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.

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, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social sciences. Never mind Sigmund Freud.

Since that time, Carol Gilligan has become a towering figure not just in psychology, but in the culture, with an immense body of research and writing that continues to demand a space for the interior life of girls and women in our cultural lexicon. 

In this episode, Carol talks to Elle about what she calls her ‘girl's work’ - as well as that well-known force in the world - that incentivizes girls to cover their honest voices, that makes boys abandon their intimate relationships, and that makes women choose not to say what they know.

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. “Because of my familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, I realized the violent men I was seeing in prison, they just walked right out of Shakespeare's plays. I saw Othello, I saw Richard III, I saw Timon of Athens. He understood these guys and helped me to understand them.”

In this episode, Elle talks with American psychiatrist Jim Gilligan, who pioneered extremely successful violence prevention programs in American prisons, and his co-author law professor, moral philosopher and writer David A.J. Richards, about their new book Holding a Mirror Up to Nature: Shame, Guilt and Violence in Shakespeare, about the psycho-social forces behind why murderers murder, and how we all may be living in a Shakespeare play.  

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 has a sweeping conversation with award-winning research scholar Cynthia Enloe about her groundbreaking gender analysis of military, war and international politics, and how feminist politics have shaped national and international conversations.

An influential feminist thinker, spell-binding orator and author of fifteen books on women's roles in economic markets, world conflicts, and power politics, Cynthia unpacks the very processes by which we, and everything around us, unknowingly get feminized, masculinized and militarized - but more importantly - how we can resist, and even stop or reverse these covert socializations. 

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 family courts across the world wield that power, whose interests are protected and whose are not, and the cultural forces that drive its decisions - decisions that by and large do not favor the interests, safety and welfare of women or children. 

In this episode, Elle and Grant hash through the whys, hows and very real and violent impacts of "the family court crisis", what it says about the state of men, and the urgent need for a new language and new terms for relationships between women and men.

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 world" since her days as a clinical nurse in pediatric critical care, and now she tells the real stories of the women who sell their eggs and rent their wombs in films like "Eggsploitation" and "Breeders", which shows a much darker side to this unique human trade than what the fertility industry's marketing campaigns will have us believe. 

In this episode we talk about the fraught ethics and very real physical realities around egg harvesting, surrogacy, as well as the new frontier of "gender medicine".

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 truths about why we are being sold those false stories to begin with.