Box of delight

I’m starting to realise that women are oppressed because they are more powerful than men.

I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but consider that all oppression has a reason or a motivation. It all starts somewhere. Oppressors would not seek to control, denigrate and silence people who had no power in the first place, would they?

Men don’t oppress women because they think they are stupid, incompetent, weak or incapable – they oppress women because they know that we aren’t any of those things. They know that given the chance, we will change the world in several ways which will permanently dismantle male supremacy. And they don’t want that.

For 240 years, America has toyed with the idea of a woman becoming president. This year, for an all too brief moment, it looked as if the idea might become a reality. But the dream of a female president has remained just that, a disingenuous myth America occasionally serves up in fictions, but never permits to spill into its facts. Instead of witnessing the landmark moment of a woman moving into the Oval Office, we can now see the all-too-real misogyny that became a feature of the 2016 presidential campaign bedding down in the corridors of power. When Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” in the final debate, only a few days after a series of recordings revealed him admitting to a series of sexual aggressions and assaults, many people thought it was the end of his bid for the presidency. Instead, social media during election night revealed Trump supporters – male and female – voicing the diehard view that a woman is simply not capable of being president, too weak to stand up to foreign leaders and the military.