is the world ready for a woman to lead the most powerful nation on EARTH?

c: I found an image in the news of a male politician laying unconscious and flat on his face having been punched out by another politician who opposed his views.  I guess you can call that, men at work.  I wonder, would there be any different if women were leaders.   

h: I think that’s the question on every mind right now.  In a world with negative connotations that feminine is weak, emotional and hormonal, what would it mean to have a woman as head of the world’s premier superpower as opposed to a man who’s famous for his sexist remarks and who has no idea what it means to govern.  However, he certainly knows how to get people’s attention.

c: A great quote her from A North Carolina mother — Trump’s lack of compassion is a strength. American women would benefit most from a businessman running the country.  Hillary Clinton is not a take-charge person, Obama is too “soft-spoken and “let things get out of hand. Trump knows that women want: security.  He knows women want good jobs, women want a strong economy, he will be good for women’s health … He makes women feel like ‘we got y’all.’”

h: I would say she likely hasn’t done a lot to research on what Trump actually stands for.  I see the appeal of having a businessman running the country, but in him I see the rich exploiting those who are in less than ideal circumstances.  I see the US doing this over and over again and I see him taking that even further.  Some people believe we need a catalyst right now to really change things and for people to be angry enough actually want change.  If he does catalyze it there will be an enormous surge in suffering, at least until we reach that breaking point.

c: If anyone remembers the movie Aliens Vs Predator, the slogan for that film was: no matter who wins, we lose.  This seems to be the fate facing America in this election.  Even Clinton as a woman does not represent overarching womanhood.  She represents a certain class of woman, but those who fall outside a particular profile are not welcome in her camp.  Women of color, of ethnic backgrounds or women in challenging social situations, like single moms. Obama seemed to have an appeal that even if you didn’t share his political platform 100%, he was still compelling enough that people would glom onto him.  Clinton doesn’t seem to have that appeal.

h: I think that people are still more open to trusting a black male president than to put their faith into a female president.  Again for so long it’s been that women are unfit for leadership.  The deviance factor of being a woman in leadership I believe creates disdain in a lot of the public eye. I believe that her platform and her marketing strategy has been I don’t care so much about the statistics, I care about the individual and that each individual story creates the statistics.  You lose so much when you’re just looking at numbers and you’re not hearing from the heart.  Heck, even those words would scare a lot of people away from voting for her because you’re talking about heart and emotion and caring about people when we need somebody who is strong and is not going to be swayed and can lead with conviction.  It’s as though you can’t have conviction and lead from the heart.

c: Very interesting world you used, marketing strategy.  That’s what infuriates me about all this is that it comes down to your marketing strategy.  It’s about how you position yourself to get as many votes as possible.  It doesn’t mean that you stand for any of the things that you position yourself in front of, or that you are authentic about it.  I have a quote here from a woman who says she cringes when Clinton goes into her feminine mode because she is far from that.  This comes back to our theme, can a feminine woman actually lead a nation? All the female leaders that have come to fame were not feminine women.

h: they lived in the masculine.

c: Margaret Thatcher was not warm and fuzzy, she was the Iron Lady.

h: But do you have to be warm and fuzzy to be feminine?

c: You don’t necessarily need to be feminine, however, there is a quality of feminine that has to be stripped away for these women to step forward into leadership, or least that’s the way it has been.  They have had to put on the cast iron face and go out there and…

h: Demand respect from men.  We just don’t have a lot of examples to see a woman in her nurturing self in leadership.

c: And is that what a nation would seek in their leader?

h: Do we even see that nurturing quality as a leadership quality?  We don’t have a lot of examples of that worldwide.

c: History,  in the times of queens and goddesses. The position as leader was tied to motherhood and women were revered for that quality.  That has completely disappeared.  Now it’s about force and having no one dare oppose you.

h: One interesting comment that I heard coming from the premier of Ontario was that she has steered away from hierarchical conversations and made it a collaboration instead.  She said that when she conducted herself in that way that is when the magic happened. To me, that’s very feminine, very nurturing, and compassionate.  It’s about how do we work as a group. I thought that this was an expression of her living in her feminine and being a leader.

c: Is she in charge of the most powerful nuclear arsenal on the planet? And how would that work?

h: She would hopefully talk with all of the world leaders before pressing that button.  I find it interesting that emotion is so tightly tied to women when I’ve seen more men succumb to their emotions of anger…

c: Yeah but that’s allowed.  This came out in a post for Humans of New York, it’s Hillary’s comments about one of her first learned skill as a politician.  

“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. That’s a hard path to walk.  Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem walled off.” 

c: So emotion, considered a strong asset for the feminine is the first quality that has to be stripped away for women entering a political career.  The ability to feel deeply, with compassion, and empathy along and the ability to connect to others through that must be amputated from female politicians.

h: If you want to be in leadership then give up all the things that are considered feminine.  How long have we heard that narrative?  I think that’s why we sit in the world we are in today because that has been the reality for so long.

c: My hope is that if a woman is elected to the highest office on the planet that she would bring qualities of the feminine.  I don’t see these in Hillary Clinton where it is from the heart, with power. The question is not whether American is ready to elect a female president, but whether the fractious nature of politics in Washington: deepening racial tension, growing socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots creates a perfect storm for which a collaboratively-inclined leader can be the cure.  Is Hillary that leader?

h: I think she’s more of that than Trump . He is more about a divide.  Let’s build a wall, let’s have a greater divide between the have’s and the have not’s.

c: Maybe the system needs to be broken before it can be fixed.

h: I fell though that with the right leadership we can actually put things back together and find the right glue through collaboration. I just feel the devastation will be so detrimental if the system were to collapse.  But maybe I’m just scared.

c: A lot of people still have their eyes closed. There are a lot of problems that can go very wrong very faston many different levels.  So do you take a sledgehammer to it, and a lot of people will suffer yes, but sometimes you need to destroy what is in order to build something that will work better.  That’s really frightening because the entire world will feel the effects. 

h: In the same vein, a lot of the world is already suffering.  We are still living in colonialism.  There are superpowers that will not give much of a hand up to have-not nations.  We have all seen the horror coming out of middle eastern countries and we get so desensitized.

c: I remember seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda and being devastated.  I sat motionless in the theater for half an hour after the closing credits.  At the time I didn’t know anything about what was going on in that country; how savage it was.   I felt completely ashamed.  The same thing as is happening in the world today.  We have no idea the reality of these people and their suffering.

h: It’s not living it’s just surviving, and they don’t even know how long that will last.

c: So here we are in our comfortable homes and with our cars, and I don’t say this to disparage what we have built, but we say that because we are desensitized, but the truth is we are not even connected.  

h: So where my heart is at is how do we proliferate our standard of living to the rest of the globe.

c: So how do we get that, how do we get a leader, how do we get leadership, how do we get people into power who bring this collaboration you speak of.  If we speak in masculine and feminine terms, masculine is where we are, it has brought us to this point in history and if we were to change that dynamic would it even make a difference?  How do we measure and predict that difference?  Do we have to take a leap of faith?  And are we putting a feminine woman in position, or are we putting a woman in her masculine in position?

h: That’s just more of the same. Maybe it’s when we do find a female leader, finding the right mechanisms for keeping her accountable to collaboration.  I think that comes down to different forms of governance…

c: Can you govern that, can you governance that?

h: I think there are ways to open up a conversation towards policy…

c: The heart, the heart, can you write governances for the heart?

h: I think you can.  Once you’re open to hearing the heart-wrenching stories to where the flaws are in our system and take it to your heart that some of these tragedies can be mitigated.

c: I’ll offer this, I believe we are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong direction when we talk about this energy of feminine vs masculine in leaders.  We consider the concept of feminine and we see it as associated with a certain sex.  I believe that some of the most effective leaders in history have been men who had access to their own feminine.  They had the power, and the heart.  I believe we are not necessarily looking for a female or a male leader, we are looking for a quality that encompasses compassion, collaboration, and love forged into powerful leadership. 

h: I would have to agree whether that be a well-rounded individual or leader.

c+h