It’s been said to the point of cliché that the world would be better off were it directed by women. There is little evidence to support such a thought. Our dot on the universe contains as many graceless and selfish women as it does ignorant and dangerous men.

If like many, you work in an office where women flourish, you know that there is no end to the petty bickering and jealous divisions that abound. Women have men beat all to hell with their capacity to be nasty to one another. That’s why they go to the washroom together. It’s easier to engage in slander and monger rumor with the toilets running.

Women, given their less aggressive attitude behind the steering wheel, may rightfully claim that they are safer, not better, drivers than men. On the other hand, when it comes to public transportation, at least in western culture, their sense of privilege is astounding, their behavior inconsiderate. Ignoring obvious niceties such as holding the heavy doors that lead into the subway tunnel for the next person - right after the door has been held for them, or standing directly in the entrance of the subway car itself and not moving an inch to let other people pass, is everyday occurrence. 

It is also common for women to exit by the front door of a bus instead of the back despite announcements to the contrary. They are oblivious to the delay they cause in allowing people to board and the bus to move on. It is yet more angering to watch women ignore the drivers’ enjoinders to move to the aft so others can embark. Common decency doesn’t apply even when it’s 20 below and the driver has to leave frozen passengers shivering at the stop while the bus continues with much warm, empty space. There are plenty of coarse men in the system but the ranking of women to men on the public conveyance rudeness meter weighs heavily against the frostier sex. 

Women have offered neither more nor less evidence of being better people than men. They also have no more or less claim on being capable leaders. Margaret Thatcher was an adept boss and partial advocate for what she believed. Golda Meir, the face that docked a thousand ships, was Prime Minister of Israel, no easy task given the fault lines that cleave the country and region. Cleopatra wooed, fought and rued the massive Roman Empire. Catherine the Great is considered one of Russia’s finest czars and most prolific lovers, while Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria were steely-willed overseers of England during times of turbulence and change. Mind you, Elizabeth wasn’t that fond of Catholics and not above doffing a few of their heads. Indira Ghandi and Benazir Bhutto ascended and in Bhutto’s case aspired again, to the top job in their respective countries knowing full well that doing so could end in the bloody deaths that came to both. This wasn’t being Prime Minister of Iceland. They led nations where women are historically viewed as possessions and did so in periods of extreme peril.

These people were capable commanders but their accomplishments do not sustain the notion that women are better leaders than men or without fatal flaws. For each example illustrative of female proficiency, there is another that shows incompetence, corruption or savagery. 

Having come as close to the presidency as she ever will, the world will be better off with Sarah Palin, the Ice Queen, far removed from intelligence reports in Washington. Isabella of Castile, wife of Ferdinand of Aragon, sent Columbus off on a slow boat to China where he bumped into another continent. Meanwhile, Isabella was busy chasing Jews and Muslims out of Iberia which accounts for the countless varieties of pricey ham offered to this day on the peninsula. Along with her husband, Isabella formed the infamous Inquisition where a devious neighbor calling someone heretical would make it so, subjecting the accused to unbearable torture at the hands of the ever-compassionate church. 

As beastly as were Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, Eichmann and pals, their baseness was mirrored, if on a smaller scale, by a pair of gruesome women. For sheer cruelty and depravity, Buchenwald, run by Ilse Koch, was unmatched in the methods by which it tortured and exterminated its victims. Where Eichmann sought systematic efficiency to the “Jewish problem” and later the “final solution,” Ilse Koch got off inflicting pain and suffering. In the Auschwitz labor camp, Irme Grese, the “Bitch of Belsen” heavily booted and armed, was uniformly sadistic in her treatment of slave workers and merciless in the practice of selecting those to be sent on a one way trip to the neighboring death camp at Birkenau. 

Men and women have proven themselves proportionately possible of brilliance and iniquity, accomplishment and ineptitude. Throughout history, men have had far more opportunity to rule, meaning the odds of a man screwing up were much greater. Given half a chance, women would have kept the score close. 

Today there are a number of women performing effectively as national deciders. Chancellor Angela Merkel runs the show in Germany, although according to the self-absorbed French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel is subject to his instructions. Michelle Bachelet, who somehow survived Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, is President of Chile. In Argentina, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner took the baton from her husband Nestor after term limits ended his era. Apparently the Kirchners didn’t want to go apartment hunting in Buenos Aires when European speculators had taken advantage of the country’s economic crisis to buy much of the desirable property. Now they have a few more years to look around while Cristina considers trading in Chinese RMBs and dumping the dollar. She would have considered the Pound had it not been for the British Armada protecting the vestige of empire in the Falklands. In the construction of Olympic venues and expanding airports, the city of London will relocate more people than live in the Malvinas. Come to think of it, why is Britain still in Spain? Why is Spain still in Morocco? And why is France still running St. Pierre and Miquelon, tiny islands a few miles of the coast of Newfoundland, Canada? The Age of Empire is past. Hand these places over to the local authorities.

Having established, at least in this column, that as people and leaders, women and men are comparable in ways both good and bad, why is it that in numerous global horror shows women are rushing in where strong men fear to tread? 

It’s a little uncomfortable for guys to watch young girls and older ladies lead the fight against the criminals also known as the Taliban. These thugs along with their blood-lusting buddies in Al Qaeda are as depraved as any of the worst regimes that scarred the twentieth century. There is no negotiating with this heinous malevolence. Appeasement, as it was to Hitler, is an agreement that clears the way to the next objective. So while the government of Pakistan was gutlessly ceding the Swat Valley, (read Christopher Hitchen’s important piece in Slate.com http://www.slate.com/id/2213246/), 11 year old Pakistani Tuba Sahaab was in the midst of the battle. Her resolute poetry and bold interviews vividly portray the Taliban as menacing reactionaries who want to take Pakistan back to medieval times. That’s a bit unfair to the Medievalists who contributed more to the world than beheadings, burkas and sharia law; sharia law being a euphemism for misogyny and vengeance applied by a judiciary of narrow men who were taught and have read only one book, a work of fiction at that. 

Imagine that an 11 year old girl has more courage, sense and compassion than thousands of Taliban and their preposterous clerics. These oppressors work only in cowardly, ignorant groups. Ms. Sahaab stands tall in a treacherous land and along with increased foreign pressure finally forced the large Pakistani army to at least temporarily turn its gaze from India. 

As seen on television interviews, in eloquent and angry words, Pakistani women are seething at the advancement of the Taliban. It is their lives that are most at risk. It turns out that the god of the Koran prefers women as chattel, well at least as far the guys with the measured beards have it. Has there even been a book more flexible and open to individual interpretation than the Koran? For a supposed infallible guide to life, it is a web of ambiguity that is especially bad news for women. If women don’t want to end up spending most of their lives at home, able to venture outside only if they wear a tent, they pretty much have to cry havoc before the malignancy that is fundamentalist Islam reaches them. 

In Afghanistan, schoolgirls and their female teachers bravely head to class each day all the while facing threats from their blood-lusting tormentors, threats which as the girls well know, often result in mutilation or death. School is out for girls in Taliban world. And it’s not exactly like the boys are exposed to science, world history or popular culture. Their sad education is restricted to studying the Koran ad nausea. Indoctrination replaces learning. 

The strength of the girls and women of Afghanistan and Pakistan should be enough to inspire even the most ardent isolationist. They are under attack from senseless gangs, the Taliban version of “A Clockwork Orange.” They need protection and the world has to be involved. There are some fights from which there can be no retreat. To run away now condemns millions to life without options. It deprives the rest of us of what they might have become had we but cared. 

In the tyranny formerly known as Burma, the most prominent voice against that rancorous regime is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She has been under house arrest since 1989. Despite the sacrifice of much of her life, the best the world can offer her and her impoverished countrymen is the Nobel Peace Prize. She certainly has lots of time to contemplate it. If only it had come with a “get out of home free” card. If ever a country needed and would welcome an invasion, it is the sad people of Burma. Although other countries are complicit, much of the reason that nothing is done to alleviate Burmese suffering is brought to us by the lovely folks in Beijing. Suu Kyi defies not only the despots in her government but the neighborhood, now global bully that is China. 

In Chile, it was old women marching for their disappeared husbands and sons, who first challenged the fetid Pinochet. That these courageous women may have afflicted the collective conscience of his unindicted co-conspirators in the U.S. is too much to ask, conceited as they were and remain in their ideology or self-interest. 

In Colombia, Maria Eugenia Guerrero is the latest female journalist to be slaughtered, although in fairness to the various para and official militaries operating in Colombia, they are gender neutral when it comes to murdering reporters and civilians. Whereas children in most countries learn how to speak and walk, the first thing engrained in Colombian kids is discretion. Opinions get you killed. 

Since the turn of the millennium, an average of two women a day have been slain in Guatemala. The government has been at best powerless and likely colluding. Until recently, there were few arrests and fewer convictions. The fight to stop the annihilation had to come from the women themselves. Facing intimidation and threats to her family, Norma Cruz, formed a non-governmental agency, Survivors Foundation, which has so far led to the conviction of 30 people and finally helped shame the reluctant Guatemalan government to take action. 

In Russia, the land where journalists go to die, Anna Politkovskaya, stood up to the Kremlin for the manner in which it conducted the war in Chechnya. She described in bloody and desperate detail not just the agony of the innocents of Chechnya but the inhuman and disposable manner in which the Russian military treated its own soldiers. She had corresponding contempt for the international jihadists, the barbarians who want to spread their dour version of Islam into Chechnya and beyond. These warriors of god victimized the trapped people of Chechnya as much as the actions of the Russian military. But disdain for the enemy was not enough to save her, not when accompanied by honesty about the Russian army and the Russian civilian leadership. While Vladimir Putin, riding a gusher of an oil bonanza, was showing his television and diplomatic face to the world, she was pointing out that he was still the KGB bully boy, a democrat only in appearance. Despite being arrested, tortured, and a Russian favorite, poisoned, she kept on reporting, increasingly on the president czar. 

In a country where Putin, not the medium, is the message, where rectitude is as welcome as NATO, where propaganda has a long and proud history, Anna Politkovskaya by choice, fully aware of the danger, continued to speak out until she was silenced forever by an assassin’s gun. She had spoken truth to many powers.   

The word hero is often misused to describe people either doing what they were trained to do or by those who had no alternative. The women mentioned here and thousands others, some famous, most anonymous, all courageous, all by preference, fight the good fight. They stoically or loudly defy vile and odious rulers. They understand plainly that the price they may pay for freedom is not failure but death. 

Forty some years ago, the curmudgeonly Professor ‘enry ‘iggins, a committed bachelor, sagely sang, “Let a woman in your life and you invite eternal strife.” Some would echo that sentiment. But many men have women in their lives, some men have many women in their lives and some women have women in their lives. 

On a personal level, the grumpy professor’s lament is best left to the individual, but it is undeniably clear that in the pursuit of freedom and opportunity, nations damn well better have women in their midst. Now, if they could only learn how to comport themselves on public transport.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno