Subject To Power

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...

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 landsca...

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 co...

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 Massachus...

We may think of military and war as strictly male pursuits - 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 st...

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 r...

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 an...

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 tea...

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 tra...

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 - no...

Despite great social diversity across the planet, it is an observable fact that males subordinate 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 a...

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.