“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 compartmental...

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, violence and the destruction of our natural environment. In this episode we talk about Jane’s new b...

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 a...

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 Academ...

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, ...