The rise of the strongman is bad news for women
With Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin strutting on the world stage, have real values been lost?
Dark clouds are gathering overhead for the world’s women. With the inauguration of Donald Trump the state of global gender relations will probably face another onslaught.
We’ve seen the bad behaviours against women that he has exhibited at a personal level.
Now what we must face up to is that his powerful public leadership status underscores a resurgence of the demagogic “strongman” in global politics. Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and of course the persistence of the strongman in the Middle East affects the tenor of global politics.
The macho leader, egotistic, unilateral and chest-thumping, worries us because of the grand- standing, bullying and violence that all too often follows in their wake.
What a strongman at the head of a nation also does is to impact our ideas of what it means to be a “man” and what is acceptable male behaviour at an ordinary day-to-day level. It sets a precedent about how men can or even must behave in order to be men and gives permission for treating women – or minorities – badly. It gives permission to regressive notions of gender relations which still fall desperately short of balance for the genders.
We take their anti-women rhetoric not just as the price you pay for a “real” man, but actually accept that that is how men really are. We can’t help but expect that this will trickle down into our daily social behaviours and set back the cause of women by decades.
The irony is that the domination of the world’s biggest powers by strongmen who pay little respect to women or minorities comes to the backdrop of a heartening rise in the number of female leaders and a renewed push of women’s activism across the world.
The jury is still out on whether female leaders do bring a more consensual style of politics to the global table, or even if we should expect them to, but at the very least women do have more seats at the table.
Some are speculating that the rise of the strongman is precisely a backlash to women in public and therefore a desire to reclaim “real” leadership. Mr Trump follows in the wake of Barack Obama, who has lavished praise on his wife and children.
In both the United States and Russia, Mr Trump and Mr Putin are seen by many – including women – as “real” men. Their authoritarianism is precisely what is said to make them good, strong, “real” leaders.
It’s an interesting bind we find ourselves in, especially if we are advocating more gender balance and respect in society. We complain about authoritarianism but then we vote in a strongman to be the saviour.
In the home we expect men to be nurturing and respectful, yet in leadership roles we want ag- gression and dominance.
We must be clear: these two spheres of public and private don’t exist in isolation. They are connected. So there’s an inherent contradiction. Our ideas of masculinity have not progressed as far as we think.
Public and private behaviour mirror each other, so we need to adjust our ideas of what it means to be both a “real” man and a “real” leader.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Our ideas of a real leader are very deeply embedded through centuries of history, myth and national founding stories.
It is these deep stories we must push back on. Mr Trump’s presidency should not be a new chapter for this story. Instead, we must make it the last hurrah that heralds in the erasure of the villainous strongman on the global stage. Shelina Janmohamed is the author of the books Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World and Love in a Headscarf