Female-coded skills will save us

Think about disaster movies. When the world is going to collapse, who saves the day? One, lone, male hero. Will Smith in Independence Day. Brad Pitt in World War Z. Dennis Quaid in Day After Tomorrow. Bruce Willis in Armageddon. Even when there’s a big team working to save the world, like in Project Hail Mary, it all still pretty much comes down to Ryan Gosling.

The reality of preparedness is much more mundane. I think it also requires a lot more skills that are typically female-coded, and I think that’s why they are so under-appreciated and under-recognized as preparedness.

I mentioned this in the go bag post, but your threat model dictates your prepping. At first, my threat model was basically societal collapse, and my go bag included a filtration straw (for drinking water from streams?) and a guide to wild food (for foraging… something?). 

The most realistic threat for my family is actually some relatively minor crisis that forces us to leave our home for somewhere between a day and a week. Or that forces us to stay IN our home. Flooding, hurricane, power outage, blizzard. Or where we have to leave quickly, because of a fire. These are not scenarios where we’re eating weeds. We need supplies to tide us over until systems kick in - mutual aid, snowplows, FEMA. These threats aren’t that complicated to prep for. You get a bunch of stuff, you put it in bags, you copy your documents, you keep cash on hand. You try to keep extra food around, some gallons of water. You pack the go bags.  

But there’s no romance in that. It’s too small, it’s another to-do list. You’re not the main character of a heroic survival epic, you’re just a parent wrangling freaked out kids in a school gym full of cots.  

The most narratively compelling disasters are neither insurmountable nor tedious. They offer room for agency and adventure. Villains and the possibility of heroes. There’s the possibility of superiority, if you bought the right objects or read the right Reddit boards. In those disasters, the hero is shaping, maybe even dominating the crisis, by Doing Things. He (probably he) can beat the disaster alone, with his tools and courage and smarts and strength. Like a video game. 

I will never, ever, have all the skills and tools I need to be “safe.” But I can increase my safety by creating connections with my neighbors, who have skills and tools I don’t have. And I increase their safety at the same time. Community connections happen when you organize block parties, and bring food to sick friends, and pick up someone’s kid when they’re running late, and host dinner parties where the grownups kibbitz and the kids create chaos. And all those things are things that are typically done by women. 

The glorious book A Marriage at Sea tells the true story of a husband and wife, Bill and Maralyn Bailey, who are stranded on a dinghy in the middle of the ocean after their boat is hit by a whale and sinks. The details of how they gathered water, what they ate, and their rescue, are truly extraordinary (really, the book is amazing, HIGHLY recommend). But as the author, Sophie Elmhurst, points out, the thing that kept them alive beyond (barely) meeting their physical needs was Maralyn’s laser focus on the future - specifically, the elaborate meals she planned to cook, and the elaborate dresses she planned to sew. Female-coded skills, manifesting through the additional soft skill of dreaming. She insisted on projecting them into a specific, tangible future where they survived. 

And when a group of sailors were stranded on an island in the Southern Ocean, it was in part their home-making skills that kept them alive, according to dogsledder and writer Blair Braverman. Not just their ability to build a shelter, but their competition to make the meals special, to make the home beautiful and cosy. They picked flowers for the table. The joy, the desire to actively and intentionally demonstrate care in the mundane, that was a survival skill. (Braverman makes this point in an episode  of her new podcast, What to Carry What to Burn, which again, highly recommend!).   

Stories inspire actions. If the story we tell about disaster is one lone male hero, confronting a sudden crisis that emerges from nowhere, then we will gravitate towards silver bullets and individual solutions. Sarah Labowitz of the Carnegie Endowment talks about disaster recovery’s plot problem - how experts are often just talking to themselves, and how earnest administrators don’t always get the message across. Which I think is true, but I also think we need a lot more intentional storytelling about how people are collaborating, strategizing, inventing and learning together outside the moments of greatest urgency.

The big and small ways people across this country are helping each other prepare, survive and recover IS a story, and deserves as much coverage (or more) than when the big storm or fire or earthquake hits. If we have better, sustained storytelling about what people are doing, and can do, more people will act. The hopelessness gets a counterpoint. And if you don’t see those stories in the news, we can tell them to each other, by sharing the small things we’re doing to take care of each other. 

Planning for survival is an act of imagination, fighting against the narrative of inevitability. Making that imagining real is both mundane and extraordinary. When we honor the work of turning that imagination into reality, we build the map into a liveable, even joyful future.