Subject To Power

40 years ago, Jane Caputi wrote a brilliant book about serial sex killers - The Age of Sex Crime - which is as relevant today as it was in 1987. In the book, Jane analyzes the histories of well-known, individual serial sex killers, from Jack The Ripper to The Boston Strangler to Son of Sam to Ted Bundy and many more - and answers fundamental questions about how and why they came to be - and how they fit into our cultural narratives. Jane argues that far from being monstrous aberrations, serial sex murderers occupy a role in our patriarchal culture...

Abuse and systematic cruelty against women and children is common across the world, but the term torture is still reserved mostly for men - think political prisoners, prisoners of war, victims of evil regimes. 

But guests on today’s episode, retired-community-nurses-turned-global-human-rights-activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have a plan - a 60-year plan - to broaden our understanding of torture to include women and children, and to get non-state torture recognized as a crime everywhere.

Jeanne and Linda spent their whole working lives as public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, providing womb-to-tomb care throughout the...

No matter how much the “family values” crowd wishes for women to “return home where they belong”, Linda Scott, renown expert on women’s economy and author of The Double X Economy, knows women’s economic empowerment has traversed past the point of no return. It is - in every way - too late. It is too late to force women out of the market economy and back into the private, domestic sphere - without widespread damage to all of society. Notably, a fact that is not stopping patriarchs from trying to shove women backwards. 

In founding the concept o...

In 2026 the global surrogacy industry will grow to over 30 billion dollars. The manufacturing plants and raw materials that make this massive business possible are women's bodies, and the products being bought and sold are human babies. 

This hugely profitable industry can only exist if a subset of women offer themselves up for highly invasive, completely unnatural, risky, and life-altering medical procedures resulting in pregnancy and birth, or alternatively “egg-harvesting” - all with little to no legal protection or oversight.

What motivates women to become surrogate mothers? What motivates women to have their eggs extracted for other...

Much of today’s rise of violent misogyny can find its cultural traces in the witch hunts of old Europe and North America. And while many of us are casually aware of these historical events, our two guests on this episode, novelist Zoe Venditozzi and human rights attorney Claire Mitchell, spent the last seven years digging deep into their own country of Scotland’s prolific history of witch trials and executions - a  history that was up to now virtually unknown.

Gifted storytellers and viciously funny, Claire and Zoe document their journey into this dark past in their...

Male-run totalitarian governments copy paste each other’s oppressive tactics; one aspiring dictator looks at what another tyrant is up to and adopts similar methods - and all seem to be different variations on the same theme - mainly to keep women vulnerable and under men’s control, and away from self-determination and any political power.

Guest on this episode, Li Wen, started out as a journalist and policy analyst in China and now lives in Germany where she hosts a wildly popular Chinese podcast called Seahorse Planet. Banned in China but globally popular, Seahorse Planet features crit...

One of the main goals of Subject To Power is to create an international platform for women (and some men) from different cultures to come on and report on what is happening in their corner of the world, so that the rest of us can learn from them, and maybe heed some warnings.

It's easy to think that what happens in our own little bubble is unique, unique to our government, unique to our laws, to the way men behave in our particular country, unique to our cultural customs. But the more you listen to women in...

For Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo, sauna is the medicine we need in these tormented times. “In the sauna you are brought into direct contact with the holy spirit.  It's the alternative to the patriarchal church. It's the space of peace, of equality, of ritual and the sacredness that we have lost and are craving.  It's a multidimensional healing space for the body, the spirit, and the mind.”

A researcher of women’s cultural studies and folklore, Northern women’s culture, goddess mythologies, Indigenous worldview and theory, modern matriarchal studies, the gift economy, and the bear religion, Kaarina has spent ma...

With male violence being an inescapable and world-shaping force, one that undermines democracy, equality and peace - how do we unpack and tease apart the ingredients that go into the making of men and male culture of dominance? How do we shake up and push for a cultural shift away from violent domination?

In this episode Elle talks with world-leading researcher and educator Michael Flood, who has spent his life doing exactly that - researching, writing and discussing men, masculinities, gender, violence against women, and maybe most importantly - violence prevention for men and boys and creating...

Poet Usha Akella talks about poems as bridges into worlds, bridges that help to soften borders - and there is nothing we need more at this moment - than a softening of the criss-crossing lines that cut us off from one another. Borders are hardening, honest and patient dialogue is becoming rare, and meeting each other halfway seems more and more difficult - but a poet’s words can offer a bypass, a more direct path from one human heart to another.

Acclaimed poet and author of 11 books, Usha has contributed to over 150 literary anthologies and journals, an...

Award-winning non-fiction writer and journalist Rachel Hewitt unearths and writes about various corners of women’s history - and the subsequent erasure of that same history - showing us how women are indeed equal participants in all aspects of public life - until we are banned, excluded and erased. 

In her latest book, In Her Nature, Rachel looks at women’s accomplishments in sports and the great outdoors from the Victorian era to the present, and chronicles the various ways in which men organized to exclude and ban women from athletics and the outdoors - and more broad...

Parents, teachers and youth workers of all kinds are warily watching how the internet, smartphones and social media is impacting adolescence, and there is no question that we are in uncharted territory - especially as it pertains to boys and young men.

Michael Conroy has spent his career working in personal development and well-being programs for boys and young men in secondary school in the UK, and has had a front row seat to the enormous changes the world-wide web has brought to bear on the developing minds and social lives of boys and young men...

Conversation and debate regarding transgenderism and gender ideology has been effectively forbidden and shut down for many years, and people who have dared to raise concerns have been hounded and punished in all sorts of ways. Like many outspoken feminists, Laura Lecuona was cancelled and attacked in her native country of Mexico for daring to ask questions about concepts such as ‘born in the wrong body’ and ‘gender affirming care’.

In this episode Elle talks with Laura about her new book Gender Identity: Lies And Dangers; about what sparked the transgender movement, how gender ideology became such a pervas...

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 so brutally subjugates all living creatures in the service of masculine world-making.

In t...

What drives societies to turn on women in their midst - with accusations, branding, persecution and often violence and death - in the name of witchcraft?

Witch hunting occupied a dark chapter in European and early American history, but variations of this brutal phenomena lives on in many parts of the world today.

Guest on today’s episode, multidisciplinary feminist research scholar Govind Kelkar, wrote a book called Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation and in this hour we talk about Govind’s research into modern-day witch hunts in India and around the world - th...

The world rushes to meet the ever-expanding sexual appetites of men - and then we collectively call it “men’s needs” and agree that “men’s needs” must be met. 

All forms of prostitution and pornography, online and in real life, offer a bottomless menu of sexual experiences, fetishes, and boundary-crossing pursuits. Technology works overtime to invent novel ways to achieve male orgasm and indulge men in what they might fancy next. 

And nowhere is this busy business of realizing men’s sexual fantasies more obvious than in the sex doll business. 

Guest on this episode...

Prostitution cannot be contained in one small corner of the culture. Once we accept and endorse the sale of women for men’s sexual use and abuse, the ideas and practices of prostitution bleeds into all layers of society.

Germany shows us how. In 2002, Germany gave state-sanctioned approval to the sex-trade and made prostitution a legal and legitimate industry in cities and towns across the land. 

Researcher, writer and public speaker Elly Arrow tracks and reports on all aspects of prostitution in her homeland of Germany and around the world - and in this hour, Ell...

As a woman, you can roll along with the assumption that your body belongs to you and you alone. That you are an autonomous human being like everyone else. But then your fertility, your baby-making capacity comes into view and suddenly you are subjected to powers far outside yourself.

Guest on this episode, UK journalist and author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like A Feminist and My Period, Milli Hill, has reported on and written about this complicated zone, the zone where woman meets “system”, and the power struggle that often takes place between you as an...

What makes a good human?

We receive prescriptions for virtuous morality from all manner of religions, philosophies, and intellectual traditions - but is human morality something that is taught and learned?

Guest on today’s episode, researcher and author Darcia Narvaez, does not think human morality has much to do with principles, or guidelines we’re taught, or lessons we learn. 

Rather - that human morality is built - from a complex, interwoven, physical, neurobiological, sociocultural process that begins in our mother’s womb and continues throughout our life. A process that developed out of...

As new wars emerge across the world, wars that ended decades ago are still destroying the societies that waged them.

Guest on today’s episode, Olivera Simić, came of age in the intrastate war that broke apart her country of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and has spent her life researching, documenting, bearing witness to, and articulating the uncontainable trauma that continue to ripple through her homeland 30 years later. 

In her autobiography Surviving Peace, Olivera writes about how those experiences shaped her life, and in the newly published Lola’s War: Rape Without Punishment, as well as a n...

The institution of prostitution has received a re-branding in recent times, appropriating terms from labor and the corporate world such as “sex work”, “full-service”, “clients”, “sex workers” “doing bookings” arranged by “managers” - presumably in order to de-stigmatize women who sell sex, to make the practice safer for sex sellers, and to make the sex industry mainstream.

But has the nature of the practice - of men buying women for sexual use - really changed?

In this episode, Elle talks to author and activist Andrea Heinz, who spent time in the sex industry in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where p...

In the midst of The Enlightenment, when men in the West hailed reason and rationalism, and aspired towards lofty ideals such as liberty, equality and religious tolerance - another darker social phenomenon was taking place. Over a period of more than 200 years, thousands of women (and some men) across Europe were thrown in jail, tortured, hanged and burned - accused and tried for witchcraft.

In this episode Elle talks to Marianne Hester, a world-leading researcher in gender-based violence, with expertise in domestic and sexual abuse and violence, coercive control, sexual exploitation, and forced marriage.

In...

Motherhood, in our Western culture, is full of contradictions. On the one hand, mothers perform an essential task: creating and nurturing new human life. On the other, the status of mothers is that of general servitude to the nuclear family, with no significant public voice or power.

Western culture, adopted across the world, is still largely structured in the mold that the male Greek philosophers created millennia ago. Roughly divided into a public sphere that is inhabited and controlled by men, and the family sphere which is inhabited by women and children; a “private world” that is unde...

Science and technology is a synonym for progress. It is always considered a step forward, an improvement of our lives, a promise of new possibilities. A promise of a future that will necessarily contain more and better science and technology to make our lives ever more convenient, ever more automated, ever more under our control.

For women, many of us are conditioned to welcome scientific and technological advancements as a form of liberation from our sexed bodies and its processes. Medicine, machines and technicians preside over our whole reproductive lives - and we don’t always consider wh...

The prevalence of murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or feminicide.

While criminal justice systems are kept busy processing feminicide; whole media genres are dedicated to telling the stories of feminicide; untold governmental agencies and NGOs report on the general state of feminicide - the fact remains that no government, no country in the world actually keeps statistics on feminicide.

In this episode...

Our economic institutions - capitalism, trade, money, the market - are based on one fundamental principle: Quid Pro Quo. Something For Something.

It is said that these systems sprung out of the age-old human tradition of trade, of exchange. That humans, from the dawn of time, have exchanged with each other for our needs - goods, services, emotions, care, language - that our very nature is transactional.

Our guest on this episode, independent researcher Genevieve Vaughan, has spent her life theorizing and proving the very opposite - that Quid Pro Quo, or “the exchange economy” is c...

“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 compartmentalized, distorted and split apart.

Working from the creed that “the minute something is out of sync with its context, you're busy with lunacy”, Shahieda weaves together be...

No status puts a woman at greater vulnerability than that of being a migrant or refugee.

Anna Zobnina is a Strategy and Executive Director at European Network of Migrant Women, and she knows first-hand the realities and complex challenges that migrant and refugee women face in Europe.  With over 15 years of experience in feminist analysis of male violence & discrimination against women and girls, sexual and reproductive exploitation, and international human rights policy work, Anna and her organization are at the forefront of the women’s rights policy-battles currently raging in Europe. 

Fundamental issues of equality betw...

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, and covert - in other cultures it is outspoken, brutal and overt.

In this episode Elle talks to scholar, journalist and author of Leftover Women and Betraying Big Brother Leta Hong Fincher, who has spent many years studying and w...

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 women’s lives from cultures all over the globe, she has amassed a vas...

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 episode we talk about what Hunter brilliantly captures about this “strange sphere” in Body Sh...

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.

In past episodes we have covered Heide’s work on modern matriarchies (Ep...

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 play a central role.

In this episode Elle talks...

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 gain popularity until the 2000s, and Shalva was instrumental in putting the phenomena of femicide into our collective consciousness. 

In this episode we discuss Shalva’s groundbreaking research and her work pioneering femicide observatories, the many obs...

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 breaks down how absurd - and harmful - this fictional concept is. She also takes Elle on a deep dive into what human emotion, or the affective circuitry - as she calls it - actually is and how it works.

You...

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 free and open access to vulnerable populations - the liberal myth of sexual self-empowerment is cracking.

This in part because survivors of the sex trade are finally talking, being heard, weighing in in the debate and getting politically active - in numbers. Defying the shame and...

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 partnership systems that held women in respectful regard - to that of brutal, exploitative dominator cu...

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 book, Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mothe...

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 of Patriarchy in Europe and West Asia, using a new matriarchal paradigm, she reveals evidence of an ancient past that looks very different from the official history of “civilization” that our Western history promotes.

In this...

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 weapons capable of the greatest mass death and planetary destruction.

In 1980, at the height of the arms race, Ann Pettitt was a young mother and vegetable farmer in rural...