“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” - Camille Paglia

[LabubuSixSeven]

I came across this (in)famous quote by feminist academic Camille Paglia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia) a few weeks back, and it has stuck with me.

At first, I was offended. However, as I’ve thought more about it, I can’t help but feel she has a point. Men are risk takers in ways that women are not. There are both positives (technology etc) and negatives (violence, war) to this. Is it the case that culturally and socially women aren’t allowed to take risks? Or is it that we biologically driven to not? If there were no men, would society be as progressive as it is?

I’d like to hear others opinions on this.

If she has a point, it’s a really dull and misogynistic one.

If civilisation were in the hands of women, we would have done just as well as men or perhaps a bit better or perhaps a bit worse.

Her view depends on women being stupid and lazy. I have no time for this sort of nonsense.

I would argue that ND people are out on their own with regards to invention, whole swathes of science and Maths are entirely generated by ND people. Newton and Einstein were almost certainly ND.

Many ND people especially autistic people are not by nature risk takers so the notion that taking risks is the only avenue to progress is inherently flawed itself.

TBF she has changed her mind on paedophilia (at least in a modern context - still thinks it was good for the ancient Greeks though). But she's pro prostitution - or at least against anti-prostitution laws.

She may self-described as a feminist, but many would question the reality of that.

Why would you think that the women in the past were CP types what if they were Amelia Earhart types.

No need to apologise!

C. Paglia was around a lot some years ago but I hadn't heard about her in ages and had forgotten she existed.

She's one of those people who love saying shocking things because they think it makes them seem edgy and brave, whereas it actually makes them tiresome and predictable.

To suggest that women haven't invented things is just stupid, RobinInTheCrabApple has listed just a tiny number of them, we could fill up pages with more of them.

Paglia knows about women's achievements, she's not stupid, but she says stupid things like this to get a reaction🙄

You could write a whole book about things/people that Paglia has made 'controversial' comments about.

Somebody said about her 'Camille Paglia. The g in Paglia is silent. It's the only thing about her that is'😄

An important reminder of Paglia's other crackpot views. And spot on @MrsTerryPratchett , men have claimed credit for so many things invented or improved by women.
There's a reason they call it HIStory!

I've wondered, if we weren't a sexed species, if we would have developed the way we have in terms of "civilisation" and maybe even from an evolutionary perspective. I certainly think the sex drive in men is a huge source of energy for them which drives a lot of their behaviour. Sometimes quite negatively in terms of violence but also often in other ways, I think it can be central to a lot of their drive for achievement.

But there is something competitive introduced when you have a dynamic of two sexes, and also I think by having one sex which is not tied down to childbearing and rearing, it creates a lot of capacity to pursue other kinds of things as a society - even in terms of adding physical strength in men that the limits of childbearing compromises in women.

CP always likes to say things in the most controversial way possible, but I think she also often has insights worth thinking about within that.

Her argument, such as it is, seems to be built on two assumptions:

1. The ability to invent things is tied to personality rather than, say, intellect or ingenuity
2. Women and men have fundamentally different personality traits, with no overlap

Both of those are clearly nonsense. If you're going to invent things, you need to be pretty smart. It helps to be educated as well - something that has historically been denied to women, and indeed to any group other than wealthy men. There's a reason you don't get many working-class inventors, and it's not because they lack an appetite for risk.

If you insist that personality traits are important to the ability to invent things, then you could equally argue that inventors need patience and persistence, the ability to keep trying things over and over even while failing. These traits, rightly or wrongly, are traditionally more associated with women than men.

The second point: even if we accept that women and men have broadly different personality traits, we also know that there is a huge amount of overlap. There are plenty of women who take risks - climbing mountains, or engaging in deep-sea diving, for example. There are women who are bold and assertive and aggressive. There are also men who are timid and quiet and self-effacing.

In short, the entire argument is bollocks.

A timley reminder of one of the women who pointed out how often women's inventions are overlooked and their abilities hampered: https://x.com/i/status/2034170071967277289

You know. Thingy. Named the what'shername effect. I expect a man came up with the idea really.

(For those who can't get into TwiX links this is about Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose Woman as Inventor essay in 1883 was responsible for the idea of the Matilda Effect.)

I’m firmly convinced that human society would be vastly better if women had had more influence throughout history (no patriarchy!), and that Camille Paglia is an attention-seeking knobhead.

Paglia's original project in Sexual Persona is actually quite interesting: take the analytical instrument that Sontag developed in Against Interpretation and apply it retrospectively to the entire corpus of Western art. By the time that Paglia wrote Sexual Persona that kind of revaluing-synthesis was far beyond the capabilities of any one person to perform, certainly in a single monograph - there is simply too much material to master. And unfortunately, for all her eclectic interests, Paglia was far from equal to the task - every chapter, practically every paragraph, is filled with bad history, bad economics, bad science, bad philology, bad geography, bad linguistics, bad chronology, etc. But she does show that many people working in the humanities are at least as equally deficient in areas of knowledge outside of their immediate fields, and yet they pretend that that parochialism doesn't matter.

And she did effectively argue is that unless something radically shook things up, we were at the end of great artistic achievement because we had no lens left to judge it. Paglia's project really failed before it started due to her intellectual deficiencies, but so too has every other attempt. So, she's been proved right -- we truly were at the end of great artistic achievement. With respect to her specific pronouncements on feminism, gay men and academia - most of it is best understood as an attempt to be a gadfly and bring sharp elbowed public intellectual debate into the TV age with sound-bites, rage bate and provocation. Paglia was in some ways ahead of her time, but with the caveat that age of the true public intellectual (as opposed to cultural talking head) was about to end even as she reached her heyday.

This is the full quote:

“We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities.
When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.
When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved.
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men.
Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Even Thoreau’s Walden was just a two-year experiment. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.”

I despair at the fact that an academic feminist can so completely and utterly miss the very obvious explanation: when you're oppressed, treated as subhuman breeders, denied education, and then have whatever you might discover or invent taken from you and attributed to a man, then no, you won't have a list of grand achievements to reference.

Shockingly, millennia of oppression tends to stifle achievement.

The fact that Camille cannot understand that is concerning. A feminist? She sounds like she worships men, frankly, putting them up on a pedestal and excusing all their ills, because ooh, they made bridges – a lowly woman could never have thought of such a thing! 🙄

Why do women who think so little of women as a demographic never do the logical thing according to their own views, and shut up? As clearly, nothing they have to say is of worth.

Women do and did have to devote a significant amount of energy to child bearing and child rearing...
That's true in all species, but it's interesting that a small minority of mammals evolved the menopause - effectively the female body putting the brakes on having children well before natural death or severe enfeeblement from old age would be expected to occur. Killer whales, elephants and other species which do this are all matriarchal so its possibly linked to that. Effectively menopause occurs to free up (surviving) females for the vital business of ensuring long term survival of the wider group (by being in charge of said group).

In women, the menopause sees a significant change in brain activity, effectively a rewiring and refocusing, and a reported increase in risk taking behaviour and in more assertive behaviours. Anecdotally many post menopausal women also find a boost in creativity although that might only be a change in life stages. Also, the body becomes incredibly efficient at storing fat and conserving energy. Basically in a famine "mother nature" wants to ensure the survival of a core group of older females at all costs.

So I could write a very convincing counter thesis that actually "Evolutionary Biology" proves that post menopausal women were the ones in charge in prehistoric times and the ones doing a lot of the inventing and risk taking. In reality, I have no evidence of this. No-one really knows exactly who did what, or who invented what because we weren't there when the wheel or fire or language were invented. So anyone with a sub stack can just project their own prejudices on the past and call it "science". Even if we could "prove" that the social structures of ancient times were a certain way that isnt a moral argument for structuring society now.

However the "women were naturally less prone to take risks and would have been occupied with babies all the time" argument does fall completely flat when you take into account that the human female body specifically evolved to stop doing that about 2/3 through its natural life cycle.

Paglia is difficult to explain, let alone defend, because many of her arguments genuinely lack coherence. But they are in the spirit of Harold Bloom - if you reduce Shakespeare to a mechanical product of class and patriarchal oppression then you have no Shakespeare, and by analogy there is no such thing as literature. If humanity is to have something called literature and art, then there needs to be a way to shield it from the levelling effect of Marxist critical theory (even if you yourself are a believer in critical theory). Paglia tries to do this in many ways, usually as provocatively as possible, and often incoherently. But there's at least an aspect of it that has some validity.

Actually as a counter argument to what I said , there were women like Lisa Meitner who was a very talented nuclear physicist and part of the team that worked on first understanding nuclear fission. She was invited to work on the Manhatten project but reacted with horror. The exact words being "are you mad". So maybe, without men we would have moved beyond grass huts but we would never have developed nuclear weapons. Or maybe Meitner was unusual and there are plenty of women who would have been just as driven (or short sighted) as Oppenheimer. Who knows.

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/lise-meitner/

She does that but then she veers of into very mechanistic explanations herself when it suites her. Hence the reliance on a sort of pop version of evolutionary biology at times. And also probably the incoherence.
Marxist theory is looking at history only through the lens of power structures. Its therefore very limited in what it sees and would be bleak if it formed your only understanding of the world. That doesn't make it bad in itself so long as you realise that it is a limited lens. The problem is people like Paglia (and actually Jordon Petersen as well) are simultaneously railing against that way of looking at the world but they themselves are limited in the exact same way. Just more incoherent. Which makes their arguments add up to quite a confusing and unsatisfying (and sort of pointless) way of looking at the world once you get past the high fallutin language.
If I want a good critique of that problem in Marx/modern thought I would rather read Camus. He's much more self aware and coherent and is capable of expressing an alternative, humanistic, solution.

Nobody knows who invented paved roads, indoor plumbing, or cranes.

Elizabeth Bugie was second author on the paper announcing the discovery of steptomycin, but not included in the patent application because 'it wasn't important, as she would later get married'. She got a tiny share of the royalties and no share of the Nobel prize. Mildred Rebstock didn't discover chloromycetin but did work out how to manufacture it synthetically, making it viable as a large-scale product.

It's true that the first patent for a washing machine was by a man. The second was also by a man - in Germany where a woman was not legally able to apply for a patent (see also Bertha Benz), so who knows who first came up with it. But Margaret Colvin was responsible for the Triumph Rotary washer, one of the first of the modern type of drum washing machines. And Josephine Cochran invented the dishwasher.

Most big US bridges might have been built by men, but without Emily Warren Roebling there would be no Brooklyn Bridge. And in London more than 2/3 of the construction workers for Waterloo Bridge were women.

Paglia strikes me as one of those academics who become so entangled in their own ontological framework that they can no longer relate to an embodied reality.

I am more interested in what would have been invented by women if our society was matriarchal, rather than what we wouldn't have. That suggests thinking that the world we currently live in benefits humans (when evidence around poverty & inequality, sickness, poor mental health, contaminated resources, climate impact, species decline, population decline etc etc) all point to this current system actively working against human, animal and plant life on earth.

And yes I think we would be living in more sustainable dwellings. I see a round grass hut (with equitable access to water, power, heat etc) as far more civilised than the monstrous, flimsy, plastic-infused, mould-ridden "housing" we currently create. (I say all of this as a city flat dweller btw)

Petersen is an apt reference because he shares with Paglia an extreme bitterness over his mistreatment by academia that made it impossible for him to consider intellectual topics dispassionately - a problem when that's exactly what he claimed he was doing.

...yes, but the food would have been great, and the soft furnishings to die for.

My mind goes to Skara Brae, definitely not grass huts. Two single beds, a hearth, a dresser with shelves, a toilet space in the wall. And the same pattern was found in wood on Salisbury Plain. The pattern does not call for the shared female comment when a device turns out to have an obvious flaw, such as not being able to be cleaned "designed by a man". I think those stone homes were designed by women. Children's beds probably basketwork and deliberately changeable.

Nobody knows who invented paved roads, indoor plumbing, or cranes.

I spent a fascinating day with a Mayan guide who spoke about their road and water systems. Their water was safe, sanitised and clean (because of filter systems and lime). Roman water sent them all round the twist. Mayan roads were white and glowed in the moonlight so that they could use them at night (because Guatemala is hot and humid as shit).

Just like women, it seems that brown indigenous people don't get the credit they deserve. It all looks like people just assume the best systems are white and male. I think we can safely assume history is just washed of anything female and brown.

Oh and biggest pyramid in the world. Not in Egypt.

My mother was more of a risk taker than my father. I am more of a risk taker than my brother and my husband. My daughter is more of a risk taker than my sons.

The basis of your argument is fundamentally flawed.

Apologies for not reading the whole thread before posting but I think sex with men, pregnancy and child birth are all pretty high risk, no?