Mary Beard: We are living in an age when men are proud to be ignorant

I am sitting in Professor Mary Beard’s Cambridge kitchen, where the eminent 62-year-old classicist is showing me what happens when you type “Medusa” and then “Clinton” or “Merkel” into Google. Her computer screen fills with images of the two politicians as snarling, snake-haired gorgons. This illustrates Beard’s thesis that the myths of the ancient world still influence attitudes to women in power today — the subject of her forthcoming talk at the British Museum.

More potent even than Medusa — “an image of the powerful but despicable, frightening and disruptive woman… herself a rape victim, as it happens” — is the story common to many cultures, including Greece and Rome, “of a primitive matriarchy: the idea that once upon a time, women ruled”. Far from representing a proto-feminist idyll, this is a “classic justification of patriarchy” because, in each such myth, “in the end, the women f**k it up” and the male-dominated order reasserts itself. Hmmm. Is it just me, or does anyone else see this pattern repeating itself for Theresa May once Brexit proves a disaster in the short if not the long term? “She’s certainly drawn the short straw,” smiles Beard.

Actually, Beard thinks May is more “interesting” than many modern female politicians, partly because of her penchant for leopard-skin kitten heels. “Part of the problem — and this goes back to antiquity — is that we don’t have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like,” she says. “We only have templates that make them men.” Look at the pantsuit-and-short-hair combo of Clinton and Merkel, she says, or the way Margaret Thatcher was schooled to speak in a lower voice.

May has gone part of the way down this route, with her £995 leather trousers (which led to criticism of both her style and her perceived hypocrisy, whereas David Cameron’s appearance was only ever critiqued “because he was fat”). But generally, May “falls less into the leadership stereotype than the others. People laugh at her shoes but I think it’s a way of escaping this uniform of male dressing.”

The more Beard talks about the ancient and modern world, the more parallels one sees. Athena, Greek warrior-goddess of wisdom, is often portrayed as a feminist icon. But like Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II she is an outlier, an anomaly, buttressed by male power, her existence completely alien to that of all normal women (Athena was even born of a man, springing from Zeus’s brow). Roman wives are either schemers, such as Livia, who supposedly poisoned her imperial husband Augustus, or docile creatures, who must not only be above reproach but be seen to be above reproach. You can slot any number of American First Ladies into one or other bracket.

What about Melania Trump, I ask? Her decision not to move to Washington, and to sue a newspaper over loss of potential earnings springing in part from her husband’s position, has been seen as a break with the dutiful, decorous past. “The First Lady is absolutely trapped,” Beard says. “If you do something you are damned: if you do nothing you are damned. Maybe what Melania is going to do is not play the game. In which case, clever.” Then again, she points out, Melania didn’t have great success when she did try to play the game, giving a speech that was directly plagiarised from one by Michelle Obama, so maybe her withdrawal “is not the principled decision we might make it”.

As an aside, we note that the #freemelania campaign on social media suggests she is a woman without agency, who needs to be “saved”, much as the “Don’t Do It Di” campaign in the Eighties suggested Diana Spencer needed rescuing from her impending marriage to Prince Charles (rightly, as it turned out). Beard is similarly exercised by the patronising tone of the #letlizspeak hashtag that spread after senator Elizabeth Warren was prevented from reading a letter by Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta in Congress, to protest the proposed appointment of Jeff Sessions to the Supreme Court. “Several men read [the letter] afterwards and were not thrown out of the chamber, including Bernie Sanders,” says Beard. “I mean, bloody extraordinary.”

In any case, Melania is just “a clothes horse” who, at the presidential inauguration, followed docilely behind her husband (much, she notes, as Kate Middleton follows Prince William). Trump, she adds, beat “a woman of extreme knowledge and competence” in the election by trumpeting his own ignorance. “This is the first period in my life where ignorance is something to be proud of,” she says. “But it’s male ignorance, bluff ignorance. Andrea Leadsom couldn’t get away with it. She just looked thick.”

The Trump administration throws up another extraordinary parallel. Aristophanes’ comedy, Lysistrata, in which women end a war by instituting a sex ban, is sometimes portrayed as a pioneering work in gender politics. But Beard points out: a) a woman representing Greece is symbolically carved up at the end and, b) the play “was originally performed by a load of blokes with cushions down [their fronts] to make big tits: pantomime women. Feminist play? Get real, sunshine.”

Today, though, comedians Melissa McCarthy and Rosie O’Donnell have got under Trump’s skin by brilliantly impersonating his henchmen Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon on Saturday Night Live and on Twitter. “Very funny, wonderfully self-ironising and quite powerful,” says Beard. “They are getting to Trump because he said he didn’t like his aides looking weak. Which meant: I don’t like my aides being impersonated by a female. One of the ways of abusing men is to make them like women.”

Part of the problem with female power, and something she will suggest in her lecture, is that our definition of it is too narrow. “There is a tendency to think of CEOs of FTSE-listed companies or women in Parliament,” she says. Having women in such positions is, of course, important but not the be-all and end-all. The country with the highest proportion of female MPs is Rwanda, she tells me, closely followed by Bolivia, and neither is exactly a feminist paradise. And the experiences of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and her fellow female corporate high-flyers is probably as remote from most women’s lives as that of Athena. Part of the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election, Beard thinks, is that she was perceived to have already got through the glass ceiling (itself an unhelpful concept) and done little for women still trapped beneath.

There must be some powerful women outside business, I insist. What about Caitlin Moran, JK Rowling, Helena Kennedy QC or Baroness Susan Greenfield? Even as the names leave my lips I realise they all operate in professions still dominated by men. “Maybe we need to think more widely about what power is, where it resides, what we mean by it,” Beard says. “My mother was a headmistress of a primary school. In a sense maybe we ought to be thinking of recognising that as power, as well as a woman being the boss of Santander. What about local councillors, local magistrates, women running offices? That’s power.”

Beard defines power in two ways. One, it’s about being able to get things done. Two, it’s about being taken seriously, having one’s expertise respected. In that sense, she lives among powerful women in the Cambridge University community, although they are still paid less than male colleagues. And whenever she gets into a spat on Twitter, as she did recently with Ukip funder Arron Banks over the fall of the Roman Empire, her knowledge is immediately derided. “Someone called me ‘sweetie’ on Twitter the other day because I’d forgotten an apostrophe,” she says. “That’s not taking me seriously.” (Conversely, the late TV critic A A Gill respected her knowledge but complained that she didn’t make enough of an effort for the cameras: Beard has fascinating things to say about the link between cosmetics and the perception of women being “deceptive and dissembling”, dating back to the ancient world, but that’s another story.)

It all sounds a bit depressing but Beard is upbeat. “I don’t want to end this lecture by saying, oh God, girls have got to give up,” she beams. “If you say, over my lifetime, have I been the witness of women being taken more seriously, then the answer is yes. You don’t overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation. The point of looking at this stuff” — she whacks the volume of Aristophanes in front of her — “is that this stuff is embedded in the way we think.

“We are not constrained by classical antiquity, thank goodness. We can do better. But if we really want to get to a position where women are taken seriously, then we have to take our focus away from being exclusively on a particular form of elite woman. We have to retell stories of women’s power, re-evaluate what power is. It has to incorporate the head of a primary school.”

And it has to involve a corresponding readjustment for men. “All power given to women in our current culture has to be power that men lose.” She smiles: “I can name about 100 men in Parliament we could happily get rid of.”

Follow Nick Curtis on Twitter: @nickcurtis

Mary Beard’s lecture, Women in Power, at the British Museum on March 3, is sold out but will be broadcast on Radio 4 on March 6 and published in the London Review of Books.