If women ruled the world.

That’s something that I have always grappled with. I’ve always been curios about what it would be like if most of the world wasn’t patriarchal. What if the situation was reversed?

As a child, I was under the impression that if women ruled the world, we would have many fewer wars. Shooting someone you don’t agree with just seems like such a typically male response to things. Besides, weapon design is just something that guys do. Its not to say that women wouldn’t be able to develop incredibly destructive devices if they wanted to. Its just that the compulsion to destroy and blow things up is not quite wired into them. The same way that women generally don’t see the need to build a machine that can travel at 250 miles an hour. There is a difference between a designer with passion and a designer who is doing his/her job. A man will build a gun with a gleam in his eye. A woman will do it to get a chore out of the way. So, no guns, fewer wars right?

Maybe. Maybe not. Women might have less violent approaches to conflict resolution, but that doesn’t mean that they are any less likely to enter conflict. Differences in opinion will reach boiling point, and how an entire planet of female leaders will respond is something I’ve always wondered about. We can’t take examples of past female nation leaders for two reasons.

The first, is that any female leader who comes into power she already has guns at her disposal, backed by a bunch of testosterone filled male generals. What I am interested in is a world that is matriarchal in nature. A world where the entire cabinet is made out of women, the same way many cabinets in the world now are filled with men. How would they respond to the cultural clashes and religious feuds that are bound to crop up?

The second is that any female leader who has risen up the ranks in the past have done so by emulating their male colleagues. They is something very masculine about them. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t known as the iron lady for no reason. I don’t know Helen Clarke all that well, but judging from the way the Australs debaters spoke about her, I don’t think she is all that different. What I would like to see is a woman in power who deal with a situation like a typical woman would. I’m having a very hard time imagining what that would be like.

There will probably be a lot fewer explosions. Fewer ripped limbs. Fewer dramatic images of mothers grieving in front of rubble left behind after a bombing. But I cannot believe that the absence of bullets will equate to the absence of suffering.

I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say with this post. To be honest, even if I knew the answers to the questions I have asked, it wouldn’t matter, since that world is about as real as a typical Malaysian is punctual. Its just something I think about when I have nothing better to do.