Subject To Power

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. 

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 history hides and erases. Renée builds on a rich tradition of writers, artists, scientists and revolutionaries to re-draw a world history from a female perspective that not only puts women back in the story, but that corrects the distortions and artifice designed to obscure and oppress all that is female - then and now. 

This sweeping conversation flies through sexual homonization, the origins of mathematics and human spirituality, the true purpose of religion and law, the establishments of patriarchy, privatization of the commons, and neoliberalism, witch-hunting then and now, the meaning of recent mass movements, or lack thereof, and what you can and cannot talk about today.

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 tracing patriarchy and misogyny back through - not just history, but the evolution of human neurobiology.

Between her scholarship in the field of trauma and dissociation and 35 years as a clinical practitioner, looking at thousands of cases of human-on-human harm - Christine reflects that the human species as a whole is a traumatized species. That we now might be stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of trauma and neglect, in a world culture in which neither men nor women, boys nor girls can thrive. 

But as someone who heals very broken humans for a living, Christine also shares what we need to do to cure ourselves, of misogyny and patriarchy, and the remedies are deceptively simple and completely within our human capacity.

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 of women by men shape the wider political order and what implications it has for global security and development.

Dr. Hudson relies on vast data-collection done by teams of global researchers at WomenStats database, which she created to track and analyze the status of women across the world, and in her new book The First Political Order, she masterfully joins the treatment and status of women with questions of politics and peace, and the fates of nations. 

In this first episode we jump in the deep end! Enjoy!

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.