If we think of patriarchy as a living, breathing, constantly evolving strategy that finds its expression at all levels of society - socially, economically, politically - its job number one is to control women - and thereby reproduction. Patriarchal strategies look different in different parts of the world - in some places it is embedded, disguised,…

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. Historic…

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 prostitut…

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 te…

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 …

In her recent book Femicide in War and Peace, Israeli anthropologist and femicide expert Shalva Weil says that “the dividing line between femicide in wartime and peacetime is very thin.” Trigger warning: that fact is the subject of this episode. While the term femicide, the murder of a woman because she is a woman, was created in 1973, it did not g…

In trying to explain inequality between the sexes - we often arrive at the idea that women inhabit the emotional realm, and that men inhabit the thinking realm - and in the hierarchy of realms, thinking is considered superior. In this episode, trauma and dissociation specialist Christine Forner crushes the “feelings versus thought hierarchy” and br…

The sexual exploitation industries have been extremely successful in penetrating (pun intended) every layer of society - and like Gail Dines calls it - “pornifying our culture”. But amid full decriminalization of prostitution, the rise of OnlyFans and Pornhub, pervasive global sex trafficking, and social media providing exploiters and predators fre…

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 f…

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 kno…

With a steady stream of new research coming to light, it is becoming clear that the version of Western history we are taught in school - has a thick layer of patriarchal myth-making. Heide Goettner-Abendroth has spent her whole life studying what this patriarchal overlay is hiding, and in her new book Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise …

Even in this period of perpetual war between men across the world - at no time in history did the contest for world domination reach as dangerous a moment as it did during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Male leaders in what was then The USSR - and America, were trying to outdo one another in amassing the most threatening pile of nuclear wea…

For most of us who end up in feminism, who end up actively fighting for women’s rights - the consciousness that brought us here - came at a steep price. Some of us got shocked into it, some of us went through a series of painful awakenings that forced us to search for an explanation, a framework by which to analyze the violations we had been subjec…

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…

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 …

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 pub…

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 al…

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. …

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 la…

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, est…

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 …

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 …

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 - sc…

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 s…

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 human…

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…

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 hel…

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 Enl…

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 inv…

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 biol…

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 K…

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 hi…

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…

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…

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.By elle kamihira