Posts Tagged ‘empowerment’
on money and matriarchy
When I bring up the subject of a bonobo humanity in any public place I’m more often than not met with confusion or indifference. Bonobos are either unknown or seen as irrelevant to us super-smart, super-complex humans. So, though I don’t agree, I often skip to the issue of matriarchy. And that’s when I get the response, from women, that this female political leader/boss/family member/whatever, was useless/weak/disastrous etc.
THIS IS A CATEGORY ERROR – in my humble opinion. Nothing could be more irrelevant than this response. To explain, let me again quote the author Toni Morrison, who I’ve quoted before:
‘The problem is not men. The problem is patriarchy’.
To which I will add this correlated statement:
‘The solution is not women. The solution is matriarchy’.
And to be clear, we’re living in a patriarchy.
Of course I’m well aware that the human world is a hugely complex thing, and parts of it are more patriarchal than others, and maybe there’s even the odd tiny matriarchy buried somewhere in the hinterlands of our hinterlands, but it has occurred to me that there’s one powerful aspect of our world that attests to its patriarchal nature more than any other, and that’s finance. Money, I’ve been told, is power, and I’m inclined to believe it.
I’m not talking here about gender pay gaps, which sadly have remained much the same over the past three decades, I’m talking about the vast accumulations of wealth that bestow power. According to the Forbes list of the top 20 richest individuals, two are women, and of course they’re down at the bottom half, in 15th and 20th positions, and also of course the top, say, three, are exponentially richer than the bottom three on that list, though those comparative failures are richer than the wildest dreams you and I could ever concoct.
So – money, corruption, manipulation, genocide. It doesn’t always fall out that way of course, but there are some examples worth considering. First, let me replace the word ‘money’, which conjures up an image of coloured paper and round metallic stuff, with wealth, and its associated images of servants, palatial homes, international travel, manipulation of markets and such. And of something else which is hard to produce an image of – power.
The pursuit of wealth, almost exclusively by men, has led to some consequences worth contemplating. Take the soi-disant Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. I won’t go into the complex pre-colonial history of that region, later known as sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’, but from the 1860s onwards virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa became an intense battleground between various European states, with the USA often acting as a self-interested broker. And it was all about wealth, under a cloak of humanitarian-sounding verbiage. At the end of all the wrangling, Leo Victor, by family connections ‘Emperor Leopold II of Belgium’, had carved out a massive chunk of Central Africa for himself, which he named the Congo Free State. And let it be clear, this land didn’t belong to Belgium, it belonged entirely and exclusively to Leo. By the late 1880s, just about everything was in place…
But this isn’t a horror I want to revisit (suffice to say it was about as devastating to the Congolese as Genghis Khan was to Baghdad, all for wealth, booty, plunder and the power such things bring). It was around this time, towards the end of the 19th century, that the term ‘savage’ became just a bit out-dated, what with such newly fashionable studies as anthropology and sociology. Even so, the heart of Africa has remained too dark for the world to fully comprehend the sufferings visited upon its native inhabitants by white-skinned people and their proxies.
So, if we accept that wealth is power, and we accept that female empowerment, or female domination, is worth aiming for, what can we do about divesting in, or from, males and investing in females?
So I’ve looked it up, and, unsurprisingly, most initiatives start from the bottom, which is after all, where a huge percentage of women are found. World Vision highlights seven ways to empower women – ensuring clean water (women in Africa and elsewhere spend many hours in the day trying to find and collect the stuff), supporting women and girls in crisis (child labour, enforced prostitution…), mentoring (supporting women and girls into meaningful employment), empowering entrepreneurs (microloans), education advocacy (keeping girls in school for longer, awarding scholarships), supporting mothers (with essential items and a nurturing culture), and the seventh, perhaps most vague but also most vital, respect, support and advocacy for female-hood from the cradle to the grave.
This may not have to do with wealth, except in the broadest sense, but it’s really the only way to start. And it’s very likely that if the world continues to shift towards greater female empowerment over the next few centuries (and let’s face it, it’s going to be an excruciatingly slow process), the distribution of wealth will reflect this, with far fewer of the disgustingly rich and the distressingly poor.
Will this trend, if it continues over the next thousand years or so, end up in matriarchy? Well of course it will! I can predict this with the great confidence of someone who won’t be around to be proven right or wrong. But looking around at the world today, I can predict with depressing confidence that there will be plenty of setbacks along the way.
References
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
7 ways to empower women and girls
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
how can we learn from bonobos?
Today I’ve decided to change my blog title, and to drop the conversational form of writing, though all my writing is a kind of internal conversation (channelling Adam Smith), informed by various external media.
I really want to get into this patriarchy thing more, because, in spite of all the changes that have occurred since the days of the suffragettes – and it has to be admitted that that was only a little over a century ago, in a human history that goes back 300,000 years, and a few thousand years in terms of states and ‘civilisation’ – it’s still very much a man’s world, with massive male dominance in terms of political leadership and wealth. The exceptions only tend to prove the rule.
Outside of the so-called WEIRD world, and on the fringes of it, we have Xi and his Chinese Testosterone Party, the Putinland thugocracy, little Donny Trumpet and his band of (mostly) male white mice, molto-macho politics in Burma, Tanzania, Latin America, New Guinea, Cuba, the Middle East, much of eastern Europe, and so on. Australia might like to see itself as an island of gender-equal WEIRD sanity, but it’s worth noting where the wealth lies, because there has always lain power. It’s true that Australia’s richest person is a woman, Gina Rinehart (at one time the richest woman in the world), but she began with wealth inherited from her father Lang Hancock, a fact that, unsurprisingly, she’s extremely sensitive about. Hancock was an ebullient and very racist operator, much beloved by his daughter (Hancock produced no sons), who was clearly much influenced by his style and politics. We need of course to recognise that, male or female, we’re hugely influenced by our background, and much of our character is set by our earliest years, as the Dunedin longitudinal development study has shown. Of course, that study, particularly the ‘personality’ aspects of it, is very WEIRD. In non-WEIRD cultures, most of which are highly patriarchal, female power is essentially covert, and even today, in the WEIRD world, Rinehart’s situation is highly unusual.
Outside of Rinehart and family, the top 20 richest Australians include only one woman (Fiona Geminder, daughter of the late billionaire Richard Pratt), at number 19. And as is to be expected, those at the top of these rich lists are exponentially wealthier than those at the bottom.
Of course, not all of the super-rich are interested in political power and influence in the manner of Murdoch, Trump et al, and many women, in particular, who inherit wealth through family or marital connections, have an interest in using it benefit the health and welfare of others. A Forbes article from 2018 claimed that, statistically, ‘women give almost twice as much of their wealth away as men (3.5% vs. 1.8%)’. It’s a most bonoboesque trait, as is their tendency to ‘be more co-operative in work teams’ (also from Forbes).
Developing more co-operative political environments is becoming more essential than many realise. Generally speaking, the Covid-19 pandemic would surely have been more devastating without the global co-operation managed in terms of accurate messaging and fast-paced biochemical development. And would’ve been less devastating if we’d had more of it. I recall some years ago reading about wealthy philanthropists providing interest-free loans to women in ‘third-world’ countries, because they were seen as better money managers, and less selfish in that management, than males. A quick internet search shows that this approach is still in play, though some of the sites advocating and supporting micro-loans seem out of date, and there’s a worry that this may just have been a passing trend. In any case it’s a far cry from women having their hands on the global purse-strings.
I think the WEIRD world needs to set the example here, as it is less constrained by patrilineal kin affiliations and patriarchal religio-spiritual beliefs, and has been motivated in recent decades by a lot of female empowerment rhetoric. My expectation for the future, however distant, is that female dominance will come from large-scale female-female bonoboesque bonding (with or without the sex).
Which takes me back to the bonobo world. How did their female-dominated culture come to be? How did the chimp-bonobo common ancestors live, communally? I’ve been wondering about this for some time, but all the experts I’ve read on bonobos, including Frans De Waals, confine themselves to description, as well as pointing out how their society overturns ideas of inevitable human patriarchy. We need to work out the evolution of their society, if we can, in order to effectively take advantage of it for our own sakes, for if ever there has been a time for female leadership in the human world, it’s now.
One key is to promote the kind of female-female bonding we know bonobos engage in, and we know women are capable of, given half the chance. Angela Saini, author of Inferor, an examination of patriarchy and the scientific treatment of women, provides echoing sentiments from Amy Parish, a leading expert on bonobos:
“Certainly I think when we only had chimps in the model, it seemed like patriarchy was cemented in our evolutionary heritage for the last five to six million years,” Parish says. “Now that we have an equally close living relative with a different pattern, it opens up the possibilities for imagining that in our ancestry that females could bond in the absence of kinship, that matriarchies can exist, that females can have the upper hand, that societies can be more peacefully run.”
And observing bonobos can offer inspiration to those who want to carve out a different future. “For me as a feminist,” says Parish, “it’s really interesting. Because the goal of the feminist movement is to behave with other females as though they are your sisters”.
I note that, among younger generations of women, going out in more or less large groups ‘for fun’ has become more common. This has been exploited in the sex video world with the ‘party hardcore’ set of videos, in which a disco/hotel room full of drinking and dancing women get to ‘take advantage’ of a handful of male strippers distributed around the space, for sexual purposes. Female-female sex is also featured, but, rather revealingly (so to speak), no male-male stuff. That’s apparently a step too far for us benighted humans.
The sexual side of all this is always going to be a touchy topic however. We’re the only animal to wear clothes, and to use complex language, with which we tell our kids that we have naughty private bits, and our adults that public nakedness is indecent. We create religions that tell us that sex outside of ceremonially anointed relationships is forbidden, and that reference to the sexual act and the body parts related to that act should be spoken of as rarely as humanly possible. And of course how could we engage together in scientific research, business conferencing, artistic projects or goat-herding with all our dangly stuff showing?
We don’t need to go that far, though, at least not in the short term. After all, it’s already clear that women are more touchy-feely than men. How often have we been at gatherings of friends, at the end of which the women have parted with hugs and the men with handshakes? In this we’re more like bonobos than we know. And as in bonobos this kind of sensual closeness leads to food-sharing and other forms of co-operation, and a reduction of aggression in general, it would seem to me that female leadership, and the encouragement of the female side of male humanity, is what is most needed for a human future that no longer relies on brute strength, or purely physical skills, but more and more on working together, finding common solutions, helping and caring – and not just for our fellow humans.
In the WEIRD world we have largely left behind patriarchal tribal values and the veiled, secreted women that greatly predate Islamic societies. Of course our societies are more blended than ever before (though DNA and historic research assisted by genetics has made us aware that we moved and mixed in the past more than we’d ever thought possible), and this may hinder the inevitable transition to female supremacy, but in the long run it will happen, as needs must. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, and I’m not talking about some ‘hidden hand’ theory, I just feel that for us to survive, and with us as much of the biosphere that can be saved, female supremacy, or feminisation of the human population, will be essential, and a good.
References
https://www.forbes.com.au/lists/people/forbes-billionaires-2023-australias-50-richest-revealed/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/25/the-miners-daughter
https://qz.com/1033621/scientists-assumed-that-patriarchy-was-only-natural-bonobos-proved-them-wrong