“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.

Paglia's just a provocateur.

Men are, on average, more interested than women in mechanical and technological things. It seems reasonable to assume that the world today would be very different without their input.

Whether that would be better or worse is another matter.

Sometimes I do love you lot. So many excellent cogent answers here. All i came up with was - she's a provocative pita.

carry on.

Yeah maybe she's right. And we'd be living in a way that would be sustainable for many thousands more years. How many centuries have we got left living in modern industrial civilization?

I dont care for an attempt to defend capitalism via the method of (incorrectly) denigrating women. In general I dislike the way academics tie themselves in knots to make tortured points that have little relevance or relation to reality, and yet still manage to disparage women.

Maybe we wouldn't be living in concrete jungles, maybe we would be living in better ways. How can we really know? A society that centres and prioritises things other than violence, war, destruction and exploitation might still be living in huts but who's to say that would be an inherently bad and undesirable thing? Who's to say huts wouldn't have evolved into something different and better than both huts and concrete jungles?

The idea that women are a barrier to progress is fucking nonsense when in fact men are a barrier to female progress.

Men are, on average, given more time, opportunity, and encouragement to be interested in mechanical and technological things.

Girls in the first few years of school are on average better at maths than boys. Until they absorb the message that they're not supposed to be.

Babies are given toy cars or dolls according to sex, not according to their own choices. (Some of us see dolls as a mechanical opportunity and dismantle them to see how the blink works, but a lot of parents discourage that.)

The often-quoted study that showed male chimps choose toys with wheels and female chimps choose pans and dolls - and therefore these preferences are innate¹ - had a second part that's usually overlooked. The above happened when there weren't enough of each choice to go round. With an oversupply of toys, all of them choose wheels.

Female chimps aren't uninterested in technology, they simply aren't strong enough to defend their chosen item if a male wants to take it. Female humans developing in a society that allows it might well have become just as interested in technology as men.

¹ Somehow overlooking the fact that chimps neither drive nor cook, so might be intrigued by a wheel 'Ooh, this spins in a weird way!' but will have no fucking clue what a toy saucepan is for.

That would have better without the first two paragraphs.

If we were all living in grass huts, we'd have community.
I think a lot of our ills could be solved if we had a 'village'

Baloney.
Women were the first farmers, the first brewers, the first doctors, the first creators of textiles and clothing and much more besides.

Yep. Camille Paglia is a raving loon, surely no one takes any notice of her utter nonsense

Also, girls are groomed from birth to play with dolls, play house, spend incredible amounts of time and energy on clothing and appearance while boys are given the best toys (in my opinion). I used to wait for my brothers to go outside so I could play with their meccano, trains sets, racing cars, magician sets, chemistry sets, etc.

Chinese girls are outperforming boys at maths by age 15.
Why?
Because their country needs them in the STEM industries and actively encourages girls to excel at "boys' subjects" from a young age.
It worked.

We need to do the same and stop grooming our own daughters and instead encourage them to develop their brains instead of obsessing about their appearance.

🐂💩

@TheSunjustcameout Girls in the UK already outperform boys in STEM subjects up to A Level.

In 2024 more female entrants than male achieved A and A* grades in biology, chemistry, computing, design and technology, and mathematics.

Women would do all to protect their babies and children so would build predator and weather proof housing.

Why?

I don't think that sort of anecdotal comment is very useful. I can run faster than my father but that doesn't mean women can run as fast on average than men can.

In so far as it's a comment worth considering at all, I don't think it's really much to do with individuals. Probably the most true fact Paglia referenced there was risk taking. It's fairly well established that men overall are risk takers more than women, and we can easily see why when you consider that up until about 5 minutes ago, the vast majority of women had children and spent a lot of time caring for them. Which massively changes risk considerations. There are very few societies where it mostly falls mainly or even evenly to men to care for vulnerable infants and young children.Strategies for survival between the sexes are likely to vary because of that.

I am not convinced that CP is saying that women are stupider or less able.

That's not quite the same thing as saying they might be less interested in certain things.

The fact is that we tend to see girls more often go into hard sciences and maths in countries that are more sexist, not less so. Where that kind of work is seen as high status compared to traditionally feminine work which is low status and often poorly paid.

So sure, say women don't go into engineering because they are oppressed, but that does not seem to tally well with the fact that when they are given more political and social equality, they are not making all the same choices as men and it requires continues pushing and social engineering to try and keep numbers entering those professions in balance.

The majority of GPs are now women, in some places by a good number. That doesn't mean men aren't smart enough to be GPs. And while it's interesting that GPs are more likely to be women, and orthopaedic surgeons men, and interesting to think about why, I'm not sure why it's a problem to be solved, much less something that needs to be explained away.

You're cherry-picking.

The girls who take these subjects tend to do as well as the boys but boys still far outnumber girls in Computing (5:1) , Physics (3:1), Maths (2:1) and Design & Technology (2:1).

Girls outnumber boys in A-level Biology by 2:1 but many go on to do nursing degrees which are overwhelmingly female and not particularly high-paying jobs.

Slightly more girls than boys are now taking Chemistry at A-level possibly to study medicine where women also outnumber men at university (60/40 split).

However, 80% of Engineering and Computer Science students are male and 83% of maths teachers are male despite 76% of teachers overall being female.

We need to copy the Chinese approach to counter the negative gender-stereotypes still firmly in place in Western society in relation to maths, physics and computer science. Otherwise we will never close the pay gap.

If only men control technology that puts women across society at a huge disadvantage on many levels.

The perceptions about differences in risk taking between the sexes may in any case be overstated, and also complicated by women showing variations throughout the menstrual cycle (I don’t know if any studies have looked at post menopausal women). I found a paper I vaguely remembered from a few years ago (and a bit more info) using Perplexity …I think this link should share it if anyone is interested.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/a-few-years-ago-i-think-there-TookjBpQTJGJ6i5D8.Kqyw

Does that complicate it?

Risk taking has been linked pretty conclusively to testosterone levels I believe. Obviously people have all kinds of personalities and experiences but that seems o explain the menstrual cycle element quite easily.

I think a lot of women would report that anecdotally as well.

@TempestTost "I am not convinced that CP is saying that women are stupider or less able."

Then what is she trying to say, if not that? Does she truly believe that without men, women would be stuck in the stone age, having not invented anything beyond grass huts? It's utterly ridiculous, and sounds very much like she thinks women are stupider and less able.

Well since Ada Lovelace invented computing and Hedy Lamarr invented frequency hopping technology which made the Internet and Bluetooth etc. possible, I'm going to guess - yes they would have.

Not to mention that Mileva Maric did Einstein’s maths for him because they both agreed she was the better mathematician.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_and_discoveries_by_women Some of my favourites are chemotherapy drugs, the whooping cough vaccine, the Harvard stellar classification scheme, pulsars, the composition of the Sun, and of course Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Grace Hopper and Rosalind Franklin. Did you know that Watson and Crick didn’t just “also” find out about DNA structure or “develop” her work? - they literally had a spy in Franklin’s lab.

My guess would be that’s it’s largely down to greater-male-variance in relevant dimensions, including intelligence, coupled with higher rates of topic obsession and more leisure time.

To invent something new it helps to be different. Men tend to be more varied in their preferences than women. And inventions are often made by the very intelligent. There seem to be more very stupid men than very stupid women, and similar at the other end of the scale. And to keep persevering even when most sensible people would have stopped, and have time to do all of the above.