and China on the birth rate panic and each of our government’s desperate attempts to promote marriage and so-called family values.
We talk about what is considered a good and acceptable kind of feminism in China and the kind of feminism that can ruin your life - and how we, in this ultra-patriarchal world, build a more just social order and what that looks like.
EPISODE LINKS
Seahorse Planet Podcast
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
One of the main goals of Subject To Power is to create an international platform for women (and some men) from different cultures to come on and report on what is happening in their corner of the world, so that the rest of us can learn from them, and maybe heed some warnings.
It's easy to think that what happens in our own little bubble is unique, unique to our government, unique to our laws, to the way men behave in our particular country, unique to our cultural customs. But the more you listen to women in places elsewhere, the clearer it becomes that so many of the methods and tactics used to control women - are the same across nations, and are very predictable.
In this episode Elle talks to young Hungarian feminist Krisztina Les, about what her advocacy and activism for women’s rights in Hungary looks like, and all of what we could learn from what has unfolded there in the last 20 years.
It has never been more crucial that we look beyond our own country’s borders to see what might be ahead for women in our own countries. How democracy, basic freedoms, women’s rights, equality and whole value systems can be dismantled in a very short amount of time. And that none of it is guaranteed.
EPISODE LINKS
PATENT Association
FiLiA Hague Mothers
Telex: Expat mother who died in house fire in Budapest had been living in fear for a long time
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
For Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo, sauna is the medicine we need in these tormented times. “In the sauna you are brought into direct contact with the holy spirit. It's the alternative to the patriarchal church. It's the space of peace, of equality, of ritual and the sacredness that we have lost and are craving. It's a multidimensional healing space for the body, the spirit, and the mind.”
A researcher of women’s cultural studies and folklore, Northern women’s culture, goddess mythologies, Indigenous worldview and theory, modern matriarchal studies, the gift economy, and the bear religion, Kaarina has spent many years investigating the very old history of sauna and sweating cultures in Finland, in Old Europe and in Indigenous cultures in North America.
With her new book Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality, Kaarina explores the origins of pre-Christian, pre-patriarchal sauna as a sacred space for healing and rebirth, and how female symbols and the maternally perceived cosmos in past sweating cultures have been transformed.
In this episode we talk about the early religions that didn't require belief in an abstract god because they were based on mother earth and verifiable material reality. We talk about the patriarchal takeover of sacredness, the great cost of losing our embodiment and connection to the natural world, the power of feminist spirituality to reconnect our broken bonds, and how we embrace the darkness so we can be reborn in the spring.
EPISODE LINKS
Kaarina Kailo’s website
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
With male violence being an inescapable and world-shaping force, one that undermines democracy, equality and peace - how do we unpack and tease apart the ingredients that go into the making of men and male culture of dominance? How do we shake up and push for a cultural shift away from violent domination?
In this episode Elle talks with world-leading researcher and educator Michael Flood, who has spent his life doing exactly that - researching, writing and discussing men, masculinities, gender, violence against women, and maybe most importantly - violence prevention for men and boys and creating alternative, more positive masculine narratives.
Starting with the question of what makes a subset of men join violent extremists movements, Michael takes us through what the research reveals in his book Masculinity and Violent Extremism (co-authored with Joshua Roose in 2022). We then move into a broader conversation about the overlap between violent extremism and the mainstream conditioning that makes up modern masculinity, and crucially - the unifying role of misogyny. Also, with masculinity on the move and being redefined, how do we seize this moment to move away from entrenched, pro-patriarchal visions of manhood?
EPISODE LINKS
XY Website
Masculinity and Violent Extremism
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
X: @SubjectToPower
email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Poet Usha Akella talks about poems as bridges into worlds, bridges that help to soften borders - and there is nothing we need more at this moment - than a softening of the criss-crossing lines that cut us off from one another. Borders are hardening, honest and patient dialogue is becoming rare, and meeting each other halfway seems more and more difficult - but a poet’s words can offer a bypass, a more direct path from one human heart to another.
Acclaimed poet and author of 11 books, Usha has contributed to over 150 literary anthologies and journals, and is the founder and director of Matwaala, a South Asian diaspora poets’ collective launched in 2015.
Usha's poetry is full of very real world matters and it does not shy away from confronting the ironies and contradictions of living life as a woman on this planet - no matter our cultural belonging. With her x-ray honesty and masterful craft, she writes from the raw emotions of her own life experiences as well as a soaring bird's eye view.
In this episode Usha reads several poems from her book I Will Not Bear You Sons, and shares the stories behind the poems as well as the clash of cultural forces that shaped her as a woman and as a poet. We also talk about the firestorm that erupted around the book in India, the different forms of patriarchal control women endure, Usha's own refusal to be silenced, the cost of writing feminist poetry, and finding sisterhood with fellow women’s writers.
EPISODE LINKS
Matwaala South Asian Diaspora Poets’ Collective
I Will Not Bear You Sons
The POV
CONTACT US
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Award-winning non-fiction writer and journalist Rachel Hewitt unearths and writes about various corners of women’s history - and the subsequent erasure of that same history - showing us how women are indeed equal participants in all aspects of public life - until we are banned, excluded and erased.
In her latest book, In Her Nature, Rachel looks at women’s accomplishments in sports and the great outdoors from the Victorian era to the present, and chronicles the various ways in which men organized to exclude and ban women from athletics and the outdoors - and more broadly from public spaces and public life.
In her writings, which includes the brilliant Substack Small Revolutions, Every Day, Rachel makes crucial connections between women’s hidden history and how women navigate our current-day climate of rising misogyny. She also writes about feminism, grief, trauma and recovery - and her own experiences as an ultra-runner.
In this episode Elle and Rachel cover a sprawling map of topics, from Rachel’s research and writing about women’s history in sports and outdoors adventure, to how women navigate public spaces - now and then, the constantly changing shape of misogyny and how women weigh being safe against being free. We also talk about Rachel’s own running career, and how immersion in nature can carry you through grief and trauma, and much, much more.
EPISODE LINKS
Rachel’s website
Small Revolutions, Every Day
Family Fortunes by Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall
CONTACT US
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Parents, teachers and youth workers of all kinds are warily watching how the internet, smartphones and social media is impacting adolescence, and there is no question that we are in uncharted territory - especially as it pertains to boys and young men.
Michael Conroy has spent his career working in personal development and well-being programs for boys and young men in secondary school in the UK, and has had a front row seat to the enormous changes the world-wide web has brought to bear on the developing minds and social lives of boys and young men - in particular, the pornification of the internet and culture more broadly and the rise of the manosphere and related misogyny.
In 2021, feeling like existing programs were not up to the task of supporting and safeguarding the healthy development of boys, Michael founded Men At Work, an innovative training program using dialogue to develop and equip boys and young men with critical thinking skills, sharper curiosity and discernment, as well as greater capacity for empathy and other pro-social modes.
In this wide-ranging conversation Michael talks to Elle about the art of fostering a positive vision for boys and young men, what should and shouldn’t be feared about the big bad internet, Andrew Tate and incels, what the Netflix series Adolescence told us and what it missed, what feminism has got to do with it, and why raising healthy young men matters to all of us.
EPISODE LINKS
Men At Work
CONTACT US
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
X: @SubjectToPower
email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
CREDITS
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Conversation and debate regarding transgenderism or gender ideology has been effectively forbidden and shut down for many years, and people who have dared to raise concerns have been hounded and punished in all sorts of ways. Like many outspoken feminists, Laura Lecuona was cancelled and attacked in her native country of Mexico for daring to ask questions about concepts such as ‘born in the wrong body’ and ‘gender affirming care’.
In this episode Elle talks with Laura about her new book Gender Identity: Lies And Dangers; about what sparked the transgender movement, how gender ideology became such a pervasive social phenomenon, what exactly it entails for boys and men and girls and women who become trans identified, as well as the impact of this movement on women and women’s rights.
We also discuss why radical feminists in particular have been sounding the alarm and mounting such an opposition to gender ideology, and why there is such an authoritarian prohibition against debate.
EPISODE LINKS
Gender Identify: Lies And Dangers by Laura Lecuona
The Transexual Empire by Janice Raymond
The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner
The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir
CONTACT US
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
CREDITS
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Like a detective trying to establish a motive for the crime, Aurora Linnea digs deep into our cultural history and Man’s destruction of the living world to find the root causes of what she calls “the world-destroying violence of male dominion”.
In her phenomenally beautiful investigation, the book Man Against Being: Body Horror and The Death of Life, Aurora Linnea comes up with a very coherent - and illuminating - set of theories about why and how Man constructed the patriarchal doctrine that so brutally subjugates all living creatures in the service of masculine world-making.
In this hour we talk about man’s fear of death and life, the fear-to-domination pipeline, women as the eternal scapegoat, man’s revenge against a biology he cannot escape, the unending disaster of splitting the world into warring halves (think female/male, body/mind, nature/science), and how necessary it is that we end male dominion and return to a reintegration of body and mind and living earth.
CONTACT US
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
X: @SubjectToPower
Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
CREDITS
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
What drives societies to turn on women in their midst - with accusations, branding, persecution and often violence and death - in the name of witchcraft?
Witch hunting occupied a dark chapter in European and early American history, but variations of this brutal phenomena lives on in many parts of the world today.
Guest on today’s episode, multidisciplinary feminist research scholar Govind Kelkar, wrote a book called Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation and in this hour we talk about Govind’s research into modern-day witch hunts in India and around the world - the surprising factors that drive it, how it unfolds in communities, why women are targeted, and what the practice tells us about men, women, and different kinds of power and powerlessness.
Episode Links
GenDev Center for Research and Innovation
Contact Subject To Power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
The world rushes to meet the ever-expanding sexual appetites of men - and then we collectively call it “men’s needs” and agree that “men’s needs” must be met.
All forms of prostitution and pornography, online and in real life, offer a bottomless menu of sexual experiences, fetishes, and boundary-crossing pursuits. Technology works overtime to invent novel ways to achieve male orgasm and indulge men in what they might fancy next.
And nowhere is this busy business of realizing men’s sexual fantasies more obvious than in the sex doll business.
Guest on this episode, Caitlin Roper, is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout, a global grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising and popular culture. Caitlin’s writing has been featured in The Guardian, Huffington Post, and many other publications and in 2022 she came out with her book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating.
In this hour we talk about all of what Caitlin discovered when researching the whole world of sex dolls - the manufacturing, the marketing, the men who buy and use the sex dolls, and the many real-life impacts on women, girls and boys.
On the sympathy-inducing ways in which sex dolls are marketed, how they are offered as a cure for lonely men, suggesting that a silicone replica of a woman provides the human connection that these men lack, Caitlin says, “What sex dolls do, is they actually get in the way of any kind of intimacy and real connection, genuine human relationships because they keep the user alone. They're penetrating a doll, but there's no connection because again, they're alone. They're masturbating into an object.”
Episode Links
Collective Shout
Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating
Contact Subject To Power
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Prostitution cannot be contained in one small corner of the culture. Once we accept and endorse the sale of women for men’s sexual use and abuse, the ideas and practices of prostitution bleeds into all layers of society.
Germany shows us how. In 2002, Germany gave state-sanctioned approval to the sex-trade and made prostitution a legal and legitimate industry in cities and towns across the land.
Researcher, writer and public speaker Elly Arrow tracks and reports on all aspects of prostitution in her homeland of Germany and around the world - and in this hour, Elly talks to Elle about what it was like to come of age as a young woman in a pro-prostitution culture, how it has affected relationships between men and women in her country, and how the normalization of prostitution has bled into other sectors - housing, employment, labor, children’s rights, local and national politics, immigration, policing and more.
We also talk about the debate that is now being had in Germany about whether to adopt the Equality Model, whether to try to rein in the 20-year prostitution industry that has exploded across the landscape - or to continue being “Europe’s brothel”.
Episode Links
Elly Arrow on YouTube
Elly Arrow Blog
Red Light Exposé
The Invisible Men - Germany
Contact Subject To Power
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
As a woman, you can roll along with the assumption that your body belongs to you and you alone. That you are an autonomous human being like everyone else. But then your fertility, your baby-making capacity comes into view and suddenly you are subjected to powers far outside yourself.
Guest on this episode, UK journalist and author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like A Feminist and My Period, Milli Hill, has reported on and written about this complicated zone, the zone where woman meets “system”, and the power struggle that often takes place between you as an autonomous woman with inherent rights - and the powers that be.
In this hour we talk about the much-contested world of childbearing and Milli’s writing and activism to empower women and girls to reclaim their self-determination. But also how Milli, mid-career, has found herself under attack by gender ideologists and how she is now documenting the ideological capture and implosion of her own former community - women’s organizations in the areas of menstruation, breastfeeding, pregnancy, antenatal care, and birth - that once were exclusively for women and girls, but are that no longer.
Episode Links
Milli Hill’s website
Milli Hill’s Substack
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
What makes a good human?
We receive prescriptions for virtuous morality from all manner of religions, philosophies, and intellectual traditions - but is human morality something that is taught and learned?
Guest on today’s episode, researcher and author Darcia Narvaez, does not think human morality has much to do with principles, or guidelines we’re taught, or lessons we learn.
Rather - that human morality is built - from a complex, interwoven, physical, neurobiological, sociocultural process that begins in our mother’s womb and continues throughout our life. A process that developed out of humanity’s millions-year-old evolution of child-rearing practices that made us the connected, cooperative, socially intelligent species we actually are - underneath the last few thousand years of trauma.
As a young academic, Darcia, driven by an intense feeling that there is something wrong with the way humans treat each other, turned to the study of human morality. In her years of research she took a multi-disciplinary approach to find answers, incorporating evolutionary biology, anthropology, developmental psychology, animal sciences, neuro-sciences.
Along the way, she published dozens of academic articles and twenty books, among them one titled Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. Also, synthesizing her discoveries about what humans actually need to thrive, Darcia developed a new framework called The Evolved Nest, a blueprint of real-life practices that produce human beings with healthy, connected moralities.
In this hour Elle talks to Darcia about The Evolved Nest, about her research into human morality, how humanity got so lost, and how to cultivate and build back our species-normal compassionate nature.
Episode Links
The Evolved Nest
Darcia Narvaez, PhD
Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
As new wars emerge across the world, wars that ended decades ago are still destroying the societies that waged them.
Guest on today’s episode, Olivera Simić, came of age in the intrastate war that broke apart her country of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and has spent her life researching, documenting, bearing witness to, and articulating the uncontainable trauma that continue to ripple through her homeland 30 years later.
In her autobiography Surviving Peace, Olivera writes about how those experiences shaped her life, and in the newly published Lola’s War: Rape Without Punishment, as well as a number of academic articles, Olivera draws on twenty plus years of in-depth conversation and documentation of the experiences of victims, perpetrators and everyone in between - from all sides of the war.
In this hour we talk about the long-term impact of war, particularly on women, in her home country of Bosnia Herzegovina, as well as the limits of institutions - law, medicine, social welfare, education - to remedy the horrific crimes and atrocious violence committed by neighbor against neighbor, countryman against countrywoman.
Episode Links
Olivera’s website: https://oliverasimic.com/
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
The institution of prostitution has received a re-branding in recent times, appropriating terms from labor and the corporate world such as “sex work”, “full-service”, “clients”, “sex workers” “doing bookings” arranged by “managers” - presumably in order to de-stigmatize women who sell sex, to make the practice safer for sex sellers, and to make the sex industry mainstream.
But has the nature of the practice - of men buying women for sexual use - really changed?
In this episode, Elle talks to author and activist Andrea Heinz, who spent time in the sex industry in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where prostitution is regulated under the Equality Model, where the city of Edmonton issues licenses for brothels, and where the “sex work is work” model is fully embraced.
In this hour we talk about what Andrea learned through her experiences in prostitution and how it changed her, about her awakening and exit, and how she is now channeling those years of trauma into speaking and writing about the realities of working in the sex industry.
We discuss the belief systems underpinning the “sex work is work” creed and try to answer questions like - if sex is a service that women provide to men, then what is sex for women? What are the actual risks and impacts of having unwanted sex with many strange men all day, every day? Has the “sex work” makeover de-stigmatized sex sellers as promised and made prostitution safer?
Episode Links:
Red Light Exposé
When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?
CEASE
Edmonton John School
Andrea Heinz’s academic paper A Mule For The Patriarchy
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Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
In the midst of The Enlightenment, when men in the West hailed reason and rationalism, and aspired towards lofty ideals such as liberty, equality and religious tolerance - another darker social phenomenon was taking place. Over a period of more than 200 years, thousands of women (and some men) across Europe were thrown in jail, tortured, hanged and burned - accused and tried for witchcraft.
In this episode Elle talks to Marianne Hester, a world-leading researcher in gender-based violence, with expertise in domestic and sexual abuse and violence, coercive control, sexual exploitation, and forced marriage.
In her book Lewd Women and Wicked Witches, Marianne looks at male violence and domination through a historical lens, locating the “witch hunts” - the violent persecution of women - in a period of massive restructuring of society, within which a male-female conflict over resources and power was raging. In this hour we talk about how and why women became targets of the “witch craze”, what the “witch hunts” accomplished for the patriarchs, and how those historical events shaped the gendered ideology we still live with today.
Episode Links:
Marianne Hester
Journal of Gender-Based Violence
Lewd Women and Wicked Witches
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Motherhood, in our Western culture, is full of contradictions. On the one hand, mothers perform an essential task: creating and nurturing new human life. On the other, the status of mothers is that of general servitude to the nuclear family, with no significant public voice or power.
Western culture, adopted across the world, is still largely structured in the mold that the male Greek philosophers created millennia ago. Roughly divided into a public sphere that is inhabited and controlled by men, and the family sphere which is inhabited by women and children; a “private world” that is under constant surveillance and control by the public sphere.
While feminism continually challenges this patriarchal social order, and women as a class have made enormous gains in the public sphere, motherhood is still an arena where patriarchal interests come into direct conflict with human needs and women’s humanity.
In this episode Elle talks to political scientist and author Mariam Tazi-Preve, whose research fields are politics and reproduction, motherhood, fatherhood, family and population policies, European welfare state, gender and political theory, and theory of civilization.
Mariam has written extensively about the history of motherhood in Western patriarchy, about the invention of marriage, and the development of the nuclear family. In this hour we will talk about these social structures and the impact they have had on women, men and children throughout our history.
Episode Links
Mariam Tazi-Preve website
Motherhood In Patriarchy
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Science and technology is a synonym for progress. It is always considered a step forward, an improvement of our lives, a promise of new possibilities. A promise of a future that will necessarily contain more and better science and technology to make our lives ever more convenient, ever more automated, ever more under our control.
For women, many of us are conditioned to welcome scientific and technological advancements as a form of liberation from our sexed bodies and its processes. Medicine, machines and technicians preside over our whole reproductive lives - and we don’t always consider who or what drives the science, who benefits from these advancements, and what might be lost - as tech invades the most intimate parts of our human selves.
In this episode Elle is joined by Mary Lou Singleton, a life-long women’s health activist, midwife and public speaker, who has spent her career observing the very heady evolution of the reproductive industry and gauging where humanity is headed within the realm of conception, pregnancy, birth and motherhood.
Episode Links
Enchanted Family Medicine
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
The prevalence of the murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or feminicide.
While criminal justice systems are kept busy processing feminicide; whole media genres are dedicated to telling the stories of feminicide; untold governmental agencies and NGOs report on the general state of feminicide - the fact remains that no government, no country in the world actually keeps statistics on feminicide.
In this episode, Elle speaks with data analyst, author and director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT, Catherine D’Ignazio about her new book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Catherine’s book tells the story of the people, mostly across the Americas, who decided to pick up the job of counting women killed, independently and unpaid, and how they have turned this work into a powerful activist movement.
We talk about revolutionizing data science, examining and challenging power through data activism, why governments are willfully blind to femicide, what can be learned from anti-femicide movements in Latin and South America, understanding feminicide as a large-scale pattern beyond the “isolated incident” model, and how women’s risk of murder is connected to the devalued status of women.
Episode Links:
Join free book club for Counting Feminicide from now thru Aug 31, 2024.
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Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Our economic institutions - capitalism, trade, money, the market - are based on one fundamental principle: Quid Pro Quo. Something For Something.
It is said that these systems sprung out of the age-old human tradition of trade, of exchange. That humans, from the dawn of time, have exchanged with each other for our needs - goods, services, emotions, care, language - that our very nature is transactional.
Our guest on this episode, independent researcher Genevieve Vaughan, has spent her life theorizing and proving the very opposite - that Quid Pro Quo, or “the exchange economy” is completely incompatible with human life and human needs.
That in fact, it is the basic interaction of unilateral giving and receiving, “the gift economy”, that is the hidden blueprint of human life, and that the “exchange economy” is indeed a parasitic system - an economy that rests on a sea of unseen and unacknowledged gifts.
In this episode we talk about the maternal roots of the gift economy, the gendered division of these opposing economies, how “the exchange economy” destroys mutuality, empathy and human connection, and why we need to find our way back to our original gift-based economies. And that “when we base our economy on giving and receiving rather than exchange, we create completely different human relations.”
Genevieve Vaughan's Links:
gift-economy.com
maternalgifteconomymovement.org
Gift Economy on YouTube
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Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
“Men don’t fall from trees - they subscribe to societal messages, they follow rules,” says Dr. Shahieda Jansen, clinical psychologist, scholar in masculinities, and author of Masculinity Meets Humanity: An Adapted Model of Masculinized Psychotherapy.
In this episode Shahieda takes us through her own journey of research, practice and discovery, devising all-male group therapy that would re-integrate, re-contextualize, and pull back together elements that Western style psychology has compartmentalized, distorted and split apart.
Working from the creed that “the minute something is out of sync with its context, you're busy with lunacy”, Shahieda weaves together belief systems rooted in the cultures, histories and identities of the men with whom she works. She draws on ancient and vibrant African relational ethical philosophies and understanding of the self, combines it with the latest science from around the globe, and builds bridges across the divides we all are shaped by - ancient from modern, culture from science, thinking from feeling, men from women - self from others.
In this sweeping conversation we talk about Ubuntu, African identity and morality, Afro Eastern model of the self, Umoya, the ravages of colonization, the centrality of emotion, how “belonging is not recognized in the healing professions for the radicalness that it is”, and how Shahieda uses her wholeness approach to tend to the men in her all-male therapy groups.
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Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
No status puts a woman at greater vulnerability than that of being a migrant or refugee.
Anna Zobnina is a Strategy and Executive Director at European Network of Migrant Women, and she knows first-hand the realities and complex challenges that migrant and refugee women face in Europe. With over 15 years of experience in feminist analysis of male violence & discrimination against women and girls, sexual and reproductive exploitation, and international human rights policy work, Anna and her organization are at the forefront of the women’s rights policy-battles currently raging in Europe.
Fundamental issues of equality between men and women are on the table, being hotly debated between EU governmental bodies, big international NGOs, the UN, and all the moneyed interests trying to influence them - and no one stands to lose more than migrant and refugee women, most of whom have fled men’s wars, violence and poverty and are trying to survive in a new land.
In this super-sized episode we talk about every variety of men’s violence, sexual exploitation, surrogacy, forced marriage - and the literal gauntlet of violations, both personal and institutional, women endure to survive - in their country of origin, on their journey to Europe, and as migrant women living in Europe.
Links
European Parliament September 14, 2023 resolution on the regulation of prostitution in the EU
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Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
If we think of patriarchy as a living, breathing, constantly evolving strategy that finds its expression at all levels of society - socially, economically, politically - its job number one is to control women - and thereby reproduction.
Patriarchal strategies look different in different parts of the world - in some places it is embedded, disguised, and covert - in other cultures it is outspoken, brutal and overt.
In this episode Elle talks to scholar, journalist and author of Leftover Women and Betraying Big Brother Leta Hong Fincher, who has spent many years studying and writing about how women in China are finding themselves on the receiving end of both old and new patriarchal strategies in their country. But also about how women in today’s China are resisting, and fighting against domination - both in the private sphere and the public arena.
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
In many ways, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in myths, religion, and history - are blueprints for our human lives. But the converse is also true - how we see ourselves, our attitudes, behaviors, and who holds power - in turn shape our stories. In Western culture, there is no story as powerfully influential as that of Greeks.
Historical researcher Max Dashu has spent decades looking for the women in our stories, across the timespan of human history. Collecting visual evidence of women’s lives from cultures all over the globe, she has amassed a vast visual archive of female iconography and scholarship.
In this episode we talk about Dashu’s most recent research project, Women in Greek Mythography - a deep dive into the major female figures of Greek myth, their surprising pre-Greek origin stories, and what the highly patriarchal Greek myths, art and history reveal about how Greek women of the times may have lived, and how it affects all of us today.
As Dashu reflects, “when you think about these stories being told and sung and acted out in dramas, and through all the arts, pottery, weaving, architecture and sculpture, everywhere you look you have an enactment of this culture of domination. What kind of effect does that have on a female psyche?”
Patriarchy #History #GreekMyth
Max Dashu’s work
Suppressed Histories Archives
Suppressed Histories Archive YouTube Channel
Suppressed Histories Archives stream-on-demand videos
Veleda Press
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In her new book Body Shell Girl, poet and sex trade survivor Rose Hunter brings us into the strange theater that takes place between sex buyers and prostitutes when money is exchanged for various sex acts. Describing the everyday reality of her ten years in massage parlors, brothels and hotel rooms of Toronto and Vancouver, Hunter says of prostitution, “it’s really nothing to do with sex, it's this other odd category, with its own bizarre rules, a very strange sphere unto itself.”
In this episode we talk about what Hunter brilliantly captures about this “strange sphere” in Body Shell Girl (that which is often missed in the so-called prostitution debate): the million minute ways that ‘being for sale’ breaks down every aspect of your life, the survival behaviors and language you must cultivate to avoid male rage and violence, the impact of losing connection to your body when it no longer belongs to you, but also - what it is like - to be on the receiving end of stark-naked male entitlement, to be an unwilling actor in rote and porn-fed male fantasies, and to never ever being able to say no.
How did patriarchy first begin? The answers to that question are many and varied, and most often tries to explain it by one single factor - Agriculture! Private property! Men are stronger!
But - the history of patriarchal development is a lot more complex and interesting than one single answer - and very few people have decoded what the evidence tells us about how patriarchal patterns arose and evolved in ancient Europe and Asia Minor - as deeply as research scholar Heide Goettner-Abendroth.
In past episodes we have covered Heide’s work on modern matriarchies (Ep 16:The Peacebuilders) as well as the history of matriarchal societies in ancient Europe and West Asia (Ep 25: The Mothers of Invention). Well, strap in - because in this third installment we are talking about how those ancient matriarchal cultures came to their dramatic ends. About how the first small cells of patriarchy began and then grew and took hold in different parts of the ancient world, how it spread and destroyed former matriarchal cultures. How matriarchal societies waged resistance and fought against their oppressors to protect their egalitarian way of life, but how in the end those brutal forefathers prevailed and shaped the world we live in today.
For most of us who end up in feminism, who end up actively fighting for women’s rights - the consciousness that brought us here - came at a steep price.
Some of us got shocked into it, some of us went through a series of painful awakenings that forced us to search for an explanation, a framework by which to analyze the violations we had been subjected to or witnessed.
Our guest on this episode, Brazilian journalist Andreia Nobre, tells the story of her own harrowing awakenings, starting at the age of 8, that put her on a lifelong quest to make sense of the lack of safety, autonomy, and dignity she experienced as a girl, as a young woman, as a mother - in Brazil, in Portugal, and in the UK.
A passionate journalist and researcher, Andreia channeled her journey from silenced victim to outspoken survivor to wide awake activist, to report on the very dire reality women of the world still face - in the West, in so-called developing countries, and around the globe.
There is no issue where the distance between the idea - and the lived reality - is as far apart as in prostitution. The discourse about prostitution often takes place miles away from the thing itself, and is had by people far removed from the violence and trauma of prostitution. The voices of survivors of prostitution are rarely heard because their lives are inevitably impacted by the violence and trauma of prostitution.
Our guest Cherry Smiley, an Indigenous feminist researcher, activist and author wanted to bridge this gap, and set out on an academic research project on the subject of prostitution - in the hopes that by shedding light on the lived realities of Indigenous women and girls in prostitution, she would shift people’s thinking about what prostitution actually is. She then wrote a book about her arduous PhD journey and her evolving insights called Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined.
In this episode we talk to Cherry about putting her whole academic career on the line taking on the ‘sex work is work’ creed, the courage it took to bring her life experience as an Indigenous feminist woman to bear on her research project, and the cost of speaking up against the things manstitutions hold sacred.
A huge thank you to everyone who is listening, subscribing, sharing and engaging with Subject To Power. We are 20 episodes in and wrapping up Season 1 with immense gratitude and a few reflections by host Elle Kamihira, as well as a bit about what we have planned for Season 2 and forward.
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If patriarchy is our default system - radical feminism is the only system of thinking and action that challenges the status quo of male domination. The only analysis that looks at our current world from women’s point of view and with women's interest in mind.
And radical feminists - the women who speak, write and shape feminist thought, who are public and loud, are by definition brave people, because they are going against a powerful world order that definitely doesn't want to have its power challenged. A world order that punishes women who make too much noise.
If those radical feminists are deliberately silenced, chased out of their jobs, their institutions, deplatformed, even chased out of their countries, or threatened with violence - like this episode’s guest, founder of Feminist Current Meghan Murphy was - we are silencing the only people who can explain to the rest of us what the patriarchy is up to.
When we talk about rights and freedoms it is often in political, economic, and gender-less human rights terms. The conversation is often dualistic - taking place on the right/left divide or the black/white divide, or the south/north divide or the rich/poor divide - and much that is crucial to women, gets missed. Or obscured.
New Zealand author Renée Gerlich grapples with all of what is missed when we do not take women, half of humanity, into account in her new book Out Of The Fog. In this important book she sidesteps the distracting and false choices we often entertain, and instead challenges the incredible contradictions embedded in our modern liberation movements.
In this episode we talk about Renée’s own quest to fully understand all of what is at stake for women and men, to excavate the forces that distort our connection to eros, the life force, that stunt and disfigure our living energies - and how we can cultivate freedom in an unfree world.
For many of us, pornography seems like an inevitable fact of life. Internet porn use is so widespread, so normalized, so uncontroversial - that it’s controversial to be critical of pornography.
But, as Dr. Gail Dines says, questioning what IS - is in her job description - as a feminist, and as a sociologist and world-leading expert on pornography.
Gail is the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality and founding president and CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization that provides educational tools for parents and teachers to cope with the impact pornography is having on young people.
Gail Dines reframes pornography to show how ‘the industrialization of sex’ has groomed and captured Western culture in the last 70 years, and in this conversation she takes us through the key moments in the evolution of porn - from Hugh Hefner to Girls Gone Wild to OnlyFans. We also talk about what today’s global sex industry does to women, what consuming it does to men across the world, and how we build resistance to the pornification of our lives.
Is our justice system in the business of determining what is true or false? Do our courts really determine who is guilty or innocent? Does our criminal justice system punish those who violate, and protect and restore the rights of the violated?
As a former prosecutor and now professor of law, Deborah Tuerkheimer has spent her career studying how law and culture interact, and is a leading legal authority on violence against women, domestic violence, and sex crimes.
In her recent book Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers she examines how our cultural values shape how law is written and executed, and also how our laws determine why we believe some and not others - and why we care so much about some, and so very little about others.
In this episode Deborah breaks down how the “credibility complex” not only dictates how justice is meted out, but how the justice system, just like our culture, orients to the pain of the powerful, and disregards the pain of the powerless. And how, in a world where women as a class are subject to the greater power of men as a class, ‘justice’ becomes a tenuous matter.
Many scholars who study the evolution of humanity - sociologists, anthropologists, biologists - have come to the conclusion that we, all of us, would not have survived, let alone have evolved into the complex, resilient and innovative species that we are - without millennia of stability and peace.
This episode’s guest, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, established the formal study of this peaceful past - and present - known as Matriarchal Studies. Through the institute she founded, International Academia Hagia of Modern Matriarchal Studies, she has spent nearly 40 years researching and disseminating a vast repository of knowledge about matriarchal societies around the world - their politics, economics, social practices and spirituality.
In this episode we barely scratch the surface of what there is to know, but for those of us who worry about our violent and unequal present, where only a few humans at the top of the hierarchy are getting their needs met, and great masses of our human family suffer - it feels like a key to a different world, a different humanity.
www.goettner-abendroth.de
www.hagia.de
We may believe that violent patriarchy is an inevitable reality, that our current world culture simply is a result of our immutable human nature. A human nature that is in a constant and brutal competition for limited resources, in which only the most ruthless of us survive and thrive.
But there is much evidence - in our history, in our bodies and brains, in our nature - that tells a very different story. A story of peace, cooperation and sophisticated organization. A story in which mothers play a central role.
In this episode Elle talks to sociologist Andrea Fleckinger, who studies and lectures on modern matriarchal societies. While we can find matriarchal cultures in our history, there are in existence today - societies all around the globe that have preserved and now maintain their traditions of egalitarian matriarchy - and Andrea breaks down exactly what it means to be a matriarchy - the social structures, values and practices that sets them apart from patriarchal cultures, and what we can learn from them.
Matriforum
Every major religion in the world today features a male deity. Or as Miriam Robbins Dexter puts it: “Man was created in God's image and woman wasn't.”
How does it affect women of the world - that we have no major religious symbols that reflect the female? That most religions greatly devalue women? That most religions have taboos against the female body and its life cycles?
These are questions Miriam has spent her extraordinary career grappling with, and also what drove her to look into prehistory - our pre-patriarchal history - on a search for female deities and past religions that may have offered women affirmation of female power, the female body, and the female will - rather than shame and denigration.
In this episode, Miriam, a hugely accomplished research scholar in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and mythology, talks about uncovering the female aspects of prehistoric belief systems, unearthing the roots of Indo-European patriarchy, and how she and famed archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (and many others) formed the contested theories about the matriarchal societies of the neolithic.
We know that our sexuality is central and significant to our human existence - it is a complex package of functions - biological surely, but also it allows us crucial intimate connection with other human beings, it is a powerful regulator and stress reducer, and a portal to joy and many other life-giving emotions and expressions.
And yet, we have allowed a massive commercial industry that brutally exploits vulnerable women and children for men’s disconnected, private, anonymous sexual gratification, to invade every corner of our lives and culture. This new breed of porn is unrecognizable from the porn mags of yesterday, and carry a very different message - that of violent misogyny.
Melinda Tankard Reist, author, activist and founder of the grassroots organization Collective Shout, have spent the last two decades staring into the abyss, reporting on the destruction that today’s porn is causing - to relationships, families, schools, communities - and our humanity.
However, not content with just reporting, Melinda and Collective Shout are also going after and shutting down predatory peddlers and their goods and services both online and in real life. We talk about all of the above, Melinda's new book He Chose Porn Over Me, and the bravery needed for this type of activism.
The battle for control of reproduction is as old as time, and since women alone have the power to create new life, women’s bodies continue to be the de facto battlefield for that power struggle.
Political, economical, and social means have been used to wrestle this unique capacity away from women themselves, but in the last hundred years or so - science and technology - invented and controlled by mostly men, have overtaken every inch of human baby-making.
Dr Renate Klein, a biologist and sociologist, has scrutinized and critiqued what she calls the “techno docs” and their advancements for over 40 years, and has written several books such as Broken Bonds and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation on the subject. In this episode we talk about where the science has taken us, and all the moral questions that arise from this hugely profitable industry.
We are in our 6th millennia of patriarchy, and as this episode’s guest Susan Hawthorne puts it, “the publicity program for patriarchy has been going for some 5,000 years”. As a poet, author and founder of the feminist publishing house Spinifex Press, and as a lesbian radical feminist, Susan decidedly belongs to the publicity program for the other side, the side that has been fighting against ‘the rule of the father’ since the time of Cassandra.
Susan, herself a feminist prophetess of our time, speaks in the clearest and most concrete way about the destruction that absolute male power has wrought, and drawing from ancient myths, mother nature and her own deep erudition - has written volumes that envisions a different way to live - in books like Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalization and Biodiversity and Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy among others.
In this episode Elle and Susan riff on the dangers of watered down liberal feminism, the importance of having a 40,000 year plan, and patriarchy’s many, many Trojan Horses. Plus poetry.
If we were to devise a mechanism by which male power writ large can reach the innermost center of female power - and maim or destroy it - it would look like the internet-fueled sexual exploitation industries that are now in full bloom. If we were to devise a mechanism by which we remove men’s empathy and humanity, making them dangerous to all humans - it would look like today’s pornography landscape.
Robert Jensen is a lifelong radical thinker, speaker and author who have researched, analyzed and written about the sexual exploitation industries since the 1980s. In this episode of Subject To Power, Robert shares his observations on the profound and humanity-altering effects that the sexual exploitation industries are having on men, women and children around the world.
What happens in the course of our childhood that shapes girls and boys so differently? Why do men and women end up with such vastly different psychologies and moralities? Those are questions Carol Gilligan has grappled with since she exploded into the field of developmental psychology in the 1980s with a book called In A Different Voice.
Translated into sixteen languages, and with over 700,000 copies sold around the world, In A Different Voice started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social sciences. Never mind Sigmund Freud.
Since that time, Carol Gilligan has become a towering figure not just in psychology, but in the culture, with an immense body of research and writing that continues to demand a space for the interior life of girls and women in our cultural lexicon.
In this episode, Carol talks to Elle about what she calls her ‘girl's work’ - as well as that well-known force in the world - that incentivizes girls to cover their honest voices, that makes boys abandon their intimate relationships, and that makes women choose not to say what they know.
Centuries before psychoanalysis was born, William Shakespeare was analyzing the root causes of male violence and giving detailed, intimate, almost microscopic second-to-second descriptions of what goes on in the minds and hearts of violent men.
When, as a young prison psychiatrist, Jim Gilligan was tasked with creating mental health programs to help reduce violence in extremely brutal Massachusetts prisons in the 1970s, he drew from an unlikely source - the plays of William Shakespeare. “Because of my familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, I realized the violent men I was seeing in prison, they just walked right out of Shakespeare's plays. I saw Othello, I saw Richard III, I saw Timon of Athens. He understood these guys and helped me to understand them.”
In this episode, Elle talks with American psychiatrist Jim Gilligan, who pioneered extremely successful violence prevention programs in American prisons, and his co-author law professor, moral philosopher and writer David A.J. Richards, about their new book Holding a Mirror Up to Nature: Shame, Guilt and Violence in Shakespeare, about the psycho-social forces behind why murderers murder, and how we all may be living in a Shakespeare play.
We may think of military and war as strictly a male pursuit - but governments and militaries all over the world spend a lot of man-hours strategizing about the different kinds of women they need to control to do the war-waging, as well as in preparation for war and recovering from war, during so-called peace-time. As this episode's guest Cynthia Enloe puts it "they never want us to know they are strategizing about masculinity and femininity, but they're doing it all the time."
In episode 7, Elle has a sweeping conversation with award-winning research scholar Cynthia Enloe about her groundbreaking gender analysis of military, war and international politics, and how feminist politics have shaped national and international conversations.
An influential feminist thinker, spell-binding orator and author of fifteen books on women's roles in economic markets, world conflicts, and power politics, Cynthia unpacks the very processes by which we, and everything around us, unknowingly get feminized, masculinized and militarized - but more importantly how we can resist, and even stop or reverse these covert socializations.
If we ask what the key instruments are, by which male power and control is maintained - family court is right at the top of the list. As an institution, family court operates in near-total secrecy, cloaked in privacy laws, and with no independent oversight. Worlds unto themselves, family courts wield enormous authority and power, and a long and invasive reach into how we conduct our most private relationships.
Journalist Grant Wyeth has spent the last few years delving deep into exactly how family courts across the world wield that power, whose interests are protected and whose are not, and the cultural forces that drive its decisions - decisions that by and large do not favor the interests, safety and welfare of women or children.
In this episode, Elle and Grant hash through the whys, hows and very real and violent impacts of "the family court crisis", what it says about the state of men, and the urgent need for a new language and new terms for relationships between women and men.
Revolutionary advancements in biotechnologies has created a massive industry known as 'third-party reproduction', which has moved the process of procreation out of the domain of womanhood and into the hands of medicine and commerce. Women, or their eggs and wombs, are still needed however, which has given rise to a global market in which these biological functions are sold and rented - and used and controlled.
Award-winning filmmaker and bioethicist Jennifer Lahl has studied this "brave new world" since her days as a clinical nurse in pediatric critical care, and now she tells the real stories of the women who sell their eggs and rent their wombs in films like "Eggsploitation" and "Breeders", which shows a much darker side to this unique human trade than what the fertility industry's marketing campaigns will have us believe.
In this episode we talk about the fraught ethics and very real physical realities around egg harvesting, surrogacy, as well as the new frontier of "gender medicine".
Women always face conflicting cultural narratives in which our sex plays a central role, and much of the time the rhetoric in the foreground is there to cover up a very different reality in the background.
In this episode Elle jumps into three hotbed areas - prostitution, surrogacy and the transgender movement - with Swedish journalist and author Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who has made a career out of tearing down the stories we're being sold, digging deep into complicated issues, and revealing greater truths about why we are being sold those false stories to begin with.
For women and girls, studying history rarely gives us the answers we seek about how we arrived here. Official history is written by men about men, about male projects, enterprise and progress, and women are all but footnotes.
Elle speaks with author and artist Renée Gerlich, who has had a driving passion since childhood, to uncover what official history hides and erases. Renée builds on a rich tradition of writers, artists, scientists and revolutionaries to re-draw a world history from a female perspective that not only puts women back in the story, but that corrects the distortions and artifice designed to obscure and oppress all that is female - then and now.
This sweeping conversation flies through sexual homonization, the origins of mathematics and human spirituality, the true purpose of religion and law, the establishments of patriarchy, privatization of the commons, and neoliberalism, witch-hunting then and now, the meaning of recent mass movements, or lack thereof, and what you can and cannot talk about today.
What if misogyny is not the hatred of women - but a phobia? What if patriarchy is not a power structure - but a pathology? And what if we could trace these twin phenomena back to their point of origin like we can trace the eruption and evolution of a virus? Elle has a rapid-fire conversation with trauma specialist and scholar Christine Forner about tracing patriarchy and misogyny back through - not just history, but the evolution of human neurobiology.
Between her scholarship in the field of trauma and dissociation and 35 years as a clinical practitioner, looking at thousands of cases of human-on-human harm - Christine reflects that the human species as a whole is a traumatized species. That we now might be stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of trauma and neglect, in a world culture in which neither men nor women, boys nor girls can thrive.
But as someone who heals very broken humans for a living, Christine also shares what we need to do to cure ourselves, of misogyny and patriarchy, and the remedies are deceptively simple and completely within our human capacity.
Despite great social diversity across the planet, it is an observable fact that males subordinates females across almost all human cultures. Elle speaks with securities scholar Dr. Valerie Hudson about how this ancient sexual order came to be, the role male violence has played and continue to play, and how the persistent and systematic subordination of women by men shape the wider political order and what implications it has for global security and development.
Dr. Hudson relies on vast data-collection done by teams of global researchers at WomenStats database, which she created to track and analyze the status of women across the world, and in her new book The First Political Order, she masterfully joins the treatment and status of women with questions of politics and peace, and the fates of nations.
In this first episode we jump in the deep end! Enjoy!
Subject To Power is a sprawling investigation into universal female subjugation and male domination, the forces that keeps us unequal, and what it all means.