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 challenged. A world order that punishes women who make too much noise.

If those radical feminists are deliberately silenced, chased out of their jobs and institutions, de-platformed, even chased out of their countries, or threatened with violence - like this episode’s guest, founder of Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy was - we are silencing the only people who can explain to the rest of us what patriarchy is up to.  

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 the distracting and false choices we often entertain, and instead challenges the incredible contradictions embedded in our modern liberation movements. 

In this episode we talk about Renée’s own quest to fully understand all of what is at stake for women and men, to excavate the forces that distort our connection to eros, the life force, that stunt and disfigure our living energies - and how we can cultivate freedom in an unfree world.

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 provides educational tools for parents and teachers to cope with the impact pornography is having on young people.

Gail Dines reframes pornography to show how ‘the industrialization of sex’ has groomed and captured Western culture in the last 70 years, and in this episode she takes us through the key moments in the evolution of porn - from Hugh Hefner to Girls Gone Wild to OnlyFans. We also talk about what today’s global sex industry does to women, what consuming it does to men across the world, and how we build resistance to the pornification of our lives.

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: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers she examines how our cultural values shape how law is written and executed, and also how our laws determine why we believe some and not others - and why we care so much about some, and so very little about others. 

In this episode Deborah breaks down how the “credibility complex” not only dictates how justice is meted out, but how the justice system, just like our culture, orients to the pain of the powerful, and disregards the pain of the powerless. And how, in a world where women as a class are subject to the greater power of men as a class, ‘justice’ becomes a tenuous matter.

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 Academia Hagia of Modern Matriarchal Studies, she has spent nearly 40 years researching and disseminating a vast repository of knowledge about matriarchal societies around the world - their politics, economics, social practices and spirituality.

In this episode we barely scratch the surface of what there is to know, but for those of us who worry about our violent and unequal present, where only a few humans at the top of the hierarchy are getting their needs met, and great masses of our human family suffer - it feels like a key to a different world, a different humanity.

www.goettner-abendroth.de

www.hagia.de

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 prehistory - our pre-patriarchal history - on a search for female deities and past religions that may have offered women affirmation of female power, the female body, and the female will - rather than shame and denigration.

In this episode, Miriam, a hugely accomplished research scholar in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and mythology, talks about uncovering the female aspects of prehistoric belief systems, unearthing the roots of Indo-European patriarchy, and how she and famed archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (and many others) formed the contested theories about the matriarchal societies of the neolithic.

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 sexual gratification, to invade every corner of our lives and culture. This new breed of porn is unrecognizable from the porn mags of yesterday, and carry a very different message - that of violent misogyny.

Melinda Tankard Reist, author, activist and founder of the grassroots organization Collective Shout, have spent the last two decades staring into the abyss, reporting on the destruction that today’s porn is causing - to relationships, families, schools, communities - and our humanity.  

However, not content with just reporting, Melinda and Collective Shout are also going after and shutting down predatory peddlers and their goods and services both online and in real life. We talk about all of the above, Melinda's new book He Chose Porn Over Me, and the bravery needed for this type of activism.

Collective Shout

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 sociologist, has scrutinized and critiqued what she calls the “techno docs” and their advancements for over 40 years, and has written several books such as Broken Bonds and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation on the subject. In this episode we talk about where the science has taken us, and all the moral questions that arise from this hugely profitable industry.

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, speaks in the clearest and most concrete way about the destruction that absolute male power has wrought, and drawing from ancient myths, mother nature and her own deep erudition - has written volumes that envisions a different way to live - in books like Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalization and Biodiversity and Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy among others. 

In this episode Elle and Susan riff on the dangers of watered down liberal feminism, the importance of having a 40,000 year plan, and patriarchy’s many, many Trojan Horses. Plus poetry.

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 and written about the sexual exploitation industries since the 1980s. In this episode of Subject To Power, Robert shares his observations on the profound and humanity-altering effects that the sexual exploitation industries are having on men, women and children around the world.