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 this hour we talk about man’s fear of death and life, the fear-to-domination pipeline, women as the eternal scapegoat, man’s revenge against a biology he cannot escape, the unending disaster of splitting the world into warring halves (think female/male, body/mind, nature/science), and how necessary it is that we end male dominion and return to a reintegration of body and mind and living earth.

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CREDITS

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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 - the surprising factors that drive it, how it unfolds in communities, why women are targeted, and what the practice tells us about men, women, and different kinds of power and powerlessness.

Episode Links

GenDev Center for Research and Innovation

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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, Caitlin Roper, is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout, a global grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising and popular culture. Caitlin’s writing has been featured in The Guardian, Huffington Post, and many other publications and in 2022 she came out with her book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating.

In this hour we talk about all of what Caitlin discovered when researching the whole world of sex dolls - the manufacturing, the marketing, the men who buy and use the sex dolls, and the many real-life impacts on women, girls and boys.

On the sympathy-inducing ways in which sex dolls are marketed, how they are offered as a cure for lonely men, suggesting that a silicone replica of a woman provides the human connection that these men lack, Caitlin says, “What sex dolls do, is they actually get in the way of any kind of intimacy and real connection, genuine human relationships because they keep the user alone. They're penetrating a doll, but there's no connection because again, they're alone. They're masturbating into an object.”

Episode Links

Collective Shout

Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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, Elly talks to Elle about what it was like to come of age as a young woman in a pro-prostitution culture, how it has affected relationships between men and women in her country, and how the normalization of prostitution has bled into other sectors - housing, employment, labor, children’s rights, local and national politics, immigration, policing and more. 

We also talk about the debate that is now being had in Germany about whether to adopt the Equality Model, whether to try to rein in the 20-year prostitution industry that has exploded across the landscape - or to continue being “Europe’s brothel”.

Episode Links

Elly Arrow on YouTube

Elly Arrow Blog

Red Light Exposé

The Invisible Men - Germany

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

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 autonomous woman with inherent rights - and the powers that be.

In this hour we talk about the much-contested world of childbearing and Milli’s writing and activism to empower women and girls to reclaim their self-determination. But also how Milli, mid-career, has found herself under attack by gender ideologists and how she is now documenting the ideological capture and implosion of her own former community - women’s organizations in the areas of menstruation, breastfeeding, pregnancy, antenatal care, and birth - that once were exclusively for women and girls, but are that no longer.

Episode Links

Milli Hill’s website

Milli Hill’s Substack

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Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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 humanity’s millions-year-old evolution of child-rearing practices that made us the connected, cooperative, socially intelligent species we actually are - underneath the last few thousand years of trauma.

As a young academic, Darcia, driven by an intense feeling that there is something wrong with the way humans treat each other, turned to the study of human morality. In her years of research she took a multi-disciplinary approach to find answers, incorporating evolutionary biology, anthropology, developmental psychology, animal sciences, neuro-sciences.

Along the way, she published dozens of academic articles and twenty books, among them one titled Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. Also, synthesizing her discoveries about what humans actually need to thrive, Darcia developed a new framework called The Evolved Nest, a blueprint of real-life practices that produce human beings with healthy, connected moralities.

In this hour Elle talks to Darcia about The Evolved Nest, about her research into human morality, how humanity got so lost, and how to cultivate and build back our species-normal compassionate nature.

Episode Links

The Evolved Nest

Darcia Narvaez, PhD

Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

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 number of academic articles, Olivera draws on twenty plus years of in-depth conversation and documentation of the experiences of victims, perpetrators and everyone in between - from all sides of the war.

In this hour we talk about the long-term impact of war, particularly on women, in her home country of Bosnia Herzegovina, as well as the limits of institutions - law, medicine, social welfare, education - to remedy the horrific crimes and atrocious violence committed by neighbor against neighbor, countryman against countrywoman. 

Episode Links

Olivera’s website: https://oliverasimic.com/

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Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

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 prostitution is regulated under the Equality Model, where the city of Edmonton issues licenses for brothels, and where the “sex work is work” model is fully embraced.

In this hour we talk about what Andrea learned through her experiences in prostitution and how it changed her, about her awakening and exit, and how she is now channeling those years of trauma into speaking and writing about the realities of working in the sex industry. 

We discuss the belief systems underpinning the “sex work is work” creed and try to answer questions like - if sex is a service that women provide to men, then what is sex for women? What are the actual risks and impacts of having unwanted sex with many strange men all day, every day? Has the “sex work” makeover de-stigmatized sex sellers as promised and made prostitution safer?

Episode Links:

Red Light Exposé

When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?

CEASE

Edmonton John School

Andrea Heinz’s academic paper A Mule For The Patriarchy

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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 her book Lewd Women and Wicked Witches, Marianne looks at male violence and domination through a historical lens, locating the “witch hunts” - the violent persecution of women - in a period of massive restructuring of society, within which a male-female conflict over resources and power was raging. In this hour we talk about how and why women became targets of the “witch craze”, what the “witch hunts” accomplished for the patriarchs, and how those historical events shaped the gendered ideology we still live with today.

Episode Links:

Marianne Hester

Journal of Gender-Based Violence

Lewd Women and Wicked Witches

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness 

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 under constant surveillance and control by the public sphere.

While feminism continually challenges this patriarchal social order, and women as a class have made enormous gains in the public sphere, motherhood is still an arena where patriarchal interests come into direct conflict with human needs and women’s humanity.

In this episode Elle talks to political scientist and author Mariam Tazi-Preve, whose research fields are politics and reproduction, motherhood, fatherhood, family and population policies, European welfare state, gender and political theory, and theory of civilization.

Mariam has written extensively about the history of motherhood in Western patriarchy, about the invention of marriage, and the development of the nuclear family.  In this hour we will talk about these social structures and the impact they have had on women, men and children throughout our history. 

Episode Links

Mariam Tazi-Preve website 

Motherhood In Patriarchy

Contact Us 

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

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Email us at  [email protected]

Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness