Archive for the ‘female leadership’ Category
Always look on the bright side….
Okay, trying to stay positive, or push myself into positive mode, what about female leadership on the world stage in these torrid times?
Here in Australia, we’ve had one Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013. It seems, like many of these recent female leaders, she was on the conservative side, for a Labor PM. Most ‘notorious’ at the time was her opposition to same-sex marriage, a view she later changed – after her stint in office. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act was finally passed in 2017, during Malcom Turnbull’s period as PM (Turnbull was more liberal than the Liberal party generally). It had been a long struggle beginning in 2004 when the Howard government passed an amendment to the Marriage Act (1961), explicitly excluding same sex unions from being recognised as marriages. I see it as a minor victory for the Bonobo Sisterhood, though I suspect that change will occur through a multiplicity of such minor victories.
Globally, currently we have Sanae Takaichi, PM of Japan, Giorgia Meloni, PM of Italy, Judith Suminwa, PM of the DRC, Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados, Mette Frederiksen, PM of Denmark, Evika Silina, PM of Latvia, Inga Ruginiene, PM of Lithuania, Brigitte Haas, PM of Liechtenstein, Sara Zaafarani, PM of Tunisia, and that’s not a full list – for example Mexico’s current political leader is their President, Claudia Sheinbaum – they don’t have a parliamentary system. Many of these are ‘firsts’ in terms of female leadership in their countries. Never a female leader in the USA of course, and I wouldn’t hold my breath… Canada has had one PM, Kim Campbell, and she didn’t last six months. I think it’s gonna be a long long time… It will take many generations, not years, to recognise the full value of female leadership. And it will need to be collective, not just one female surrounded by pushy male ‘minions’. As I’ve written before, slowly slowly catchee monkey…. a very appropriate term for the bonobo sisterhood, and its brotherly friends.
The big worry at present is that the most powerful and dangerous countries – the USA, Russia and China in particular, seem to be the furthest from female leadership (ok, leaving aside the Middle East). This is hardly coincidental of course. If we can weather the storms created by these macho, bullish nations over the next century or so – a big ask, admittedly – we just might start inching towards a bonobo humanity….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_female_heads_of_state_or_government
bonobos and me: a personal exploration
Yes, it’s me, why not?
So yes, like everyone, I was born into a patriarchal society, but it’s always complicated. The first society we start with and have to negotiate is family. We were more nuclear than most nuclear families (don’t worry, I’m not talking about radiation and fallout), because we left my native Scotland for Australia when I was five, leaving behind all grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on, never to be seen again, at least by me.
We came via ‘assisted passage’, as skilled migrants. My mother was the skilled one. South Australia was in need of nurses, and my mother heeded the call. She was always the decision-maker. I don’t know how she did it with three young kids, my older brother and sister and myself, but she took up a job as a nursing sister, and then as an assistant matron of a hospital in Gawler, and later still as a nursing teacher/lecturer. My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. It wasn’t a happy marriage – my mother did a lot of shouting, and I always worried that my father, who’d been an amateur boxer in his youth and was impressively muscle-bound, would lose it and go for her, but that never happened, though he’d sometimes threaten – ‘I’ll put your head through that wall’ was a favourite line of his. My mother, though, did occasionally throw things at him, including a pot of something, soup I think, from the kitchen. I don’t know if it was hot or cold.
I was always embarrassed and shamed by these noisy rants. People walking by could surely hear them. And as I got older, the thought of running away from home would seem more and more enticing. The transition from primary to high school was another trauma. The school’s headmaster was a rabid authoritarian who chilled the atmosphere whenever he showed up or spoke into the PA systems installed in every classroom. He haunted the school corridors in black ceremonial robes, which earned him the nickname ‘batman’, and I came quickly to despise him for his self-importance and ridiculously fearsome temper. He picked me out for a couple of dressing-downs, because he knew that I had the top IQ score for entry into the school, which was streamed into classes by those scores, and I wasn’t living up to my ‘potential’. By this time, at around fourteen, my anti-authoritarianism was at its height, and my school results were declining, as I took pleasure in reading everything but the prescribed texts.
Of course it was also that time of life when sex was rearing up its enflamed head. I would make a list in my mind of the prettiest kids in my school or elsewhere, male or female. I took pride in thinking in these ambisexual terms. I played with the thought that some girls would be better off as boys, and vice versa. I imagined kissing boys, just because I knew it was ‘wrong’. And once, when attending a wrestling match, of all things, with a friend, I got an erection from watching his handsome profile as he intently watched the muscle-bound ogres in the ring. Again, this didn’t make me feel ashamed or confused, it made me feel somehow superior and aesthetically enlightened. However, as the boys became hairier and less pretty young men, I gave up on bisexuality, rather sadly and wonderingly.
I’ve written in my novel In Elizabeth about my first sex, on my 16th birthday, granted to me by my girlfriend of a few weeks, who was experienced in these matters, so she told me, though a year or so my junior. It was short, furtive and uneventful, and it seemed to me that kissing her beautiful face was much more of a thrill. But what happened shortly after this event had much more to do with our primate cousins.
Due to all the domestic strife I was spending much of my spare time away from home, hanging out with other kids, mostly older, at the parks around the local shopping centre. I wasn’t exactly accepted by these kids, but I hung around the fringes, feeling vaguely despised because I knew nothing about car engines and other esoterica. I was an obsessive reader of Thomas Hardy novels at the time, but somehow I didn’t think…
However, my new girlfriend was very interested in these boys, some of whom she vaguely knew, and she wanted me to introduce her… Of course I agreed, though I knew, I just knew, that this would be disastrous.
So we duly arrived at the park one early evening, and I could see that the sight of Edwina, my putative girlfriend, caused some arousal. One of the lads, gigantically proportioned compared to me, and a solid thick-thighed defender in the local soccer team which I also played for, began to niggle and jab at me, which then led to a kind of long, one-sided wrestling match which, of course, left everyone amused except myself. And so ended the beginning of my sex life.
So alpha maledom was never within my purview. And looking back at that scene, I can’t help but think of chimpanzees – very basic (with apologies to chimps). I would ever be the subordinate male, wishing and hoping but never really expecting. I should also point out that, from age five to fifteen, I was the smallest kid in my class, male or female. Size does matter, they say.
Of course, I’d never heard of bonobos back then. I first heard of them on the ABC radio ‘Science Show’ when I was around thirty years old. The male journalist ended his report saying something like ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’. They’ve been a kind of leitmotif for me ever since.
I’m rereading Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood, recognising that the book is principally addressed to women, which perhaps disappointed me first time around, as a far-from-alpha male who never made aggressive advances towards a woman (and certainly not towards men!), and whose more or less pathetic advances were likely repudiated due to their pusillanimity. And I can also admit to rejecting advances of women I was attracted to, due to performance anxiety. At least one of those rejections, I felt, was one of the dumbest and costliest of my life. But who knows…
So I don’t know where I’m going with all this, except to say that the battle of the sexes needs to continue, and women need to win. I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes, because I see matriarchy as a far better solution – which of course doesn’t need to disadvantage men, if only they could see what might be in their best interest. The wars going on at present are thoroughly male, as wars tend to be, and feminism seems currently to be struggling, not just in the USA. Female political leadership, spotty though it is, is coming to be taken for granted, as it’s nowhere near commonplace enough to seriously challenge patriarchy. I worry that something truly disastrous may have to happen before we find ourselves taking that positive turn in any big way.
Bonobos managed to take that turn, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been born of disaster. It even may have been born of plenty. We really don’t know quite how, and it’s probably the big question we should be asking. The USA, for example, should be the land of plenty – which it likes to advertise itself to be. For some it is, of course – the rich-poor gap is massive there. Its per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the developed world. Its name for itself – the United States – is a sick joke..
But of course I’m veering off-topic. Bonobos present us with a true society, with no-one left behind unless they’re overly violent, and then they can be forgiven. And they don’t make war with their neighbours, for no good reason. We need to keep focussing on the example they set. I know I’ll keep being inspired.
Reference
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
Women in charge? One day…?
To start with – ‘Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression’ – Nelson Mandela
A few years ago I read Australian author Jess Scully’s book Glimpses of Utopia, which looked at hot spots in the world where positive developments were happening, often within otherwise chaotic or brutal situations and regimes. It wasn’t an overtly feminist work, but it was clear that women were behind most of the good stuff. Unfortunately I loaned the book out and it never returned, as happens, so I’m not sure if she wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women working together to try to reduce the suffering and set an example of peaceful co-existence, or if I read about it elsewhere. …
In any case, Israeli and Palestinian women are still marching and advocating for peace. I’ve written, of course, about the Palestinian situation many times, and ever since, as a child, I read about the slaughter and betrayal of the native people of the so-called ‘new world’ – new, that is, to the European colonists of what is now called North America, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the issue of what is now euphemistically called ‘settler colonialism’. But of course, it has happened, time and time again, here in Australia, and in New Zealand, and throughout the Americas. David Reich, in his ground-breaking and comprehensive book Who we are and how we got here, provides genetic evidence of the rapid spread into Europe of the Yamnaya people and culture from about 5,000 years ago. Intermixing was commonplace and the genetics tend to dispel all notions of hereditary purity, whether in individuals such as the reigning British monarch, or in broader ethnicities, such as the Celts or the Goths or the Jews. A lot of this intermixing was the result of rape and pillage, which can sometimes be identified through complex genomic analysis, and we can consider this with regard to the concept of miscegenation, once frowned upon, but now virtually dismissed as an issue, at least in the so-called developed world.
Women will be at the forefront of this intermixing, whether sexual or otherwise, because they’re more attuned to collaboration than males in general, but we need to socially acknowledge and facilitate female leadership as much more of a priority than ever before. Think of the fact that we’re now living in a world in which some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including if not especially the USA, are now nuclear-weaponised. Russia and China, both of which are more or less unstable oligarchies/dictatorships, have very sizeable nuclear weapons stockpiles, and other not-quite-reliable countries, such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel, belong to the nuclear fraternity. All of these countries, of course, are led by males and their male advisors and lapdogs, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable. What will it take, to recognise that female leadership and unity is pretty much the sine qua non of future human survival.
Observe the more brutal aspects of male leadership today. Here’s the latest Wikipedia data on the Putin war on Ukraine:
The casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas,[1] and between 1,274,000 and 2 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to June 2026.
Obviously there have been more casualties to October 26, and every expert analyst I’ve listened to has argued that Putin has virtually no chance of winning, even if he orders full-scale mobilisation. Then there’s the nuclear option, and this really worries me.
This is just about one male who clearly doesn’t care about the suffering he causes, to his own people and others. And then there is Trump, with his regime’s international and domestic attacks upon innocent people. The world is crying out for more female leadership – collective female leadership – but it would only be likely to happen in those countries already on their way to female equality, and there are precious few of them. I like to think Australia is one, but my country has virtually no leverage on the world stage. What will it take to bring about anything close to a bonobo humanity? Will we have to be brought to the precipice? Are we there yet?
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia: real ideas for a fairer world, 2020
https://www.vitalvoices.org/barefootwalk/
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
more or less sad thoughts on female leadership
Have there been any female dictators? I’m thinking of the more or less modern era, so ruling out Catherine the Great and … I can’t think of any others. And of course some might want to argue that Thatcher was a bit of a dictator, but….
As for the males, whether we’d want to call Putin, Xi, Erdoğan, Nazarbaev, Aliyev, Khamenei, Lukashenko, Kabila, Castro, Kim Jong-Un, Htin Kyaw, Hun Sen, etc, dictators or some other things (and the list here covers only a small number of candidates), is a question. There’s no hard and fast definition, obviously. In any case there are no females on this list, and if I made it twice as long that would still be the case.
There is of course the case of Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, who was Prime minister from June 1996 to July 2001 and again from January 2009 to August 2024. Her story is an extraordinarily complex one, in a nation that has experienced massive division and violence. From Wikipedia:
Except for her husband, children and sister Sheikh Rehana, Hasina’s entire family was murdered during the 15 August 1975 Bangladeshi coup d’état which saw the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Hasina, Wazed and Rehana were visiting Europe at the time of the assassination. They took refuge in the house of the Bangladeshi ambassador to West Germany; before taking up an offer of political asylum from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India.
Clearly Hasina’s family were heavily involved in Bangladesh’s extremely divided and violent politics, and it seems her own position shifted over the decades from leftist reformism to something more punitive and survivalist. And needless to say, like Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and just about any other female political leader of the last century, she would have been surrounded by ambitious males, and might have felt that more than a pinch of male ruthlessness might be required to stay on top. Not enough to prevent Gandhi and Bhutto from being murdered, however.
Politics, and life in general, seems to be a little less nasty in Scandinavian countries, however, as Rutger Bregman describes it in his hopeful book Humankind. As of early 2026, northern Europe has female Prime Ministers in Denmark, Iceland, Latvia and Lithuania, and Iceland also has a female President. These are nowadays the sorts of countries that would never tolerate a wannabe dictator like Frump, and I think you would find, overall, a relationship between female leadership (especially backed up by female advisors and other females in government) and a more generally contented and humane society. This is just starting to happen in a world where it has virtually never happened before.
The USA, that benighted country, has never had a female monarch as yet (I explained in a previous post that the country’s federal system is essentially an elected monarchy), but both Hilary Clinton (2016) and Kamala Harris (2024) came closer to being the first than any other females. Clinton actually won the popular vote by a large margin, and Harris’ loss dumbfounded many, most especially my good self, because Trump’s clearly criminal behaviour during and after the 2020 election, and his long criminal record, should have disqualified him from running, as well as rendering him a losing candidate. But then, it’s the USA we’re talking about.
Frump is now eighty going on nine, and angling to be an eternal dictator, which is very likely to happen. Another eighty years should not be a problem for this eternal child. Sadly, as a mere mortal, ageing naturally, I won’t live to see it. Still, there will be elections, perhaps, and claims about term limits, but can any of this compete with high finance and crypto-currency? I very much doubt it.
But really, there are congressional elections in November, which Frump is trying to find a way to subvert, which of course is interesting to observe from a relatively safe place here in Australia. I suspect he’s determined to use his monarchical powers to declare massive overseas and internal interference, and to bring about military intervention. Elections will be suspended, martial law will be declared, and nuclear readiness will be directed, mostly at China, but there will be others in league. Will this be the time for Australia to gain the ascendancy?
Sorry, I funtasise. I was talking about female leadership. I don’t really understand how Frump became the USA’s king again, after all the previous shite, but since most people in that country are acting as if this is all normal, we have to expect a long if not eternal rule. Here in Australia we’ll be forced to speak New Yorkinese, and women will be forced underground together. This, if we can somehow manage it – but we excel in sorority – is where we can regroup, and foregather, and, seeded by a generous handful of male sisters, plan a massive return to prominence…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Hasina
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history, 2019
https://www.councilwomenworldleaders.org/current-women-head-of-state-and-government
Female leadership? It needs to find strength in numbers
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….
a more feminist future…. ?
On the patriarchy matriarchy feminism masculinism front, I watched a while back a video, apparently one of a series, by a young woman who presented, with amusing confidence, an anti-feminist position. I didn’t pay too much attention to her spiel (and thankfully I can’t find the video now to reference it!), but I noted a lot of approving comments, all from males. One even happily highlighted Aristotle’s view that women are naturally inferior, in terms of rationality, to men. Presumably this allowed him to believe that, whatever his own level of ‘rationality’, it was superior to that of the four billion or so females that inhabit the planet. I should mention that Aristotle also believed that slaves were naturally less rational than free Athenian citizens. Presumably female slaves were doubly dumb.
I’ve just finished reading Darwin’s The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, and I found it hard to take in the end, as in the final pages he expatiated on human sexual selection. Basically he was claiming that males select females for their physical appearance while females select males largely for that rationality thing, which explains why men have evolved to be smarter than women. So, I try to make allowances for Darwin, like Aristotle, being a creature of his time and his culture, as I am of mine…
Having read Darwin’s Origin of species a couple of times, and now his Descent of man, I’ve noted the great number of references he has to others in his field of interest – breeders of livestock, pigeon fanciers, ornithologists, zoologists, botanists and so forth, with whom he has corresponded. Not long ago I came across a collection of his correspondence, here in Adelaide’s reference library – a whole shelf of heavy tomes of the stuff. And in my own reading of these references, I’ve never found a single female. That’s Victorian England for you – not so different, perhaps, from ancient Athens, as far as the status of women is concerned.
Things have changed though, in the WEIRD world, in the last 150 years, and Darwin has been proven wrong about the female intellect. And it stands to reason – male dogs and cats aren’t smarter than their female counterparts, and female bonobos aren’t intellectually superior to the males they manage to keep in their place via a powerful sisterhood. Male gorillas may be bigger and tougher than the females but there’s no evidence that they’re smarter.
Having said all that, I’m still holding out for a female-dominant human world, as they have other qualities that we need more than ever in the current climate. Yes there may have been some not so admirable female leaders in recent years (the only period in which female political leadership has been allowed), but none have been as disgusting as Putin or so absurd as Trump, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assess current female leadership without recognising that they’ve achieved their position within a largely patriarchal framework. That framework, it seems to me, is more competitive (and thus warlike) and less collective than that of matriarchy. Not that the difference is huge – I’m a big fan of women’s soccer, and of course it’s hugely competitive, but you don’t get quite the brutalism and the confrontations with referees that are fairly common in the men’s game. Time may tell a different story, but I doubt it.
But returning to the young woman who’s presenting an anti-feminist series of videos, my guess is that she’s been shaped, as I’ve been, by childhood experiences. My own childhood was shaped by a dominant and largely competent female parent, who was the major breadwinner, as she moved up the scale from a registered nurse to a sister to an assistant matron of a hospital and then, after further training, to a nurse educator, while my father remained an unskilled labourer, often unemployed. My mother also ran the house, getting my siblings and I to do set chores – even assigning sections of the back garden for each of us to tend. The house was filled with books, though she wasn’t a big reader, and my father not at all. The marriage wasn’t a happy one, though they were still together – only just – when I left home at about nineteen.
So, though I had clashes with my mother, and in many ways it wasn’t a happy childhood, it was definitely due to her that I and my siblings are very much on the feminist side, which makes me speculate about the anti-feminist woman on Youtube. It seems highly likely that for her, the father was the dominant parent, and competently so, and the mother, not so much. This is wild speculation of course, but – well, perhaps not so wild.
It’s the free will/determinism thing again. Trump’s grandad was Friedrich Drumpf, but someone was inspired to switch it to something nominatively determining, and the rest is a horrible history. I’ve read a biography of Putin, and I’ve heard much of the early childhood of Trump, all enough to explain what terrible tragedies they are for the rest of the world – but their success in obtaining leadership has also much to do with the psychology, if I can describe it so, of the countries they’ve come to dominate. With Trump’s country it’s libertarianism, ‘the land of the free’, where anyone can apparently become a billionaire if they work hard enough, or are super-smart or super-bold, etc. In Russia – well, its autocratic history is long, and is well described by Orlando Figes in The story of Russia:
The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the 16th century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan.
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, p51
The tsars maintained this largely bogus tradition to the end, and Putin, after a period of bolshevik turmoil, and the hopes of Gorbachov’s perestroika, has effectively resurrected it:
Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.
Ibid, p52
So, Russia and China have never come close to anything resembling democracy, in spite of glasnost and the brutally suppressed Tiananmen Square protests – their long, brutal histories have made such a transformation highly unlikely – but then, the future is long – at least we hope so.
A lot of those hopes, for me, lie in a greater – and greater and greater – role for women in government. First, inevitably, among democracies, so that the ultra-male oligarchies and dictatorships will be shamed and bewildered by the people they’re dealing with, and then…
Well, it’s a pleasant dream…
References
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to sex, 1871, in Darwin: the indelible stamp, ed James Watson, 2005
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022
women and the future
8,000 years ago….
My previous post reminded me of some pieces I wrote (about a year ago), which I’ll reference below. I’m quite proud of these pieces – it seems indignation can bring out the best…
By the way, what happened to evolutionary psychology? To judge from Ryan Ellsworth’s efforts, it was a questionable enterprise, especially in trying to cement patriarchy into our biology. I would guess that it was never a ‘field’ that attracted female intellectuals. Here’s a passage from Ellsworth in his critique of a book by Susan Block called The Bonobo Way, which I criticised (his critique, not the book) in my earlier piece. Obviously I’m still fuming!
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
One has to read this passage a couple of times to let it sink in. Or at least I did – smarter people might’ve recognised the bullshit straight away. It’s there in the first two sentences (okay, the second sentence takes up most of the passage). The first sentence states as fact that there are ‘human sex differences in sexual desire’. So that must be why it’s okay to call men ‘studs’ and women ‘sluts’, or as Ellsworth puts it, we must recognise the fact that ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men’. And it would seem to follow that if they have such desires they should be ostracised and shamed. Ellsworth even tries to argue that to suggest that women might have such pluralist desires is sexist because it (sort of) turns them into men, stripping them of their identity as caring mothers or potentially caring mothers, which is their evolutionary role.
Evolutionary psychology doesn’t seem to have lasted long, which I think is a good thing. It seemed to be wanting to find an evolutionary explanation for what many might find to be shifting social-psychological phenomena, and I don’t think that works. For example, in the WEIRD world we’ve shifted from larger families to smaller, often single-parent families, and family roles have changed. Marriage isn’t so essential to the reproductive process as it was, and of course it only came into being relatively recently, and as for monogamy, we have no idea whether that was practiced by humans, say 200,000 years ago. None of this has to do with evolution in a Darwinian sense – we often describe society as having ‘evolved’ in the last couple of centuries, but this nothing to do with the Darwinian concept.
So, back to monogamy. It’s seen as the norm for we humans, especially when it comes to bringing up children. And yet, neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, and clearly they manage to reproduce, and their offspring are just as well-adjusted as their parents. So when and why did we or our ancestors become so, and will we ever cease to be so? Ellsworth claimed in his essay that there have never been any successful or lasting matriarchal societies, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and of course it would not be of interest to him to mention the controversial but undeniably thought-provoking finds at Çatalhöyük suggesting plenty of goddess-worship. As I’ve often pointed out, the double male god-worship that constitutes Christianity was both born of and a template for thousands of years of patriarchy, still championed by the Catholic Church, so it’s intriguing to wonder about the society around Çatalhöyük, a mere 9,000 years ago. Believing in females with godly powers just doesn’t fit with a male-dominated society, and even those who argue against evidence that the undoubtedly remarkable society that created Çatalhöyük was matriarchal tend to argue for gender egalitarianism, which is remarkable in itself (though I’ve read anthropological studies on some Australian Aboriginal societies that have come to similar conclusions).
All of this makes me wonder again about early humans and their ancestors, Australopithecus and the like, especially considering that bonobos are clearly matriarchal and chimps are clearly patriarchal. Of course, size matters, pace bonobos, and it has recently been found in a study published last year that both A. afarensis and A. africanus, and especially the former, were more sexually dimorphic than present-day humans. But size matters less in the modern WEIRD world, where brute strength is of decreasing importance. I suppose these days we should be looking more at brain size, or rather brain complexity, and I very much doubt if we found any real difference there, which is doubtless why nobody much studies gender-based brain complexity, whether in dogs, cats or humans (I did once have a university friend who seriously asserted that men were naturally more intelligent – and she spoke of neurological complexity – than women; but she was young, and I let it pass, probably due to shock).
Generally, though, I feel optimistic about the greater empowerment of women in the future (the future is long, and I’m getting old, so I’m not worried about being proved wrong). This in spite of Trump and Putin and the Ayatollahs and the Sudanese and so many other African and Middle Eastern nations/regions. We describe them as living in the past for a reason. And Australia, far from the madding crowd of backward-facing nations, with more and more women in government, both nationally and in my home state, can and hopefully will set a small example that exhausted and disillusioned humanists elsewhere might take notice of…
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
a closer look at bonobos, enfin
As this blog is called what it is, I’ve decided to read the entire, long, Wikipedia article on bonobos to get a more subtle and comprehensive feel for their society and how it shapes their individuality – though of course I’ll continue to write on completely different subjects. What I’m finding so far is that there are nuances, as you would expect, and as we find in human societies. And of course it would be the same with other social species – a member of the normally less dominant gender will, through proven capabilities or particular personality traits, be given a more prominent role than usual, and leadership of or status within the group is not solely based on gender. Ranking may have a degree of fluidity based on behaviour and alliances. Not all males are subordinate and not all females are bosses. Nevertheless, bonobos are definitely matriarchal – just as chimps are patriarchal, also with some fluidity.
It surprised me when I learned, some years ago, that bonobos have a ‘male philopatric’ society. The term conveys a gender distinction – the male stays ‘at home’ for mating and reproduction, while the female moves to another group for that purpose. This occurs in some human societies too. While visiting the Tiwi Islands just north of Darwin, I was told by our islander guide that he had just ‘lost’ his sister, who had moved to another tribal group to marry, meaning that their connection was permanently broken. His culture actually forbade him to have any more contact with her. So the early Catholic Church prohibitions against first, second, third and fourth cousins marrying, as described in Joseph Henrich’s historical account of the WEIRD world, as well as many long-held cultural traditions of Australasia and elsewhere, likely hark back to our hominid ancestors.
In any case, male philopatry doesn’t seem very matriarchal. There are of course good reasons for philopatry (male or female) in general, as well as good reasons for its opposite, male or female dispersal, which inevitably means that these behaviours, their causes and consequences, are widely disputed. I think I’ll return to this issue in another post.
A particularly interesting feature of bonobo culture, fairly recently recognised, is co-operation between two separate groups, or troupes. This was in the Congo’s Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, which may, I think, represent a space between ‘the wild’ and ‘captivity’, and so may influence behaviour. From Wikipedia:
Over two years of observation, researchers witnessed 95 encounters between the groups. Contrary to expectations, these interactions resembled those within a single group. During these encounters, the bonobos engaged in behaviours such as grooming, food sharing, and collective defense against threats like snakes. Notably, the two groups, while displaying cooperative tendencies, maintained distinct identities, and there was no evidence of interbreeding or a blending of cultures. The cooperation observed was not arbitrary but evolved through individual bonds formed by exchanging favors and gifts. Some bonobos even formed alliances to target a third individual, demonstrating a nuanced social dynamic within the groups.
This contrasts importantly with the deadly clashes between groups of chimpanzees observed by Goodall and others.
Bonobos engage in tongue-kissing, the only non-human creatures observed to do so, at least thus far. And this brings us to sex, a difficult topic to write about, even in a blog nobody reads, given so many cultural and religious tabus swirling around it in human society. So, best just to be descriptive, without making comparisons to H sapiens.
Bonobos aren’t monogamous, and they engage in sexual activity from an early age. It is mostly masturbatory, and indiscriminate, with the possible exception of mothers sexually engaging with adult sons. Heightened sexual activity often occurs when rich food sources are found, in which the masturbatory sex often occurs in large groups, increasing generalised bonding. Female masturbation is helped along by the fact that their clitorises ‘are larger and more externalised than in most mammals’. Well, here, comparison with humans is instructive:
… while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.
All quotes here are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise stated. The most common sexual combo is female-female. Their face-to-face, body-to-body interactions are referred to as genito-genital (G-G) rubbing, which is often accompanied by loud noises, hopefully of pleasure.
So, while female-female masturbation is the most practised sexual behaviour of the species, enhancing bonding against any male threats, male-male masturbation is also a regular thing:
The most common form of male–male mounting is similar to that of a heterosexual mounting: one of the males sits “passively on his back [with] the other male thrusting on him”, with the penises rubbing together because of both males’ erections
Clearly sexual activity is encouraged and valued as the most essential feature of bonobo society, and is practised in a variety of ways – penis-fencing, rump-rubbing, genital massaging, oral sex (among males) and, as mentioned, tongue-kissing. Adult-child sex is more common in males than females, though there’s no penetration. Is this because they’re avoiding pain, or because they know the connection with pregnancy? The general scientific consensus is that non-human species engage in sex based on instinct, hormones and such – that’s to say, more or less unconsciously without being aware of possible or likely consequences. I’m not entirely convinced, especially re our closest relatives, but how can this be tested? In any case, regardless of all this sex play, bonobo birth rates are no higher than those of chimps.
Unsurprisingly bonobo social relations are just as complex as those of chimps, and perhaps also humans, with personal animosities, rivalries and close friendships within and between genders, and the fact that infanticide in bonobo society hasn’t been observed isn’t proof that it hasn’t happened – after all, we’ve only known of the existence of bonobos for a little under a century. Still, bonobos are definitely different, and in what I would call an inspiring way. You could say that sex becomes a feel-good strategy, but also a way of diminishing any sense of male ownership of offspring. As Wikipedia puts it:
The strategy of bonobo females mating with many males may be a counterstrategy to infanticide because it confuses paternity. If male bonobos cannot distinguish their own offspring from others, the incentive for infanticide essentially disappears. This is a reproductive strategy that seems specific to bonobos; infanticide is observed in all other great apes except orangutans. Bonobos engage in sexual activity numerous times a day.
Anyway, enough of sex, let’s explore violence. Chimps, as mentioned, tend to be hostile to those not in their own troupe, and even patrol their own borders, looking for trouble. Very West Side Story. And yet, to my surprise, bonobos, are more violent in general.
In the wild, among males, bonobos are more aggressive than chimpanzees, having higher rates of aggressive acts, about three times as much. Although, male chimpanzees are more likely to be aggressive to a lethal degree than male bonobos which are more likely to engage in more frequent, yet less intense squabbling. There is also more female to male aggression with bonobos than there is with chimpanzees. Female bonobos are also more aggressive than female chimpanzees, in general. Both bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do.
All of this sounds interesting, but ‘aggression’ might be a little more difficult to define than we think. In humans, for example, accusatory or bullying language, or the sharing of images, can be used aggressively without anything physical occurring. It has even been known to cause the victim to commit suicide. We have subtler and often more effective ways to make others suffer, and ‘non-physical’ aggression may have a physical, even deadly, impact. It is also a way of getting around laws prohibiting physical violence.
In any case, surely a major reason for the supposed greater physical aggression of chimps and bonobos, and doubtless other apes, compared to humans, is how we ‘count’ aggression. Is carpet-bombing physical aggression? Nuclear warfare? The wholesale slaughter of the Jews and the Congolese? The massacres of the ‘Crusades’? How can we not count remote, push-button slaughter, or starving people to death behind walls, or burning them to death in buildings, as physical aggression? Methinks there’s need for a rethink.
So let’s turn to something less controversial. Like all the great apes, bonobos pass the self-awareness mirror test, and it’s clear that the variations in their vocalisations have meaning, though whether they rise to the standard of a proto-language is a matter of definition. They also use many meaningful hand gestures.
A famous example of a bonobo being taught to communicate using a keyboard, and to respond effectively to whole sentences, is that of Kanzi:
Kanzi’s vocabulary consisted of more than 500 English words, and he had comprehension of around 3,000 spoken English words… Kanzi is also known for learning by observing people trying to teach his mother; Kanzi started doing the tasks that his mother was taught just by watching, some of which his mother had failed to learn….
Kanzi was also taught how to make simple stone tools, though he found a method of making them in his own bonoboesque way. There seems no doubt that effective rapport between bonobos and humans will benefit both species.
Finally, there’s the ecological importance of bonobos. They’re essentially one of the two apex species of their region, the other being elephants. Both species are frugivorous, and their ecological role is vital:
It is estimated that during its life, each bonobo will ingest and disperse nine tons of seeds, from more than 91 species of lianas, grass, trees and shrubs. These seeds travel for about 24 hours in the bonobo digestive tract, which can transfer them over several kilometers (mean 1.3 km; max: 4.5 km), far from their parents, where they will be deposited intact in their faeces. These dispersed seeds remain viable, germinating better and more quickly than unpassed seeds. For those seeds, diplochory with dung-beetles (Scarabaeidae) improves post-dispersal survival.
Diplochory means two-phase seed dispersal, using more than one vector or carrier.
Anyway, I think that’s more than enough info for one post. The Wikipedia article on bonobos makes for a very solid book chapter, with 178 references, so far. And it ends nicely with informing us all of the annual World Bonobo Day, established in 2017. No prizes should be given for guessing the date!
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2021
Eartha Kitt – the sexiest matriarch?
When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin to lose
Bob Dylan, Like a rolling stone
Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008
So before I go onto the second lecture on immunology, a break to write about a theme I’ve neglected for too long – interesting women as models for a future matriarchy. So the other night, in a slightly boozy session with friends, one of them happened to mention his interest in Eartha Kitt, whom I knew only as something of a sex icon who had the obvious bon goût, and the most unAmerican ability, to sometimes sing in la belle langue. So we spent the next pleasant hour or so sampling her most playful work on Youtube.
Before that session I knew vaguely of Eartha Kitt (the earthy kitten?) as perhaps a comedienne of sex, who sang purrrfectly absurd songs sending up and celebrating the world’s most delicious vice. But…. well, let’s find out more.
She was born in the tiny town of North (or on a nearby plantation), in South Carolina, and having checked out what information is available online about the town, I find no mention of surely one of its most famous daughters. But then, her beginnings weren’t auspicious. Her father is basically unknown – some say a plantation owner’s son, others say a local white doctor. Could it be that her success had to be attributed to ‘white genes’? Others, or maybe the same conjecturers, say that she was the product of rape. In any case, her mother (who was of mixed Cherokee and African descent) began a relationship with a black man, who rejected Eartha as being ‘too white’. So, not exactly your standard middle class or even working class beginnings.
So, just a few lines on that earthy name of hers. Eartha really was her birth name, and her family name was Keith, (or Keit) or at least that was the surname of her mother, Annie Mae Keith, who died when Eartha was still quite young. The inspired switch from Keit/h to Kitt seems to have been Eartha’s own.
But more on her unpromising beginnings. She was sent away to be raised by a relative, one Aunt Rosa, ‘in whose household she was abused’, according to Wikipedia. The nature of the abuse isn’t mentioned, but it’s clear that life wasn’t easy for her in this period. She recounted in a later interview that ‘we’ were near starvation at this time, though who exactly she was referring to is unclear. I may have to read one or all of the three autobiographies she has written…
The difficulties of her early years are, to me, made clear by the fact that she wasn’t even sure who her mother was, let alone her father. According to Wikipedia,
After the death of Annie Mae, Eartha was sent to live with another close relative named Mamie Kitt [okay, so that’s where the name came from], who Eartha later came to believe was her biological mother, in Harlem, New York City, where Eartha attended the Metropolitan Vocational High School (later renamed the High School of Performing Arts).
No date is mentioned for this big city move, clearly a decisive event, but it was likely in the early 1940s. According to her daughter, this was undoubtedly the essential move of her life, getting her away from the bigotry of the South, where she was discriminated against by both Blacks and Whites. Interestingly, she wasn’t aware of her own birth day, until a group of students from her home state of South Carolina unEarthaed her birth certificate in 1998. She was born on January 17, 1927. Wikipedia next states, without evidence, that ‘she began her career in 1942’, whatever that means. After all, she was only 15 at the time. In any case, she’d clearly shown enough talent to appear ‘in the 1945 original Broadway theatre production of the musical Carib Song’, though not in a major role. In the 1950s she recorded a number of songs and gained her enduring reputation as a tongue-in-cheek ‘sex kitten’, with a very distinctive and, to me at least, very unAmerican, voice. Speaking of which…
She toured Europe as a dancer and vocalist from 1943, an extraordinary opportunity for a young teen, where she also proved to be skilled at picking up languages – la langue d’amour especially, but according to Wikipedia she was able to sing in eleven of them and to speak more or less fluently in four. C’est ridicule ça! When as a youngster I first heard her singing in French, I thought she was a native, or from the French Carribbean (if I’d heard of such a place) – at least, not a United Stater. In any case, such polyglotism seems freakish to me, in the best possible way. But French was the foreign language that had the most influence on her early career. Apparently she’d been touring with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe and was offered work in a Paris nightclub, which she accepted, becoming fluent in the language much quicker than I ever could. Bitch!
So when she eventually returned to the USA, reputation enhanced, she came to the attention of one Orson Welles, and made her acting debut in a Welles adaptation of Faust, as Helen of Troy (of course). This was in 1950, and she want on to record songs such as C’est si bon, Santa Baby and I want to be evil in the early fifties, establishing her reputation as an earthy sex kitten. Or should I say tiger, panther, bonobo…?
So this is a real rags to riches story, of a talented and enterprising young girl from the most unpromising of backgrounds, which, frankly, moves me more than I can say. And she has all the best bonobo qualities, though much better looking, at least from a human perspective.
It’s interesting – and very USA it seems – that a performer who, in a most unAmerican voice, performed I want to be evil and a deliciously slurpy (but strangely affecting) Lilac wine in her younger days, to grand acclaim, would be ‘outlawed’ for her sympathy for the young American troops being sent to an unnecessary war in Vietnam (not to mention the Vietnamese and Cambodian people caught up in the slaughter). It’s likely her early touring life gave her more of an internationalist, humanist perspective. And she spoke often about ‘falling in love with yourself’ as a prerequisite to a happy and fulfilling life, which is, I think, a more sophisticated view than it might sound. Only she would know how many intimate relations she had, but not too many, it seems. She married only once, relatively briefly, a union which produced her only child, Kitt McDonald, who is devoted to her memory.
I feel quite privileged now to have discovered the life of this fascinating and worthwhile person, who was more than just a unique polyglot entertainer. Hell, I may as well quote some of the Wikipedia material on her activism:
Kitt was active in numerous social causes in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, she established the Kittsville Youth Foundation, a chartered and non-profit organization for underprivileged youths in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Kitt was also involved with a group of youths in the area of Anacostia in Washington, D.C., who called themselves “Rebels with a Cause”. She supported the group’s efforts to clean up streets and establish recreation areas in an effort to keep them out of trouble by testifying with them before the House General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor. In her testimony, in May 1967, Kitt stated that the Rebels’ “achievements and accomplishments should certainly make the adult ‘do-gooders’ realize that these young men and women have performed in 1 short year – with limited finances – that which was not achieved by the same people who might object to turning over some of the duties of planning, rehabilitation, and prevention of juvenile delinquents and juvenile delinquency to those who understand it and are living it”.
I wish I’d been there to hear her! Articulate and precisely on point – this approach reminds me of what I’ve been reading in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Treat people like shit and you’ll get nowhere with them. Treat them as better than they have been and they will learn to love themselves and their environment more.
Kitt was also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed during World War 1 and still in existence. She was under CIA surveillance from 1956, further proof of her bonafides as an international humanist. And there’s more:
Kitt later became a vocal advocate for LGBT rights and publicly supported same-sex marriage, which she considered a civil right. She had been quoted as saying: “I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it?”
Indeed. With the current turn to conservatism, intolerance and patriarchal attitudes, Eartha Kitt’s attitude and example, including even her sexiness, reminds me of the purpose of this blog (she surely would’ve loved the bonobo example). Vive Eartha Kitt! I wish I could’ve met her.
References