Women in politics turn out to be just as shit as men
Gender equality takes a huge leap forward as a failed reptilian experiment to fabric a humanoid out of the pulp of past daily mail editions and children’s tears triumphs over the re-heated corpse of Thatcher to become our new PM.
The next prime minister of the UK will, barring a major political fuck-up not unknown in recent politics, be a woman. She will join an emerging cohort of female political leaders.
For anyone possessing the radical belief that, strangely, women are humans – equipped with a full array of human faculties – this should be a cause to celebrate. It would appear that, finally, our pre-frontal lobes have outperformed our testosterone glands to allow the green shoots of a politics not based on penis-envy power games, but on some rag-tag ideal of meritocracy, to emerge.
Why then, in our wonderful world of pre-ordained and ‘post-factual’ opinions, are we not more excited? Probably because the latest great leap forward in female representation at the top level has either come at a time when all available options are thoroughly bad apples, or at our realisation that, as equally capable agents, women are equally capable of being the same vacuous power hungry troglodytes as the men who graced the halls of office before them.
Let us look then at the playing field, starting at home. Following the UK’s wonderful decision to look inwards from the world and sacrifice future happiness to nurture a heartwarming sturdy feeling of ‘get ’em out of our country’, the job at the top has become free. Vying to replace The Thick of It’s answer to Frank Underwood, David Cameron, was a woman so keen to drop the pusillanimous papers defending some inconvenient construct called ‘human rights’ that one could be forgiven for believing that she regularly underdoses on the warm milky formula with which her contacts in the 13th canton of hell supply her in order to maintain the impression that she is a living, breathing, homo sapien. The only obstacle standing in her way was a city extraordinaire, whose CV neatly spells out the time she single-handedly averted the 1996 currency crisis, landed a research probe on Mars, and unwound a terrorist plot to kill both The Queen, and the surviving members of Queen. After what we can only imagine to include an exchange promises to the end of a cabinet position, a case of Cabernet Sauvignon, and a cabinet of hunting licenses from one banker husband to another, the latter cleared the way for the former, and we have a brand spanking new prime minister.
Across the hall, Labour welcomes yet another ex-Oxford PPE full-time politician as she lines up a cruel usurpation of what appears to be the first principled party leader since most of the readers were born. Her qualifications include backstabbing, cold-calling, and media malleability; and her hobbies include seeking power, neoliberalism, and the Iraq war.
North of the wall, and for that matter, in the wild west that is Wales, gender advancements have been manifest in the heady blend of whinging nationalism and heavy handed socialism. For those unacquainted with the events of the 20th century: having a unified and apparently homogenous common enemy, a strong nationalistic sentiment, and socialist governance, are not always the most healthy of mixes.
Across the Atlantic, the masthead of gender advancement isn’t actual a feminist concerning with tackling the structural disadvantages and pitiful worker’s rights that allow women to make a mere 77 cents to the male dollar (such as Warren and Sanders), but instead the venerable Clinton. Clinton will have the job of facing the renown misogynist and Derridian controversy guru Trump with a band of feminist credentials that extend scarcely further than ‘being a woman’ – albeit a white wealthy woman who has been running for the position quite probably for all of her life.
Sadly, it seems that women in politics can’t all be Aung San Suu Kyi or pre-Greece-crisis Merkel, we can’t hope for a grand overhaul of the old order through the liberal feminist route of allowing privileged women to don blazers and succeed to the same degree as privileged men. Because, unfortunately, women have a habit of being just as shit as their male counterparts. For this curmudgeonly rant to not be uselessly destructive – perhaps it is about time we try and reorganize society so that it isn’t only the dross (to use the other coal mining term, slag, would likely be too inappropriate) and the crud that sifts to the top of the political pile – but to make some system where neither gender nor virtuosity can impede the realisation of great leadership.