a bonobo humanity?

Sanna Marin, current PM of Finland. The Scandinavians so often set the example

I live in Australia, thankfully, far from the madding crowd of male thugs and bullies in charge of such scary northern hemisphere oligarchies and/or dictatorships as Russia, Iran, the USA, China, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Burma, Uzbekistan and Trump’s Venezuela, to name a more or less random few. It really is demoralising to find, as I pass my 70th birthday, that so much of the world is in such a mess, with so little good news to turn to.

Where do our future hopes lie? Not so much in individual female leaders – Japan’s first female PM, Sanae Takaichi, has views described by Wikipedia as ‘conservative or ultra-conservative’, and she apparently wants to be seen as Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’, as she’s a big fan of Margaret Thatcher. Oh dear. At least she has a pro-Taiwan foreign policy. Italy’s first female PM Giorgia Meloni, another ‘right to far right’ leader, was involved in fascist politics in her youth. It almost seems as if female political leaders can’t be trusted, or popular, unless they come from a solidly conservative – that’s to say, male-dominated – part of the political world. Then again, New Zealand has had Jacinda Ardern (PM from 2017 to 2023), and we in Australia had our first and only female PM Julia Gillard (2010-2013). Both were Labour Party leaders. And I think it’s fair to say that Gillard in particular was given a really rough ride because of her gender. Ardern, on the other hand, benefitted, I would think, from being the third female Prime Minister of her country. Their second female PM, Helen Clark, held the post for nine years. This has paved the way, in New Zealand at least, for female leadership being something slightly approaching ‘the new normal’. Another approach has been that of Australia, where I live. It now has 22 women in the Cabinet, the core governing body of our federal system. That’s 55% of the total. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher only ever had one other woman in the cabinet in her 11-year tenure as PM – a Baroness who spent two years in the House of Lords. Currently, 50% of Britain’s Cabinet are women – a record for the country. Gradually, creepingly, the numbers are rising for women in government positions throughout the WEIRD world, and just look at those countries that eschew female political empowerment. They are invariably the world’s worst.

As for the power of the purse, or wallet (or crypto-wallet?) which is massive in that same WEIRD world, that power is still held overwhelmingly, and I do mean overwhelmingly, by men. I could provide the gory details, but surely everyone knows how true this is. Even though my own knowledge of crypto-currency is less than zero, I’m certain that it’s more or less entirely controlled by men, simply because I’m not a complete idiot.

Anyway, leaving that mysterious realm aside, female political empowerment in the future could be a weapon against the Puddings and Frumps of the world. Imagine if the current President of Ukraine was a woman, with a largely female cabinet, how that would play out in terms of global politics and alliances.

Losing our religion is another way we can boost the eternal feminine. Christianity, which is fading fast in Australia, involves the worship of a double male father-and-son act, and in its Catholic form, the next tiers of power are the ever-male Popes or Papas, the ever-male cardinals, the ever-male archbishops, the ever-male bishops and the ever-male priests. How delightfully aberrant. It’s my view that Protestantism was the first step away from that patriarchal religion, and towards atheism.

And then there’s Islam, the most patriarchal of all the world’s long-standing religions, all of which are patriarchal.

The growth of feminism in our global politics and economy, a slow but steady development – would that it were so much quicker – will lead to the increasing isolation of these rogue macho states. Take for example supposedly secular China, which surely has little excuse for its machismo. It has had no women in its 24-member politburo since October 2022, and has never had a woman in its 7-member Standing Committee, the elite body that essentially runs the country, when it’s not a dictatorship, which it arguably is today. But then, Xi PingPong is 73, and Mr Pudding almost a year older, and Frump is 80, I believe. They’ll all be dead soon enough, and the odour of machismo that hangs over the northern hemisphere, like that of a never-cleaned toilet, may just start to fade a little….