“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.

Leisure time is in practice likely to be a factor for some sorts of invention but I’m completely baffled by the notion that ‘men tend to be more varied in their preferences than women’.

I take it you haven’t heard of Lovelace, Lamarr or Hopper? I think your logic is flawed and misogynistic.

Shall we discuss the theory that if civilization had been left in male hands we’d be less civilized than bonobos?
What do we mean by ‘civilization’? Social systems requiring first trust and then some concepts of fairness, communication, transmission of acquired knowledge? Rather than cities and the means to bomb them into rubble.

I think we have to consider the role of gender conformity. Are men more interested in these things, or is it because it’s more socially acceptable to be interested in these things?

From an early age, children are pushed into gender conformity and stereotypes. I don’t think women are biologically programmed to keep their house clean any more than men, it’s just more acceptable for men to get away with not doing stuff.

Women are seen as ‘geeky’ for enjoying STEM subjects and I have heard children as young as 4 saying things are for ‘boys’, yet have witnessed no difference in terms of girls and boys experimenting and problem solving.

Historically men have claimed inventions, but a lot of the grunt work and even the ideas have been done by women, it was seen as more palatable coming from a man. I’m sure people have witnessed this in the office!

What does that even mean "civilisation left in women's hands"?
I see women everywhere across civilisations from leaders, nurturers, healers, dreamers, supporters, instigators, I could go on but actually can't even be bothered. She's starting from a ridiculously flawed premise then follows it through to an event more ridiculous conclusion.

For a feminist she has a lot of internalised misogyny.

It interested me too (because I wouldn't say it's blindingly obvious from observation, either). But here's one big meta-analysis that looked at: time preferences (how do people trade off costs and benefits over time?), risk preferences, and social preferences (how people trade off their own outcomes vs those of others). Men and women both cluster around the middle of those ranges, but women cluster more around the middle. If you look at the extreme ends, its men.

I can sort-of see it in real life. Someone's desire is to live their whole life in their bedroom. Man or woman? Someone's desire is to walk every desert in the world. Man or woman? Stereotypically I think we'd say 'man' for both.

It feels quite value-neutral (is being more-moderate or more-extreme better, as a group?). Depends if you care about the top end or bottom end of outcomes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2026112118

Yes, in some ways East Asian cultures are better than European cultures when it comes to girls/women and parity of professions.

Really? I did not know testosterone is linked to risk taking. Why do teenage girls exhibit risk taking behaviours when their estrogen is peaking? And let’s not forget that lots of things influence risk taking including neurodiversity. I often wonder if the risk taking thing is a bit of a stereotype to justify why we still push boys in one direction and girls in another.

Intelligence studies show women tend on average to be more intelligent than men. Intelligence is also inherited via the female line. I personally think that women were evolutionarily selected for intelligence because we would have to outwit instead of outpunch any predators- whether on four legs or two.

Could be (I've seen studies that say the reverse, and ones that find basically no difference at the mean). But the issue here is at the tails: are there more men or more women at the very far extremes (extremely high and extremely low) or is it still basically the same? There, the evidence seems fairly solid that there are more extreme men in both directions.

A bit of a side-track but I'm always puzzled why men and women are roughly the same intelligence level at the mean. Given the massive and ancient sex-specific selection pressures, it seems strange to me that the optimal intelligence turns out to be roughly the same in both groups. (My intuition is the same as yours, by the way: I'd 'logically' expect women to be significantly smarter than men based on my cod evolutionary psychology stories. I can understand people whose intuition is the other way. What I find weird is how it turned out basically exactly the same, talking averages. That's counterintuitive to me).

This is like sexism all over.Of course some women ,and some men are perfectly capable of invention.They have just been held back by the patriarchy. In 1962 A woman pilot applied ,but was turned down due to the"social order " of that time and the public "wouldnt like it!". Of course men wanted their women having create a nice home and cater for them .who wouldnt.

To the space programme i meant!

Technically men and women rely more on intelligence and group cooperation/communication than strength. We were never the strongest or had the biggest teeth. We got to the top of the food çhain because of our brains. Incidentally I think the most important invention ever was speech and we don't know who invented that. But it makes me wince when (usually men) try to argue that being good at empathy and communication is inherently female. It's actually what makes us human (though the fact women score higher on those scales on average is interesting and certainly not a disadvantage).

Intelligence is interesting because there's now evidence many of the genes for specific conditions that inhibit intelligence (severe learning disabilities) are carried on the X chromosome. Since men only have one X chromosome that makes them more vulnerable to diseases carried on that chromosome. This could easily explain that at the extreme lower end of the IQ scale there are mainly men. It's bad luck rather than some specific evolutionary plan. You could extrapolate from that and say that this could also explain why there are more men at the extreme top of the IQ scale. Basically if "intelligence is on the X chromosome" there would be more likelihood of men reaching the extremes since they don't inherit 2 chromosomes balancing each other out. But this isn't really good science because it makes a lot of assumptions. E.g Intelligence and the inheritance of intelligence is much more complicated than just IQ or just a single gene. Even if it was true, that doesn't imply that men are more varied in areas outside IQ/intelligence or that there is some evolutionary advantage to men being more spread out. It's literally just a by-product of how out sex chromosomes work. If it was true that would also imply everyone inherits their intelligence from their mother's and that how clever or not fathers are doesn't really matter for their childrens Intelligence.

IQ tests themselves are limited in what they measure. They don't measure creativity or inventiveness they measure IQ. It's true that creativity tends to increase alongside IQ. But if you try measuring just creativity/inventiveness NOT IQ then you don't see much difference in how female and male results are spread out among the spectrum. There is no sign male results are more extreme. So saying more variation in IQ results must mean móre capacity for inventiveness in the face of measuring inventiveness itself is at best really bad science.

In terms of evolutionary pressures ...

If a female human in prehistoric times had to fight of a sabre toothed tiger on her own she would die very quickly. If she had to bring down a wooly mammoth for food she would likely starve or have to resign herself to eating frogs and nuts.
Men are stronger than women. So if a male human in prehistoric times had to fight a sabre toothed tiger alone or take down a woolly mammoth alone.... He would also die. While there's a difference in strength between men and women there is far greater difference between humans as a whole and other animals. The idea that women had to rely on their wits more and men on their brawn is flawed because in the past we all had to rely on our wits and each other to survive in a world with very big animals with sharp teeth. Hence the development of speech and the ability to work in groups is now thought to be the most important catalyst in the evolution of modern humans. It's likely how we overcame other animals and how we outcompeted other sapiens. The idea that women stayed home tending the fire or gathered food while men hunted large animals isn't based on anything you can observe in the animal kingdom (plenty of mammal carnivores have smaller females than males but in none do only males hunt). What's more likely is that hunting large animals was a whole tribe activity and involved driving them into steep ravines or off cliffs. And involved a very sophisticated level of strategy and communication. (The other way humans can hunt is by running after an antelope for days until it gets too tired. Men are much faster than women but when it comes to extreme endurance running we tend to equalise with each other. It's fascinating that very extreme long distance running is what we evolved to do, men and women.)

I do think there are differences on average between men and women. But trying to extrapolate from those to make pronouncements about evolution or the development of society just ends up as "just so" story telling. Likewise making guesses on how we evolved based on guesses of what early human life was like is (as you said) cod-science.

Paglia does worship men. There's several articles I've read where she essentially says she sees herself as an exception as she believes she's achieved greatness but that usually it's more likely for men to do this.

She's frankly a car crash, as pps have said. I will find links later, but from memory : she signed a petition in support of NAMBLA in the 1990s, the quote about erotic fondling was given in an interview with the pro paedophilia IPCE magazine, she is clearly bisexual (as she has said several times she's attracted to men) but calls herself a lesbian yet says she's learned to appreciate penis & other lesbians should too, as dildos are basically the same thing...you get the idea. She really seems to have it in for lesbians, which seem to stem from disillusionment with the 1970s ones she knew : lots of comments about them being boring, conformist, desexualised etc Despite being in a long term relationship with a woman who she has a kid with! Loathsome woman.

I have read some of her books : Sexual Personae, Vamps & Tramps and I do think that she sometimes has interesting insights into books & film. But her more political stuff is highly dubious...

Men tend not to get pregnant or take on the majority of childcare and housework and all related activities. This leaves a lot of free time to do whatever takes their fancy once they have sufficient funds and are not working just to survive. Boys tend to be given much more encouragement and funds by parents to set them up for success in the future. Girls are discriminated against all through education which is why so few take A-levels in subjects such as maths, physics, accountancy and computing which then excludes most from many high-paid jobs. Men live in a men's world while women have to deal with engrained societal prejudice all our lives.

Women had to fight for the right to go to university and to study in male-dominated fields such as medicine. The first female medical students were treated abominably by their male classmates. Now women make up the majority of medical students and newly qualified doctors. Nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with opportunity.

But the issue here is at the tails: are there more men or more women at the very far extremes (extremely high and extremely low) or is it still basically the same?

Genuinely, why does this matter? These are outliers. The rare exceptions. You don’t need to be a genius to invent something so more or fewer outliers has no impact on civilisation.

Recent study:
"When confidence was explicitly measured and incentivized, women consistently outperformed men. In the task measuring intelligence, they allocated their belief tokens in a way that achieved higher earnings efficiency than men, meaning they earned closer to the maximum possible expected reward, a proxy for smarter ex ante decision-making under uncertainty.
Perhaps most strikingly, the women's advantage was clearest in the most complex, high-risk settings, which are the very kinds of environments where traditional theories have claimed they shy away from competition when choosing occupations.
"The key takeaway we found was that women are better at knowing when to be confident and when to express lack of confidence," said Harrison. "We discovered with the intelligence test that used progressively harder questions, there was always a point where everyone started to make the observation that some questions were harder, and would slow down their thought processes when responding. But women arrived at that switch point quicker than men, who tended to stay overconfident in their answers for longer."
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-reveals-women-outperform-men-intelligence.html

Only if you ignore how much pressure is placed on women from the cradle to the grave to conform to a stereotype developed by men for men's pleasure and ease of life.

As to Hedy Lamarr, I admire her but there is some doubt over whether she originated the idea on the patent, and while it seems she probably did, frequency hopping & her patent are not central to WiFi and Bluetooth as articles often claim.

www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping

There are many other unsung female inventors, though ofc...

We're starting to learn the hard way that technological advances can be very negative. Think nuclear bombs, carbon emissions causing global warming, AI, pollution, etc. Grass huts sound like paradise compared with where the world is hearing.

Stuff is not usually invented by individuals anyway, it is usually a team effort.

As in, you think it’s only value-neutral if you ignore that?

@persephonia
Basically if "intelligence is on the X chromosome" there would be more likelihood of men reaching the extremes since they don't inherit 2 chromosomes balancing each other out.

I did not say intelligence is on the X chromosome, you have over simplified what is a more complex process. Intelligence is 40-80% genetic, with the genetics coming from the maternal side, some directly via the father. Maternal genetics are not only on the X chromosome. The Y chromosome will have the father’s mother’s mRNA. And of course, the X chromosome for all girls will come from the father too. The rest of intelligence comes from the developmental environment of the baby/child. As with most things, it is nature + nurture.

If it was true that would also imply everyone inherits their intelligence from their mother's and that how clever or not fathers are doesn't really matter for their childrens Intelligence.

Your assumption is that the bulk of the genetics for intelligence is through the maternal line means it’s all in a handful of genes on the X chromosome. Girls get their X chromosome from their father so the father matters too. Unless you’re defaulting to only consider male children?

I have a couple of disagreements with this.

'Girls are discriminated against all through education which is why so few take A-levels in subjects such as maths, physics, accountancy and computing which then excludes most from many high-paid jobs'

• can you elaborate on how education now discriminates against girls? There is much misogyny around but I'm not convinced there's huge sexism in the school system..there's plenty of evidence that schools if anything are more likely to use learning styles etc that are suited to the average girl more than the average boy.

Most teachers are female, moreover : you'd hope this might lessen sexism towards girls.

In the most equal countries, the Nordic ones, women are even more likely to go into non-STEM jobs. Maybe this is partly because preferences on average tend to differ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of-working-in-the-worlds-most-equal-countries

Money isn't everything. Women need financial independence but I don't think pushing people who don't want to do STEM into STEM should be a feminist goal.

I do think it's key for women to have ways to influence what's going on in STEM. Too often women are ignored: look at the misogyny in AI companies, for one. .

Well, the flaws in your logic are

• only populating the planet with humans, woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers- both a lone man or woman would die quickly against either one. However, there are a lot more of the medium sized animals that a man could more capably fend off with a stick compared to a woman.

• confusing hunting- where humans are the predator with being hunted, where humans are the prey. Yes, much of hunting the very large animals was a cooperative entreprise that involved both sexes.

• assuming all the humans got along famously and the smaller, weaker female ones never had to fight off or defer to or convince the bigger, stronger male humans that a brilliant idea was their idea all along.

• neglecting the fact that early humans had a greater sexual dimorphism than modern humans. So the men were proportionally alot bigger than the women compared to today’s humans.