It's (still) a man's world
This thought has been constantly on my mind since the morning of November 6th.
My initial thoughts on Trump’s victory could be summarised as the cryptobros won. But his victory, of course, represents far more than just macho investors in Bitcoin. But do take a minute to look at these charts. Bitcoin is either a bubble about to burst or has changed forever the way dirty money becomes clean, and there is no turning back from this. Many speculate on what a Trump presidency will mean for the crypto market. But even if you take a super simplistic view: the digital assets sector is made up of Elon fan-boys who clearly are celebrating, and this will mean more “normal” people will get in on the game, and suddenly…what was once fringe becomes mainstream. But surely will be bumps along the way, when the fringe pause to take profits, first. How could they not take a bit of profit when you look at this one month chart? It’s insane. Yes, they want to see it go to $100,000 for emotional reasons. But then? I think it could easily slip back down to $75,000 before starting another slow climb. But don’t listen to me. I have no skin in the game (sadly).
Trump’s victory was a reminder that for so much of the world’s population (how much of course depends massively on where you live), a woman will never be seen as an equal to a man, best case scenario, she will be put on a pedestal for her “feminine” qualities, but in terms of leadership, the confidence isn’t there. This includes, of course, many women who essentially voted against their own bodily autonomy, which means many women also think a man should generally be in charge. I am struggling with this, because we are already living in a man’s world, and it is not as if everything is going swimmingly. When we did/do let women be in charge of things, it is not as if they have a record of messing everything up. I am now starting to realise, very slowly, in my old age, why powerful women in Hollywood started founding their own production companies, insisted on working with female directors, etc. I never, ever thought of myself as a feminist. I always found that word repulsive, to be honest. But it does now blow my mind how men continue to fail upwards (Trump is the best example of this), and the world continues to push aside overqualified women. I wonder what it is about a smart woman that the world finds so threatening.
I do think this too had a lot to do with how America voted. I think a lot of young men voted for Trump in the hope that traditional, male jobs for non-college grads would somehow be magically restored, whether through him slapping tariffs or deporting millions of immigrants. As the middle class has shrunken, many of the jobs which have appeared are in service industries and as such tend to be more often filled by women. As western women have become breadwinners in their own right, they have also changed their attitudes to dating, and I think this must threaten young men more than anything. There are countries where dating and money are intertwined, and there is an unspoken language about what a man’s responsibilities are financially towards his girlfriend, and perhaps in those countries things are less…confusing.
I look at Trump’s cabinet picks, and am just blown away by how much men can get away with. Much like Trump himself. If you have time, do check out the film The Apprentice. I went in not having read a single review, and was therefore quite surprised by the material (I had naively thought it would have something to do with the reality show itself). It is very well acted and I learned a lot, assuming of course that it is based on some version of the truth.
I do think it will be telling to see just how much this new cabinet, assuming the majority of them are approved by the vote in Congress, will actually be able to change things. Or will we Americans discover that our government apparatus has grown so big and unwieldily that it really doesn’t matter who is in charge of each department? Will Elmo and his co-head discover that revamping the entire structure of the federal government is perhaps more than a two-man job? Will the web of bureaucracy grow even larger in an effort to untie it? Maybe the men will flop entirely. Or maybe they will succeed in blowing something up, and Americans will experience what it is like to live under a GOP-led government intent on reducing the size of the government in general, while providing tax breaks to corporations and friends and family. Will they actually manage to achieve their lofty goals? Or will Trump pull America into isolationism, not really giving a damn what happens in the rest of the world?
When someone asks me of late what I think will happen with the war in Ukraine, I tell them honestly, I really do not know. I cannot imagine a lasting peace is anywhere near Trump’s list of favourite agenda items he would like to focus his efforts on. Therefore, I rather assume he will give in to what Putin asks of him. A frozen peace doesn’t really help Putin — he had that since 2014. He has made clear that he wants Odesa and the Black Sea ports, perhaps he will keep pushing for those, while continuing to claim more territory within Ukraine. NATO membership for Ukraine, some argue in the west, would end the war, but it will never happen. I just don’t see any world in which Putin or Russia’s future leader agrees to this. Russia wants a Russia-friendly government installed in Ukraine, in the part of Ukraine Russia does not manage to grab for itself, and I don’t see them settling for much less. Although much has been written of late of Russia’s economic troubles as the country experiences stagflation as a result of an economy entirely built around war production, with extremely low unemployment, a falling rouble, rising prices on consumer goods, and very high interest rates, the thing with Russians is: they will tolerate pain for a long time. For many absolutely ordinary families from the hinterlands, this war has made them richer than they would have been without it, even if that meant losing some loved ones to the war.
I watched the brief video this week when Putin went live to talk about the new missile they launched at the rocket plant in Dnipro. It is named “little nut” in Russian, which is a play on words as a figure of speech is to call someone a “strong little nut”. Putin looked old, tired, in need of a top-up of his botox regime, and seemed obsessed with highlighting for the zillionth time that the west is to blame, Russia is only retaliating, and will continue to do so. He, like, Trump, will stick to his line of arguments to the end. He will not bend. He has no incentive to bend. At the moment, he really doesn’t have any incentive to end the war, either. It is Ukraine that struggles now to find people to fight. Every Ukrainian I speak with has a story of friends or family trying to escape the draft officers who literally pull men off the street. A young man from a village (here for cancer treatment) recalled how his buddies were caught in Odesa, and even then managed to escape through the bars of whatever holding facility they were taken to by the recruitment officers, managing to make it back to their home village undetected. This young man went on to say that Zelensky will continue the war because when the war ends, he will need to call elections, and he knows how unpopular he is at the moment. Some speculate Zelensky faces either death or life in prison after he leaves the presidency. In other words, it almost sounds like both leaders have personal reasons for wanting to continue the bloodshed.
Trump’s America first agenda will focus inwards, which means he won’t exactly be in a hurry to solve the world’s problems on behalf of the world, either. He has nominated several people who are downright incompetent and/or dangerous to lead the departments he would like them to run. Americans will now get to see how that goes. And who knows, maybe the plumbing will keep on working no matter who is tinkering with he pipes, or maybe they will be able to blow things up, and quickly. I am still fighting my own personal, never-ending, Kafka-like battle with FAFSA, the most inept and black hole government website ever built, so at this point I’m feeling downright libertarian, after living abroad for so long and only once asking for something and having that not work. But I digress.
I got all of my political predictions quite wrong. I thought at the last minute that Kamala might pull through. I was wrong. My gut instincts were right about economic pain, which I had witnessed myself firsthand in October, but I underestimated how many men and women would never vote for a woman of color. Here in Austria, it is looking like we will have a three-way coalition of conservatives, socialists, and liberals, while I was sure the far right would not let that happen, having won the popular vote. I am therefore doubting my own gut feeling a lot at the moment. I have, however, developed a new trick when it comes to making hard decisions. I generally loathe decision making in general, I try to avoid conflict wherever possible, I tend to react based more on how I expect the other person to respond rather than listening to my gut. I am trying now to listen to my gut more, and to learn to say “no” more. My trick is as follows: I ask myself, what would a man say/do? Because my learned experience is most (not all, of course) men will always put their own self-interest first. This guides their decision-making process. We women do have a tendency to want to try and find a compromise where we sort of get what we want while also making sure no one is mad at us. I have now, in my old age, accepted that someone being mad at us might also be a necessary part of making a tough decision that’s right for you.
This holiday season, I’m feeling even less festive than usual, and I usually dread this season of endless cooking and gift-giving to begin with. I am trying to find compromise, doing some things for my kids because they appreciate it, while saying no to others. I have decided not to organise any activities for Ukrainians in Austria this year, because it has been nearly three years now and I think long overdue for the baton to be passed to those who have firmly established themselves here and are on stable footing. I am grateful to Mario for continuing to distribute grocery cards via our Cards for Ukraine; another batch went out this week. I will be sending one card tomorrow morning (thank you!): to a mother and children who recently arrived and their grandmother wrote me asking for help.
I think one of the hardest things in life is to accept when things change, and not for the better. For example, here in Vienna, we are downright spoiled with near-perfect public transportation. This summer, though, they did a lot of work on it, and as such, inconvenienced us by rerouting and cancelling routes many of us used. Then fall came and we all breathed a sigh of relief because it was dependable again. Until a fire broke out recently, and it wasn’t. They are now going to take weeks to repair five or six central stations, basically taking out a main artery of our subway network. As a result, the commuter trains and trams are overflowing with people, as you have your usual weekday crowd plus all the tourists who flock here for our chintzy Christmas markets. In short — it’s maddening, and won’t be over until best case early December. Instead of accepting this new reality, I am every day cursing it, wondering where all the people came from and why they cannot repair the tunnel faster. Acceptance of any new reality is hard and takes time, and probably an important stage in this process is denial, at least at first.
But change can also be positive, and I have been, as I mentioned a little while back, working on something entirely new that I am almost ready to bring out to the world, now I am struggling with the how. Baby steps, as they say. Keep asking myself, what would a man do, and for now, it helps. I think. But we women succeed in many ways because of our empathy and our ability to listen and to feel, and I would never want to lose that, either.
If you are looking for a light listen, I really enjoyed this recent conversation with Cher of all people. I have so much admiration for people who show to us all that reinvention is possible at any age.