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 s...

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 w...

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 episo...

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. I...

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. “Becaus...

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 fam...