Can Women Save Us?

Our human species faces two existential threats. The first is accelerating climate change of our own making. It appears to be reaching a tipping point (see this post, or this one for more detail). Beyond that point, it could become self-sustaining, even if and after we cut our carbon-dioxide emissions to zero.

The second existential threat is nuclear war. As nuclear technology and weapons proliferate, this threat is growing. Putin’s current nuke brandishing and North Korea’s and Iran’s rushes to grab nuclear weapons make this threat clear.

Both threats are unique in our species’ evolution and our recorded history. Both could decimate, if not exterminate, us by our own hands. Planetary heating and the weather catastrophes it causes know no national boundaries. Likewise, the consequences of nuclear war, including wind-driven fallout and “nuclear winter,” don’t stop at national frontiers.

So, as these threats mature, the victims won’t be just one nation or group or another, as in the past, but all of us. Both threats are species-wide: they do not discriminate among nations, tribes, races, or political ideologies.

A natural question then arises. Throughout history, men—nearly always—have run everything: tribes, nations, armies, businesses, churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, hospitals and first responders. It exaggerates nothing to say that men, as leaders, voters, and followers, have brought us to where we are. So, as women rise to not just to work in, but to lead, our various institutions, can they save us from our growing existential threats? Can they save us from our male selves?

Women have saved American democracy, quite recently. The “gender gap” in the 2020 presidential election was at least 9 percentage points. At least nine percent more women voted for Biden than the Demagogue. That’s over 4.5% of all voters.

In an election in which key states turned on low single-digit leads, that made the difference. Had the several States not ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, we might now be in the second year of the Reign of Donald I, Emperor of America, with Don Jr. and maybe Eric to follow, by right of heredity.

Let that sink in for a moment. Then think of the election to come. If we avoid a GOP takeover of Congress—or a gridlocked Congress with House and Senate divided—women will have made that happen. They are more motivated now, after the Demagogue-packed Supreme Court ripped away their rights to bodily autonomy.

Maybe the Demagogue wouldn’t actually call himself Emperor. But that’s what he would be in fact. Having learned well from his first term, he would have packed the federal bureaucracy, the courts and our military leadership with loyalists, ideologues and sycophants, ignoring credentials, character, expertise and basic competence. The only “character” our Demagogue values is loyalty, to him.

Over the past two years, our government would have come to resemble nothing so much as Vladimir Putin’s. And what demented soul could ever conceive of Putin as a woman, or a woman as doing what he’s done? Everything about him, from his consistent, calculated deception, through the little-man’s urge to stretch his height with gratuitous violence and terror, to his brutal war against decency and ordinary people in Ukraine, all scream “Macho Man." Putin is a modern Napoleon, with lots of nukes but without the original’s conscience or empathy for ordinary subjects.

But this essay is not about what or how. It’s about why. Why would fewer women than men vote for the Demagogue, whose self-evident goal was and is to rule by decree, by Tweet, and in his own interest. Why would they refuse, in greater numbers, to genuflect toward a man who would cure Covid with bleach and declassify documents by thinking about them? Why would so many more men than women vote for a man who (to resort to Obamanian understatement) has so many serious defects in character and competence? Bear with me: I have a theory.

The most dangerous substance in the Universe, I submit, is neither plutonium nor enriched uranium. It’s testosterone. Both males and females have it, but men have more, and their bodies use it in different ways. In men, testosterone promotes extraordinary physical effort, aggression and risk taking. It seems to promote action over caution and consideration.

Don’t just think of Putin. Think of his predecessors, going back to Genghis Khan: Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kims of North Korea. All have been willing, if not eager, to sacrifice human beings, even by the millions, for their personal power, dominance, ideology, crackpot schemes, or even vanity. How many similar female leaders in history can you name?

Next consider the great British Queens. Queen Elizabeth I took the reins of a small island nation riven by internecine warfare and assassination. In her reign as monarch, she transformed England into a (relatively) peaceful and prosperous paragon of learning, Enlightenment, exploration, commerce, trade, technology, science and industry.

The cultural changes that QEI supervised and promoted made Britain the shining light of human civilization for three centuries. We in America inherited the culture she nurtured, and it gave us our “American Century” and basic values, including the Bill of Rights. And that Queen’s late namesake, Queen Elizabeth II, has kept the flame of Enlightenment alive for most of a brutal century by her example alone, without any real political power at all, and with no direct way to ameliorate residual colonial nastiness. That’s why so many around the world are grieving her loss.

During the century or so of “women’s liberation,” it’s been fashionable to focus on how women can do all that men can, in civilizations where size and strength no longer matter outside of sports. But are there differences between women and men that matter, too? Might those differences actually confer advantages in leadership, promoting the survival of our species? Let’s analyze.

Women’s biological evolution has given them a different profile of risk and aggression. For at least several months in pregnancy, they suffer physical conditions that men would consider a disability, if not a disease. For years afterward, they bear primary responsibility for feeding, nurturing, caring for, and protecting infants as they grow into toddlers and children still too young to care for and protect themselves. So women’s biological role, which men can never completely fulfill, requires stability and continuity, if not peace, for over a decade. At a very basic level, women ensure the continuity of our species and our community life.

I know, I know. No two women are alike, and all deserve the right to choose for themselves what they do in life. An increasing number never have children, especially in developed nations. That’s probably a good thing: there are far too many of us already, so accelerating climate change may cut our human population the hard way. Women’s collective personal decisions to have fewer and smaller families may help avoid that fate.

Nevertheless, women’s chief biological role remains clear and unchanged. Men cannot bear children, and “test-tube babies” are too expensive and risky a thing to pin our species’ survival on.

There is another, more subtle consequence of child bearing and child rearing. Every day, women see and must manage conflicts of rival siblings as they grow. Women get practice at loving, caring for and managing all their children, even the weak, whimsical, wacky and warlike.

Perhaps that skill has waned a bit as families have gotten get richer and smaller, at least in developed nations. But it’s still a vital part of the biological role. Might that experience and skill have value as human tribes vie for space and survival on a planet whose habitable space is declining, and on which nuclear weapons threaten catastrophe?

The point here is not to put women in a cage disguised as a pedestal, as the late Justice Ginsburg once lamented. Nor is it to categorize them as all the same. It’s simply to recognize that biological inheritance and imperatives may make women less likely to take on potentially fatal risks like making war in the nuclear age, letting global warming run way past its tipping point just to squeeze every dollar out of fossil fuels, or unmasking in the middle of a pandemic.

Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take risks and be “decisive.” That’s especially so when the decision involves intense physical effort, like striking a tormentor, running into battle, cutting down a tree, crossing a raging river, or parachuting from a moving plane. Testosterone helps motivate and power physical feats of courage.

But here’s the rub. At our current level of civilization, “decisiveness” in physical feats is rapidly losing importance outside of sports. In everything else, we have to think and plan and calculate carefully in order to get things right.

That’s why environmental impact statements are so long. That’s why it’s taking years, if not decades, to solve our chronic housing shortage, clean up our air, and slow the acceleration of global warming. That’s why we have—and why we need—so many more scientists, engineers, planners, accountants, and arbiters, and so many fewer fighters and weight-lifters. There’s a lot of stuff to consider, and off-the-cuff decision making doesn’t work so well. Testosterone can be an impediment, except in “pumping iron.” (Sorry, Arnold!)

Maybe that’s why sports of all kinds—even women’s sports—are becoming so popular. They’re the only field of modern human endeavor in which the “decisiveness” and quick action that we evolved for individual survival have such obvious and enduring relevance. They’re the only field in which quick and decisive action, the quicker the better, is unambiguously good.

So we relish sports because they feel good. But woe unto us if our natural love of sports leads us to pick the slow-witted football hero Herschel Walker over the brilliant and empathetic Reverend Warnock as a legislator or cultural leader.

Outside of sports, testosterone-fueled “decisiveness” can be dangerous or deadly. Rudy Giuliani’s “manliness” in refusing to wear a mask when he appeared right after 9/11 motivated many first responders to do the same. (This was just the first of his many transgressions against science and common sense.) Many of the first responders who aped his machismo eventually suffered and died from various lung diseases. The same thing happened to military “burn-pit” victims whose commanders “decisively” ordered enormous quantities of toxic substances burned next to soldiers’ lodgings, just to “clean things up” and decisively deny the enemy unused property and the information in it.

The whole history of global warming, including its current acceleration, illustrates much the same point. In a “decisive” rush to exploit fossil fuels before they run out, we have lost decades in the race against time and warming. That crucial delay has made our species’ happiness and survival much more precarious, as we confront an irrevocable, planet-wide, climatological tipping point.

Men have been leaders throughout history for a simple biological reason. On the average, they are bigger and stronger physically than women. But that strength and size matter little in today’s human civilization. We no longer have significant animal predators. We no longer have to catch our food on the run: we grow it, both meat and plants. And strength and size matter little in modern mechanized warfare, let alone the nuclear kind. So you might say that men’s self-evident physical advantages are obsolete.

What matters now is almost entirely a matter of psychology and sociology. Job one is working together to curtail our emission of greenhouse gases as soon possible, as the habitable parts of our planet relentlessly retreat. Job two is accommodating and caring for—as humanely as possible—all the climate refugees that even now are becoming stateless migrants. Job three is learning to share the pain and pull the oars together in this greatest existential challenge of our species’ evolutionary history. And job four is, at a minimum, avoiding nuclear conflict as we adjust to the stress and suffering from all the above.

All these jobs require consummate pragmatism: putting practical progress way ahead of nationhood, ethnocentricism, xenophobia, partisanship, ideology and all the other irrelevant abstractions that men are so good at conceiving, debating and getting their fellow men to die for. In families, women don’t worry about these abstractions as much as about whether the kids are fed and well.

As for conflict, women have learned to resolve it and foster cooperation in families from time immemorial. We now have enough evidence that they are better than men at de-escalating personal conflicts in our neighborhoods and on our streets. Enlightened police departments across our nation are acting on that knowledge, hiring more women to serve as de-escalators before street conflicts sink to the level of police killings. And this approach seems to be working.

It’s ironic that it’s taken an epidemic of police killings—even outright murders—for Americans to recognize the value of women as peace-makers, organizers and leaders. It’s even more ironic that it took gross deprivation of their rights to bodily autonomy—not the evolutionary advantages of their gender—to get more of them to vote. But the fact is that the things at which women excel are essential to our species’ survival today: cooperation, peace-making, valuing practical progress over abstractions, and subordinating one’s individual ego to the common good. Male empire-building could literally kill us, just as it’s doing in Ukraine.

Even the best of our nearly-all-male oligarchs can’t save us. The billions they donate to curing disease and retarding global warming’s acceleration won’t be enough. The hundreds of millions that they donate to mindless political attack ads designed to maintain their social and economic advantages undermine, with one hand, the good they do with the other. More than ever, we need leaders that epitomize “feminine” values and mindsets. Our species’ happiness, even survival, now may depend on women realizing their full potential and gently taking charge.

A Counterexample: Liz Truss. For every accurate generalization, there are counterexamples. One relevant in this case appears to be Liz Truss, Britain’s new Prime Minister. I can’t decide whether she’s a cheap copy of Margaret Thatcher or Marjorie Taylor Greene with an IQ boost and a British accent.

But one thing about Truss is clear. Her ideas for “progress“—cutting taxes and regulation and cutting welfare benefits—are proven failures from the worst days of Reagan and Thatcher. Don’t take my word for it; take the word of Nobel-Prize-winning pundit Paul Krugman. He calls them “zombie Reaganomics”—ideas long killed by hard experience that keep rising from the dead.

So Truss’ choice by the British Tories—not the entire British electorate—proves only one thing: no generalization is completely accurate. Like Thatcher, Truss errs in trying to play the male, this time in elevating false and discredited abstract generalizations over practical reality. The last thing human civilization needs, as it fights the twin threats of nuclear extinction and accelerating global warming, is to fight an army of zombie ideas, too. In the end, all Truss’ selection proves is that neither gender is perfect or infallible. Both are susceptible to groupthink.

Instant Confirmation? I love it when mainstream pundits and/or news provide what appears to be quick confirmation of my views. Today, as I revised and finalized this post for publication, op-ed pieces by two of the New York Times’ most thoughtful commentators did just that.

Tom Friedman—he of the “Earth is getting flatter” persuasion—described how the two existential threats of our time interact. Putin’s atrocity in Ukraine, which today poses the greatest risk of nuclear escalation, is causing worldwide food, energy and material shortages, especially in the third world. Those shortages, in turn, are causing people to despoil the Earth’s remaining intact forests, one-third of which are protected by Indigenous people. So the macho-man’s vile personal crusade not only threatens nuclear war. It also helps accelerate climate change by destroying the forests that remove carbon dioxide from our warming atmosphere. The title of Friedman’s analysis is, “Putin’s War Is a Crime Against the Planet.”

The second bit of confirmation was more direct. Its author is Bret Stephens, a conservative, a Demagogue-loather and often a compellingly thoughtful writer. He described how women, driven by gratuitous assaults on their own and their families’ personal autonomy, are leading protests against leaders’ insanity in both Iran and Russia. Albeit a bit dismissive in our American case, his peroration suggests the extent to which women’s leadership is needed and effective worldwide:

“The West has had a women’s movement and a Women’s March. Now is the time for a Women’s Revolution in Iran and a Women’s Peace in Russia.”

The title of his op-ed is “Bring On the Women’s Revolutions.” As long as you include our far-from-complete revolution here at home, I couldn’t agree more.


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