Saturday, October 30, 2010

If women were in charge of the world, would there be no wars?

Some say so.  They claim to be too empathic to resort to non-dialoging means of resolving conflict.

To these, shall we say, puffed-up feminoptimists, I provide some anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

"Oh," you say, "that's just high school."  Sorry, I don't buy it, for reasons that don't require me to positively believe in original sin.

I was that age in the last century, and things are worse now, but that kind of behavior wasn't unheard of then.  And one doesn't have to look too hard to find high school kids who never grew up.   One didn't have to look too hard to find a little girl carrying a big metaphorical stick and calling herself a woman, but still being catty to the out-crowd and attempting to establish territory through emotional and social bullying.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I have a higher-level manager who once fired someone for dressing only as inappropriately as said manager.  If she perceives or imagines a business or political threat, she'll trump up behavior or performance problems; it doesn't matter if we see through it, because her superiors don't do their homework, so ineffective threats and criticisms can always be backed by permanent changes to one's employment status.

If someone like that isn't capable of war as we know it, even a cold war, I don't want to think of what she might do instead.  Even if she weren't a woman.