Dear Queenagers
As a recovering hack, there’s a bit of me that longs to be back in the adrenaline-fuelled post-news-conference meeting. I loved “the knowing” – that sense of being at the heart of the first draft of history. But this newsletter will be less about knowledge and more about hope.
Watching President Trump take power this week; 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 (worse) saying he will expel anyone who is in the country illegally (even if they have been there for 30 years) was quite a thing.
- Queenager story: ‘How I became a gardener in midlife’
- Sheryl Sandberg on NOON: ‘It’s fantastic’
- Catherine Mayer on the physicality of grief
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). And of course, there were Zuckerberg’s comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast: that corporations are ‘neutered’ and need more ‘masculine energy’.
Less discussed is how Jeff Bezos, Mr Amazon, who now also owns The Washington Post(which reported the Watergate scandal) broke with history by failing to endorse a Presidential candidate (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.
We’re seeing the Trump effect in the UK
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 a bit of me yearns for the drama of a big breaking news story, there’s a new part which feels liberated, able to express exactly what I want – no fear of being “unacceptable” (which used to happen a lot).
I see so many of us feeling freer to express our Queenager viewpoints. At this moment, that feels like a huge boon. (That’s what makes Ask Eleanor, our monthly Member chat, so fun. This month we chatted about the film Babygirl, older women and sex.)
My experience with the tech crowd
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). 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 International 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 chatted with Nick about media barons and political influence. (Just last month the onetime deputy prime minister during the LibDem/Tory coalition left his role at Facebook, right as Zuckerberg switched his allegiance to Trump.)
It’s 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.
Cue hollow laughter.
Sometimes 5 years feels like a long time; the line of new-media-tech-bro barons on 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. 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).
Older women and the new Trump era
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 (DEI), it’s 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. The world that Musk and Trump want to build will work for the few, not the many, despite the MAGA promises of a better world for all
In this media landscape, it’s going to be increasingly important to keep making the case for a different, female, progressive, older, inclusive point of view.
In a world where women’s rights are under assault from Afghanistan to Washington, and the American President has been found guilty in a civil case of rape, the next 4 years are going to be testing.
So what can we do?
The answer: Radical hope
Rather than despairing, we need to engage in radical hope. I’ve just been re-reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. 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’re still pushing for equality now. There are ebbs and flows.
Recently I have been 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.
Words of wisdom from Rebecca Solnit
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….
Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement, pessimists take the opposite position; both exclude themselves from acting….
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.”
How hope can shift the landscape
I found this profoundly comforting.
As I look around the bleak media landscape of Tech Bros, cover-ups, bias and illegal acts, I thank that new technologies and indeed social media allow individuals like me and groups of women like us to speak to each other. (Although there is horrifying news that Meta has started censoring information about abortion in the US.) I’m grateful that I can write these words today without having to persuade a phalanx of chaps to let me write them.
Things may feel dark now, but we have co-created a space where different values can flourish. We can keep pushing for a new narrative.
So while the next years play out, let’s follow the immortal words of Voltaire: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”. Let’s keep making the arguments for Queenager power and why we matter.
Our Fundraiser: What the money is doing
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 and 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
