OF WOMEN AND MEN — LIKE FISH IN THE WATER

After a lifetime of experience and observation, in the last few years I have come to the conclusion that the major problems of society —of social relations, community, politics, economics, and the relations of humankind to the Earth/the biosphere/Gaia— simply cannot be addressed effectively without one major worldwide change. That change is a movement to complete and total equality of men and women in power, status, and decisionmaking.

Take one example. In the Miss (your nation), Miss World, and Miss Universe contests, a moment comes when the judges put THE BIG QUESTION to the contestants. In some form it is, “If you could achieve just one thing in your life, what would it be?” Hands down, again and again the most common answer is “World peace.” Can you imagine that being the most common answer in a “Mr. World” or “Mr. Universe” contest? Fat chance. The women don’t want their kids to get sent off to die in wars. For the most part they don’t want to kill other people’s kids either, or bomb their cities, or . . .   As for the men? “Well hell man, I gotta right to carry my submachine gun wherever I want to and shoot the shit out of any of them suckers who don’t do what I think they oughta.” Yes, I exaggerate, but the generals and politicians who start wars and the soldiers who fight them all over the world are at least 95 percent male. So are the murderers and thugs and rapists and those who commit all the othe crimes of violence. So are the captains of industry with vampire genes who suck the blood of working people and poor people so they can have endlessly MORE.

We are still living in a world culture defined by more than three thousand years of patriarchy and male dominance and definition of almost all our social institutions. But most people don’t see it, don’t realize it, and indeed are fundamentally clueless about it. It’s like asking the fish in an aquarium what “water” is. “Huh?” they’d say. Because they don’t know anything else. It’s the only reality they know. And if their water is dark and dirty, that’s the only reality they know. In like fashion, a society controlled by the power of male dominance and legal and religious structures is metaphorically a society of dark and dirty water. It’s outcomes are war and crime and environmental destruction. Transform that into social systems in which women and men each have an equal voice in the way society is organized and run and most of those pathologies will fall apart and open the field for a kinder, wiser, more universally nourishing culture to emerge.