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 different story. A story of peace, cooperation and sophisticated organization. A story in which mothers pla...

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, because they are going against a powerful world order that definitely doesn't want to have its power ch...

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, half of humanity, into account, in her new book Out Of The Fog. In this important book she sidesteps t...

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 Hijacked Our Sexuality and founding president and CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization that provide...

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 authority on violence against women, domestic violence, and sex crimes. In her recent book Credible: ...

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...

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 Miriam has spent her extraordinary career grappling with, and also what drove her to look into prehist...

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 industry that brutally exploits vulnerable women and children for men’s disconnected, private, anonymous se...

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 by mostly men, have overtaken every inch of human baby-making. Dr Renate Klein, a biologist and socio...

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, ...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 tradition of writers, artists, scientists and revolutionaries to re-draw a world history from a female...

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...