Kevin Myers

Boredsie

Published in today's Irish Independent:

Sorry, but women leaders just don't cut the mustard

By Kevin Myers

The 'Sunday Times' columnist India Knight is one of the best things about her newspaper. She is usually careful and nuanced in her judgments, and seems to work to no particular agenda.

So I was rather taken by her surprise that women contestants in the reality TV show 'The Apprentice' (in which Sir Alan Sugar searches for successful business leaders) were either so bitchy and bullying, or weak and pliable. Ah, India, have you already forgotten what you once knew for sure in your all-girls' playground?

As a species, women do not form into hierarchies like men. Yet contrary to what many feminists think, the hierarchy is a fairly safe place to be, once you've established your place in it. That initial process can be bloody, but it is usually brief, and once men have learnt where they stand relative to one another, they can and do co-exist.

Women tend not to have hierarchies. Instead, they have the easy affability of a coffee morning, in which there seems to be unstructured social access to one another. But that lack of structure makes its participants unsure of themselves. It is why she-gangs form around certain strong individuals, and why the term "bitchiness" accurately describes how women often behave towards one other -- in precisely the same way that female dogs do: they are riven and driven by social insecurity.

The degree to which women dislike their friends never ceases to amaze me: they talk about one another in ways that men would only do about their sworn enemies, if even then. Men dislike; men hate; men kill.

But they do not bitch. And the companion to female bitching is exclusion, that deadly social tool which is the hallmark of the girls' society and which is almost non-existent among boys.

Take an enduring culture of criticism and of exclusion, and there is only one certain outcome: division. And divisiveness is one the great and defining characteristics of female institutions.

It is one of the great historical paradoxes that feminism swept the western world even as the proto-feminist movement, the all-female religious orders, were dying. They have been reduced in the popular mind to the caricature of the Magdalene laundries. Yet at their best, the great women's religious orders of Ireland were among the mightiest and most influential institutions in this country.On the other hand, why was there the "need" to found so many Irish orders of nuns?

Does the one true church -- as it saw itself -- need such localised female interpretations of its message?

After all, there are a handful Irish male foundations.

Otherwise, generally speaking, most Irish male religious orders are offshoots of existing mainland European ones: around a dozen, probably. The reverse is true for female orders.

The Dublin telephone directory lists over 70 orders of nuns: not convents, mind, but separate religious orders of nuns, mostly of foreign foundation. So, there are eight different orders dedicated to "charity" -- the Daughters of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, the Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, the Sisters of Charity of St Paul, the Daughters of Charity and the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. All of which suggests there probably wasn't too much charity in the foundation of so many rival charities.

There are Daughters of the Cross, Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Faithful Companions of Jesus, Servants of the Holy Spirit, Little Sisters of the Poor and Poor Servants of the Mother of God.There are major orders like Holy Faith, with many houses, and tiny one likes Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and Sisters of St Joseph of Peace, with but one each. And there are five different, and therefore effectively competing, orders dedicated to St Francis of Assisi.

There you have it, in its raw and natural state: female society when left to its own devices -- fissiparous and organisationally dysfunctional. So when people say, "How much better the world would be if it were ruled by women", well, nuns have already shown us how a female-governed world would be. It might be better -- but it certainly would not be collegiate, or consensual, or obedient or orderly, which are the qualities which result from the male hierarchy.To be sure, there are some women who can command the male hierarchy, and who function socially rather like men, Margaret Thatcher being the most spectacular example of recent decades.

But, generally speaking, women who have reached the political heights have done so through special dispensation cultures, as in Norway and Iceland, where the political stakes are so low that it really doesn't really matter who rules; or through family connections like Mrs Gandhi in India or Mrs Bandaranaike in Ceylon, or Hillary Clinton (God help us) in the US. For, generally speaking, women make poor leaders: and even the best seldom command both loyalty and obedience. So it's a sure a sign of the ideological power of the feminist heresy in the modern world that such an obvious truth should take even a wise and seasoned observer like India Knight so totally by surprise.

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Ouch! I wonder how many feminists will be writing letters into the Indo today?!

The_Minister

Eeeeeeeeeeeemmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

....why is this here?

What does this have to do with UCD? We have a female deputy president who has been above average, but aside from that I see no connection.

We have a news&media forum, or AH for this stuff.

Lockage.