(Why) the Future is Feminine

Why Women are Changing a Dystopian World of Male Violence, While Men are Busy…Being Men

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
11 min readNov 11, 2019

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There’s a strange and awesome thing happening in the world today. The most radical and transformative leaders are all…women. Or at least mostly women. The men, meanwhile are busy…being men. Grinning, foolish, violent, crude, and selfish. Trumps bellowing like toddlers, Farages winking like idiot 007s, Salvinis raging like Mussolinis.

I think there’s a great truth hidden in there. The future is feminine. It isn’t that it belongs to women. But it does belong to values and attitudes and ways that we often call “feminine.” That is precisely why so many of the world’s rising leaders are women. The systems of male violence that have run the world for ages now have also run their course. They have destroyed everything they came in contact with, ultimately, from the planet to life on it to democracy. Who else was going to rebuild from the rubble of male violence but…women? Male violence made the world a dystopia. Women are changing it. But I’ll come to all that.

Now, before you accuse me of the millennial war crime of “gendering” a thing, let me point out that…I’m not. Or maybe I am — and I just don’t care. In my little household, I’m the mommy. I stay at home and write and take care of the little one, while my partner goes out in the big bad world and doctors the ill. So I’m going to speak about masculine and feminine values or ways. But these aren’t neatly “gendered” in the way we’re told to think of it now. The masculine and feminine exist, as Freud and Jung pointed out, long ago, in all of us. Not all women are gentle and sweet, and not all men are vicious and cruel. What should we — as people — be? Simmer down there, my friendly “men’s rights activist.” It’s not about men vs women, in other words.

Here’s what I see happening. Leadership as an exercise in patriarchal macho values of domination, greed, exploitation, possession, abusiveness, rank — that age is over, even as the Trumps and Farages embody it. True leadership today, and for the next century, is about nurturing and elevating and expanding the possibilities of things — from a reef to a child to a river — with care, gentleness, defiance, courage, truth, rebellion, grace. Sure, men can do that, too…

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