Opinion: Waiting in the cinema to watch The Apprentice, a movie about Donald Trump, I sat through an interminable stream of advertisements. It was an assault on the senses, not only because of the volume, but because the ads were moronic. They were visually crude, lame and unsophisticated. Like many people my age, I am continually scandalised by “standards”. As you get older you tend to think everything is becoming dumber – and often you’re right.
The film itself was full of fascinating insights. Trump is well known as the most fraudulent, unintelligent and corrupt person ever to run for US president. Yet during the election, we saw footage of American men saying they would vote for Trump over Harris because “women are too emotional to be world leaders.”
All this made me reflect on my own experience. As a middle-aged woman, I’m constantly confronted with the news that I have “brain fog”. I’ve heard this so often I began writing a fictional character who had “brain fog”. I had to stop and wonder: what would that actually feel like?
I’m all for women sharing experiences and promoting women’s rights in every sphere. But at a moment when the United States has been dithering about whether to vote for a grotesque, moronic, elderly male fraudster or a highly intelligent and competent woman, I’m not all that receptive to being told I have brain fog. Or that I need time out, I’m exhausted, I need to go home, I’m fragile, and so on.
The symptoms of ageing are real and it’s great to talk about them. But equally, if you’re lucky, you can navigate your way past them. You can use a combination of medicines (if it’s safe to do so) and remedies such as exercise. And you can operate as effectively as Kamala Harris: sharp, ready for anything, in even better shape than before.
I have found middle age to be a time, not of brain fog, but of cold-eyed intellectual clarity. It has been the time when I realised how much tedious bullshit I’d accepted without question, and how invigorating it is to be liberated from it.
I grew up with a myth: male rage was rational and female anger was irrational and emotional. This nonsense was all-pervasive and overtly expressed. A male temper tantrum was “reasonable” in the face of female “hysteria”. Men who lost their cool congratulated themselves for it. In reality, they were hormonal (theirs was called testosterone) and uncontrolled, and lacking in insight. Their brain fog was caused by aggression. In the home, a macho guy might throw his weight around; as a world leader, he might commit genocide. It was the same behaviour from the same human animal, i.e. a glorified baboon.
We’ve all known men with fragile egos who can’t cope with women of equal power. They either rage, or they turn to someone they can dominate. Kamala Harris confronted a lot of male egos too irrational and hormonal to choose a candidate based on quality. Republicans at recent Trump rallies have called her the c-word, low IQ, and a woman “handled by pimps”.
She campaigned for reproductive freedom against a Republican regime in which more pregnant women and those needing gynaecological care will die because of Trump bans on access to medical treatment. American women have risked being collateral damage to racism, sexism and male tech barons’ vacuous, destructive greed.
With the planet and democracy under threat, a serious woman fought the most consequential battle of our lifetime. She performed with ruthless clarity. In this monumental showdown, brain fog has been most patently an affliction of old men.
