Women

What is your favourite women-to-women public conversation?

It’s not a trick question. There are thousands of them on television, film, radio, theatre and online, but if you can’t think of one you are more likely to be male, and by no means alone. The simple act of men setting aside time to listen to what women say to each other when they have no specific agenda is, I suspect, uncommon.

Casual men-bashing is tedious, so I will not lament that the internet is full of men who enjoy talking to each other, often about nothing in particular. These conversations are presented as arenas of intellectual inquiry but they are more like group therapy sessions by stealth, in which men meet their emotional needs for connection, belonging, status, and the experience of attending and being attended to - that’s no bad thing! The problem is that the protagonists and their audiences often seem to believe their conversations apply to the world as a whole, rather than a fairly limited perspective on it, and they typically fail The Bechdel Test.

The Bechdel Test is about female representation in fiction, particularly regarding how women are portrayed in films. To pass the Bechdel Test, a movie must meet three criteria:

1. It has at least two women in it.

2. The women talk to each other.

3. The conversation is about something other than a man.

The test is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who popularized it in a comic strip in 1985. It’s often used as a simple way to gauge the presence of meaningful female characters in films. The test is contentious and feels dated, but the spirit of it matters a lot. I wonder how it applies to today’s media landscape and why I care.

My father did all he could with a mind ravaged by schizophrenia, but I was raised mostly by a single mother, known to others as Lesley. I can’t thank Mum enough - and probably don’t - for the quiet heroism of keeping the show on the road. There were boys and men in the picture, including friends, chess teachers, a difficult stepfather, my wayward brother Mark, and especially my Grandad - my mum’s father, who held the household well. Yet much of my childhood was characterised by lateral support (alloparenting) from aunties. I use that term in the charming way that ‘aunty’ is used in Indian English to refer to older female acquaintances of the family (many were cousins, some were my mum’s friends).¹

The ambient aunties (a great band title) were just there somehow, with their cars to collect me, their homes to go to, their abundant baked potatoes, their surprise trips to the cinema, their wooden jigsaw puzzles, and their benign curiosity about my life. And now that I think of it, all of my primary school teachers, and most of my secondary school teachers were women. I spent many years in a predominantly male environment in the chess world, and perhaps as a means of balancing that, I have always had female friends. Last but by no means least, I’ve known my wife, Siva, for over half my life. I am rarely sure what I think about something until I’ve asked myself what Siva might think about it too. So when people say that women hold up half the sky, I get it. The only thing I doubt is whether it’s just half.²

I share this potted biography to help contextualise a feeling and to frame an inquiry. At a visceral level, my personal life taught me that women know things in ways that I recognise and need but don’t always understand and cannot hope to emulate. As an adult, particularly in recent years, while working on the metacrisis, I have noticed something different - not so much the presence of women, but their absence.

**

There are some more generalisations ahead. William Blake famously said that to generalise is to be an idiot, which is a wonderful generalisation and, by definition, an idiotic thing to say. Part of the metamodern sensibility is a capacity for what I coin now as propulsive tentative generalisations or PTGs. PTGs are not factual statements, but lightly held provocations to stimulate inquiry.

So, stand back for the incoming PTG:

Men should listen to women talking to each other in public arenas, and women can help by showing up there more often.

I know it is hardly the secret of fire, but I believe this suggestion is more important than it might first appear. The Who-is-talking and Who-is-listening question matters because communication is not just about what is said, but what a speech situation makes it possible, permissible, and intelligible to say. When the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami says that what is needed is “not words and promises, but the steady accumulation of small realities” I believe he’s talking about small realities like women showing up more often in public arenas, and men listening.

In the language of the futures practice called the three-horizon model, this issue is directly relevant to the problem of First Horizon Gossip because male-dominated gossip tends to perpetuate certain patterns of collective attention, and it’s relevant to The H2minus Vortex because I think women often remain silent even when their bullsh*t detectors are beeping loudly. This point also informs ‘H2plus method’ because we need different kinds of inquiry where, for instance, somatic data and intuition are conferred epistemic status, and we recognise and reward skill in speaking of the ineffable. This transformative innovation can be informed by vision in the third horizon, for instance, through intimations of a culture in which masculine and feminine principles are in better balance (more on that below).

There is some strong indicative data that the long-form podcast format listened to predominantly by men was critical to Trump’s election victory. That point applies generally, but some believe Kamala Harris not being willing to talk with podcast hyper-agent Joe Rogan for an unstructured three hours was a particularly bad mistake (Trump’s Rogan Show appearance received well over 100 million downloads across platforms). On the touchlines last weekend, a father of one of my son’s football teammates said he found this Trump-Rogan conversation ‘reassuring’, which surprised me (because he seems sensible) and made me listen to the whole thing.

I hope I won’t have to endure Donald Trump and Joe Rogan stroking each other for three hours ever again. It was strenuous and I was not reassured, but it was useful digital ethnographic research.³

If a listener merely seeks to tune in to the public conversation and be entertained and informed, most will experience a friendly bro chat. If a listener is not hungry for a reality beyond opinion or curious about the details that will clarify the plans, then what is experienced is a kind of we-can-do-it-better solidarity. The main active ingredient of these podcasts is not the veracity of propositional statements but the palatability of interpersonal vibes and the assurance that what is being discussed is important. Trump was in charm mode and kept saying what “a great guy” everyone was while projecting confidence.

Since what is going on in these men-on-men podcasts is mostly about meeting emotional needs rather than winning arguments it appears that being in the conversation is what seems to matter, not answering questions as such. I don’t want to normalise Trump being a felon, a pathological liar, a traitor, and potentially a fascist. I am just observing that the man showed up in the main arena of the moment, and millions noticed that. The woman of the hour - Kamala Harris - did not show up, and millions noticed that too. Curiously, this kind of podcast arena - where the challenge is to hold an unstructured conversation for three hours - may now be the litmus test of authenticity and electability, and it appears to have eclipsed the institution of the Presidential Debate, which may never recover the status it had in the television era.

Like many, I have become weary of ‘conversations about conversations’, particularly the prevailing emphasis in progressive circles on who is talking at the expense of what they are saying, how they are saying it, and why it matters. There is a risk of the wrong kind of virtue signalling and precious time and energy can be squandered on the superficial end of identity politics - how things look rather than how they are.

And yet! Context - the nature of the arena and who is in it - is a kind of substance, too. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, then the medium should not always be male. The message should not be Elon Musk issuing declarations to his two hundred million followers, like Zeus with his thunderbolts raining down from Olympus. And if a conversation is a kind of world, and if, as Donna Haraway puts it, it matters what worlds world worlds, then it matters what kinds of embodied and encultured sensibility are present, because it shapes the atmosphere that delimits what can be said. It does matter who is present, who feels able or welcome to talk, who is dominating, who is reacting, who is not listening, who is absent, who is being silenced, and so on. There is a what, a how and a why inside every who, and the male and female who-dynamics are different.

I noticed the significance of this point on a relatively domestic day a few weeks ago when I was cleaning, hoovering, hanging up, changing bed sheets, and cursing my children in absentia for wet towels left on beds and errant food wrappers on the floor. During that time, I listened to Vanessa Andreotti talking with Najia Shaukat Lupson on The Entangled World podcast.

Later the same day, Elizabeth Oldfield messaged to say thanks for introducing her to Sarah Wilson with a link to the jointly hosted podcast on The Sacred Podcast and This is Precious where I get a nod from Sarah at the beginning for being ‘The World Chess Grandmaster’. That’s an overstatement, but a cheering one, and I ended up listening to the whole thing.

My point is not specific to these conversations, and I could note in passing, for instance, a good battle of ideas between Rachel Donald and Hannah Ritchie and a soulful connection between Krista Tippett and Joan Baez. However, they say that to praise in general is not to praise at all, so let me say a little more about the four particular women I listened to that day, who are doing what they can to shape the public conversation.

Najia Shaukat Lupson’s Entangled World podcast offers female leadership in a discussion space about the metacrisis that is dominated by (mostly white) men. I admire the simple fact that in the context of a busy family (she’s a mom) and work life (she works for the Civilisation Research Institute) she has shown up in public, taken the initiative and maintained the discipline of hosting a show - it’s a lot of additional organisational, intellectual and emotional work. Her introductory video is an excellent summary of the metacrisis, and the whole channel is worth your time - you can see at a glance that the cast list is not merely your usual suspects. I know from personal experience that Najia asks questions that are at once challenging and friendly, and in the interview with Vanessa she brought out aspects of her history and character that I was not previously aware of.

Vanessa Andreotti (previously Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is, I believe, a visionary and perhaps a genius. We haven’t met, so I fear taking liberties when I say that, on-screen, she resembles a relatively youthful, warm and female version of Yoda from Star Wars. I mean that in the old soul, wise, playful, and highest authority sense, rather than the - When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not - sense. Vanessa combines the epistemic and cultural agility that arises from a mixed heritage background, with a well-trained and wide-ranging intellect, leadership acumen, a teacher’s empathy for the learning process, a gift for metaphors, and a rare capacity to yoke personal experience to inform civilisational conundrums. I have read Hospicing Modernity and hope to write about it in more depth soon. I have also listened to Vanessa on other podcasts and I feel she is to metacrisis conversations (my language) what Cynthia Bourgeault is to spiritual innovation. She is ahead of the curve, having already relinquished what many still hold on to, and she is leading the way to somewhere better than progress.

Sarah Wilson is an Australian in Paris with all that implies for the combination of easy-going, straight-talking, taste and sophistication. Her work feels more journalistic than scholarly and that’s why her audience is large, varied and highly engaged. Yet her inquiries are intellectually ambitious and tenacious, and she is fearless and trustworthy in her attempts to make sense of complex phenomena of all kinds. Sarah has turned the non-fiction skill of combining personal narrative with political challenges into an art form. More generally, she has an all-conquering superwoman quality that is a little intimidating, but her writing is also full of emotional commitment and poignancy. I enjoyed my time on her show.

Liz Oldfield is one of the female friends I mentioned above, but our professional paths (and experiences) have crossed periodically over the last decade too. Liz confesses to having “main character energy” and she is a natural leader who shows up in public in a variety of ways, not least through her podcast, The Sacred, which is going from strength to strength. Liz was Christian long before it was cool, and she has brought many people into at least a more sympathetic relationship to religion, including myself, by modelling a different way of living and being, including her courage, strength-in-vulnerability, and an “allergy to small talk”. Her quality is evident in her book, Fully Alive, and in her Substack, for instance in this post wrestling with her feelings about money and in a recent Unherd debate about the apparent Christian Revival.

While I do want to praise these women and many like them, and share my wholehearted admiration for them, I don’t want to sound hagiographical because that defeats the purpose. There is an inequality of talent and opportunity, and there are leaders and exceptional achievers out there, yes. But it’s also true that we are all ordinary and extraordinary in different ways and times. These folk mentioned are like you and me, with limitations and imperfections, doing what they can with what they have, talking about what feels important to them in a way that inspires others. So it may help to say that Najia’s podcast remains niche for now, Vanessa’s pedagogical proclivity sometimes feels patronising - for instance when she spends the first 100 or so pages of her wonderful book advising people not to read it. Sarah’s share-it-with-the-world-let’s talk-it-over digital footprint is so large that it can feel like a hyperobject. Liz sometimes seems greedy for emotions, and I think she’s still trying to convert me…

**

But while I listened to these conversations, I noticed myself welling up. As unbidden tears approached the surface I asked myself why they were there.

“It is just such a relief to hear women talking freely to each other in a public forum”, they seemed to say, “that we wanted to let you know”.

Really? Well, yes. It surprised me, too.

I fear that it sounds pathetic to cry like that, a caricature of progressive over-sensitivity, sentimentality, and performativity, but I was alone and initially confused. Tears can arise from your eye trying to wash away misplaced grit, but sometimes tears are more like cosmic messengers, sent out by the imaginal realm as an upwelling from the interior. The conversations were good, but it was not their content that touched me it was their context. The feeling was about the context of two women speaking together out of mutual curiosity with no particular agenda for the public. That context intimated a larger pattern that needs to be brought into being, a pattern of female presence - showing up, and mutual recognition - finding and enjoying each other in public, that feels like a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for cultural renewal. I don’t fully understand why.

As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long­ dominant but now alienated masculine and the long­suppressed but now ascending feminine.

Is that why my tears were sent into battle? Those are the words of Richard Tarnas in his stunning epilogue to The Passion of the Western Mind where he argues towards the end (p23 onwards) that the next phase in the evolution of consciousness is a necessary integration of masculine and feminine qualities; that integration is not without pain and sacrifice but is ultimately for the greater good, and it has some resonance with final participation in Owen Barfield’s terms, or an integral consciousness in Jean Gebser’s terms. These models of the evolution of consciousness typically speak to a primal unconscious union leading to differentiation, an awareness of differentiation without union, and then a differentiated union.

The feminine then becomes not that which must be controlled, denied, and exploited, but rather fully acknowledged, respected, and responded to for itself. It is recognized: not the objectified "other," but rather source, goal, and immanent presence…

Again Tarnas. And, yes, maybe. Yet in the meantime, there is Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu et al, to contend with, and in different ways Starmer, Macron and Scholtz too. The problem is rarely just men, but men’s distorted love of attention and craving for power. Unless you read a bad comic, the aim is never to supplant men with women. It is naive to deny that women love attention and power too. They have shadows just as we do, and they are not always kind to each other.

However, I see at least two helpful ways of looking at the pattern I am alluding to.

The first way is informed by Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour, work and action; these correspond broadly to surviving, producing and creating. The issue is less about women (or men) ‘working’ in the professional realm, which is often merely about society reproducing itself through capitalism. The contention is that the rebalancing needed is for men to do relatively more of the labour - the dishes/laundry/logistics/feeding cycles - so that women can do relatively more of the action - the new ideas, alliance keeping, culture-making and institution building. Another way to put that is that if men want more women to show up in the public realm, they need to show up in the private realm. I hesitate to use myself as an example, but my best work over the last two years has been Siva’s work.⁴

The second point concerns what it means to invite in ‘the sacred feminine’ or ‘the divine feminine’ as described in religious and philosophical traditions, esoteric understanding, and spiritual practice. I am at the edge of my competence here, but I believe there is a there there, or perhaps even a here.

For instance, the simple thought that God has a mother in the Christian tradition is mind-blowing because it implies there is a female quality that is metaphysically before Jesus. And while the role of ‘the feminine’ could simply - and yet profoundly - mean Yin balancing Yang, it might also be about working with energetic centres in the body to summon Shakti, or attending to cyclical time and lunar logics, or it might mean travelling to a safe space to make direct contact with Mother Ayahuasca.⁵

And it’s not all about motherhood, homemaking, or even creativity. There is Saraswati and Lakshmi, yes, but then there is Durga and Kali - sometimes feminine love means being fierce, even violently protective. And then there are feminist theologians like Catherine Keller, who offers a process philosophy and mythopoetic take on the creation story; for instance, noting that the translation of Genesis need not be in THE beginning, but rather “In beginning”, that God is not omnipotent and more like a persuader than a ruler, and creation never comes before relationships, and it may have failed several times before it worked.⁶

There are of course important distinctions between male and female on the one hand, and masculine and feminine on the other; some see these as entirely different things - one sociological and the other spiritual; but some feel the significance of the overlap and I am in the latter group (informed by Perspectiva’s systems, souls and society premise). There are also important distinctions between different kinds of feminine, none of which is about feminism directly, but that conceptual work is not mine to carry, at least not today. Moreover, I know women who dislike the term ‘feminine’ for being adjacent to femininity and all that implies about being demur, gentle and yielding.

F*** that, they say.

Yet surely these things, while distinct, are all somewhat related? I can’t speak to the meaning of the divine feminine or its place in the evolution of consciousness with any authority, but I am interested to hear from others who can. I say this because I suspect if there is any meaningful sense in which ‘the feminine’ can help save humanity from itself, it will begin to manifest in female epistemology, expressed through women reshaping the public domain through their action in the Arendt sense, populating public space and leading it in ways that haven’t been seen before. I don’t know what that means or how it looks, but I think it starts with women getting together.⁷

**

I am not merely saying that men should listen to women, though that’s true (and yes, vice-versa; though then the injunction feels misplaced and oppressive). Nor am I making the point that men should proactively seek out female authors and speakers to accelerate and enrich their learning, though that’s true too; in passing let me note my friend Vanessa Chamberlain recently ‘showed up’ with some beautiful reflections here on Substack, and that the formidable human rights lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh gave a rousing speech on the subject at hand at the Irish Tatler Women of the Year awards. The other well-trodden suggestion is that women should speak up in public more often, even when, and especially when, they are not quite sure how to say what they feel needs to be said, and that trying to may make things worse. In such cases, the challenge is to eff the ineffable as my PhD supervisor Guy Claxton once put it.

That’s all adjacently relevant, but it’s not my specific point.

I wrote this post to highlight the potential importance of three particular co-arising active ingredients. Together they create emergent properties with cultural value that may have cosmic significance (yes, really). I wonder if I’ve even created a new variant of The Bechdel Test for our existing and emerging media landscape in which the aim is to achieve:

1. Women talking to each other.

2. In public.

3. Men listening.

But here’s the challenge as I’ve experienced it. When I ask some women: You complain about men talking, but why don’t you show up and speak up more often? Their answer is usually something like: “Well, where do I start? Your context, your premises, and your expectations all militate against it. I don’t recognise myself in the context of your arena and don’t want to speak from a place of exile.”

I have noticed something resembling this feeling of not being able to talk in the context of Gaza. The analogy is contentious, and I don’t want to go there now, but the endnote gives some context. In light of the discomfort elicited by the emotional heat of the issue, I want others to keep talking about it. I share this parallel to convey that I have some sense of what it feels like to have things to say, and yet not want to speak.⁸

And of course, I can’t speak for women. Yet I imagine many women often experience a kind of entanglement, in which so much of the default male context and framing feels wrong, so much that is felt is not recognised or attended to, and so much that is expected feels misplaced. I am not sure what can be done about that, but I suspect it is about experimenting with different conversational forms, and women taking the lead. As Richard Rorty put it:

A talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.

I’ll end with a recommendation shared by another female friend, Pippa Evans, in the context of noting that the inclination to take to the microphone and speak to an audience as an individual with something important to say, definitely leans male. As an alternative way of performing, she highlighted Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, surrounded by admirers on and off the stage. Joni is still the star, but everyone seems to feel the starlight as their own, and she is all the more star-like for being part of a constellation.

I don’t know what follows, but I’m keen to hear from you in the comments.

1. The title of this post was going to be ‘Ambient Aunties’ inspired by watching Paddington in Peru over the weekend, where the plot revolves around Paddington’s love of his Aunt Lucy, and his determination to find her at all costs. I chickened out because there is something puerile about that expression, and it could easily be misconstrued.

2. This beautiful expression was initially a Chinese proverb, popularised by *checks notes, oh no it’s Mao Zedong…* It has been used so much over the last fifty years that it seems to have transcended its origin story.

3. Imagine a dystopian novel, perhaps 2024, in which it is mandatory for all citizens to listen to repeated conversations between Trump and Rogan…

4. Details of Arendt’s threefold distinction is all over the internet, but I came across it in the excellent series on intellectual history called Talking Politics by David Runciman.

5. In Christianity, it could be about rediscovering the meaning of Mary Magdalen through the work of Cynthia Bourgeault.

6. I encountered these ideas through a lecture by Matt Segal.

7. There might well be a case for building energy in private first, perhaps collectively. In an earlier essay on Witch Envy, I suggest that the emergent properties arising from women being together led to them being separated as a matter of social control, but if that’s right, it is passed time not only to relinquish that control, but to actively encourage those emerging properties. Even so, whatever the energy and emergent properties of c it needs to manifest publicly. If that’s right, men could help by tuning in to whatever is required to help make that possible, which might sometimes mean making way or stepping aside - the ‘ego death’ that Tarnas speaks of. In most cases, however, it probably just means showing up differently, and perhaps primarily to listen.

8. It has become too painful to think and talk about what is happening in the Middle East. I have public views on the matter which I feel deeply because I’m human, but hold lightly because I’m an amateur living in London with no direct skin in the game. I recognise a complex and contested history of tragedy and trauma and an enduring threat to a nation (Israel) but mostly I see genocide and genocide denial cloaked in racism and islamophobia. I see antisemitism too, but not to the same degree in this context. I have lost friends over varying perceptions of security, what is necessary, what can be justified, and what can’t. The issue complicates my feelings about the West’s support for Ukraine, which I have cared about for some time. If America (and to a lesser extent the UK) is diplomatically and militarily supporting the killing of thousands of children in Palestine, it feels strange to support it in providing more weapons for war in Eastern Europe, even if the context is very different. Life would be much simpler if The USA, Israel and Ukraine were on one side, my side; and Iran, Hamas and Russia were on the other, but I can’t see it that way anymore, so dissonance arises. Attending with compassion to Gaza makes calls into question all the years in which I assumed I was on the right side of history. With that kind of confounding awareness, it’s hard to resist a moral collapse to relativism and nihilism. The desire not to speak out on Gaza more often might be cowardly on my part, or it might just be that it’s not my life, and not my battle to fight, and who cares what I think, but I do feel somehow silenced on the matter, and not by anyone in particular.