Poet Usha Akella talks about poems as bridges into worlds, bridges that help to soften borders - and there is nothing we need more at this moment - than a softening of the criss-crossing lines that cut us off from one another. Borders are hardening, honest and patient dialogue is becoming rare, and meeting each other halfway seems more and more difficult - but a poet’s words can offer a bypass, a more direct path from one human heart to another.Acclaimed poet and author of 11 books, Usha has c...

In her new book Body Shell Girl, poet and sex trade survivor Rose Hunter brings us into the strange theater that takes place between sex buyers and prostitutes when money is exchanged for various sex acts. Describing the everyday reality of her ten years in massage parlors, brothels and hotel rooms of Toronto and Vancouver, Hunter says of prostitution, “it’s really nothing to do with sex, it's this other odd category, with its own bizarre rules, a very strange sphere unto itself.”In this episo...

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 tra...

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. “Becaus...

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...