Subject To Power

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 Di...

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 ...

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 masculinit...

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 Wye...

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...

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 bei...

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, scienti...

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 o...

Despite great social diversity across the planet, it is an observable fact that males subordinates 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 gl...