Having now stepped into the next stage of my life, my Crone years, I’m thoroughly channelling the Grumpy Old Woman archetype. I thought I’d start writing my blogs again after a year of silence giving more voice to that emerging part of myself. “C’est le privilege de l’age”, we say in French.
I attended a session on ageing at the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival held in Katoomba, NSW, in early November 2025. The session was hosted by Maeve Marsden as the MC, herself a writer and performer, with two scheduled writers/ speakers: Deborah Oswald, and Maxine Beneba Clarke.
When I arrived, the room, aptly named the Grand Dining Room, was packed. At a glance, as I had anticipated, I noted that the audience consisted mostly of a sea of white women over 60, with a smattering of older white men (WM), and a few younger people. I quickly searched and found a spot among the closely-packed audience.
I thoroughly enjoyed Maeve’s skilful hosting, evenly moving between the two guests, allowing each to take her turn in the limelight. Both writers shared different perspectives on aging, and most particularly, aging as women. Maxine added her perspective from her experience as a brown woman.
When Maeve opened up the floor to questions from the audience, she carefully spelled out the terms of engagement: brief, with a focus on a specific question, ending with a question mark. As this was day three of the festival, I had heard the frame at each session I attended when questions were invited from the floor. By now, I expected the audience to be well trained and to stay within the frame. We did … until some didn’t.
They’re so pre-dick-table
An older, tall white man took the mic when it was his turn and proceeded to hold forth. He started off with his personal life advice hacks to anyone ageing, but then proceeded with a treatise of his own on ageing itself. I waited for the question. The audience waited. The writers waited. Maeve waited.
The man continued, using his standing position and imposing stature, speaking with hardly a moment to draw breath, to make it known that he was very comfortable taking this role, taking up space like this. It reminded me of why Sarah Hagi tweeted her now viral comment, “Oh! To have the confidence of a mediocre white man,” in 2015. Ten years later, this man showcased everything that inspired Hagi’s perceptive remark.
Sick of being forced into playing the role of captive silent audience to yet another grandiose mediocre white man holding my attention to ransom, I loudly called out, “what’s your question?”
Of course, as a lowly older woman in the audience, my interjection did not count for him. He didn’t even look like he registered that I had said anything worthy of attending to. Fortunately, Maeve pulled rank, interrupted his flow, and insisted that he formulate a question. After some mumbling, he managed a pseudo-question that no one answered.
The mic changed hands until I heard another man’s voice booming through the speaker. Inauspiciously, this one started off by telling us he would begin by being sexist. There were incredulous audible groans right across the audience. One woman near me muttered, “because of course, we haven’t had nearly enough of that in our lives.” I don’t know whether he heard her and purposefully chose to ignore her comment, or if he was just intent on cosplaying the brave messenger bringing the ignorant masses a painful corrective message that must be told for their own good.
He proceeded to point out that the panel was all women (check), who were reading from their female-character centred work (check), offering their views about the female experience of ageing (check). And?
He went on to whine about the fact that men who are widowed end up isolated and lost when their more socially-skilful female partners die before they do (sic). (Transl: how inconsiderate of them!) In his jeremiad, he reproached women in general for this woeful state of affairs for men, and reproached the woman-centred session for being precisely that up to that point. As he still refused to formulate a real question as requested, I could hear the surly criticism within his monologue in subtext: “Men are suffering, you’re wasting time on this trivial stuff; what have you got to say about the more important/ pressing/ serious issue of men’s pain?” It reminded me of the repeated whine from men in the media on International Women’s Day every year: “What about men? We don’t get to have our day” — almost always ignoring the fact that there’s been an International Men’s Day every November 19 since 1999. Most men (still) don’t know about it, perhaps because women aren’t organising the day for them and making it happen.
Re-centring women and our lives’ experiences
I shouldn’t be shocked, yet I still am, when I see how often so many men STILL react with surly aggrieved entitlement and resentment when the conversation does not centre men and men’s experience.
The session was clearly by women, about women’s lives and the experience of ageing, for a largely female audience.
That was precisely what was intolerable to both of these fellows. They had to grandstand, claim the higher ground of being The Knowledgeable One, The Defender of the Under-Represented, Under-Recognised Oppressed Man, and expose what they believe to be the Great Unfairness Gap between the Genders.
Basically, this IS the white man’s (WM) complaint.
When the conversation focuses on women’s experience, women’s needs and priorities, men (whether they recognise it or not) who’ve long benefited from patriarchy being set up to prioritise, privilege, and cater for their needs/ demands have strong reactions. They believe they’re being cancelled, that they’re being discriminated against, or at least, not being catered to.
In this instance, I think these WM found being in a position where they had to listen to and consider a brown woman’s reflections on her own experience during the session added to their perceived sense of being unfairly dealt with.
The Macro in the micro
Whether in a small writers’ festival room or on the world stage, we see these same gender dynamics play out everywhere. Patriarchy is staging an all-out assault on whatever changes managed to be introduced in the last 100 years, in an all-out campaign to claw back and reassert the hegemony of the white male experience and white male entitlement to rule above everything else, to the exclusion of all else.
In the US, where there’s been over 100 years of clear recorded evidence of women’s contribution to all kinds of fields for the betterment of humanity, thanks to the opening of education, employment and financial opportunities that were previously forbidden to them, we see men reacting just like the two men I witnessed, but on a much bigger and far more destructive scale.
On the false pretext that women who’ve attained positions of power, particularly in previously male-dominated fields, only obtained such roles illegitimately under ‘unfair’ DEI provisions and not on merit, we see the current US administration firing women (particularly Brown women) from such positions en masse. We see the US administration rewriting reality and history, even obliterating records that show women’s contribution over the last hundred years (and throughout history).
White men everywhere are unhappy that others on the planet have come forward to speak about their experiences, thus either de-centring white maleness as the dominant experience, and/or no longer accepting the long-held representation of white maleness in the idealised, sanitised form we’ve all been fed for so long.
In the face of this, white men at all levels of many societies are pushing back with what Michael Kimmel called ‘aggrieved entitlement’[i] Far from wanting to build a fairer, more just and more equitable world for all, such white men want the good ol’ days back. They want their previous privileges back, and they want the rest of us to sit down, shut up, go back to what they see as ‘our places’, and get with their program. That’s basically what Project 2025 in the US is. It’s the kind of program on offer by all forms of authoritarianism, fascism, and any system of religious nationalism.
Right now, we’re seeing the rise of right wing ideologies, authoritarianism and religions everywhere, pushing what they claim to be the ‘natural order’ of patriarchy, which pushes claims that women are ‘naturally’ subservient to men and meant to serve men, that white men are ‘natural’ leaders, and pushing for the rest of us to return to being slave class at the white men’s service.
We’re not going back
I, for one, am glad I saw how Maeve kept a firm grip on the frame, insisted we all stick to it, and reminded the sullen old white men present that their entitled efforts to take charge and derail the focus would not be tolerated. Maeve firmly returned to the task at hand – privileging women’s voices and centring women’s experience.
I’m also very glad I witnessed a rising tide of dissent from almost every woman present in that room. White men who think they can just step in and wrest back control in any context they step into to suit themselves and demand to be prioritised and catered to need to learn to sit down. And they need to learn to listen and reflect on what they are hearing.
If it was that ‘natural’ for men to be the only leaders, and for women to obey them and be subservient, it wouldn’t take so much violent effort to disenfranchise and force women back into subservience to men.
Whether in a micro context like this festival, or on the bigger world stage, this drama is being played out everywhere, from the private, domestic sphere, to public arenas everywhere. We may have enjoyed a hiatus of a hundred years or so when non-WM got to vote, accessed education, accessed positions of significant power and money based on our own merit, and accessed a degree of sovereignty over our lives, but the WM who view equality as dispossession are making a determined and brutal effort to reinstate what they see as the ‘natural’ order of things.
This is the time for all of us who have only recently arrived to claim for ourselves what had previously been the preserve of WM privilege for centuries, to stand up and hold the line.
We’re not going back. If this speaks to you, either in terms of your own efforts as a woman to hold the line, or if this piece stirred a curiosity in you about how you, as a white man, might need to reflect upon and challenge your own sense of aggrieved entitlement to being centred in everyday life, and explore how this might stand in the way of you having deeper, more satisfying relationships with others in your life, contact me.
