more often than not I find the answering of a question with another question pretty stupid… well more often than not I am correct… sometimes though one wonders…
Recently I was listening to a discussion between Harari and Natalie Portman. One of many interesting topics they touched upon was the question about why women have come to be discriminated against and oppressed through human evolution… the accepted answer was that no one really has an answer to this question because there really is no reason to value one sex above the other… It made me think is it really true that no one really knows or is it the politically correct position to take, no one knows, really!
My belief is that the reason is the same that provokes any wild animal to attack, fear! Fear of being overpowered, decimated, extinguished, proven incorrect. The smarter of the species inevitably has the job of making the strategy, building the plan and the minions do the heavy lifting. This has been the accepted reality through the ages. What happens when massive scale automation makes the heavy lifting redundant? Are we making the worker bees obsolete by rushing down the automation, AI, ML path? Come to think of it we have been moving steadily down this path since time immemorial…. the first time humans discovered that striking flint makes fire and then the first human threw a steak into that fire the downward slide for workers being the low value humans had started… it was the inventors, the intellectuals, the artists, the seller of ideas, the brainiacs who immediately became the toast of the town (ok caves, at that time)… I would be willing to bet that the person who threw the steak into the fire was a female who had been tasked with keeping the fire going while the men folk went hunting… but then we would never know would we… So this slow slide into ignomy for the worker (hunter/gatherer at the start) is what I feel is the reason for the fight back. The workers wanted to stay relevant in the face of the threat of automation. So when they returned home and demanded food they were presented with a steak done medium rare… “Yuck!” they all go collectively, “hate it, never put our food in the fire again!!“… and then slowly they develop the taste for cooked food… victory for the women who were home taking care of the kids and the fire… that was the first time the toxically masculine male understood “oh boy, we’re fucked… they are going to win every single time… we have to do something about it”… well so much for that realization… they’re still trying to stop the march…
The supposedly stronger sex (hunter-gatherer) had been bested and the warning shots had been fired… come to think of it strength was never the issue, brains and emotional quotient (that X-factor that has been recently discovered by so many of us woke folk) yeah that is all that mattered… the muscle invariably followed and the brains led (don’t believe me? Well just look at Hitler… not exceedingly muscular or even mentally stable, drug abuse, cancer, rumored to have lost one testicle and the leader of such a deadly destructive force… brains above brawn). I would go as far as to say that the stronger party had been fooled into believing they were in control… they never really were… in most situations they had been manipulated by the smarter, socially slicker, emotionally balanced bunch into doing all the heavy lifting while being led to believe that they were the ones who were more powerful… Scientifically now it has been proven that there is no reason to consider men stronger than women… it was through the conditioning over successive generations that society had established that men stronger than women in reality there is no genetic reason for this to be true.
So then why did this conditioning this implantation of the idea that women are physically weaker come from? Why of course from the men… they were fucked remember, when they realized that the women were always going to have their way after the first victory over cooked meat. So now these enlightened men got together and devised the greatest con of man… women are weak. If you condition a species over centuries to believe that they are weak they will continue to believe that for an eternity. A few outliers will try to change the narrative once in a while but the overall picture will stay true to your propaganda. The panic-striken, petrified, terrified male hunter-gather threatened by the possibility of being rendered redundant foisted the belief that men were stronger and smarter than women… the women being the smarter of the lot went along with the narrative… why though? Because they knew it was a much more peaceful life that way and any how these buffoons are going to come back home and eat the steak we give them to eat… so we are the ones controlling the narrative much as they may think they are the ones in control… so essentially an Oceans Eleven happened here… conning the conmen! A veritable heist that no one has still really figured out yet…
So after establishing that there really was a double agent at play all along and then the conmen had been bested at their own game let’s look at present day gender dynamics… Trump, that 10ft 322lb embodiment of vapid, toxic, masculinity does not miss a chance to run down (or grab by the pussy, as he so famously advised) the women he encounters… 10 bucks says that’s because he’s afraid, mortally scared of independent, intelligent, strong women who know him for the damp squib that he is… he surrounds himself with show pieces who are embodiments of the quintessential subjugated deferential females that the stone age man liked having around… That Kamala Harris (no saint there but then compared to Trump anybody is better) chose to not let Pence speak over her at the VP debate was enough to rile a supposedly covid infected Trump into announcing “this woman will replace Biden within three months beware of this witch… Biden will not last three months in office and that other grand witch Nancy Pelosi is scheming to replace Biden with Kamala“… The import of this verbiage to the Proud Boys type male priviledge club members is that “guys this is a threat to us we will be extinct if we allow these women to talk strongly… come vote for me I’ll ensure your toys are never in short supply and no one forces you to take a bath“… sadly that’s the story at more places than just the USA.
Closer home in India we have Mamata Banerjee constantly being derided for the law and order situation. Her only fault, being a woman. There are a number of other border states in India ruled by men, Arunachal Pradesh, practically sitting in the lap of the Chinese, land locked Nagaland forever looking for independence from India, Punjab barely sticking on after an extremely bloody and violent campaign to defeat the separatists and constantly fighting war with drugs and other similar issues, Kashmir the less said the better… all states ruled by, you guessed it, men… and yet if you were to switch on the TV or check online the only CM getting flak for not being able to handle cross border tension is Mamata Banerjee… In my opinion she’s doing an extremely good job of managing a border state given that there are no open riots or campaigns for secession from India and without any external (read political intervention from the center and other parties) there is relatively an atmosphere of peace. But no the narrative is built by the men in power and they have declared that Mamata is a failed experiment. So down with the female in power, we men will show you how to run the state… into the ground…
So are there any stories of hope? Why yes of-course, to the south there’s Jacinda Adern and to the West there’s the real leader of the free world Chancellor Angela Merkel. Two amazingly articulate and perceptive females who have shown us that there is a way to be human in this ever aggressive society. Even within the corporate sector we have numerous females who are examples of responsible sustainable and balanced growth that can do wonders way beyond even the dreams of most of the male business leaders. Invariably when I see a business doing exceedingly well and being socially responsible I realize that it’s helmed by and populated with some of the best specimens of the “supposedly weaker sex“… Case in point is Microsoft. A few years back (4 years to be precise) Microsoft hired an opensource evangelist by the name of Jessie Frazelle. Jessie helped Microsoft turn a new leaf and make forays into the open source world and embrace Linux (till then a rival but now soon to replace Windows as the primary offerings from Microsoft). The induction of Jessie opened up a host of other lateral hires where amazing developers and systems people, mostly females, were on-boarded to give direction to the company, keep it relevant in the face of fierce competition from Linux, Android and even iOS. There was a time when people were almost forgetting about Microsoft until MS rebuilt itself as this cloud infrastructure company which Jessie was a very huge part of. This is just one story there are thousands upon thousands of such stories about the turnaround that women have affected without really resorting to aggressive tactics involving pissing on a competitors parade as most men would usually advise. Silently build a better product and live and let live, voila Azure is born! Today Azure is practically the best cloud computing infrastructure company having beaten AWS at the game (well some may say not yet, to which the ladies at Microsoft would just say “hold my drink”)…
Men need to reconcile with the fact that merit is all that is going to matter in the long run. Might as well pull up our staid cotton socks and prepare to get out of the way. The women today are coming to rattle your cages, confuse and confound you with their intelligence and perception skills. All along smart men all over the world prided themselves about not having too much patience to explain things… well here’s a species that will explain everything they do and enable others to achieve similar greatness. However you need to have the patience to listen and learn. And if you are still hung up and confused about the fact that there’s a new sheriff in town boy, get out of the way…
The era of men better than women should come to a close now. Most men who grew up in homes with ramrod fathers and subjugated moms are getting a culture shock of their life and will resist. And yet things are slowly changing because if anything change is inevitable and who better than women to manage the change… not because they are better, stronger, smarter (maybe, maybe not but stating that would just be the same injustice all over again in reverse ) but because we now have enough examples all around to see that men have run this world into the ground and what small examples we do have of success in keeping things afloat involve men and women working as equals with mutual respect and concern for each other…
Wish you a Happy International Day of the Girl.