While the women of Iran are liberated by American and Israeli bombs, and Melania Trump presides over a session of the UN Security Council, it’s easy to wonder what the point is in fighting for anything. But International Women’s Day is upon us, when we traditionally go into raptures for our commitment to equity and women’s rights. The leaders and institutions who busy themselves dismantling the very protections women need will be professing their eternal devotion to gender justice across myriad social media posts.

The pursuit for equity is not going well, and it’s worth asking why.

 

Internal incoherence

By allowing our fight for justice to be coopted into a fundamentally unjust and exploitative political and economic paradigm, we have made the pursuit of it feel implausible and not wholly meant on a visceral level, even to ourselves. It sure as hell doesn’t feel plausible to society at large. It comes across as insincere.

Some of it actually is insincere. Greedy corporations had no trouble dropping DEI policy like a very hot potato the second it started looking like Trump’s arrival could bring penalties for being out of sync with his orange “grab them by the pussy” orthodoxy. An extreme example, perhaps, but are the rest of us that different?

A dishonest tension sits at the heart of our value system and this is problematic. Our rhetoric contradicts our actions. In our heart of hearts, we surely feel the hypocrisy of it all. Yet we insist that others swear allegiance to our equity scripture by using our compulsory language and dutifully performing the rituals of our hollow faith. The list of examples is possibly endless:

•  How is it that we call for equity for women and not address the promotion of retrograde social and gender norms for profit via commercial advertising and internet algorithms? 
• What kind of equity are we ready to support when the gender pay gap conveniently subsidises profit margins and has done so since always? 
• What does gender justice look like when we permit the porn industry to make vast profits from the exploitation and degradation of women, and from propagating sexual norms that are exploitative and degrading for women?
• Isn’t women’s unpaid care work too convenient to give up? Who will hold up the roof if we no longer rely on it?
• Isn’t it cynical to we tell women they can have it all in a thoroughly rigged system, and blame them when they cannot in fact have it all, not even a decent chunk of it?

All of these things are trade-offs, choices, and we make them willingly. What do they tell us about ourselves?

What is actually on offer for women and men?

Women are sold an unachievable fiction miles away from the reality of their multi-layered burden. We’re exhausted. Men are, ironically, in no man’s land, no longer drawing a sense of self from the role of family provider and protector, largely deprived of class identity, many adrift with no clear roadmap of what their rightful place is in our sanctimonious sexual politics. 

Populist clarity

Populists on the other hand have no such problem. There is no internal tension in their ideological offering. Their essentially classic conservative worldview is anchored in a belief in a “natural” order of things. Many in our society welcome a return to such a “natural” order of things. To some extent we are all primed for it, and actively have to grapple with this belief as we develop a progressive worldview.

It might seem distasteful, but it’s fully and perfectly aligned with the conservative moral system (really well described by Lakoff as one of the prevalent moral orders). This is a worldview that accepts natural hierarchy and sees strength and privilege as a measure of merit, as endorsement from divinity in some cases. Men above women, adults above children, man above nature. 

This way of looking at the world assigns clear roles to men and women. Fuzzy gender identities are an irrelevance as in this way of conceptualising the world, they simply fall outside the scope of what is deemed “natural”. 

So what?

It’s perfectly OK to disagree with these views. 

What is perhaps less OK is to tolerate an internal contradiction within our own stances, an incompatibility in values that discredits everything we stand for, to others but also to ourselves. Exploitation cannot be simultaneously OK and not OK. We cannot simultaneously claim inequality is merit driven, and a symptom of injustice. We cannot really pick and choose when our values stand and when they don’t. 

The goals of feminism are not achievable under this version of feudal, imperialist, violent, anti-human, tech-enabled post-capitalism. We cannot continue to allow the heist of power and resource by a small number of morally bankrupt men and pretend we seek a world where there is plenty for all, and lives of dignity for all.

Stepping up to pay the price of solidarity

Our willingness to tolerate the current morass means, like the Manic Street Preachers sung, that our children will be next. The time has come not to describe what we’re against, but to paint a picture of what we are for, our vision of a world that offers women and men the equity and dignity we all deserve. To craft this alternative to dystopia, we need to re-learn to think and act collectively, meet in real life, pay the price of solidarity. 

See you next time.

• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. 

  We couldn’t ask for starker, clearer cut times. The people who hold the reins of our commons are turning out to be morally bankrupt, intellectually mediocre and unsettlingly cocksure in their relationship with the amorphous masses (that’s us). Their swagger is terrifying.

  The imagery of this new era is insane.

• A five-year-old with a blue bunny hat being ushered towards an immigration detention centre.
• A tech giant contemplating slipping antibiotics to his unsuspecting wife, to treat an STD acquired from raping trafficked children.
• A billionaire paying USD 75 million to produce a puff piece “documentary” on the US president’s vapid wife - whilst simultaneously firing hundreds of journalists from the paper he bought only to neuter and weaponise.
• A banker turner prime minister stating the obvious and offering no vision, lauded as some sort of saviour of the rules-based international order.
• Perpetrators of genocide invited to sit on a “Board of Peace”.
• The European Commission surreptitiously doing away with democratic checks and balances in aid of big money interests, from Europe and elsewhere.

All of this in plain sight. On our screens, in front of our noses. A fetid swamp of cruelty, theft, aggression, grab them by the pussy. We watch this like it’s happening to other people, sedated by decades of stability and relative prosperity. But it’s an overt and hostile takeover of our commons. 

None of it is new, but it helps to see it in such horrifying detail.

Our democracies, our state structures have for a long time been deployed in service of the wealthiest in our society, most overtly since the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s. Under the veneer of progress, we have allowed unjust accumulation of wealth, immoral distribution of resources, destruction of the natural world and an exploitative, extractive global order. It’s been overt, not covert, for quite a while. In 2008, we bailed out the smart arses who pissed our money up the wall and passed the bill over to the most vulnerable in society, who paid for it with two decades of austerity. Look at Oxfam’s inequality reports to see how the distribution of wealth has progressed over the last decade.

This transfer of resources to a small number of very wealthy, unaccountable people who have control over every lever of power in the community is mediaeval.

Even more mediaeval when you realise they are so entitled that they expect sexual access to hareems of children.

We need to understand that the job of building a new societal project, a dream that our fellow humans can align themselves with is for us, and for no one else. There are no other grown-ups in the room. Only our feudal overlords.

A societal project starts from the redefinition of what is right and what is wrong, and a clear statement of what society will deliver. Let me give you some examples:

• When communism collapsed, its collective project was redefined as a prison, totalitarianism, violence. The promise of the new society was freedom, freedom to express one’s individuality and freedom to prosper. That’s the dream that society realigned itself with.

• Budding contemporary fascism paints the invasion of the other as a threat. The other with his brown skin, backward religion. But also the woke other, with her anti-human values, her sanctimonious language and commitment to making all children gay. Its societal project is both purity and strength.

We don’t have a societal project. We are Mark Carney. We recognise that what we’ve known is broken but we have nothing to put in its place. We are stuck in a space between horror and delusional hope that things will somehow right themselves.

I saw a progressive funder recently suggest that AI might help us tackle polarisation and disinformation. That’s the same as saying Jesus could help us shore up our democracies. There are a lot of ifs.

If we accept this is our generational task, we can get further sooner

We really are better than this. We are more than capable of grappling with this generational task, reshaping society so that our kids don’t grow up in some shitty 90s sci fi dystopia, but a society that is actually with investing our strength and energy and dreams in.

We need to accept this is our job, even if it feels like quite a task. Watching the world unravel while we do nothing will be far worse.

If you had to choose a role for yourself in this societal reorganisation, what would it be? Would you be a priest, and organiser, a resource gatherer, the person with the large purse? Being nothing is a very poor option.

Even as we look down the barrel of the gun that is fascism enabled by technology, it’s still awkward to talk about the things that communism got right. Apart from pulling whole generations from the indignity of subsistence and ensuring unparalleled social provision, one thing that communism also did was deliver feminism - from above.

From comrades

While that might sound distasteful, and it sure as hell was a long way from perfect, it did mean that growing up behind the Iron Curtain in the 80s, there was never a reason to suspect inequality between men and women. Everyone was a comrade. Women pursued science careers and had access to leadership that might have delighted their Western counterparts. To this day Eastern Europe has notably higher proportions of women doctors, scientists, and tech specialists than do countries that have enjoyed the more lauded freedoms of capitalism.

This is the point at which apologies and caveats are expected, and clear professions of faith that communism was also bad. Comparisons between then and now are however useful, as we take fast strides towards a new period of authoritarianism in human history, a fascist takeover of the architecture of the state solidified by the almighty tech-enabled distortion machine of social media and AI.

To French maids

Far-right autocracy has women back in the kitchen as trad wives, pushing out babies without paracetamol. Technology enshittifies our existence by proliferating misogyny on social media and through biased large language models that reshape social reality. Whole new generations of boys are steeped in dehumanising sexual norms driven by increasingly degrading and ubiquitous pornography. Before long, the cultural and social gains of the last few decades will seem like a woke hallucination.

The iconography of technofascism will have us in aprons and suspenders, in service to the bros, the pater familias, the mighty boss man. In the second brush with European autocracy of our lifetimes, we will not be comrades, but objects in service to strongmen, saucy French maids in all seriousness, without the nudge and without the wink.

What if the growing darkness of the far right is - regrettably for us all - grounded in a legitimate political claim? What if power in our societies has indeed been steadily usurped by economic and political elites, eroding into meaninglessness our collective controls over law and order, security, economic wellbeing and social protection?

After all, why do Europe’s figureheads have the swagger to disregard international law in a genocide? In whose name are they bowing to swindlers and autocrats? Why are they so coy in safeguarding us from the mind-altering cesspit of social media? How exactly are they ensuring that AI development is in service to our collective good, and not a very private profit motive? Where do they find the audacity to protect the rich from contributing to the common pot, while burning through social safety nets with perverse moral élan?

If society is run in the direct interest of a small number of people, the time has come to stop the machinery of the collective being misused in this way. It's time to replace the certifiably insane fictions that stop it from serving the interest of all. That have us staring into the abyss of genocide, planetary oblivion, mass destitution and a collective loss of faith in our own humanity. The outcome of this power heist is not pre-determined. We have a choice.

The best way to let Saturday afternoon roll into evening is with steely vigour. Come along, say what you think, roll up your sleeves, have a laugh and a drink with others who feel just like you.

We are a world away from a post-WWII consensus of collaboration, solidarity and care. Our moral poles have flipped entirely. Wherever we might find ourselves, we seem to have sleepwalked into a world underwritten by codes of venal self-interest. We all know this is not who we are as people. After all, we teach toddlers to share and care for others, yet we stay silent as some make sacks of gold from selling cigarettes to children and missiles to psychopaths. 

This winning mindset from which only a small number of humans profit holds us captive by feeding us the mockeries of separation - as Audre Lorde perfectly named them. The fiction that we face life alone, as individual units in an atomised multitude of difference, is profitable for those who want to sell us lipstick. For those who want our aspirations to seek no other channel than finding the right kind of sneakers – and certainly not to question a way of organising society that keeps private greed and callousness untouchable.

Things have gone too far already, enabled by our silence. Re-becoming a collective, a whole, a body of people who know right from wrong, requires a rewiring of our individualised selves, a re-coding of our ideas about what is real.

Come along so we can make a start, with honesty, laughter (yes) and a hopeful conversation.

When capitalism stood victorious over communism and the end of history was declared, opening the doors to an era of selfishness did not feel embarrassing in Eastern Europe, even though it was the antithesis of the collective norms by which our societies had been organised. A new morality of choice, freedom and democratic consent gave the new order legitimacy. It was to be an enlightened free-for-all, not brutal pillage. So enlightened did it appear, that for the couple of decades up until 9/11, even its militarised interventionist manifestations seemed like they were probably justified. All shall have democracy and free trade, whether they like it or not.

35 years on, consent is no longer required, West as much as East. The moral veneer is gone. Cheap vilification of the vulnerable is a popular outlet for our justice appetites. Capital dismantles our societal architecture, chainsaw in hand, ably fusing the technological means of mass disinformation and the legitimate levers of the nation state. Rule of law is now for pussies, democracy is for chickens. Strong men are in. Those who want Greenland can claim it. Children can go ahead and die of preventable diseases. It’s time to cut disability benefits, but never, ever to tax wealth.

The terms of engagement belong unilaterally to those with power, to be imposed over those without. Capitalism without the promise of consent is hurtling towards fascism. The dynamics of domination are reshaping everything, from our politics to our tariffed shopping baskets, from our imaginations to our sex lives.

Violence cannot be our only possible trajectory. Join us for a hopeful discussion and imagine a future worthy of our best selves.

We know we are better than the news updates that read like dystopian sci-fi every morning. But what specifically are we?

Late capitalism is a church without god, without heaven and without penance. Its monstrous glass and concrete temples signal power, but no promise of absolution. No reward, no relief, no angels, no virgins. Earth burns. Millions toil but cannot escape the precariat, their promised repay not even a pension, let alone comfort. Righteous and rightful pitchforked rage is harvested greedily by callous heirs of blood emerald mines and property speculation.

Our reality is immoral, illogical and unhopeful.

Whether we like it or not, western liberalism is right now the emptiest of promise of all contemporary doctrines. Even bloodthirsty autocrats offer something greater than the self, as we obsess over pronouns while forgetting to utter the value system that sits behind them - one of dignity for all.

We can give each other the confidence to voice and shape what being better than this means. Join us for a hopeful conversation.

I have not really known what to say or write lately, as the good people around me commiserate the fast-as-a-Tesla Trumpian unravelling of the US state architecture – and with it our collectively held norms of decency, the multilateral system and international solidarity, as first round victims.

 

Even a dyed-in-the-red-wool leftie like me can only watch aghast as the corporate plunderers of our collective pantry rip up their diversity policies to fit in with the new Nazi saluting zeitgeist. Even the most misanthropic cynic must have read with some revulsion the instruction to the besieged people of Gaza that they find new homes abroad, while their homeland is redeveloped into a Middle Eastern Riviera under US ownership. Whoever took the official photo of the inauguration of the new Belgian government has an artist’s eye for the sombreness of these times.

 

I have sympathy with those who look to our remaining system levers for countering this wave of harm – yet this is akin to pleading with the Romanian Communist Party hierarchy in the autumn of 1989. Our own apparatchiks are busy dining out on the scriptures of the last four decades, offering up a smorgasbord of regurgitated delusions of growth and deregulation for competitive advantage.

 

The way forward from here is closer to faith than it is to town planning. It’s no bureaucratic challenge, but a test of our essential character. If we are better than this, we ought to congregate and be counted. Name what we are and should be and do the hard work to make it happen. It’s a return to integrity. 

 

Join us for a fiercely hopeful conversation

In the Deep Thought series, Andreea offers opportunities to interrogate our ideas of what is normal and desirable in society. Together we walk towards the mindset shifts that are needed to protect our planet, make the world safe and ensure lives and dignity and meaning for all. Deep Thought is a space for courage and authenticity, with no stone left unturned. We build trust, encourage each other and take action together.

2025 starts with a caricatural crystallization of the value system that has made possible the dominance of capital over our societies in the last couple of centuries, and probably the feudalism that preceded it. The tyranny of self-interest. Invade whoever you like, pillage what pleases you, buy Greenland, extract rent, “grab them by the pussy”. Be free to say and do exactly as you like. Develop dystopian technology for your own profit, manipulate and lie for your self-advancement. Enslave, exploit, dupe, threaten – as long as you come out on top. Let the Earth go up in flames, you won’t be around long enough to fully face the consequences. “Externalities” are someone else’s problem - amen. 

Today’s moral reckoning means it makes sense to start disowning these selfish permits. We can be unlike Trump and Musk, unlike Putin, unlike De Wever, unlike Le Pen and also unlike each and every member of a tired and mediocre elite who can’t countenance a way of being that upsets our selfish moral code. 

Our complicity can be cured. Our systems can still tame the techno fiefdoms, they can legislate to protect us, and flick the “off” switch if they must. Care, respect, sharing, looking after our commons, looking after each other, ensuring no one has to face their vulnerability alone - this can be the moral code that fills our airwaves. This is the purpose of society. As the tech bros of disinformation and incitement profit from our disarray, nothing (but fear) stops us from dancing to a better moral tune.

Our problems are not failures of reason, they are failures of values. Putting this right starts with naming what should be, and there’s no time like the present. Join us for a hopeful exchange and flick the moral switch.

Social norms, including sexual norms, are socially constructed. They are our collective inventions and tacitly accepted conventions. There were times in European history, not so long ago, when the sight of bare ankles might have sent pulses racing. Today we are less easily impressed. 

Where the Church once held regulatory power over our bonking, modern appetites are rather more readily shaped by commercial strategy. Commercial determinants of human desire vary vastly, spanning from mass cultural products such as music, film and literature, to advertising and – not least, pornography. Power over our sex lives is advantageous for some and less so for others, as in other eras throughout history.

While it’s hardly a social taboo to talk about our sexual appetites, it’s nevertheless difficult to critique contemporary sexual norms without appearing puritanical. As women, we are no prudes. We discipline our bodies, starving our appetites and plucking out our body hair, in the name of sexual freedom. We feign delight at being choked and spat on, we push the boundaries of what our bodies deem tolerable. From time to time, we gasp in horror at stories of pensioners being raped by dozens of men while unconscious, without a single one questioning whether or not it was an acceptable thing to do.

If we were tasked with crafting the sorts of sexual norms we’d want our daughters and sons to grow up with, what would they be like? Is kinder sex still sexy? Who gets to decide? Join us for a hopeful, if slightly awkward conversation.