Sally Field won an Emmy last night and said dumb things:

“At the heart of [her character] Nora Walker, she is a mother,” Field said. “May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised, and to especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait – wait for their children to come home for from danger, from harm’s way and from war. I’m not finished. I have to finish talking … if the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamn wars in the first place.” When she said “goddamn” onstage, however, Fox censors apparently took the opportunity to bleep the rest of her comments. “I wanted to say something about the mothers who wait for their military children to come home from harm’s way,” she said backstage. “I said at the end that if mothers ruled the world, there would be no wars.” When asked if she minded that her comments may have been cut off, she said, “Oh well.” “I’ve been there before,” she added. “If [mothers] ruled the world we wouldn’t be sending our children off to be slaughtered. I shouldn’t have said the ‘god’ before the damn.”

Jesus H. Christ.

I remember the first time I encountered this sort of opinion – that if women were in charge, humanity would live in peace. I was 11 or 12 years old and read it in a book, and I swear to god, I actually laughed out loud. I remember thinking, this fool has obviously never met any females.

It starts in about 4th grade, when girls start engaging in what can only be called a war of attrition via emotional abuse. They form evil little cliques and set about utterly destroying each other’s self-esteem and pride. I got glasses when I was 11, and the first dozen people to call me “four-eyes” were girls. When I didn’t start growing boobies as early as some of the others, it was the girls who snickered at me on the playground and called me President of the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee. There was a fat girl in my neighborhood back then, and guess who shunned her and called her “pig” and “lardbutt” on the bus? Not the boys. (Granted, they just ignored her. But which is really worse?)

Then you move on to the nightmare-scape called junior high school, where the females carefully hone their craft and the sabotage is raised to a whole new level of hate. During my soul-ripping years there, I had one boy who “bullied” me but there about five girls who did, and they were ten times meaner about it. Sneaky and manipulative. At least when boys pick on you, it’s all out in the open. Girls? Oh god no. They use subterfuge and reconnaissance. Girls will pretend to be your best friend just to discover your weaknesses, which they’ll then employ to bring you down.

Like the bitches in my 7th grade homeroom class. For reasons known only to Satan, a group of them decided they hated a girl named Cassie, who lived near me and was actually a really sweet kid. These girls befriended her for a while, let her into their “friend”ship ring of evil, and then suddenly one day when she walked in, they completely ignored her. I remember her crying later at lunchtime, and I heard that she’d told them that her stepdad drank beer in the evenings and now those little snots were telling the whole school he was an alcoholic. That rumor never died.

But that’s nothing. Wait until high school, when the competition for boys gets serious and the rumor-mongering takes on apocalyptic proportions. This is when the girls start calling each other sluts just because they like the same guys. There was a cheerleader at my high school who got pregnant in 11th grade and she went from being the one all of us envied to the one we all called dirty, dirty names. The boys never really said anything but the girls, oh sweet Jesus, we were brutal. On the bathroom wall, someone wrote in lipstick, “Tiffany is the WHOREleader! Keep your legs closed SLUT.”

Sugar and spice, my ass.

Then we grow up and start having babies, becoming those sainted “mothers” Sally is talking about. You know, like Britney. Or more seriously, like this woman or this woman or this woman.

I’m not trying to say men are any better, because they’re not. They commit most of the murder and mayhem on this planet but frankly, I think that’s just because they have more time on their hands. It’s absurd to think that putting women in control of the world would make any difference; women have just as much hate, spite, and pure evil in them as men do. We simply express it differently most of the time, but not always. There have been times when mothers held vast power, and did they bring peace to all lands? Ask Cleopatra.

Anyway. I know I’m opening up a big nasty can of political incorrectness, but what bugs me the most about the idea that “there wouldn’t be any goddamn wars in the first place” if mothers were in charge is that it ignores the fact that there probably wouldn’t be any goddamn technology, either. Or modern medicine or modern cities or most all the shit we take for granted, 99.9% of which was invented, built, and maintained by men. I wonder if people like Sally Field would have mothers “in charge” but still let the men do all the dirty hard work.

Not that we’d still be living in caves necessarily but really, it deserves some thought. The exact same testosterone-fueled drive that makes men fight wars also makes them build bridges and tall buildings and computers. Made them hunt animals to feed the tribe, made them relentlessly experiment with domestication of animals and crops, made them invent metallurgy, made them invent the fucking wheel. There is no doubt that women are intellectually capable of all of these things, but the fact is that we did not do them on any kind of meaningful scale throughout all of human history.

And it’s not just because we’ve been too busy making babies for 150,000 years. It’s because we don’t have as much testosterone, and therefore we aren’t as big, as strong, as daring, or as experimental as men. And this really is okay to admit. Who knows what would happen if women didn’t have to carry pregnancies and raise children and so had more time on their hands; I’m sure it could be a piquant debate. But if you want my personal opinion, I’m gonna have to go with: it wouldn’t be much different than it has been.

Nor would it be different if “mothers” were suddenly put in charge. I feel vicarious resentment of that claim because if I were a man with children, I’d really like to know just what in the hell makes Sally Field think women love their children more than men do. Human nature is what it is, and we will fight over shit until we go extinct. Even if the best mother EVER was Queen of the Planet, someone somewhere would still need to have their ass kicked, and she’d have to send somebody’s child to do it.