“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...

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 eternal war, and brought into focus the historical events that turned our human cultures from peaceful ...

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...

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 a...

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, ...

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 strategizing about masculinity and femininity, but they're doing it all the time." In episode 7, Elle...

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 wor...

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 ...

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 tr...

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 and what implications it has for global security and development. Dr. Hudson relies on vast data-col...