ANOTHER CARDBOARD CUT-OUT of Hillary Clinton. What are the chances? Nine months after the Women’s March, I brought my mother to a convention centre in downtown Toronto to hear Clinton speak. Mildred applied crimson lipstick while we waited for the event to begin. As she sidled up to cardboard Hillary to have her picture taken, her smile was bright, if slightly forced. This was my gift to my mother; I couldn’t change the world, but I could shell out $160 to make her pretend, for an hour, that everything would be okay in the end.
It had been a hard eleven months since the election of the man my mother would refer to only as “that buffoon.” If anything, those eleven months had been worse than we imagined — the president ordered a controversial travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries, which was repeatedly challenged in court; he refused to condemn lethal racist behaviour; his administration rolled back wage protection for women; reproductive rights were threatened across the country.
On the day I wrote this, a new poll revealed that 56 percent of respondents felt that Trump was “not fit” to be president. Across America, the resistance was strong: Women were signing up to run for political office in record numbers.
Above our heads in the convention centre, a screen showed the cover of Clinton’s memoir, What Happened, which had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the weeks after its release. A video played, and in it Clinton quoted Dorothy Rodham: “My mother taught me that everybody needs a chance, and a champion. And I still hear her voice urging me to keep working and fighting for right no matter what.”
The atmosphere was jubilant and defiant. All five thousand seats were sold. Women roamed the aisles with their daughters and friends, their sisters and colleagues, some wearing pantsuits, some wearing T-shirts that said “Nasty Woman” and “I’m With Her.” There were so many women that they started to colonize the men’s washroom, which frankly is a revolution I could get behind.
My mother was beside herself with anticipation, her cane drumming the floor. This was her Woodstock. The lights dimmed and the crowd let up an anticipatory roar, and I thought of all the people who were afraid to say out loud during the campaign that they were with her. I thought of the male journalists who continued to write that she should “go the fuck away.”
My mother climbed slowly to her feet, dropping her cane on me in the process. Teetering, she clapped so loudly that I worried she would have a stroke and I would be exposed as the terrible daughter who never got First Aid training. Mildred wore a bright red dress, the same red as Clinton’s jacket, a red that said “No, I have a better idea, why don’t you go the fuck away.”
Not that Mildred would ever say something so profane. Her strongest epithet, saved for moments of great irritation, is Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This is why I was taken aback when she turned to whisper in my ear, after listening to Clinton outline the various barriers to her election, including Russian meddling, sexism, the FBI: “Wow. She really got screwed.”
I told you my mother was wise. On stage, Clinton ran through the many reasons for her defeat, which also included a divided and rage-filled electorate and an overemphasis on her use of a personal email server. (She also accepted blame for the loss, although not as often in person as she had on the page; in her memoir, I counted more than twenty instances of regret or apology for her shortcomings during the campaign.)
And then there was, undeniably, sexism. Clinton didn’t have time in her speech to go into all the ways that misogyny played a role in the campaign, because we needed to get home within the next century. She distilled one bit of research that Sheryl Sandberg shared with her: “For men, professional success and likeability go hand in hand. Not for women. The more successful a man becomes, the more people like him. With women it’s the exact opposite. The more successful women become, the less people like us.” She paused for a beat, with the timing of a sharpshooter: “I’m sure some women in this room have an inkling what I’m talking about.”
“That’s right,” my mother said, nodding fiercely. I looked over at her, thinking that I knew nothing of her life, her struggles. What had she buried so deeply that she had forgotten, and I’ll never know?
“So yes,” Clinton continued, “there are lots of reasons why being a woman in politics can be downright infuriating.” I remembered all that I had seen and heard during the election: the signs that showed Trump urinating on her name, the men yelling “Lock her up.” I thought of the girl in her prisoner’s uniform, outlined against the bright Florida sun.
Nothing would change until we made it change: “The only way to get sexism out of politics,” Clinton said, her voice rising, the voice that was too shrill to be presidential, “is to get more women into politics.” And the word “Yes” burst from my mother, as she climbed to her feet one more time.
KILLER ROBOTS, AMAZON PLANETS, AND THE FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE
IN THE SUMMER of 2017, a vending company called Three Square Market in River Falls, Wisconsin, held a “chip party.” That is, it implanted microchips in fifty of its eighty employees. With their permission, of course. To make life easier, of course.
The radio frequency identification chip, just the size of one grain of rice, was implanted in each employee’s hand, a procedure that was not in the least painful, according to Three Square Market’s CEO, Todd Westby. He told CNBC that it felt like having someone step quickly on his hand while wearing a dress shoe. But there was so much to be gained for so little pain.
As CNBC noted, “The device allows door access to enter the building, [employees to] sign into their computer, and pay for snacks — all with a wave of their hand on a sensor. The microchip replaces passwords, ID badges, and even credit cards.” The employees who got chipped were enthusiastic, Mr. Westby said: “The people that did decide to do it really were looking forward to the convenience that it does bring to the everyday life.”
They were looking forward to the convenience. This might have been the moment when my trepidation about the future slid into full-blown panic. It’s one thing to sign away your bodily autonomy, but it’s quite another to barter it for faster access to a Sprite. Was convenience really now our Holy Grail? Had remembering passwords become too heavy a burden for our pleasure-seeking brains? Was this capitalism’s end game — an army of microchipped drones passing in front of a vending machine or a door, too lazy even to reach into their own pockets? Had we reached the anthropological age called Can No Longer Be Bothered to Lift a Finger?
I would like to pretend to be cool with the whole microchipping idea. I would like to be the groovy futurist and not the thumbnail-chewing old lady who sees us hurtling toward hell in a handbasket. But I feel increasingly like Teddy, the main character in Kate Atkinson’s incandescent novel A God in Ruins, a former bomber pilot who feels modern life spiralling beyond his control: “Like a dog, Teddy thought, he had had his day. ‘I’m too old for the world,’ he said.”
Or is the world too fast for us? This moment, now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, feels calamitous, perilous. I imagine it did for people at earlier moments of great technological change: That mechanical loom, it’s going to steal our Ned’s job! I think I’ll smash it flat with this here hammer.
This moment feels particularly fraught, though. The last embers of capitalism’s dying fire provide heat to fewer and fewer people, even as the oceans and skies grow hotter around us; technology proceeds at its own pace, untethered to morality, guided by a profit incentive unshared by most and understood by few. Social justice is still a mirage for those historically pushed to society’s edges. Loneliness is a public health crisis. Market forces alone determine what we should and should not value, even as wealth inequality grows. Where is the vision for tomorrow?
IT NORMALLY COSTS twenty-four dollars for tourists to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher Wren’s wondrous palace of God in Central London. On the balmy evening I visited in May 2012, it was free, which was ironic becau
se we were there to talk about how pretty much everything in our lives had come to carry a price tag.
I rode the Tube from my home in North London to hear the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel speak about his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. The world was still reeling from the banking collapse of 2008, and further unbalanced by the global Occupy movement that followed. It seemed the world was waking up every morning filled with doubt: Where the hell were we going? Did you bring the map? Wait, I thought you brought the map! Sandel’s book, which beautifully synthesized the way that market thinking had come to dominate all facets of human life, blew the cobwebs from my mind. It marked the place where we were, and that place was terrifying.
“We have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society,” Sandel told the packed audience, his voice echoing through the cathedral’s soaring pillars. We sat together on folding chairs, the bearded and sensibly shod folk of the anxious middle gathered in a hallowed space that had hosted the funerals of queens and admirals. Frightened as we were, there were not a lot of people in that audience in danger of falling off the edge. That was Sandel’s point.
“At a time of rising inequality, as money comes to buy more and more, the effect is that rich and poor increasingly lead separate lives. There are fewer and fewer occasions, public spaces, where men and women from different walks of life encounter one another in the ordinary course of things.” This, he said, would be corrosive to democracy in the end, because a society needed to have some sense of the common good as a goal for its members to work toward.
In a way, Sandel was preaching to the converted: He was just showing us new hymns. Money could buy everything at the beginning of the twenty-first century, if you had enough of it: New blood to replace your tired old blood; a fast-pass to bypass the crowds at the amusement parks and on the highways; advertising space on the forehead of a hungry college student. The market was our god, capitalism our church, and we worshipped whether we wanted to or not.
I wandered out into the velvet spring night — spring in Britain really is a delight beyond description — and walked across the cobblestones of St. Paul’s churchyard. Here, a few months earlier, the raggedy tents of Occupy London had huddled against the Cathedral’s stone walls. The church fathers had tried to banish them; the protesters hung on. I visited one day and talked to the protesters, who were damp but filled with frustrations ready to explode.
They were tired of cuts to public services, tired of greed, tired of the way the world was parcelled out by people they would never meet. They imagined something better, a happier way of living. Aaron, a twenty-year-old set painter, told me that his friends laughed at him for camping out in the cold and rain.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “This is a global awakening.”
It felt, at that moment, as if there were a global awakening: that we had learned something from the legions of blank-eyed bankers shuffling like zombies from their towers, all their possessions in cardboard boxes. Maybe we had learned, finally, that the game was rotten from the inside.
Instead, the momentum seemed to fizzle. The Occupy movement was forced by state authority from its campsites, moving underground to feed into other social-justice streams. The banking collapse was forgotten, like a collective delusion, and neoliberalism continue to plough ahead, harnessing all human enterprise to the mechanism of markets. And instead of the great coming-together that Aaron mentioned, instead of the Age of Aquarius, we witnessed a great darkness descend. The Age of Sauron, more like.
I, an inherent optimist, felt my heart sag as I watched events unfold, a riot of discontent and fracture. The promise of the Arab Spring was squandered. Corruption and economic collapse in Brazil. Fascism alive and well in Europe and on the streets of America. A freshly engaged, terrifying nuclear arms race. A poisonous, poisoned demagogue in the White House. As women’s reproductive rights were squashed across the United States, people watched The Handmaid’s Tale on their TV screens, not noticing the reality of The Handmaid’s Tale creeping up outside their windows. It was hardly comforting that this blinding and lethal ignorance is central to Margaret Atwood’s prophetic novel. The mirror cracked. No one could bear to look into it.
I became fixated on the erosion of trust in public institutions, which seemed to me the precursor of a great fall. Every year, studies would show that people’s trust in the established order was failing, and that they no longer believed in government, media, churches, business, the justice system. Worse, they actively mistrusted these institutions. Worse, this mistrust led them to believe life was getting worse, not better.
“There is growing despair about the future, a lack of confidence in the possibility of a better life for one’s family.” That sentence comes from the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual report that polls residents in twenty-eight countries to determine their feelings about social institutions and governance. The title of the 2017 survey says it all: “Crisis in Trust.” Trust in government, business, media, and NGOs had plummeted since the survey began in 2010. Fifty-three percent of respondents said the overall system had failed them; only fifteen percent believed it was working.
Clearly, money can’t buy everything: It can’t buy a system that works for most of the people. Or, perhaps more precisely, as presently constructed, the system is not one that most people can buy into. So where do we go from here? And is it up to women to fix a broken world? Let’s just add that to our to-do list, shall we?
THE FIRST SEASON of the hilarious Canadian comedy program Baroness von Sketch Show contains a skit about what the future might look like if power changed at the top. It is the year 2050, and the setting is a World Summit held in Copenhagen. The camera reveals that all the participants are women.
“This is our first world summit since the revolution, where we ascended to power replacing our male counterparts,” says the first woman to speak. She is not identified as the leader or the chair; clearly those hierarchical designations have fallen by the wayside. She asks if any delegates have had problems with their economies. The women shake their heads. Everything is fine. Climate concerns? Again, they agree it’s all good.
“Conflict?” the woman at the podium asks. “Any war?”
The delegates chuckle, and one says “No, we just talk it out these days.”
Finally, the representative from one region admits, slightly sheepishly, that she’d had a bit of conflict with another delegate: “Then I realized I was just projecting all my shit onto her.” They grin at each other and link pinkies in solidarity.
Their business sorted in less than a minute, the women pack up their papers and prepare to leave. One of them says, “I can’t believe this summit used to take days.”
Bada-bing!
The sketch is genius for the way that it subtly undermines the notion of feminist utopia (we would still be blaming ourselves for any moment of conflict) while enforcing what many of us believe in our deepest hearts: The world would be a better place if women had more say in the running of things. At the very least it would be less fucked up.
When I was a child, the only imagined female future was the one we occasionally glimpsed on rainy Sundays when the Buffalo television station showed old science-fiction movies from the 1950s. There you’d seen planets run by women, cone-breasted and hair-sprayed. After initially making war on the square-jawed astronauts who invaded their planets, eventually they’d succumb to the charms of these earthlings whose manliness could barely be contained by their silver jumpsuits. With the arrival of the men, the women — who had until then been running around their planets without a care — would see the error of their unnatural ways. Then the future would be safe.
It is a truism that all imagined futures in some way embody the moment of their creation. In the postwar period, the patriarchy must have seen the first disquieting blips of female discontent on the radar; Betty Friedan was putting a name
to this nameless anxiety. Consciousnesses were being raised at Formica tables across the land. No wonder men had to imagine other worlds in which their control was not only benign, but a salvation.
In 1976, Marge Piercy wrote her landmark futurist novel Woman on the Edge of Time. It’s the story of a Mexican-American woman, Connie, who has suffered dire abuse at the hands of men and society, and ends up a tranquilized mess in a mental hospital. She is visited by Luciente, a woman from the year 2137, and shown a future free of oppression, where men and women live and love as they please, bound by no restrictions except that they do good for the community.
It is an idealized vision of the future, and a brave one. Dystopias are more popular for writers than utopias, since they contain more drama and conflict. As novelists like to say, “Happiness writes white.” Piercy chose a desperately tumultuous time to imagine a calmer and more just future.
The 1970s were a time of social upheaval and economic and political crises — yes, much like today. In this chaos, the seeds of feminism had taken hold and were blooming. There was serious progress advancing women’s reproductive and economic freedom, a trajectory that was bound to continue till the great starburst of total equality and emancipation was reached. Or so it must have seemed at the time.
But, as Piercy writes in the preface to the fortieth-anniversary edition of Woman on the Edge of Time, that promise has not only not been fulfilled, it has in many ways been squandered: “Inequality has greatly increased. As I write this, more people are poor, more people are working two or three jobs just to get by, more people find that their savings and their future have been wiped out by bad health or losing their jobs.” At the same time, women’s political progress and control over their bodies has stalled or regressed. The result of the ascendance of corporatism, Piercy writes, is that we are too busy putting out today’s fires to imagine how to spark a better future.
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