Patricia Lara published a few days ago, in her column The viewer, a conversation that would have deserved further discussions, but in Colombia, whose elusive reality throws a new problem in our faces every twelve hours, was lost in the midst of issues that seem more urgent. Her interlocutor was the journalist Alejandra de Vengoechea, and the conversation began with a suggestive phrase, to say the least: “How tired testosterone is ruling the world!” And I made a quick inventory of the men whose decisions have caused untold suffering in recent months and threaten – these are my words, not those of the journalists – with launching us into even darker times, of even greater suffering. Hamas, Putin, Netanyahu, the ayatollahs of Iran: to all these characters, architects of our present violence, the journalists’ conversation opposed the name of Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, whose handling of moments of crisis – and had several, even in a remote and small country: further proof that there are no longer remote or small countries – it seemed frankly wonderful to so many of us.
I hasten to say that New Zealand is, in this world of ours, an exemplary country, and that makes everything easier: there are countries, simply, where sanity is easier. I have only been there once, in the city of Wellington, but it only took me a few days to understand that there is something special about New Zealand: it was the first country in the world, if I remember correctly, to recognize the rights of its aboriginal people ( He did it in the 19th century, when no one would have demanded something similar from a government of colonizers), and his civic conversations – on immigrant rights, religious freedom, ecology, even rugby – reveal an enviable democratic culture. . But that doesn’t matter: especially in times of social media, there is no small problem nor a totally sensible society, and those that affected Jacinda Ardern – the attack on the Christchurch mosques in 2019 and the Covid virus months later – would have course a major challenge for anyone. And yes: Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the two incidents, very different in duration and political implications, was so sensible and responsible that a conversation quickly arose between us: when talking about government, is it possible for women to do it? do better?
About ten years ago, in a public forum, I dared to suggest that this is the case: that the world would be slightly better if women were in charge, or if they were in charge more frequently. Ten years ago, opportunistic or last-minute feminism—nor its predictable corollary: irritated misogyny—had not become fashionable, so I said that without worrying about trends. Ten years later, I still think: contrary to what history dictates, political power is better in the hands of women. But not only the political one: the economic one can also be part of this conversation. In those days we were still suffering the consequences of the 2008 crisis, and now, with the elements at our disposal – and after dozens of films, documentaries, books and journalistic articles that have been published on the subject – it seems clear to me that that debacle It had a lot to do with a certain masculinity, or a certain way of exercising masculinity, which involves risk behaviors more typical of an adolescent without a prefrontal cortex. I don’t remember where I read the statements of a victim of scammer Bernie Madoff: “We wouldn’t have lost everything if Bernie had been Bernadette.” The phrase has some humor, of course, but you have to look at it closely.
In those days, the financial crisis had devastated Iceland’s entire economy, and everyone knew where the causes lay: in a banking culture of reckless risk that wanted to put the country – with its 300,000 people – to compete in the shark tank of the financial world. In all parts of the world, this admiration of the irresponsible and the ambitious, so sadly masculine, has had disastrous consequences; in Iceland it destroyed the three main banks and plunged the country into a catastrophe from which it could very well have never emerged. I wouldn’t want to trivialize the matter, but what happened then was very simple: the women came to clean up the mess that the men had left. The positions of power that the discredited leaders abandoned were occupied by a generation of female economists aged 40 and up, and the prime minister was replaced by a lesbian woman who was then in her early 70s: Jóhanna Sigurdadóttir.
Again: I don’t remember where I read (this could be an article about people who read too many newspapers and then can’t remember where their information comes from) about an economist who had founded a new investment fund with different securities: she preferred prudence to risk, for example, and was not ashamed to carry out “emotional” research on the companies in which he invested. If I remember correctly, he was talking about due diligence emotional: know what the company’s financial culture is like: look at the people, not just their numbers. They were practices that had something revolutionary at the time. But they worked: in a matter of five years, Iceland had completely emerged from the crisis. We will have to see what direct relationship there is between one thing and the other.
Nobody has to point out to me the existence of the Marine Le Pen or the Giorgia Meloni of this world, or of our ineffable local representatives of the most intemperate and angry extreme right, or of the silliest left-wing populism here and in Latin America: that exists everywhere. But I am not sure that these specific cases invalidate the conversation that Patricia Lara proposed. There are forms of irresponsibility towards others, unscrupulous risk, avoidable violence, lack of empathy or outright bullying that have a lot to do with a certain sexist culture, or a certain cultural machismo. And I’m not just talking about politicians who threaten another person with “hit in the face, faggot,” or who yell at another person to “be a man,” or who brag about grabbing women by the vulva and then are rewarded. with the presidency of the United States. Or maybe yes: maybe I am talking about them too, although those schoolyard behaviors, those of a gang member’s apprentice or a locker room stalker do not belong to the same order as the wars that are changing our world forever. But it is true that they say a lot about us and our societies: about what we are, what we tolerate, what we admire.
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