Subject To Power

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 the stigma, women are writing books, appearing in media and waging political campaigns - and insisting that we listen to their accounts of what sexual exploitation really looks and feels like on the receiving end.
In this episode, psychotherapist and author Mia Döring talks to Elle about her new book Any Girl: A Memoir of Sexual Exploitation and Recovery about her experiences in the Dublin sex trade, the damage it wrought, and the importance of truth-telling to our collective healing.

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 cultures that venerate men and violence.
More than 30 years hence, Riane reflects on the impact of Chalice, which is often compared to that of Darwin’s Origin of Species - and her body of work that followed - works like The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics; the award-winning Tomorrow's Children and her latest work Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives & Future. 
A celebrated cultural historian and evolutionary theorist, as well as founder of Center for Partnership Studies, Riane’s research has influenced fields including history, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, education, human rights, social and political science, and healthcare. Now in her 90s, Riane is still honing her super-power: synthesizing wildly disparate disciplines and weaving them all into a cohesive worldview full of hope and useful instructions for a better future.

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 Mother in the Anthropocene, in which she critically reimagines The Anthropocene, The Age of Man, from an eco-feminist perspective. Not for the tender-eared, in this sweeping conversation Jane breaks down the origins of the term motherf***er, explains why Mother Earth is not a metaphor, spells out the difference between omnipotence and cunctipotence, and much more.

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 episode, Heide talks through the evidence that points to millennia of peaceful development taking place in mother-centered cultures, throughout the Neolithic and before that the Paleolithic. Human societies with well-developed social structures, whose creativity and inventions laid the foundation for life as we know it.

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 Wales and found herself in much closer proximity to the nuclear threat than most - and in this episode Ann is going to tell the story of how she became a leader of the largest all-women peace action of all time - The Greenham Women's Peace Camp - which lasted 20 years and helped end the Cold War.

For most of us who end up in feminism, who end up actively fighting for women’s rights - the consciousness that brought us here - came at a steep price.
Some of us got shocked into it, some of us went through a series of painful awakenings that forced us to search for an explanation, a framework by which to analyze the violations we had been subjected to or witnessed.
Our guest on this episode, Brazilian journalist Andreia Nobre, tells the story of her own harrowing awakenings, starting at the age of 8, that put her on a lifelong quest to make sense of the lack of safety, autonomy, and dignity she experienced as a girl, as a young woman, as a mother - in Brazil, in Portugal, and in the UK.
A passionate journalist and researcher, Andreia channeled her journey from silenced victim to outspoken survivor to wide awake activist, to report on the very dire reality women of the world still face - in the West, in so-called developing countries, and around the globe.

There is no issue where the distance between the idea - and the lived reality - is as far apart as in prostitution. The discourse about prostitution often takes place miles away from the thing itself, and is had by people far removed from the violence and trauma of prostitution.  The voices of survivors of prostitution are rarely heard because their lives are inevitably impacted by the violence and trauma of prostitution.
Our guest Cherry Smiley, an Indigenous feminist researcher, activist and author wanted to bridge this gap, and set out on an academic research project on the subject of prostitution - in the hopes that by shedding light on the lived realities of Indigenous women and girls in prostitution, she would shift people’s thinking about what prostitution actually is. She then wrote a book about her arduous PhD journey and her evolving insights called Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined.
In this episode we talk to Cherry about putting her whole academic career on the line taking on the ‘sex work is work’ creed, the courage it took to bring her life experience as an Indigenous feminist woman to bear on her research project, and the cost of speaking up against the things manstitutions hold sacred.

A huge thank you to everyone who is listening, subscribing, sharing and engaging with Subject To Power. We are 20 episodes in and wrapping up Season 1 with immense gratitude and a few reflections by host Elle Kamihira, as well as a bit about what we have planned for Season 2 and forward.
 
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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.