President Obama Says Women Should Rule the World — and I Agree

Considerations Towards a More Matriarchal Society

I have a public confession to make. Over the course of my nine-years of working in politics, I eventually learned to stop talking to men at work. In politics, we had to get results and results meant talking to voters in whichever city we happened to find ourselves in, but more importantly, voters who were willing to engage in a dialogue and free, open discussion.

These voters, simply put, were almost never men. Former-president Obama has been in the news lately discussing the role of women in politics and I’m reminded of the years I put in and what I’d learned during the course of my tenure. More on this important tidbit, later…

What if women ruled the world? What if we could hand over the keys to the levers of power, at least for a little while, and give women 100% charge and responsibility of our most prized and precious institutions? Well, for the most part, I have to say that I agree with Barack Obama’s recent comments that if we did just that, we’d see things get a lot better.

While Obama’s comments may sound extreme, I completely and emphatically agree with him and much of this stems from that time I spent in political work. This is a place where you notice some of the divides between men and women the most — wherever there is power, control, competition, and social need, we will notice the divides between the behaviors of men and the behaviors of women at their most glaring. This means, politics, sex, dating, religion, and work are the places where our differences will be the most pronounced, in my view, and once we grant this difference, we also grant that there might be better and worse ways of governing.

“Now women, I just want you to know; you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you’re better than us [men],” Obama said while delivering a speech in Singapore.

He continued, “I’m absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything — living standards and outcomes.”

The former president then went on to say that the problem was older men trying to cling to power when they no longer are capable of desiring to do their jobs of public service, saying:

“If you look at the world and look at the problems it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way…It is important for political leaders to try and remind themselves that you are there to do a job, but you are not there for life, you are not there in order to prop up your own sense of self-importance or your own power,”

I don’t mean this in any way to sound really ass-kissy and those who’ve read my rather unapologetic work should know that I pull no punches, but I emphatically agree with all of these statements, and I do so as a supporter of Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 elections (I also support Warren this year). Men have had their turn, plenty has gone wrong, so what might be the harm in giving women a shot at the reigns of power? An intriguing thought, to say the least.

The thing is, while Bernie could be held up as a gold-standard veteran in politics, I mean, he’s practically Jesus, but for every one Bernie Sanders, there are literally scores of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham figures, Orin Hatch and Joe Biden personalities, there are old men aplenty who refuse to step aside and hand over the reins of power because their ego won’t let them. It seems at face value that Obama’s diagnosis is correct.

There are also plenty of aggressive, hostile, and young men in politics as well and while we could point to the occasionally toxic woman in politics, the fact that they find themselves competing in such a male-dominated theater means they have to conform or be left behind. I think this has more to do with biology and evolution than we are willing to credit. I firmly believe there are vast differences to be had, at the very least, by evening out the number of women and men in political positions of power.

I feel like many feminists are right on the money with the idea that women cannot express certain emotions while enveloped in a male-dominated framework like politics and that the only exception to this, for instance, like when a woman such as Sarah Palin expresses anger with Liberals, is that women can express outrage, anger, frustration, “losing their cool,” and more, but only when it’s in support of patriarchal principles — otherwise, they’re labeled emotional basketcases and written off by the men who already hold power.

Yet, there is much more research to be done before we can make definitive claims outside of the small sample of my empirical experience…

Back to my time in politics…

When we needed to get out and canvass the voting public for a particular cause, some of the other experienced veterans and I learned not to waste our time talking to men — it’s not that I don’t like men, it’s just that men almost never care about social issues, at least not enough to stop and talk to a party representative or stranger. It felt like, at the time, 1 out of every 100 men would engage in the political process while maybe 40 out of 100 women would. Women were also more open to listening and didn’t feel a need to “take charge.” Another guy I worked with from South Los Angeles had also caught on to this phenomenon and we both actually joked about it occasionally. We would intentionally work together so as to maximize our time (and income) at work together.

We’d often have to document who we talked to for accountability measures and at the end of most days, we’d review that we might have talked to 400 or 500 women — and no men whatsoever. This wasn’t sexism, this just made sense and was the best way to maximize our time — men didn’t respond as women did. It was virtually guaranteed that if a canvasser talked to both men and women, at the end of the day, they’d have spoken to a lot fewer voters, effectively performing less well at their jobs.

I once went to a Bernie Sanders rally, in 2016, as a Bernie Sanders supporter, with a petition to extend the existing tax of 1% on incomes to fund schools, kindergarten through community college. The event drew at least a thousand, in Los Angeles, mostly men, though it wasn’t the boom I’d expected. Even this crowd who had a vested interest in the policy I was peddling wasn’t willing to engage to affect change.

This, in my experience, was interestingly flipped when the issue was one that tended towards violence. When I worked to change death penalty laws in California or to recall the judge who let Brock Turner off the hook with such a light sentence, men lined up in droves, thankfully, so the news isn’t all bad. But I think it’s safe to say that we’re motivated by different things on a general whole, with some exceptions. When violence was involved, they were either aroused at the prospect or furious. Simply put, it may be harder to provoke men to empathy and compassion than it is to provoke them to outrage or political nihilism, generally speaking, of course— I’d like to see some research done on this topic, the sociopolitical behavioral differences between women and men and what sort of social stimuli we respond to.

In the meanwhile, those who scoff at the Presidents remarks should stop and take a moment to consider. They’re also usually the very same men who do the bare minimum, if that, to contribute to a better world which can’t be a coincidence, so I wouldn’t be surprised if none of them did for the exact same reason they never stopped to talk to us. You see, the thing is, democracy is a tremendous responsibility and our current masculine conception of freedom is totally devoid of personal responsibility. Until this is reconciled, we’re doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes, like electing Donald Trump.

While I’m not much for identity politics being a foundational feature of our belief system, I do believe that there is merit in balancing out the differences between the sexes in the political process. We need equality, at the very least, in our representation, sooner, rather than later. That said, I’d gladly sign up to live in a world ruled by women.

Men have been the rules for the entirety of human history — isn’t it time for a change of pace? We’ve literally got the entirety of human history, in all of its blunders and errors, to point to and say that men haven’t exactly brought us peace and prosperity. Is it time we considered a matriarchy? What say you, dear reader? Perhaps the loving and nurturing, not to mention fecundity and responsibility of maternal principles might be a nice change of pace because I’m tired of the hyper-vigilance, security state, the Prison Industrial Complex, the homelessness crisis due to sell-or-starve capitalism. What say you, dear reader — what say you?