WHAT would happen if girls suddenly held power in their hands? Literal power, which lights up streets and skims across puddles of water, and travels inside the bodies of the people these girls touch.
In Naomi Alderman’s “The Power,” which editors of The New York Times picked as one of the 10 best books of 2017, girls wake up one day and find that a skein of electricity rests within their collarbones. With practice, they learn to send electrostatic charges out through their hands. Some are mild and cause no more than a pleasurable shiver. But other girls soon discover they can send charges powerful enough to kill. They also learn that they can awaken the same power in older women.
You can imagine the trouble that ensues.
Some girls get into street fights and invent names for those who won’t use their power to defend themselves. “Flat battery” is among the milder ones. Some gleefully sink into crime. But the same power allows others to perform feats: some break free of human trafficking and prostitution rings, while others seize political power as revolutionaries or as candidates for public office. One starts a new religion. Another forms an entire new country.
This sudden change in power relations frightens parents and local authorities so much that, at first, boys and girls are sent to separate schools. Men clamor for government-supplied armor and self-defense classes, when they’re not exchanging conspiracy theories online. Some won’t stop asking for a cure, although most of the girls and women do not see their new condition as a disease. They soon acquire a taste for power and use it without apology or restraint.
Reality’s a lot less dramatic and more complex. A few days before International Women’s Day, the government’s statistics office released a new factsheet that showed how women have gained power in some areas, but lost it in others.
The social welfare department reported, for instance, that they handled 1,151 more cases of violence against women in 2018, compared with the year before. The increase is considerable, at 27.5 percent, from 4,190 cases in 2017 to 5,341 last year. The Philippine National Police told a different story. In 2017, it received 34,143 reports of violence against women, and this was 6,541 cases (or 16.1 percent) less than what they received (40,684 cases) in 2016.
One way to measure power is to see what women own and what decisions we get to make. The same report from the Philippine Statistics Authority showed that one in every three women owned a house in 2017, but only one in every 10 owned land. Out of every 10, only two possessed bank accounts. (But eight out of every 10 had a cell phone.) Among the women who made money, only four out of every 10 said they were the ones who solely decided how their earnings would be spent.
In the fictional world Alderman created, girls receive power as a gift; some could choose not to use it. But for most, the challenge that awaits is learning to check it, so that they avoid harming others. Some never learn. “I feel instinctively,” one character writes, “that a world run by men would be more kind, more gentle, more loving and naturally nurturing. Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women—with babies to protect from harm—have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.” This is audacious, entertaining fiction.