Bring Back the Dinosaurs
Sitting in the Bristol Museum with my three year old the other day, three dinosaur books down, I came across this little beauty, “Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish” and was struck by its prescience.
Written in 1972 by Michael Foreman, it’s a cautionary tale for our times, that uncannily seems to have predicted the bizarre, billionaire bro space race between Musk and Bezos. Hear me out. The story features a super wealthy man of industry who becomes fixated on a star in the sky. “I must fly” said the man./ I have money./ I have many men working for me./ I must fly, somehow I must fly”. So he channels his energy and power into building a rocket to reach this star. Sound familiar yet? In so doing, he plunders and pollutes the earth, but he reaches his star.
Meanwhile, the dinosaurs return and stamp on all the rubbish scattered across the industrial wasteland that was once the earth. They stamp and stamp and clear it away. Soon, it is said that under their protection, “green shoots appeared/ bursting through cracks and climbing over forgotten walls”. The longed-for star is a let down (hello Oscar Wilde quote).
So the man sets off to conquer yet more stars but boomerangs back to good old Gaia again instead. He doesn’t even recognise the planet he left behind, so transformed is it by the diligent dinosaurs. After a dressing down by a brontosaurus, the moral of the tale is clear, “the earth belongs to everyone, not parts of it to certain people/ but all of it to everyone, to be enjoyed and cared for”. The sky rings with the sounds of the birds and beasts proclaiming this truth. That is the end of that, we assume. Lesson learnt.
Perhaps in the 70s the idea of an individual funding and achieving space exploration was as far-fetched as the idea of, say, dinosaurs returning. Who knows, maybe let me know in the comments if you remember that decade and the original space race of the 60s. However, this children’s story is actually the teensiest bit true.
The space race is hotting up and with it the atmosphere. They say that increased space exploration comes with climate costs: pollution, carbon emissions and even environmental risk from falling space debris and harmful chemical substances. What on earth is going on?! Shouldn’t we be funnelling everything into fixing our own planet before we go off and colonise Mars? What do you think? I think it might just be time to bring back the dinosaurs. Or failing that, maybe someone should send Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos a copy of, “Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish”. It’ll be available on Amazon after all.
Why Mary Beard’s “Women & Power: A Manifesto” is More Relevant Today Than Ever (Copy)
Mary Beard’s, Women & Power: A Manifesto is more relevant today than ever in the lead up to the US presidential election. With online abuse against female politicians at an all time high, now is the time for women’s voices to be heard.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about what stops us, women, from using our voices and speaking up in the public arena. What is this silencing mechanism, both internal and societal, that mutes many of us? From public speaking to politics, women are still underrepresented in the Venn diagram of power and voice. A recent report by the United Nations shows that, “At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power, will not be reached for another 130 years.” That is a sobering statistic in the lead up to the US presidential election. It certainly sheds some light on why, in 2024, are we still asking the question of whether the world is ready for Madame - as opposed to Mr - President. How is it that leadership and oratory are still seen as male pursuits? Well, there’s no one better to turn to for wisdom on this topic, than Mary Beard.
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard.
The subject of women and power (and our historical lack thereof) may be no laughing matter, but I found myself chuckling away to, “Women & Power: A Manifesto”. With wry wit and razor sharp insight, Beard elucidates the absurdity of long-held attitudes towards women taking up space (and airwaves) on the public stage. Her stated aim for the manifesto is, “to explain how deeply embedded in Western culture are the mechanisms that silence women, that refuse to take them seriously, and that sever them from the centre of power.” She traces these attitudes back to the dawn of Western civilization and picks out the parallels with our present day. She also highlights the ramifications for women who raise their voices and heads above the parapet. And spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty.
Mary Beard (photo credit to The Times)
Beard could legitimately claim expertise on the subject of online abuse, one akin to her grasp of ancient history: the vitriol she has suffered herself is sobering. She could quite literally give seminars on it. The New Yorker, describes her as, “troll slayer” which, to my mind, is a suitably heroic-sounding epithet for Britain’s “best known classicist”. Yet, the term is hard-won. Beard downplays it in her characteristic manner and almost glosses over the terror implicit in the death and rape threats she has received. She gives the impression of someone who can handle having her genitals compared to rotten vegetables, but stoicism aside, the admission that she is abused every single time she goes on radio or TV is truly shocking.
And for what reason? What could a fiercely intelligent, wickedly funny Cambridge classicist possibly have done to deserve this? Beard first seems to have garnered attention after appearing on the panel show Question Time. Other infractions include having the gall to present a documentary wearing – shock horror – no make-up and daring to leave her hair grey and au naturel. Beard was also lampooned for arguing that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse. What right does she, a world-leading classicist, have to give an opinion on ancient history and her own area of expertise. Outrageous!
“It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you are saying it.”
And that’s the thing. As Beard points out in the manifesto, it is the speaking itself that is the perceived crime: “it is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you are saying it.” In other words, women are still, in the 21st century, being shamed into silence (or at least that is the intended outcome) for daring to have an opinion or to say anything on the public stage. And why? Because: patriarchy.
Depressingly, though unsurprisingly, it’s men who are levelling this abuse against women, systemically and individually. Instead of the agora or public forum, it’s the public arena of social media and the comment sections on websites, where women are flogged and shamed. As Beard points out, “when it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.” It’s by no means all men, but there is a small sector, the alt Right or the bro trolls, who clearly still believe that women’s tongues should be metaphorically (and sometimes not so metaphorically) excised.
Indeed, for thousands of years, public speaking was seen to be synonymous with maleness. Beard argues that the roots of our attitudes towards power and one’s right to speak, our “templates” for power and authority, stem from the oratory of Cicero and the deeply held belief that rhetoric and the art of public speaking is a man’s domain. The manifesto is littered with examples that demonstrate this, from Telemachus in The Odyssey, telling his mother to get back to her loom, to the ‘hilarious’ concept of a woman run state in Arsistophanes’ Lysistrata.
A depiction of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
And it is politics, as in actual power, read, the traditional seats of male power, that Beard is mostly concerned with here. Politicians certainly seem to be in the firing line. Throughout the book, Beard gives examples of hideous invective that contemporary female politicians have suffered, from misogynnistic memes to deeply dark death threats. Notable examples are Angela Merkel and Hilary Clinton, who both endured extensive comparisons to Medusa (and worse). You know, Medusa, the gorgon, famous for her writhing snake hair and ability to petrify anything that gazed upon her. She was beheaded by Perseus and used as a talisman on Athena’s shield. A perfect symbol indeed for the violent silencing of powerful women.
Putting personal politics aside, clearly this sort of trolling is far from acceptable. I am, in fact, putting personal politics aside here, as political persuasions or parties are not relevant to the task at hand. What all these politicians have in common is that they are a) women and b) trolled and that they are trolled precisely because they are women. Yes, male politicians might get lampooned too, though it will (usually) be for what they have done, rather than because of an intrinsic part of who they are. Unless of course they are an ethnic minority.
Hilary Clinton as Medusa (source Wikepedia)
Diane Abbot is one of the UK’s longest-standing MPs and has received more vitriol than is fathomable, over the course of her career. She is also both black and a woman. Beard references the abuse Diane Abbot received (unacceptable amounts of criticism for muddling the figures on her party’s policing policy) as an example of how women are judged more harshly than their male counterparts. Boris Johnson, though similarly bumbling, got off much more lightly during that same campaign. Since this manifesto was written in 2017, the situation seems worse, if anything. When Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation last year, she stated that the political landscape for women was “much harsher and more hostile” than she had ever experienced adding that,
“Social media provides a vehicle for the most awful abuse of women, misogyny, sexism and threats of violence for women who put their heads above the parapet,”
Helen Maher, who was a candidate in the June 2024 UK election, was reportedly asked for photos of her feet and whether she was on OnlyFans. Although, this example is slightly comical, research shows that the reality of all this unwanted attention is putting women off entering politics. And that’s precisely what the misogynists want.
It’s perhaps a particularly apposite time to be considering these issues. The US presidential election is less than a week away and, just as Clinton before her, Kamala Harris finds herself in the firing line for daring to make a bid for power. It is interesting that Harris has avoided centering her campaign on race or gender. She said in a recent interview, “I believe I’m the best person to do this job, at this moment, for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.” This is quite the contrast to Hilary Clinton’s tactics in her 2016 campaign, in which she wore white to symbolize the suffragists and repeatedly talked of shattering the glass ceiling. It’s a savvy move and one learnt from the failure of the Clinton campaign: it doesn’t pay to play “the woman card” in politics. Especially not at this level. Clinton didn’t lose solely on account of her gender; for a large part of the electorate she also seems to have represented everything they disliked about the intellectual and political elite. However, clearly the whole '“making history” angle wasn’t appealing to many voters - and it’s a narrative Harris is keen to avoid.
Hilary Clinton, U.S Presidential Election 2016
Again, this is something that Beard addresses directly, when examining the tendency for female politicians, from Margaret Thatcher to Angela Merkel, to employ in part, the “androgyne” tactic. She writes, “we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man. The regulation trouser suits…are also a simple tactic- like lowering the timbre of the voice - to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power.” It might be savvy to downplay the gender card and perhaps essential if Harris wants to win, but it’s depressing nonetheless. How long will women have to ape men and contort themselves, to be always “perceived as belonging outside of power”?
The Harris campaign unofficially acknowledge a coded sexism at play in the language voters use to pollsters. “She’s not ready”: read, “we’re not ready for a female president.” Similarly, the language Trump uses of himself when he talks of his strength, feeds into male political tropes. Strength is shorthand for “maleness”, whereas being a woman denotes “weakness”. Indeed, the age-old sexist and misogynist jibes are out in full force in this election that is all about gender, although not overtly stated as being so. The outcome of the presidential campaign is yet unknown, but Harris has already won the title of the most attacked American politician on the internet. And quelle surprise. Not only is she a woman who holds power, but she’s a woman of colour. The sexist and racist fury against her started to crescendo after she was announced as Biden’s running mate. Here’s a little taster of some of the sweet-nothings Harris received. As the Emily List pressure group explains, “Stereotypes and tropes centred around diminishing the qualifications, leadership, looks, relationships and experience of women candidates for office are always part and parcel with her campaign. This is exacerbated for women of color.”
The higher you soar the hotter the hate. So, what to do about it? In her own life, Beard advocates calling the perpetrators out; a reverse public shaming, if you will, with a dollop of humour thrown in. When A.A. Gill snidely remarked that she was more suited to being a contestant on The Undatables than to TV presenting, her retort was an acerbic but good-humoured piece in The Daily Mail. Its title: “Too Ugly for TV? No, I’m Too Brainy for Men Who Fear Clever Women.” Pow! She also famously befriended a few of her detractors after publicly naming and shaming them and even provided one with a job reference.
For women in politics, the answer is clearly to keep going, to keep showing up. There isn’t an alternative. But something more radical needs to change in our collective conception of power itself. As Beard summarises,
“You can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently.”
She cites collective, non prestige-driven power as an example of this; the Black Lives Matter movement has been incredibly and powerfully effective, started as it was, by three women with no celebrity status. There is power in using our voices. Women should not silence themselves for fear of criticism. Yes, it’s easier said than done, but there’s no point cutting our own tongues out to appease this dark, shadowy part of the male online psyche. That small, but vocal minority, are more than happy to do that for us. The world doesn’t need women to mute themselves. Surely part of the the answer, at least, resides in more visibility and more voice. We need to use our voices loudly and collectively.
Beard concludes that, “the picture overall…is gloomy. We have not got anywhere near subverting these foundational stories of power that serve to keep women out of it." Seven years on, this is as true now as it was then. If Kamala Harris does succeed in becoming the first female president of the United States, it would be a step closer to rewriting the story. The reverse is also true. Whatever happens at the polls across America next week, we need to rewrite what power looks like and redefine its terms to truly make space for women. That’s only going to happen if women continue to speak up, share their voices and put themselves forward on the public stage. Yes, women still have to pay a very high price for being heard, but the alternative is much more costly.