Radical hope: keeping a candle burning in the dark

In dark times, independent media voices like the ones you find here are crucial, particularly when it comes to Queenagers and older women

Photo by David Monje on Unsplash

Dear Queenagers

As a recovering hack, I find weeks when there are huge news stories challenging. There’s a bit of me that longs to be back in the adrenaline-fuelled post-news-conference meeting where the real decisions were taken. I loved ‘the knowing’ – that sense of being at the heart of the first draft of history.

Watching President Trump take power; seeing him sign orders intended to remove the USA from everything from the Paris Climate Accords, to the World Health Organisation; ditching Diversity Equity and Inclusion and (worst) saying he will expel anyone who is in the country illegally (even if they have been there for 30 years) was quite a thing.

Most notable to me is how quickly the media world in particular is shifting towards his agenda. The Tech Bros can smell the money; cash for missions to Mars (Elon Musk), more power and influence for a Facebook with no fact checkers (Mark Zuckerberg). Less discussed is how Jeff Bezos, Mr Amazon, who now also owns the Washington Post (once the paper that broke Watergate) broke with history by failing to endorse a Presidential candidate this time (Bezos didn’t want to be on the wrong side of Trump). And there he was, next to Mr Google, in the front row at the inauguration.

And its not just in America. Much of the British media swung in behind Trump too. “Trump is humiliating his woke enemies and it’s a joy to watch” screamed the Telegraph last week, while one of their columnists wrote: “Why we Brits envy the US having Donald Trump”.

So while there is a bit of me that yearns for the drama of a big breaking news story, there is a new, larger, part which feels liberated. These days I can write exactly what I want with no fear of my true views or feelings not being acceptable (which used to happen a lot) and no fear of writing against what the proprietor would wish. Here, we are free to express our Queenager viewpoint, see the world through our older female lens. At this moment, that feels like a huge boon. (If you’d like to see more of my work, come to a NOON event, or sign up to receive newsletter - which is now sent from my own website, please visit Noon).

Watching Trump, surrounded by his powerful Tech Bro sycophants, I thought back to my visit to Facebook HQ in Silicon Valley in early 2020. I’d gone there to interview Sheryl Sandberg for International Women’s Day (the article was the cover of the magazine I then edited and the puff on the paper’s masthead). While I was in Palo Alto I was invited to dinner by Nick Clegg and his wonderful wife Miriam Gonzales (we’d met through her Inspiring Girls organisation where I had been a mentor). The house was pure Dynasty, knee high picket hedges and legions of staff in white aprons with silver trays. The supper was an intimate affair for about 10 with some Facebook insiders, some other Clegg friends from the UK and me. I started chatting to Nick (who left his role at Facebook last month, just as Zuckerberg switched his allegiance to Trump) about media barons and political influence. I’m sure I don’t need to remind all of you that Nick Clegg was once the UK’s deputy prime minister during the LibDem/Tory coalition; or that at the time I was a senior executive at News UK. It is a matter of historical record how Thatcher, Tony Blair and then David Cameron courted the Murdoch press and its powerful proprietor. Nick argued vehemently that night about how, although the tech moguls now had more power than someone like Rupert Murdoch, they were not yet wielding it or using it politically in the way that press barons traditionally did.

Sometimes five years feels like a long time; the array of new-media-tech-bro barons sitting in the front row at Trump’s inauguration shows just how quickly that changed. These days Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are fully MAGA’d up, inside the tent with Trump. When Trump was first elected, it was Murdoch he courted and who was on the end of the phone. These days the power of social media and its platforms eclipses even the reach of Fox News (which was at the centre of the drama in the first Trump election as the TV series Succession so brilliantly depicts).

So why does this matter? Well as the world shifts into a macho, strong-man era, where women’s rights are eroded (abortion anyone?) alongside protections or help for those who enter the world from a place of disadvantage (the point of DEI) I feel passionately that it is going to be up to places like NOON to keep burning the candle of hope for a different, more inclusive, female and progressive way of being.

In a more masculine, combative era, with a UK press skewing dramatically to the right: The Sun, The Times, The Telegraph, Daily Mail (even outlets such as the outwardly liberal I-Paper are owned by Associated Newspapers, the parent company of the Mail). That leaves on the left only the financially depleted Mirror and The Guardian (which can be just as biased but from the left).

In this media landscape, it is going to be increasingly important to keep making the case for a different, female, progressive, older, inclusive point of view. One which argues passionately that women don’t, (as the Gen Z Bible goes) Owe Men Pretty, that females are not here just to be eye-candy or pussy-groped by alpha males (like Trump), or breed their children (Elon Musk’s view of females) - but that our experiences and our lives matter. That we should have control of our own narrative and our own bodies.NOON

In a world where women’s rights are under assault from Afghanistan to Washington, and we have an American President who has been found guilty in a civil case of rape and brags about how he gropes women, it looks like the next five years are going to be testing.

So what can we do? Well for one thing spaces like NOON and our Queenager community can act like a beacon and a rallying place for a different point of view. And rather than despairing, we need to engage in radical hope. I’ve just been re-reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark: The untold History of People Power. She explains that all big social changes have arisen because a small group of people got together and made the argument. Often it took years – look at the fight to get women the vote, that took a century and we are still pushing for equality now. There have been ebbs and flows. Recently I have been feeling a little despondent; for the first time in my adult life I began to think that perhaps women have got as far as they are going to get in terms of equality. I’d always believed that the generation behind us Queenagers would land far higher up the beach than we have. Now I wonder whether rather than being the forward troops, with a mighty army forging behind us to travel further, we are actually as high as the tide is going to get… But then I re-read Hope in the Dark and I changed my mind.

Solnit writes: “Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone, or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement: pessimists take the opposite position; both exclude themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter and who and what it may impact are not things we can know beforehand. We may not in fact know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone….hope is a dimension of the soul… an orientation of the spirit, of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well.. but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes millions are stirred by the same outrage, the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change in the weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. To hope is dangerous and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I found this profoundly comforting. Things may feel dark now but we have co-created a space where different values can flourish. As I look around the bleak media landscape of Tech Bros and cover-ups, bias and illegal acts I thank the new technologies and indeed social media for the way it allows individuals like me and groups of women like us to speak to each other without our words and thoughts being censored by a proprietor. I am grateful for the freedom to write these words today without having to persuade a phalanx of chaps to let me write them, or publish them. When I interviewed the Dalai Lama years ago he said to me: “If you ever think you are too small to make a difference, think about spending a night in a room with a mosquito”.

Women’s suffrage came about eventually because women like us organised and made the case for it. Similarly we can keep pushing for a new narrative about what women are for: we are not just here to be breeders and eye candy for men like Trump or Musk. We matter in and of ourselves. As we age, we move into our power and wisdom – that has value in and of itself, even if this toxic macho male lens doesn’t recognise it. Of course it is not ALL men; the majority are lovely and suffer as much from the antics of a few Alpha leaders under patriarchy as women do. The world Musk and Trump want to build will work for the few, not the many; despite the MAGA promises of a better world for all.

So while the next years play out, let’s in the immortal words of Voltaire “Cultiver notre Jardin” – keep making the arguments for Queenager power and why we matter. We might feel we are being submerged by a mighty tide pulling in the opposite direction, but if we keep our candle burning, our hope alive, we can remain a beacon of possibility. That there is another way; a different approach, a better way to be.

Six weeks ago, we launched our NOON Fundraiser – I am so grateful to all of you lovely people who donated. Your money is helping us to expand the NOON Circles across the UK (and the world), paying for our new Supporting Queenagers series (do check out some of our events on divorce) and allowing NOON to keep making the case for a new story about the value of older women;that we have so much more to give, that there really is Much More to Come. The Crowdfunder is still live – if you’d like to help us keep the hope candle burning, consider becoming a Paid Member of NOON or donating.

Have a lovely Sunday. And thank you.

Xx

Eleanor