I have gone goblin-mode, but this time I may have pushed it a little far, even by plague standards.

The venue is industrial-chic-meets-Burning-Man in a grimy part of town where the kiss of gentrification makes the repurposed warehouse ideal for tonight’s 60th shindig. The guests are pimped up in sequins and faux furs with a dusting of psychedelics, and they’re stomping to Deep House on a dance floor. How retirement-age women can pull off the spray-on lycra look is a thing of mystery, given most of us have bloated like startled puffer fish after months of soothing our way through pandemic house arrest with comfort carbs and boot-legged wine.

Goblin-mode, Oxford Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year: ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly… typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations’.

Free from the tyranny of office protocol and social etiquette, COVID lockdown let us all happily go to seed in our flannel PJs, and we haven’t quite found our way back. When I finally crawl out of seclusion, I can barely recognise the person peering back from the mirror. Heavier, wilder, unkempt.

We could have done with puppy socialising classes to remember how to be communal animals again, and I need a wardrobe overhaul for the unexpectedly stubborn new heft.

I skulk up the stairs, trying to dissolve into the bare brickwork. No one will see the intrepid National Geographic writer, the author-of-many-books, the woman who stood her ground before charging lionesses, and was airlifted from advancing insurgents in the back of the East African beyond. They won’t see the person who saved her own bacon from the wrath of an angry witch hunter on the Angolan border, or the adventurer on high seas when the Southern Ocean tried to buck the helicopters off the back of a research ship.

What they’ll see — honestly, is anyone even looking? — is a middle-aged woman who looks like an over-stuffed scatter cushion in a sky-blue button-up sack with a knotted belt that rides up awkwardly, adding all the wrong lines to a billowy bosom and pudding waist. Saggy leggings, no-fun flats, barely a lick of makeup.

The new hair has finally spiralled out from the Ronald McDonald clown cap and gained a bit of volume — it takes three times longer to grow curly hair, given how much it coils back on itself — but it is an ungovernable frizz. No amount of salon goo or home remedy can tame its rude elocution, it will not lower its voice into polite ringlets.

Even with the best preening I cut an unremarkable figure, but the loose interpretation of tonight’s dress code is a grave error of judgement. I feel like a worn-out laying hen amongst birds of paradise.

The usual crew is up on the mezzanine, thankfully, blowing smoke chimneys, and I tuck in under their collective wing.

A newcomer wanders up to do the niceties. He works his way around the circle, pumping Benoit’s hand, then Darren’s, exchanging names. His hand swings past me as if I am a pane of transparent glass, and he picks up the etiquette with Victor, with a volley of conviviality above the din.

If I want to be part of the conversation, I’m going to have to elbow my way in, frump-factor timidity be damned. I dial up the volume on the body language, thrust a hand in his direction, and step squarely into his field of vision.

To be technically accurate, given the height difference between us, it was less of a squaring up, and more of a triangulation.

An ancient part of his brain registers movement. Pity I wasn’t wearing red, because it would then have issued a danger warning, too.

‘Oh!’ he says, ‘Sorry…’ and introduces himself.

Disappearing act

I’m not generally one to quote actors — they don’t have quite the same heft as Simone de Beauvoir or Fredrick Nietzsche — but Meryl Streep knocked it out the park when she said that old age is a privilege denied many. Given the myriad ways we can be plucked from the gene pool, she’s not wrong: dispatched by a nasty little tumour; a high-speed head-on; an olive pip lodged in the oesophagus for a few seconds too many (or, one could say, just long enough). It’s a small miracle many of us even make it to 50. For those of us who do, half of us will have to deal with a physical change inside our brain-box that’s a bit like surviving a traumatic brain injury.

Menopause.

Fellas, before you glaze over and reach for Popular Mechanics, consider this: you’ve cruised through life in a car with a six-cylinder turbo engine. One day, you wake to find you’ve got a lawnmower engine under the hood. It spits and splutters, but there’s zip when you put your foot to the floor. 

I’m not going to trot out the usual self-deprecating accounts of the midlife woman sloshing through a work meeting looking like she’s survived a burst geyser, or brain-blanked as she’s gone live on-air for a news broadcast, or how she’s carpet bombed her family because someone didn’t buy fresh milk.

We’ve heard those stories before.

This part of the story is way darker than that, and seldom talked about. Menopause can be life-threatening: behind the hot flushes, irritation, sleeplessness and brain fog is a tempest of anxiety, self-doubt, and a growing sense of irrelevance and worthlessness which lead many women to consider — how shall we say this delicately — taking early retirement. Yes, by that I mean many of us drop out of the work force, because we think we’ve got early-onset dementia or just can’t think straight anymore. But I also mean that many of us think about stepping out of the game entirely. Some of us do.

I’m going to take a gander at why this is, and it’s not just because menopausal women have got the nuclear equivalent of pre-menstrual tension, aka a bad dose of dodgy hormones. It’s because we’ve spent our lives in a fishbowl culture that has told us our primary value to society is in how fuckable we are, and now that we’re not, we’re irrelevant.

Virginia Woolf’s middle-aged Mrs Dalloway possibly captures the moment best as she contemplates her place in the world while strolling down Bond Street on her way to buy flowers: she is, she suddenly realises, becoming invisible.

While men tend to gain stature with age — the silver-fox thing on our big screens, even as their crowns thin, their bellies swell, and their jowls droop — they carry with them their accumulated wealth and political power. Women don’t.

His master’s voice

An author-editor-poet friend invites a handful of literary types to lunch at her swanky Art Deco apartment in town. There are about eight of us — mostly women, one man — and we make writerly chatter around a table set with the kind of platters you’d see in a foodie magazine.

Our conversation tacks with the winds, a regatta of fluttering sails and easy banter, although the male author is unusually retiring. He’s normally the quick-witted raconteur, which gets him on the A-list at literature festivals. He likes to opine about sport and travel, and is an unabashed Hemingway fanboy.

Eventually we drop anchor briefly in the cove I’m familiar with: I’m working on a piece on psychedelics as medicine, and how they might be a way to bring about a collective nature awakening in the face of planetary collapse. The talk feels edgy, and I’m fired up.

The following day, the host sends a text. The male author wants to know more about magic mushrooms and would like to get in touch.

‘Here’s the thing,’ the friend hammers out on her phone. ‘He didn’t know your name. He’d never heard of you.’

We’re both a little aghast. This writer and I have navigated the same literary waterways for over two decades. We both write non-fiction, we’ve been on the same book festival programmes, we’ve both been published in the same national newspapers. I don’t read his work much — the topics aren’t my thing — but I’ve known his byline since I was a rookie, fresh out of varsity.

In all this time, he doesn’t seem to have registered my byline at all.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. In her book The Authority Gap: Why women are still taken less seriously than men, and what we can do about it, British journalist and author Mary Ann Sieghart pulls together the evidence to support what most women know intuitively and have experienced personally: that men are assumed to have authority and competence, and treated accordingly, while women have to continually prove theirs, even when they already have the credentials.

The upshot is that men tend to read mostly male authors, and pay little attention to what women writers have to say. Publishing figures show that men buy fewer books by women authors, and tend not to follow women on social media.

Not only do men not regard us as authorities on subjects, Sieghart argues, they don’t even know what we’re authorities on, because they generally don’t read our work.

Women writers have been wise to this for some time now.

Joanna Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books as JK Rowling because she knew she’d have more chance of breaking into the genre as JK than as Joanna. Little Women author Louisa May Alcott wrote many of her books as AM Barnard. Ninetieth century French writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin used the nom de plume George Sand. Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch, used George Eliot as her cover. Danish author Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa as Isak Dinesen. Science fiction writer Alice Bradley Sheldon used the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr as ‘a good camouflage’ so she could make her way in the man’s literary world.

Anticipating this, when Sieghart was wrapping up her book she insisted that the cover of The Authority Gap have neither curly writing nor the colour pink. She wanted the book to be something that men would not be embarrassed to be seen reading on a London tube.

On the back of this collective wisdom, I decide to write this book under the gender-ambiguous nickname that some of my closer friends use. It won’t be long before readers figure out that it’s a moniker for a human-with-ovaries, but hopefully not before they’ve read enough of the book to be intrigued and might be willing to risk reading a few more pages penned by a female.

The invention of women

It’s baffling that Hemingway still has such a following, given that he wrote Mills & Boon for blokes.

Ursula le Guin most certainly did not write Mills & Boon. The wizardry of her storytelling in Left Hand of Darkness isn’t just because she’s unafraid of the elegance of long sentences and biggish words. Hemingway kept things short and tight, maybe because he took too much of his own advice about writing drunk, editing sober. Good writing and a bad hangover are an oil-and-water mix. Whatever the case, he’s no match for the political sophistication in Left Hand of Darkness, an excoriating take-down of our society’s gendered caste system.

Hemingway glorified this caste system. Le Guin tears it apart.

She conjures an off-Earth society where everyone is gender-neutral. Individuals only come into sexual viability for a few days in a monthly cycle. In this brief coital window, a person could either emerge as male or female, something they have no control over. If a person couples with another during this time, they could impregnate their partner, or become pregnant; they could father the child, or be pregnant for many months and have to nurse the child as its mother.

The outcome is that an individual might be both a mother and a father to the offspring in their respective broods, and that the risks and burden of pregnancy and parenting are shared.

It also means that Le Guin’s society isn’t driven by the ever-present aggression that simmers above the layers of those with heightened testosterone, and the fever of male lust. This leaves people free to get on with more productive things, and there’s much less conflict, sexual competition and war.

When the people of Gethen in Le Guin’s world learn that a visiting envoy from Terra, who resembles Earth humans, exists in a constant state of sexual viability as humans do, they think of him as a ‘pervert’.

Le Guin didn’t have much time for Hemingway or his liquor-soaked melancholy. She was more interested in tearing down the caricatured masculinity that is valorised in the heroes in his novels and in the man himself — the ‘beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences’.

She was born in 1929, and grew up before ‘the invention of women’.

‘When I was born,’ she writes in her 2004 essay collection The Wave in the Mind, ‘there were actually only men. People were men.’

Even though women in the US were given the right to vote in 1920, the country still had a long way to go before they were to be on an equal footing to men. They still aren’t.

Men have written the rules of the game. Men have decided over time who has personhood before the law, and who doesn’t. Men created a legal system that recognises themselves as subjects before the law, and others as ‘objects’ or property, and they decided over time if that status changed. Think: enslaved people, females, people of colour, corporations (yes, corporations are regarded as ‘people’ before the law), and nature (a lion or a baobab tree is regarded by the law as an object, like a building or a desk).

Men decided who could learn to read, and who couldn’t. They said who could run for government, own property, and have bank accounts. Men decided who they’d allow into the inner circle, and who they wouldn’t.

Le Guin may have been born into a country where women had recently been given the right to vote, but that doesn’t mean women were allowed into the Old Boys’ Club.

The invention of women is not neat, linear and inevitable. History is showing us that it doesn’t bend naturally towards justice, as Martin Luther King hoped and prayed would happen with social change. It grows and dies unpredictably, and as chaotically as the laws of physics plummet towards entropy.

In some parts of the world, women are being uninvented as we speak.

The Taliban has again barred Afghan girls and women from schools and university campuses. Females are back under house arrest, with their fathers, brothers or husbands as their wardens, and can be beaten to death with impunity for breaking a morality law, like showing too much hair.

Women in the US may be charged with a criminal offence in some states if they terminate a pregnancy — even in the case of rape, incest, or where the woman’s life is at risk because of the pregnancy — because lawmakers have reversed the Roe v Wade abortion law.

Gambia is about to reverse a law that banned the practice of hacking off a girl or woman’s clitoris in a form of mutilation that is the equivalent of a castration, and forever stripping her of her ability to have sexual pleasure.

Sidebar: For many in the 'progressive' world, the onus is on the woman to manage a couple’s birth control. For those who end up on the pill, this is sometimes like being chemically castrated, such is its wet-blanket effect on a woman’s libido. And then the bloke moans that she's not into it enough.

Going nuclear

It’s half-way into a four-day music festival in an outdoor venue up in the foothills of the Cape Fold Mountains, and the baristas at the pop-up coffee stall must have been up all night, but by the look of things, this isn’t their first rodeo. Their hides are weathered after years of unguarded sunburn, trance party dust, and whatever cocktail of intoxicants they’ve no doubt necked over the years.

The coffee machine coughs with steam that blasts through the fragrant grounds, filling paper cups for the first sunrise customers.

‘Ja, it’s a good thing Hillary Clinton didn’t win, hey,’ one of them says. ‘Can you imagine! First bit of PMT and boom, World War Three!’

Their laughter has a bass-line of chesty rattles — nicotine has no doubt been part of their above-the-counter drug repertoire.

‘Um…?’

They peer over. I’m number two in a queue of only men.

‘Um… Are you saying a woman can’t make a competent leader because she has a menstrual cycle?’

Only the coffee machine dares hiss.

To start with, these two lads could have done with some high school biology revision. By the time Clinton ran for the Oval Office, she was 69, well into post-menopause. Her track record before then suggests that the occasional pre-menstrual blues didn’t get in her way throughout her career, and by now PMT would have been a long-extinct volcano. Two decades extinct, give or take.

Pity her husband Bill’s hormonal volcano wasn’t quite so under control when he was leading his country, or he wouldn’t have faced impeachment proceedings because he couldn’t rein himself in around a young, vulnerable female intern. But society’s norms made a mockery of the female intern, rather than give the predatory man a stripping down.

By the time Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby took her show Nanette to the stage, Donald Trump was in the White House. She chastises her fellow comedians for failing to do their job as social commentators, where they should have hammered Clinton for his abuse of power. If comedians had done their job properly, she argues, they would have made Clinton the punchline of their routines, instead of Monica Lewinsky. ‘(T)hen perhaps we would have had a middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience in the White House, instead, as we do, a man who openly admitted to sexually assaulting a vulnerable young woman because he could.’

Remember the Trump p*ssy-grab locker-room boast?

The coffee baristas might also have benefited from remembering that the few times the world has come within a hair’s breadth of mutually assured destruction at the pointy end of a nuclear warhead, it wasn’t because a moody woman was about to slam her palm down on the launch-button. Hashtag: OldBoysClub.

The menopausal woman is still something of an oddity. Up until a century or so ago, women generally didn’t live much beyond their mid-40s. Society has only had a few generations to decide what to do with her. How useful is she? She’s no longer young and fuckable. Sorry horny lads. She’s lost her use as brood mare for the family line. Sorry patrilineal wealth-hoarders. She could pay her way by giving free child care for the grandkids?

Or she could be allowed to take hold of the reins and blossom into leadership.

Female orca whales go though menopause. So do elephants. These two species have structured their societies into matriarchal communities. Once females outgrow their fertile years, they don’t become redundant. They aren’t ‘put on the shelf’. They’re not regarded as having ‘no skin in the game’. They step into leadership roles that they’ve spent a lifetime preparing for. They’re keepers of communal knowledge, and their experience allows them to guide their pods or herds through the world.

They do this, without waiting for the men in their families to give them permission to do so.

#OldBoysClub

I explain to a group of people during a trauma workshop why I feel like I’m going mad.

Imagine you’re standing on a rooftop, overlooking a village, and you can see a tsunami hurtling towards the village. You’re bellowing at the top of your lungs.

‘Run! Run! Get to higher ground! There’s danger coming! RUN!’

But your words are reduced to feral grunts because your tongue has been ripped out. You wail and shout and cry but the odd passer-by thinks you’re just the village loon.

Imagine feeling like this for 20 years?

Joanna Macy, a doyen in the environmental activism world whose work specifically addresses the psychological fallout of working in this space, talks about how being a witness to the suffering and destruction we’re causing can drive you mad, particularly if you keep it locked away inside.

It is equally maddening when you try to externalise it, but where your words are mute.

I feel though as my tongue has been ripped out, in part, because of the Old Boys’ Club.

It was until pretty recently that the Old Boys’ Club thought Black and Brown people, women, gays, the disabled, and minorities like Jews and Romas were too feeble-minded, too emotional, too deviant and delinquent and inept to be allowed the keys to the club. At its peak in the late-1800s, proponents of social Darwinism corrupted the idea of evolution to suggest that nature’s way was a matter of the survival of the fittest. The fittest, by their reading, were the strongest, most aggressive, most competitive. The gold standard of what it means to be the ideal human is the manliness that Hemingway represented: tall, strong, bearded, sexually aggressive, assertive, virile, confident to the point of boastful.

This was the top dog, the alpha, the central reference point against which everything else was measured.

Darwin actually theorised that evolution was about the survival of the most well adapted. A body with super-strong thigh muscles is going to be better at powering up the steepest mountain trail, or hauling bigger rocks. But similarly a slight, agile frame is better suited for spelunking, which is why female cavers were recruited to get down into the caves in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site to retrieve the bones of what researchers say are our extinct hominin cousin, Homo naledi.

A body with darker skin and curlier hair is better suited for shedding equatorial heat, and higher melanin is a natural sunscreen against cancer-causing UV. Lighter skin is better suited to the low light conditions of the higher latitudes, and such a person is better able to process Vitamin D from sunlight, without which a person’s bones get crumbly.

It isn’t the physical trait itself that’s at issue here — there are some notable biological differences between bodies with different levels of testosterone, or with oestrogen and progesterone present — the issue is the value we’ve attach to those differences, and who attached those values. This valuing is how we’ve landed with pejorative language that throws shade on someone’s masculinity if they throw like a girl, if they’re limp-wristed, if they’re a cry-baby.

Economists like Herbert Spencer amped this up further, suggesting that Darwin’s idea confirmed that certain character traits are genetic, such has being hard-working or being able to build up wealth. Rich people get rich because they’re fitter, the poor are that way because they’re stupid and lazy.

Enter, today’s notion of meritocracy, the bedrock of the so-called American dream where if you’re just willing to work hard enough, you’ll claw your way out of poverty and misery.  Hello, free-market economics, which strips away social safety nets for workers and the poor, because if they just wanted freedom from poverty badly enough, they’d work for it. Thank you Ayne Rand, and her acolytes Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Today it sounds bonkers that the ‘rest of us’ — those outside of the gentleman’s club — aren’t mentally or morally fit enough to take part in society on an equal footing with those in The Boys’ Club.

But the echoes of this obviously pseudoscientific codswallop still resonate in the bigoted attitudes that stop men from reading women authors, or following us on social media, or holding back in a board room so that we can have a chance to speak and actually be listened to.

The same is true for authors and researchers of colour, who are similarly left off citation lists or the reading lists because they’re not thought to be authoritative or competent. To borrow once more from Martin Luther King, oh to be judged on the content of our character and our brains, not the colour of our skin or the distribution of our reproductive organs.

I’m back on that rooftop, trying to bellow a warning out to my fellow villagers, trying to point to all the suffering that’s happening because of our blind, greedy consumption — the animals burned alive, the women abandoning their dead babies on flooded roadsides, the starving giraffe, the albatross chicks being eaten alive — but my voice is nothing but dull grunts. Imagine how maddening that is, to be rendered mute because humans-with-penises think you’re not worth listening because you’re a human-with-ovaries?

The scold’s bridle

A few days after the 60th birthday party, and I’m still stewing about the incident with the chap on the mezzanine, so I take to Twitter, tagging Sieghart for solidarity. A heart pops up beneath my Tweet, and she forwards it on.

It’s not long before some chap in the UK responds: ‘maybe this guy just didn’t like the look of you?’

‘Really?’ Sieghart fires back. ‘Are you saying you’d introduce yourself to three people in a group, and ignore the fourth, because you didn’t like the look of them? Isn’t that a bit rude?’

‘Well,’ he lobs his grenade over Sieghart, landing it squarely at my feet, pin pulled, ‘you do have the face of a dog that’s been stung by a wasp.’

Meet the modern-day scold’s bridle: online trolling.

The scold’s bridle was a Dark Ages device — medieval in its time, and medieval in its intention — and it was designed to punish a lippy women.

The device was a cage that strapped around her head, with a metal plate that went into the mouth to tame her tongue. Sometimes the bite plate was barbed. It was usually the husband or male family member who brought this nasty little thing out of storage, and it’s purpose was to do more than just to shut the woman up or inflict pain. It was designed to make a spectacle of her. There was sadistic theatre in its use. The woman was dragged through town like a dog on a leash, past her friends and neighbours and community, in an act of public humiliation.

It was also known as the witch’s bridle.

What better way to shut a woman up today, than humiliate and shame us on social media?

What better way to do so than to try to remind us that our only social currency, our only bargaining power in a group, is our looks. If we don’t bring pleasure to a viewer, if we’re poor by this ledger, we’ve got as much trading power as a beggar on the street. We’re worthless. Shut up, the man is saying, and know your place.

Boosted by having a heavyweight like Sieghart in my corner, and from the safety of my desk in Cape Town, I fire a missile back at the Twitter twit in a way I probably wouldn’t have the courage to do in person.

‘Tsk, tsk. Honey, is that really the best you can do? Why not raise the content of the argument, not the shrillness of your voice?’

He deletes his Tweet.

Incorrectly female

Australian stand-up Hannah Gadsby made her name as an unapologetically bloke-ish looking lesbian comedian.

She’s routinely mistaken for a man, with her boyish cropped hair, masculine jackets, and barely a lick of makeup.

One such encounter becomes the fulcrum around which the Nanette show unfolds. Spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the show — it’s an essential bit of social commentary, so go find it online — she describes what sounds like a funny encounter between herself and a not-very-bright homophobic Australian man at a bus stop.

By Gadsby’s account, the story is hilarious, up until the point where he beats her up because he realises she’s ‘a lady faggot’ and thinks she’s hitting on his girlfriend. This chap could get his head around the idea of another man hitting on his woman, but not a lesbian hitting on his woman.

For that, he beat her up so badly that she needed medical help.

He beat her, she says, because she was ‘incorrectly female’.

‘Being incorrectly female is a punishable offence.’

Scold’s bridling is just one of the ways that women are disciplined for being incorrectly female, for daring to think, behave, comport, groom, or assert ourselves in ways that aren’t becoming of the notions of being part of the second-rung group, and won’t defer to male authority.

Today’s scold’s bridle has us fat shamed, slut shamed, shamed for being too cold, too sexually aggressive, too clever, too prudish, too opinionated, too assertive, too loud, too coy, too bossy, too boastful, too independent, too needy, for being gold diggers.

That’s the ‘cold’ violence of disciplining women.

The ‘hot’ violence is the whipping that Gadsby took at the bus stop.

Hashtag: GBV

Hashtag: SheAskedForIt

Hashtag: KnowYourPlace

Hashtag: SheWalkedIntoTheDoor

Hashtag: Femicide

Hashtag: HonourKilling

Hashtag: SheMustHaveProvokedHim

Hashtag: IfICantHaveHerNoOneCan

Hashtag: CorrectiveRape

Hashtag: Rape

Hashtag: HackOffHerClitoris

Hashtag: RapeAsWarWeapon

The root of the rot: brawn vs brains vs beauty

As the old saying goes: there are old mushroom pickers, and there are bold mushroom pickers. There are no old, bold mushroom pickers.

Back in our wild foraging days, roving hunter-gatherer clans needed a few basic street smarts to survive. It was handy to know how to track game along migration routes, where the grasses would flush after a summer shower, and where the reliable waterholes were during drought. It was useful to know how to trip up a galloping antelope, where the tubers ripened, and what tree bark could treat a fever.

A strong clubbing arm would have helped dispatch the antelope, and bought some social cred within the group. Saving your extended family from a lethal dose of death cap mushrooms would be high up there in the social currency stakes, too.

The value of our different contributions to the group changes a bit when we settle into farming about 12,000 years ago. No longer tracking nature’s shifting seasonal pantry, we have to stockpile food to make it through the year. Hoarding food means having a place to stash it, which means we need buildings, and land to have the buildings on, and notions of property rights and ownership.

We also needed to protect all of this from marauding neighbours.

Those in a group who can fend off the pillagers are likely to have stronger bodies. Stronger bodies, because they’ve got bulkier muscles; bulkier muscles, because they’ve got higher testosterone. Higher testosterone is found more commonly in male bodies.

Testosterone gives the human body extra heft, but also the fiery emotions that help wield this heft. Hands become fists, fists become weapons.

Higher testosterone gives a person more aggression, anger, assertiveness, a stronger sex drive, and the drive to dominate. Over time, these traits become increasingly valuable to the group, and earn individuals who have them higher status. These traits become a form of social currency.

Property starts passing down male lines, too, and the accumulated wealth goes into his bank account, not hers.

This is the thin end of a wedge that over generations allows men to amass economic clout and political power, and decide how our communities organise.

Woman’s child-bearing contribution becomes her biggest asset. Child-bearing is tied to fertility, which is tied to youthfulness and sexual appeal. Her social currency, her power to negotiate status in the group, is bound up with her looks. Et voilà, a woman becomes an object for viewing pleasure, rather than a subject in her own right.

By the time European culture has stamped itself on so many parts of the world, its beauty standard has become the measure of a woman’s bargaining power in the group. Crudely put, this gets us to the exaggerated caricature of today’s Barbie Doll look: long straight blonde hair, big blue eyes, narrow face, thin nose, peachy skin tone, narrow waist and hips, impossibly slender legs.

The male gaze is a crude political truncheon that enforces this beauty standard. It can be wielded by men and women. It is an instrument that rewards those who conform to the beauty standard — whether by the accident of genetics, or expensive work in a beauty salon — and punishes those who don’t. The woman who satisfies the desires of the male gaze is rewarded with social rank — she is made visible, she is ‘invented’ in the eyes of the beholder. The woman who fails to satisfy this gaze is punished by being stripped of social rank and rendered invisible.

#everydaysexism

We’re back in 2003, and I’m the rookie science writer sitting in a bubble of my own making at a coffee shop in a twin-set-and-pearls part of town. My brain is grinding through some of the most complicated climate science every published.

No hyperbole there. Every six or seven years, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) hand-picked scientists put out a series of door-stopper volumes: how much carbon pollution has thickened in the atmosphere; how global temperatures are responding; what signs we’re reading from the environment that prove how much the system is lurching away from the safe norm; which parts of the world are most vulnerable, and why; how much we need to slow emissions, and by when; how we brace for impact.

The urgency of the message is cloaked in cool, technical language, but it’s clear we’re in deep shit.

The text is heavy going. I read some sections three, four, five times over, and even then I don’t understand it enough to judge if I’ve understood it at all. No doubt I’m frowning, because that’s what happens when my brain is in low-range, grinding over rocky terrain.

There’s a voice from somewhere outside the sound booth of my concentration, from a chap dressed in businesswear at a nearby table.

‘Hey, it’s not that serious.’

It takes me a second or two to register. My brain is changing gears but the clutch isn't fully engaged.

I give a reflexive laugh.

It’s not the words that are confounding, so much as how confident he is in his reading of my internal experience, and the certainty of his role to address it.

What I would like to have said, but didn’t have the self assurance at the time, is that it was that serious. Way, way more serious than he probably realised. Life-threateningly serious, in fact.

What I’d like to have said is that I was deep in thought and was rather inconvenienced by him barging in and derailing my concentration. What I’d like to have said is that it was also somewhat annoying to have a stranger assume it’s his place to police my facial expression.

But I didn’t, because my brain was still stripping gears, and because nice people don’t tell men in coffee shops to mind their own bloody business.

Who’s the fool?

Social conditioning creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop in these gender games: maleness is associated with confidence, competitiveness, and assertiveness. Men are expected to be self-promoting, even boastful. Because society expects this of them, they then act that way, and society embraces them for doing so.

Women, on the other hand, are expected to be less authoritative and less assertive, and therefore modest in our presentation. We therefore behave that way. We’re polite, we underplay our expertise, and are even self-deprecating. The upshot is that people then assume we are less authoritative, and we’re treated that way.

The end result — of society welcoming men’s over-confidence, women expected to be retiring and becoming retiring because of it— is probably best demonstrated in the area of gender representation in science and technology.

Even today, the idea exists that men are biologically hard-wired for the ‘hard’ skills like maths and science and problem solving, while women are supposedly hard-wired for ‘softer’ skills like relationships.

Australian science writer Cordelia Fine says the reasoning goes something like this: how do you explain the fact that even in developed countries, where many gender gaps have been filled, women still trail men in certain hard-skill industries and sectors? If women have relatively equal access to education and job opportunities, then surely the only reason they don’t succeed in these areas is because our brains aren’t built for it. Men’s brains are simply more capable of ‘understanding the world’ while the bricks-and-mortar of women’s brains make us better at ‘understanding people’.

In Delusions of Gender: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference, Fine shows the faulty reading of neuroscience behind the supposed sex differences between male and female brains.

Her award-winning 2010 work shows that psychology and social conditioning explain the disparity, not biology. When it’s assumed that boys will make better scientists or engineers, and that girls will make better teachers and nurses, they’re raised and educated to be that.

Sieghart finds evidence to support this in her own more recent research. In a UK survey, many parents estimated that their boy children were cleverer than their girl children, even when the kids were equally intelligent. When parents believe this, they raise and educate their kids accordingly.

It was true in my family: it was a given that my brother would become an engineer, or similar. For the girl children, we just needed to marry an engineer; and if we could fend for ourselves as a nurse or teacher in the meantime, well good for us. The family resources, parental guidance and emotional support were doled out accordingly.

The confidence feedback loop also leads to men over-estimating their competence, the evidence shows, meaning they’re more likely to bullshit their way through a situation, and people will believe them.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is what psychologists call a ‘thinking error’, where people perceive themselves to be smarter and more competent than they are. It’s that old not suffering fools adage. To say we don’t suffer fools gladly assumes we’re capable of judging who the fool is, and who isn’t. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger show that those least qualified to make the judgement about their foolhardiness are most likely to think they’re not the fool. The person doesn’t know how little they know, but will gallivant into a situation with such self-confidence that others will be convinced by their bluff and bluster, and give them the benefit of the doubt.

In one study, Dunning shows that men overestimated their performance in a scientific quiz, while women underestimated theirs, even though both groups had done equally well in the test. Women did so because ‘they thought less of their general scientific reasoning ability than did men’, he writes in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003.

The upshot of this self-belief, Dunning argues, is that women avoid careers in science because they don’t believe they’re capable of doing well in them.

T+

Writer-actor Sandra Tsing Loh reckons women are the victims of our hormones, but not in the way the PMT tropes go.

When puberty hits, we get smacked about the ovaries with oestrogen and progesterone cycles, sure. But the problem isn’t the monthly mood spin-cycle. The problem is the need to breed, Tsing Loh writes in her hilarious 2011 essay The Bitch is Back in The Atlantic.

Drunk on the biological drive of our switched-on breeding bits in our fertile years, we find ourselves becoming compliant wives and mothers, obediently tying ourselves into knots to satisfy patriarchal expectations. Before we can say boo to a bambino, we’re swooning over the ratty toddler, diligently folding the laundry, making teenagers’ peanut butter sandwiches, and stepping around drunken louts melting sweatily into the couch while some or other ball game fills every corner of the communal lounge with ear-splitting decibels.

Come menopause, the oestrogen and progesterone cocktail drops, the fog clears, and poof, the spell is broken. We’re back to normal. We can become like all the other arseholes in the house, lounging about watching TV and leaving our dirty dishes for someone else to clean up.

Given the mess our society is in right now — in case anyone has missed it, we’re facing an extinction level event driven by a dominant group whose selfish, competitive, greedy over-consumption is coming at the cost of all of life on Earth — I don’t think society’s problem is the molotov cocktail of oestrogen-progesterone, as those coffee baristas suggested.

Peering through the telescope of 12,000 years of human history, I’d say testosterone has a thing or two to answer for. It ignited the fuse of physical strength and character traits that allowed men to rise above others in communities, to get more social rank and power. As they gained power, men structured society based on an artificial caste system that put themselves at the top of the pile, and let them write the rules of a game that allowed them to cement their power while exploiting, dehumanising and objectifying the ‘other’, be it women, people of colour, or the more-than-human. At its pinnacle — now — it has metastasised into a hyper-competitive, greedy, ego-driven individualism that puts selfish hoarding and jostling for power — aka predatory Capitalism — over the needs of the collective good.

And here we are: extinction level event.

Could unregulated, out-of-control collective testosterone be the most dangerous chemical on the planet right now?

Redemption song

There is the possibility of redemption, though, and it comes from a family of our cousins in the Serengeti in East Africa.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology and neuroscience at Stanford University, and he spent many years hanging with baboon troops in the Serengeti. One family, in particular, has something to teach us about our own behaviour.

Humans are old-world primates, and we evolved in similar conditions to those in which baboons live today, Sapolsky says. We have a similar culture.

Baboons enforce their hierarchical social structure through the top-dog males’ use of violence and brute force. Females keep the family bonded by doing the touchy-feely stuff, the grooming and cuddling, raising the kids, folding the socks, etc. That’s how it’s always been, primatology tells us, and that’s how it will always be.

But one of Sapolsky’s study families was hit by an unexpected social disruption. The alpha males in the troop were taken out by a lethal tuberculosis infection.

Conventional wisdom regarding baboon society is that the next-tier males should pick up the cudgel from the dead leaders and enforce the hierarchy with the usual fists-and-canines approach. Not so. What Sapolsky saw in this family was that the typically female behaviour took over the group dynamic. Much more kissing and cuddling, nurturing, mutual grooming; less brawling and bullying by the males.

Six years later, the family was still behaving like a bunch of make-love-not-war hippies. The females had stepped into leadership.

Sapolsky rates this as one of the most mind-blowing discoveries of his scientific career.

If a baboon’s culture can change so dramatically, can humans do the same thing? Could one small community spread its gentler, less war-mongering culture to others? What kind of social tipping point would be necessary for this happy contagion to spread? And who needs to be leveraged from their top perches in order for this to happen?

The ‘uglification’

During lockdown, I dust off an old hobby so I can Zen my way through the infinity-looping tedium and uncertainty: drawing. The online art instructor gives our class the task of sketching some portraits. The idea isn’t to draw the perfect picture, she tells us, but rather to embrace the mistakes, allow the ‘wrong’ lines to be the true lines that capture our subject.

With no other hominin about, I reluctantly turn to the mirror for the necessary subject matter.

By now, I have come to an uneasy rapprochement with the Ronald McDonald skullcap. But there’s something new to contend with. I appear to have developed a distinctly bovine profile: a Brahman hump rising between my shoulders, and a dewlap where once there was a chiselled jawline.

How could this be, I chew on this cud of uncomfortable self reflection, while my jaws grind down another fistful of Smarties?

I bravely confront this new self, completing a series of sketches which melt and bulge with lines that are grotesque, although not entirely honest — the sketches don’t capture what I actually see in the mirror, but how I feel when I look in the mirror. Maybe this is what body dysmorphia looks like, I propose to my therapist months later.

The series is called Filth & Filthy.

Germain Greer reckons there’s a wonderful fecundity that comes with being the invisible older women. Not having to give a shit about what people think of your appearance frees you up to do a lot of other stuff, like tear down the patriarchy, one small, bare-knuckled confrontation at a time. More orca, less baboon.

But alas, before the middle-aged woman becomes invisible, she must first go through what author-poet Karin Schimke calls ‘the uglification’, which she describes in pyrotechnic prose in her essay Change, published in the 2020 anthology Living while feminist: our bodies, our truths.

The uglification isn’t a confrontation with vanity, where a woman realises she’s lost her looks and allure. No, that suggests too shallow an experience. The uglification is the devastating existential slap where we’re confronted with the realisation that society is telling us we have no value anymore.

Menopause is about way more than just the uglification, or the disappearing act that follows it, which is the psychological consequence of changing hormones. There’s something dramatic going on in the brain, itself, at the same time.

Researchers have been fretting so much about ageing men’s wilting willies that they have only now thought to point an MRI scanner at a menopausal woman’s brain to see if anything’s going on in her grey matter as the stopcock in her reproductive bits shuts off certain hormones after decades of chugging them out with engineered precision.

For sure, there is. A part of our brain physically shrinks during the menopausal transition, clogging things up for a time. The brain fog, forgetfulness, and crippling exhaustion that cause menopausal women to fear we’ve got early-onset dementia, to drop out of the workplace, and to give up on life: it’s not a touch of the vapours or an imagined malady; it’s a real, biological thing.

We’re now learning that menopause isn’t just an endocrine or reproductive health issue, something that bizarrely has translated into a situation where we attach our identity and worth to whether or not two little organs — the ovaries — are switched to ‘on’ or ‘off’, like a conscientious kettle.

Menopause is a neurological event.

Thankfully, it’s temporary. That shrinky bit recovers eventually, and the neuroscience shows that we’re tired and brain fogged during this time but not cognitively impaired. Remember that! No decline in cognitive ability, just a little less juice in the tank to run at high speed for hours all day.

This part of the story isn’t just about a woman’s irksome transition from a kettle-on to kettle-off fertility-state. It’s about what this midlife transition shows about the experience of being a second-caste citizen for a full lifetime. This is how women experience life  when they are expected, first and foremost, to be a pretty piece of fluff, and as a result are excluded from the public square in all the ways that matter. This part of the story is also about all the voices — people of colour, those who are the keepers of indigenous wisdom and science, ethnic or religious minorities, the more-than-humans — that are excluded from the collective conversations because they are largely invisible from the vantage of the rarified white male.

As we try to confront the climate crisis, if our public discourse keeps favouring men’s voices and ideas and thoughts, and ignores the full spectrum of Earth’s voices, we’ll be like a canoeist trying to cross a pond with our paddle stuck to starboard: more of the same old bluff and bluster, while we splash about in dizzying circles.

Half of the world’s population is made up of people who inhabit bodies with uteruses, the political, social, and economic consequences of which are significant. Half of the world’s 50-year-olds are going to go through the mosh-pit of menopause. We can all do with talking about it instead of clutching at our pearls in a flush of Victorian sensibility or dismissing it as a boring/icky/irrelevant ‘women’s thing’.

Sadly, the evidence shows that I might well have lost the male readers by now, who will have tuned out. Female readers, let this part of the tale embolden you to, shall we say, assist the men in your life in their political education. Tell those around you what it’s really like to be a woman in this world.

As I weather the uglification, I try to ignore the new dewlap which quivers with a bit too much enthusiasm when my body is in motion. There are days when the incorrectly female me wants to plunder my retirement savings so I can pay a surgeon to excavate the jawline that I know is still in there somewhere. There are other days when the disobedient female in me wants to plunder the same savings so I can fund a sabbatical to write this story, because the boys out there in the world need to hear a thing or two from us females.

The timing of my menopause isn’t without irony. My body’s thermostat goes on the blink just as another hotter-than-ever summer flashes red alerts on weather warning maps. The slightest provocation — a cup of tea, a stroll to the shops, a gust of warm wind — and I vent like a geyser. I wonder what’ll get me first: a hot flush or a heatwave? Maybe both.

Until then I’m deep in the swamplands of the uglification, though, and so I mark my older women friends’ coordinates on the map and set a course in their direction. They know the route out of here.

But the path between my ‘here’ and their ‘there’ is unmarked on the map. There are no contour lines or danger signs — here be thickets, here be safe passage, here be cliffs, here be dragons. The best I can do is dip into the backpack of life experience, and keep an eye on the weather.

It also means sometimes eating chocolate cake for breakfast.

No more fucks left to give

The inspiration for the Clever Girls party comes as I’m prepping for what will become my first National Geographic magazine assignment. I don’t know it at the time, but other assignments will follow. This is a pretty big deal, a bit like the natural history writer’s equivalent of summiting Everest. It’s the most important gig of my writing career, no question, so I’m a mix of nerves and more than a little ego as I pop into an electronics shop to buy a computer cable.

The man behind the counter is about my age. He doesn’t seem to notice this, though, because he manages in the course of our conversation to call me a ‘clever girl’.

Maybe I’m just being thin-skinned, or maybe I’m too cocky and my ego is bruised. Or maybe this is the final nudge across my threshold of tolerance.

Either way, I see an opportunity to assist him in his further growth. I’m channelling Hannah Gadsby now.

‘Woman,’ I say. ‘The correct term is woman. I haven’t been a girl since I was about 12.’

Judging by his face, he doesn't seem as grateful for my feedback as I thought he’d be.

I could extend the lesson a bit. I want to say that if he is going to judge my intelligence, it shouldn’t be on the basis of my choice of computer gear, which is neither here nor there. Rather, he should judge me on my publication record, which is not inconsiderable.

Of course I can’t say this. It would be boastful, and it’s not ladylike to boast.

Also, the poor fellow is in full fight-flight mode and I don’t think he can handle something as grammatically complex as a double negative.

Instead, I let the frosty silence settle, while he gets the cable and wraps up our business.

On the drive home I do a mental tally of all the times my women friends have had to bat away this kind of everyday sexism. The put-downs, the condescending, the dismissing, the gaslighting, the mansplaining, the many ways we’re talked over, interrupted, and simply overlooked.

All the times we’ve giggled or looked away to diffuse the tension, turned the other cheek, let it go.

How many missed opportunities to assist those chaps in their own education.

I decide then that my 50th birthday, two years from now, will be a ‘Clever Girls’ party, a celebration of all those women who won’t be quiet anymore. Those women who have no more fucks left to give.

The invite will read: ‘Clever boys welcome, too.’

Chapter 7…