Subject To Power

“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-integr...

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 gi...

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,...

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...

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 th...

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 ev...

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 differen...

In her recent book Femicide in War and Peace, Israeli anthropologist and femicide expert Shalva Weil says that “the dividing line between femicide in wartime and peacetime is very thin.” Trigger warning: that fact is the subject of this episode.  While the term femicide, the murder of a woman because she is a woman, was created in 1973, it did not gain popularity until the 2000s, and Shalva was in...

In trying to explain inequality between the sexes - we often arrive at the idea that women inhabit the emotional realm, and that men inhabit the thinking realm - and in the hierarchy of realms, thinking is considered superior. In this episode, trauma and dissociation specialist Christine Forner crushes the “feelings versus thought hierarchy” and breaks down how absurd - and harmful - this fictiona...

The sexual exploitation industries have been extremely successful in penetrating (pun intended) every layer of society - and like Gail Dines calls it - “pornifying our culture”. But amid full decriminalization of prostitution, the rise of OnlyFans and Pornhub, pervasive global sex trafficking, and social media providing exploiters and predators free and open access to vulnerable populations - the...

Since it was published in 1987, Riane Eisler’s groundbreaking international bestseller The Chalice And The Blade has launched a full frontal challenge to the conventional story of our cultural origins - and has given us a brand new way to think about our ancient past, our present and how we shape our future. It upended the major religions we take for granted, the idea of eternal patriarchy and ete...

Our language - profane, sublime and everything in between - holds hidden truths about our cultural heritage, our current reality, and who determines it. Etymology, the study of the origins of words, can unlock this knowledge.  Jane Caputi has spent her career unearthing the history and meaning of words, our language, cultural beliefs, and how we know what we know - with a particular focus on sex,...

With a steady stream of new research coming to light, it is becoming clear that the version of Western history we are taught in school - has a thick layer of patriarchal myth-making. Heide Goettner-Abendroth has spent her whole life studying what this patriarchal overlay is hiding, and in her new book Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy in Europe and West Asia , using a ne...

Even in this period of perpetual war between men across the world - at no time in history did the contest for world domination reach as dangerous a moment as it did during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Male leaders in what was then The USSR - and America, were trying to outdo one another in amassing the most threatening pile of nuclear weapons capable of the greatest mass death and planet...

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, Br...

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 an...

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.   Subject To Power Website Subject To Power Twitter Subject To Power Instagram

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, bec...

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 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, hal...

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 Hijac...

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 aut...

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 -...

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 Mir...

We know that our sexuality is central and significant to our human existence. Human sexuality is a complex package of functions - biological surely, but also it allows us crucial intimate connections 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 industr...

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 b...