It’s been said, at least by women, that the world would be better off were it directed by women. However, there is precious little evidence to support such an assumption. Our dot on the universe contains as many graceless and selfish examples of the fairer sex as it does ignorant and dangerous men.

In the modern office, where women have their rightful and indispensable place, there is no end to the petty bickering and jealous divisions that abound among them. Women have men beat all to hell with their capacity to be nasty to one another. While men would rather shit in a nearby forest than share a trip to the bathroom with another guy, women coordinate their bladder and bowel movements to coincide with other women. 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 correctly claim that they are safer, if 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 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 vexing to watch women ignore the driver’s enjoinder 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 taking public transport, but the ratio of women to men on the common conveyance rudeness meter weighs heavily against the frostier sex.

Outside of public transport, women historically have offered neither more nor less evidence of being better people than men. They have no greater nor lesser claim of being capable. As with men, some women in power have been brilliant, some dim, some thoughtful, some heedless, some compassionate, some ruthless.

Queen Isabella of Castile in Spain, wife of King 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 Spain, families who had lived peacefully alongside their Christian neighbors for centuries, whose only crime was in not being Christian. Along with her husband, Isabella, pious Catholic that she was, appointed the Spanish Inquisition. This unholy alliance of crown and God meant a currying neighbor calling someone heretical would make it so, subjecting the accused to unbearable torture, often death, at the hands of the ever-compassionate church. The state claimed the properties of those condemned by the church, a mutually parasitic relationship.

Elizabeth I of England saw Britain through turbulent and dangerous times. It was an era of great expansion, with England defeating and replacing Spain to become the dominant European power. On the home front, Elizabeth, whose father was Henry VIII, the Reformer and indulgent tyrant who took a scalpel to the Roman church’s umbilical cord, tolerated Catholics so long as they expressed fealty to her. That tolerance was not so limitless that Shakespeare, and other voices of the time could speak freely of religion. The executioner took more than a few Catholic lives at the beheadst behest of the Queen.

Catherine the Great was one of Russia’s great rulers, learned and progressive, more so for the time. For what it matters, she was also a prolific lover of younger men, another case study of sexual appetite and the attraction of youth, not being restricted to men. She engaged in wars of expansion at the cost thousands of lives; no different, if more competent, than kings and czars of her time.
What these historic women had in common is that they were effective leaders in eras and countries, where women were considered inferior, where being female was almost always an insurmountable obstacle to success. These women, certainly as capable as their male predecessors and successors, could be just as ruthless and calculating as any man, their rule shaped more by the times than by gender.

More recently, Golda Meir, the face that docked a thousand ships, was Prime Minister of the youthful state of Israel, no easy task given the fault lines that cleave the country and region. She dismissed the rights of the Palestinians, inviting Jewish immigrants from around the world to occupy Palestinian land and dispossess the non-Jewish people who had lived there since ancient times.
Margaret Thatcher brooked no opposition, condemned Nelson Mandela while refusing sanctions against the apartheid government in South Africa and ordered the British Navy halfway round the world to thrash the hapless Argentinians in order to maintain one of the last scraps of empire, the frigid Falklands.

As gender is not a deciding factor in a person’s capacity to rule, or to hold office, nor is it a guarantee that women will govern better than men, nor create a kinder, gentler, more thoughtful world. Men and women have proven themselves proportionately apt to brilliance and iniquity, accomplishment, and ineptitude.

Indira Gandhi in India and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan led countries marked by grave religious and societal divisions, places where violence is commonplace, where political assassination is omnipresent. They both had to confront the very real possibility that they would be killed in office. This wasn’t being Prime Minister of Iceland. Both nations historically viewed women as possessions – misogyny was well engrained. Tragically, as they worked to better their respective countries, both determined women were gunned down; Gandhi by Sikh extremists, Bhutto, likely by Al Qaeda, or by Al Qaeda actors within the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence, ISI.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to demonstrate that she is an accomplished leader, as well as an adroit politician. She displays more sagacity, greater wherewithal, than her self-absorbed neighbour, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whatever his boastful claims to the contrary. Old attitudes and rivalries die hard.

Michelle Bachelet, who somehow survived Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, is the popular president of Chile. In Argentina, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner took the baton from her husband Nestor after term limits ended his era.

Good women are as disposed to lead as good men, but equally susceptible to the pursuit of power as its own end. They are as sage and tough as men or as prone to vicissitude and violence. A world of female leaders does not signal a better, saner, or safer place, any more than it suggests that things would be worse.

Yet there are regions around the globe, horror shows, far from the interests of the United Nations, where women are rushing in where strong men fear to tread.

It should be uncomfortable for men to watch young girls and older ladies lead the fight against the vile thugs known as the Taliban. These assassins, along with the cutthroat criminals that are 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 is but an agreement that clears the way to the next objective.

While the government of Pakistan was shamefully ceding the Swat Valley to the Taliban, as per Christopher Hitchens’s piece in Slate earlier this month, 11-year-old Pakistani, Tuba Sahaab, was amid the battle. Her resolute poetry and bold interviews vividly portray the Taliban as menacing reactionaries who want to take Pakistan back to their understanding of medieval times. That’s unfair to the Medievalists who contributed far more to the world than misogyny, beheadings, burkas, and sharia law. It’s sadder still that during Middle Ages while Europe was engulfed in religious wars, and in the persecution of learning, it was the Near East that was alive with discoveries in science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.

So it is that a young girl, surrounded by hateful idiots, themselves inspired by vile clerics, has more courage, sense, and compassion than all of them. These cruel oppressors work only in cowardly, ignorant mobs. Ms. Sahaab stood tall when doing so made her a target. She galvanized foreign leaders to force the large Pakistani army to turn its gaze, at least temporarily, from India, to confront the Taliban menace.

Expressed through eloquent, angry words and deeds, 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, as the bullies with the measured beards have it. Like other historical novels posed as moral compass, the Koran is purposefully vague, leaving it open to self-serving interpretation. In the hands of those who seek to seize and hold power, the Koran offers justification for the imposition of misery, aggression, and violence. Venerated as an infallible guide to life, it is a web of ambiguity that is especially bad news for women. If women don’t want to spend their days at home, able to venture outside only if they wear a black tent, their lives totally controlled by ignorant and domineering men, they have no choice but to cry havoc against the malignancy that is fundamentalist Islam.

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 often result in mutilation or death. School is out for girls in Taliban world. And it’s not exactly as if 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 in a land where learning once thrived.

In Russia, the land where journalists go to die, Anna Politkovskaya, stood up to the Kremlin for way 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 common enemy was not enough to save her, not when accompanied by her honesty about the Russian army and the Russian civilian leadership. While Vladimir Putin, riding a gusher of an oil bonanza, was sharing his public face with the world, Anna Politkovskaya was pointing out that he was still the KGB bully boy, a democrat in appearance only. 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 women of Latin America have long been the glue that has held society together. In the face of military dictatorship, the wealth of nations held in the fewest of hands, the self-interested hierarchy of the Catholic Church, civil war, the scourge of narco-traficantes, pervasive corruption, extreme poverty, and the common abandonment of family by indifferent fathers, women have stood up and soldiered on.

It was the old women of Chile, 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 vainglorious ideology.

In Argentina, in the 1970’s and 80’s, it was the street protests of mothers and grandmothers of their 30,000 people “disappeared” in the “Dirty War” that brought an end to the military dictatorship. A generation later, the women of Argentina went back to the streets to battle government corruption and debilitating inflation.

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, often complicit. 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 act.

The word hero is often applied to describe people either doing what they were trained to do, or to those who had no alternative. The women of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world, some famous, most anonymous, fight the good fight by choice. They stoically or loudly defy corrupt and odious rulers. They understand plainly that the price they may pay for freedom is not failure, but death.

The curmudgeonly Professor Henry Higgins, a committed bachelor, sang, “Let a woman in your life and you invite eternal strife.” Some men might echo that sentiment. But many more men have women in their lives, some men have many women in their lives, and some women have women in their lives.

The grumpy professor’s lament aside, it is undeniably clear that in the pursuit of freedom and equal opportunity, the nations of the world damn well better have women in their lives. If they could only learn to comport themselves on public transport.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno