The institution of prostitution has received a re-branding in recent times, appropriating terms from labor and the corporate world such as “sex work”, “full-service”, “clients”, “sex workers” “doing bookings” arranged by “ma…
Motherhood, in our Western culture, is full of contradictions. On the one hand, mothers perform an essential task: creating and nurturing new human life. On the other, the status of mothers is that of general servitude to th…
Science and technology is a synonym for progress. It is always considered a step forward, an improvement of our lives, a promise of new possibilities. A promise of a future that will necessarily contain more and better scien…
The prevalence of murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or f…
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 prostituti…
Our language - profane, sublime and everything in between - holds hidden truths about our cultural heritage, our current reality, and who determines it - and etymology, the study of the origins of words, can unlock this know…
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 fa…
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 we…
The battle for control of reproduction is as old as time, and since women alone have the power to create new life, women’s bodies continue to be the de facto battlefield for that power struggle.
Political, economical, and…
We are in our 6th millennia of patriarchy, and as this episode’s guest Susan Hawthorne puts it, “the publicity program for patriarchy has been going for some 5,000 years”. As a poet, author and founder of the feminist publis…
If we were to devise a mechanism by which male power writ large can reach the innermost center of female power - and maim or destroy it - it would look like the internet-fueled sexual exploitation industries that are now in …
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 …
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-wagin…
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…