Subject To Power

When we talk about the oppression of women, we may idealize certain countries who seem to have been successful in creating real, material gains for women - and we may look in horror at countries where women have little to no power, or who suffer under a great deal of male violence. Reality is often much more contradictory. In cultures that may be feminist-friendly and equality-minded - masculine values and patriarchal networks still find a way to dominate. Or in cultures where women are fighting for their very existence, new feminist and women-centered systems spring to life where least expected. In their new book, Planet Patriarchy: Global Tales of Feminism and Oppression, veteran feminists, award-winning authors and journalists Rahila Gupta and Beatrix Campbell take a close look at 8 very different countries - to discover the many varied faces of patriarchy.  The societies Rahila and Beatrix report on; Iceland, South Africa, El Salvador, China, Russia, ISIS, Saudi Arabia, and Rojava, have very different histories, cultures, and political and economical systems - everything from military dictatorships, to liberal democracies, to religious monarchies, state-run capitalist, and post-revolutionary societies - or a mix - but what unifies them and what is present always - is the patriarchal power structures that run through whatever the governing systems happen to be. In this hour, Elle talks to Beatrix and Rahila about their epic journey around our planet, now nearly overtaken by overlapping and intersecting patriarchal power structures - and how women in different parts of the world are resisting male domination, fighting for women’s rights and interests, and maintaining solidarity in their movements. Patriarchy may endure, but so does feminism and the struggle to achieve liberation for all women. EPISODE LINKS Planet Patriarchy Southall Black Sisters CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

When news of men’s coordinated sex attacks erupt in the media, such as the recent Cornell 7, or the Giséle Pelicot case, or the global Whatsapp groups dedicated to rape techniques, not to mention the Epstein files - we desperately want to think about these atrocities against women and children as an abomination. We call for the punishment of the depraved men who did it. We feel compelled to think of these crimes as a horrific breakdown of societal norms. Author Aurora Linnea has written an extraordinary essay titled The Unexceptional Jeffrey Epstein: Rapist Everyman and Ubermensch published on her Substack Holistic Anti Atrocity Feminism - which takes the very opposite view. In her essay, Aurora examines Epstein’s sex crimes enterprise - trading girls and women to other men for sexual abuse - in a historical context. She traces the practice of men working together in informal or formal networks to sexually violate, back in history - showing us that Epstein and all other predator networks IS our social norm, and actually fits very neatly into our cultural landscape.  In this hour we talk about how we stop pretending that Epstein is a rare monstrosity, what gang rape as a practice reveals about male sexual mores and norms, and the very central role that sexual violence against girls and women play in how men bond with each other and how they broker status and power amongst one another. Or as Aurora puts it, “ women and girls are very valuable capital in the homosocial maneuvering of men under patriarchy.”  EPISODE LINKS Man Against Being (Spinifex Press) by Aurora Linnea The Unexceptional Jeffrey Epstein: Rapist Everyman and Ubermensch CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

40 years ago, Jane Caputi wrote a brilliant book about serial sex killers - The Age of Sex Crime - which is as relevant today as it was in 1987. In the book, Jane analyzes the histories of well-known, individual serial sex killers, from Jack The Ripper to The Boston Strangler to Son of Sam to Ted Bundy and many more - and answers fundamental questions about how and why they came to be - and how they fit into our cultural narratives. Jane argues that far from being monstrous aberrations, serial sex murderers occupy a role in our patriarchal culture that is both accommodated and endorsed.  In this hour Elle talks with Jane about all aspects of serial sex killing; the folk hero appeal of serial sex killers, how sexual terror is used to preserve male power, how the serial killers, police and media co-create “monster genius mastermind" narratives and how these narratives fit hand in glove with a common collective male fantasy of hurting women.  We also talk about the real silencing of victims and how women everywhere are invited to identify with the serial killer’s victims, both in the real-life cases, then in the true crime media that retells the gruesome details, and then finally in the fictional movies, books and television that serves up an endless buffet of dead women, bloody sacrifices to male power.  EPISODE LINKS Professor Jane Caputi The Age Of Sex Crime Are Women Human? by Catharine MacKinnon CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

Abuse and systematic cruelty against women and children is common across the world, but the term torture is still reserved mostly for men - think political prisoners, prisoners of war, victims of evil regimes.  But guests on today’s episode, retired-community-nurses-turned-global-human-rights-activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have a plan - a 60-year plan - to broaden our understanding of torture to include women and children, and to get non-state torture recognized as a crime everywhere. Jeanne and Linda spent their whole working lives as public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, providing womb-to-tomb care throughout their province. As nurses they came into contact with a lot of family violence and abuse of women and children - and advocating for and counseling victims were an essential part of their job and their personal mission.  But in 1993, Linda and Jeanne had a fateful encounter with a woman who reported being a victim of life-long systematic torture, and they soon realized that they were dealing with a very different category of harm - and this set their careers and their lives in a whole new direction. The story of how Jeanne and Linda helped and cared for this torture victim, what they discovered about organized torture networks and perpetrators, how they created the model for understanding non-state torture as a phenomenon and as a crime - and how they became global activists in the process - is chronicled in their book Women Unsilenced. In this hour Elle talks with Linda and Jeanne about their story, their decades of research and founding the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture - and how they used nursing science and an unshakable ethic of care to help victims break out of silence, to tell of their victimization, to escape, and to heal from their traumas.  EPISODE LINKS Persons Against Non-State Torture website Women Unsilenced Healing United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

No matter how much the “family values” crowd wishes for women to “return home where they belong”, Linda Scott, renown expert on women’s economy and author of The Double X Economy, knows women’s economic empowerment has traversed past the point of no return. It is - in every way - too late. It is too late to force women out of the market economy and back into the private, domestic sphere - without widespread damage to all of society. Notably, a fact that is not stopping patriarchs from trying to shove women backwards.  In founding the concept of The  Double X Economy, Linda revealed how women have been economically subjugated across the world and throughout history, demonstrating through extensive data and on-the-ground research how women have been systematically excluded from the entire financial order. Linda opens our eyes to the economic injustices women are subjected to around the globe, from corporate offices to rural farms, far beyond being denied paid work or being exploited for unpaid labor. In this episode, Elle talks to Linda about patriarchy’s most powerful and enduring tool used to keep women out of power and away from agency - economic exclusion - and why it is that gender inequality is such a bad economic strategy, and gender equality is a perfect recipe for success - regardless of culture. We talk about the far-reaching consequences of shutting women out, as well as the equally far-reaching positive impacts of lifting the constraints on women, also about our Chimpanzee-Bonobo deep past, our very dark present, and the exciting new project Linda is working on. EPISODE LINKS The Double X Economy CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

In 2026 the global surrogacy industry will grow to over 30 billion dollars. The manufacturing plants and raw materials that make this massive business possible are women's bodies, and the products being bought and sold are human babies.  This hugely profitable industry can only exist if a subset of women offer themselves up for highly invasive, completely unnatural, risky, and life-altering medical procedures resulting in pregnancy and birth, or alternatively “egg-harvesting” - all with little to no legal protection or oversight. What motivates women to become surrogate mothers? What motivates women to have their eggs extracted for other women to “use”? What and who are the drivers behind the normalization of surrogacy? We know that money plays a big part, both for the surrogate mothers and to the chain of people who profit from this human trade - the surrogacy agencies, doctors, clinics, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry - what we might call Big Fertility - but there are other factors at play besides money. Guest on this episode, founder of Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Lexi Ellingsworth, has been investigating surrogacy and campaigned against surrogacy law reform in the UK for 7 years, where commercial surrogacy is still illegal but "altruistic" surrogacy is getting more and more common.  In her work to raise awareness around the mountains of ethical questions surrounding the practice of surrogacy in the UK and internationally, Lexi works closely with survivors of surrogacy and in this episode we get an inside view of the world of surrogate motherhood and the dangerously murky morality that surrogate mothers navigate on their often harrowing “journeys”. We talk about how toxic empathy, low self-esteem and needing to prove you are a good person can lead some women to offer up their bodies for use. We talk about so-called reproductive privilege, the idea that “aren't you lucky you can do this without any help, you don't have to go to an IVF clinic, and you really should help other people who don't have the same luck as you”, as well as the use of human rights language such as Wombs Without Borders, “humanitarian surrogacy” and “fertility refugees”. We talk about the dehumanizing and highly manipulative language that is now being used to trivialize the whole biological act of becoming a mother into terms like “extreme babysitting” and “easy-bake oven” and what it means for women everywhere that we are creating a subclass of women who are used or useful for breeding for other people. EPISODE LINKS Stop Surrogacy Now UK The Critic: Surrogacy Is Not a Human Right by Lexi Ellingsworth The International Coalition Against Surrogate Motherhood The Casablanca Declaration CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

Much of today’s rise of violent misogyny can find its cultural traces in the witch hunts of old Europe and North America. And while many of us are casually aware of these historical events, our two guests on this episode, novelist Zoe Venditozzi and human rights attorney Claire Mitchell, spent the last seven years digging deep into their own country of Scotland’s prolific history of witch trials and executions - a  history that was up to now virtually unknown. Gifted storytellers and viciously funny, Claire and Zoe document their journey into this dark past in their fascinating new book How To Kill A Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women as well as on their hit podcast Witches of Scotland. Through a sharply feminist lens, Claire and Zoe unravel exactly how the witch craze kicked off, spread across Scotland, and was kept going for centuries, resulting in the torture and execution of over 4000 innocent people, most of whom were women.  In this episode we talk about all of their projects, including their legal campaign to bring justice to those accused, convicted, and executed under the The Witchcraft Act of 1563, about the creation of their Clan Witches of Scotland tartan (for sale on their website), the importance of remembering and memorializing, and also about making connections between those grim events and our present time - as the forces that were at play hundreds of years ago are very much alive today. EPISODE LINKS Witches of Scotland website CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

Male-run totalitarian governments copy paste each other’s oppressive tactics; one aspiring dictator looks at what another tyrant is up to and adopts similar methods - and all seem to be different variations on the same theme - mainly to keep women vulnerable and under men’s control, and away from self-determination and any political power. Guest on this episode, Li Wen, started out as a journalist and policy analyst in China and now lives in Germany where she hosts a wildly popular Chinese podcast called Seahorse Planet. Banned in China but globally popular, Seahorse Planet features critical and inspirational feminism, the type of women’s rights talk male-run totalitarian governments despise and forbid. In this episode we talk about China’s u-turn on gender equality, the many social pressures women are subjected to now, including beauty duty, the marriage trap, discrimination in education and jobs market, and what its latest MeToo movement is accomplishing.  We talk about the huge ripple effects of China’s 35-year-long one child policy and compare notes between the US and China on the birth rate panic and each of our government’s desperate attempts to promote marriage and so-called family values.  We talk about what is considered a good and acceptable kind of feminism in China and the kind of feminism that can ruin your life - and how we, in this ultra-patriarchal world, build a more just social order and what that looks like. EPISODE LINKS Seahorse Planet Podcast CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

One of the main goals of Subject To Power is to create an international platform for women (and some men) from different cultures to come on and report on what is happening in their corner of the world, so that the rest of us can learn from them, and maybe heed some warnings. It's easy to think that what happens in our own little bubble is unique, unique to our government, unique to our laws, to the way men behave in our particular country, unique to our cultural customs. But the more you listen to women in places elsewhere, the clearer it becomes that so many of the methods and tactics used to control women - are the same across nations, and are very predictable.  In this episode Elle talks to young Hungarian feminist Krisztina Les, about what her advocacy and activism for women’s rights in Hungary looks like, and all of what we could learn from what has unfolded there in the last 20 years.  It has never been more crucial that we look beyond our own country’s borders to see what might be ahead for women in our own countries. How democracy, basic freedoms, women’s rights, equality and whole value systems can be dismantled in a very short amount of time. And that none of it is guaranteed. EPISODE LINKS PATENT Association FiLiA Hague Mothers Telex: Expat mother who died in house fire in Budapest had been living in fear for a long time CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]

For Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo, sauna is the medicine we need in these tormented times. “In the sauna you are brought into direct contact with the holy spirit.  It's the alternative to the patriarchal church. It's the space of peace, of equality, of ritual and the sacredness that we have lost and are craving.  It's a multidimensional healing space for the body, the spirit, and the mind.” A researcher of women’s cultural studies and folklore, Northern women’s culture, goddess mythologies, Indigenous worldview and theory, modern matriarchal studies, the gift economy, and the bear religion, Kaarina has spent many years investigating the very old history of sauna and sweating cultures in Finland, in Old Europe and in Indigenous cultures in North America.  With her new book Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality, Kaarina explores the origins of pre-Christian, pre-patriarchal sauna as a sacred space for healing and rebirth, and how female symbols and the maternally perceived cosmos in past sweating cultures have been transformed. In this episode we talk about the early religions that didn't require belief in an abstract god because they were based on mother earth and verifiable material reality. We talk about the patriarchal takeover of sacredness, the great cost of losing our embodiment and connection to the natural world, the power of feminist spirituality to reconnect our broken bonds, and how we embrace the darkness so we can be reborn in the spring. EPISODE LINKS Kaarina Kailo’s website CONTACT US Website: subjecttopower.com Instagram: @subject2power X: @SubjectToPower email us at  [email protected]