“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.

Until you invent fire and burn your grass hut down.
Every technological advancement is both a blessing and a curse.

'Boys tend to be given much more encouragement and funds by parents to set them up for success in the future'

Is this still mainly the case now? Really disappointing if so.

One of their X chromosomes. We have 2, remember - every egg contains a maternal one.

Often a blessing short term and a curse permanently thereafter.

Thanks for spotting the error. I did mean 1 of their Chromosomes but as often happens I can’t type as fast as I think.

1. I was focusing on larger predators/prey. If you want to talk about smaller predators then yes, a human male could fend of a wolf more effectively than a human female could. Of course, wolves make up for their smaller size by hunting in packs. Exactly the same evolutionary route Humans took. And to fend of a pack of wolves you would want to be either part of a group of humans OR use your brains to invent a defense/climb a tree/start a fire. Evolution is an arms race a lot of the time. We largely responded to that arms race by evolving sophisticated communication and problem solving. Women and men.(Wolves are a very interesting example because ultimately we teamed up with them.)
2. The predators and prey thing is different I agree. But see my point about wolves.
3. You are right they didn't. That's probably why sexual dimorphism existed. Male mammals have more spare capacity to evolve physical traits to compete with other males because they don't bear children. Hence peacocks can afford fancy tails, male lions have manes and are big enough to fight other male lions etc. But, that doesn't mean they would evolve those traits at the expense of intelligence for example. It might be that being intelligent/incentive is too important to sacrifice for the "nice to haves" (fancy tail etc). Plus, there is no reason to as it isn't zero sum. Also, if intelligence is inherited through the female line (a theory thats debatable) then any advantage conferred by a male being more/less intelligent wouldn't be passed down anyway. If that theory is true then the evolution of intelligence and communication skills would be driven by the pressures on human females. Which would mean even if there was more need for human females to be intelligent than human males, boys and girls would inherit those traits from the X chromosome.
4. Early humans didn't show greater sexual dimorphism. Our early human ancestors did. Big difference. Effectively the other sapien species we evolved from/outcompeted were similar to us in some ways but none of them evolved the capacity to work in large complex groups. Our prehuman ancestors didn't have the same intellectual capacity, and didn't have the same communication skills as us. The evolution of those is what made humans distinct and likely what made them successful. That this happened at the same time (seemingly) that sexual dimorphism reduced is interesting and supports rather than negates my argument.

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-early-human-ancestors-extreme-size.html

Great you added wolves to the planet. Another nice 🍒

See my other post on how maternal line doesn’t equate to only the X chromosome

Early humans was referring to the species we have evolved from. The ones we didn’t would not matter in this discussion. Recent discoveries have shown that earlier human species (homo sapiens ‘——-´) were able to work in large, complex groups.

Yes they were. Neanderthalsnwere.more intelligent and closer to humans than originally thought. Maybe they were nicer than us. Who knows. It could have only been chance that homosapiens dominated. This is why I'm wary of cod evolutionary biology type arguments. It's extrapolation often based on incomplete knowledge. However, even if I do try to explain everything with evolutionary biology it doesn't support the assumptions made by the likes of Paglia.

You can't argue that sexual dimorphism is an evolutionary advantage** and support that argument with the fact the species we evolved from had greater sexual dimorphism. Think about it....

**If you are arguing women and men are different in intelligence etc because of evolution then that's what you are doing effectively.

For what it's worth of you want to talk about the evolution of language and language skills I do have a pet theory that this was largely driven by women. Women are still the main drivers in introducing new language innovations (speech patterns, words etc) across societies and women are largely the most responsible for teaching infants to talk. There is evidence that females in other mammals (horses, lions etc) sometimes use group cooperation to e.g. stop the male eating their young. So it's entirely reasonable to suggest that female humans also used communication and group solidarity to defend against male aggression. However, even there I think probably the biggest evolutionary pressure came from other species. If there was less cooperation between males and females then you would expect greater sexual dimorphism. When in reality we evolved in the opposite direction. Likewise the living in family structures (with males as well as females sometimes remaining part of the group) is more likely to foster cooperation between males/females than competition which could also explain the reduction in sexual dimorphism. That doesn't mean prehistoric times were all cuddly and that men never use their strength to act like dicks of course.

However, my theory on women being the first ones to "invent" language is still only a theory. There is no way to evidence it one way or the other. It's fun to imagine/speculate but I get frustrated when people (eg Brett Weinstein, Peterson, Paglia) pretend their speculations are facts and logic. And, just because women are "better" at some forms of communication than men it doesn't mean that communication is a "female trait". It's a human trait.

Sorry I missed this before. I agree intelligence isn't just inherited and that how it's inherited is complicated. Also what is "intelligence" is complicated as well. IQ tests are arguably naturally biased and most actual experts in that area acknowledge the limitations.
Boys are specifically relevant if someone is talking about differences in female and male intelligent levels and trying to argue there is an evolutionary reason. If I wanted to argue that men had evolved to be more intelligent than women (or vice versa) because they were the ones needing to count sabre toothed tigers or something then (if intelligence is on the X chromosome) that argument wouldn't make sense since boys are inheriting their intelligence (or lack of) from their mother. So it's not possible for the "clever gene" to be passed from father to son. I do agree it's way more complicated than "a clever gene" and I don't really agree with that theory, but that's exactly why those simplistic arguments that (eg) men are better at chemistry than women "because evolution" are silly.
Likewise mens susceptibility to certain hereditary mental impairments probably isn't because it's advantageous for men to have more intellectual variation (any more than men's increased risk of haemophillia is.) It's just where those genes happen to be.

@IrishSelkie
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.

Patents and Nobel prizes correlate extremely strongly with IQ, and it’s not linear.

So if that’s a good proxy for civilisational innovation then the number of extreme high IQ outliers matters more than the mean IQ. That’s not denying non-IQ things matter a lot too.

With chart

Re Nobel Prizes, I think it's fair to point out that the Matilda Effect arguably robbed several women of prizes they deserved to have shared in.

Top of the list would be..
Rosalind Franklin for DNA structure and
Lise Meitner for nuclear fission, but other strong contenders are..
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Frieda Robscheit-Robbins
Marietta Blau
Hertha Wambacher
Esther Lederberg
Chien-Shiung Wu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect

I think men like to assert their ownership, presence, and victory over nature, by making things like lighthouses on rocks out at sea, impossible bridges, castles on rocks, ships that can go around the world, thousands of miles long railroads, skyscrapers, cars and planes. These things might have seemed impossible.

Also atomic bombs, guns etc Killing tools.

I partly agree but I think that's a bit pessimistic? A powerful ship or lighthouse or railway isn't necessarily an expression of 'ownership' or 'victory over' nature.

Yes, I may be wrong and used a poorly thought out description of what propels some men. I am not sure I even know the reason behind the attitudes of massive ambition and determination against all the odds displayed in the sorts of buildings I described before. It’s just that personally I do regard them as driven by male urges and instincts. ( And very useful.)

The weapons of destruction I do think are for dominance, power, and the wiping out of other men on the one hand, and protection on the other.

My DH has several patents and I have none. So he has definitely invented more things than me.

I wouldnt say he is a risk taker. He just enjoys the thought processes and is happy to explore ideas to problems we dont have, many of which go nowhere.

We do solve day to day problems differentlly though. But that might just be us, not a man woman thing.

The difference between us can be seen in gardening. we had a boggy garden. My strategy was to work with that and have a raised deck in the bog for people, plant lots of plants that love that condition, have a seasonal pond and then have specimen plants that need dry conditions in pots. His strategy was to put in masses of drainage and make the garden the environment he wanted it to be. Mainly because he is stronger than me and doing all that digging and piping work, heaving stones around just was not something I could do so i didnt spend time thinking about how the drainage could work.

His patents dont involve strength but I just think he got more used to exploring all the possibilities not just those he can achieve.

I agree with that: probably more on average male-typical interests though possible for women too. Women can often have great ambition or daring (plenty of intrepid female climbers or explorers) but it tends to be directed at other fields.

Otoh it would have been hard until recently to build ships etc

Agree re weapons too.

I think that tests for intelligence are inherently biased in favour of the people who design them.

But the study in that post was about things like time preference and the finding was about differences in variability.

Is a finding that one sex is more variable (both more likely to be very impatient and to be very patient) really a finding that that sex is better?

Ditto for IQ. If men were fixing it to get the result that “favours” them, wouldn’t they fix the mean? Not this more elaborate fix that gives them over-representation at both ends?

It all comes down to the reality that men need women and women need men but neither sex likes to admit that. Sex roles are organised around child bearing and rearing and of course those can gradually change over time and evolutionary changes can follow accordingly (very slowly). But it will always be women bearing children and giving birth and that necessitates at least some sex differences. I don't have a problem with the sexes being different and I like the efficiency of it. My problem is with the total devaluation of anything female and the resulting restrictions placed upon women that limit their capacity to fully contribute to society. If women had the same opportunities as men who knows what their contribution could be? Without male domination perhaps more females would become risk takers, innovators and so on. But it is an entirely hypothetical situation that will never happen so it's not even worth entertaining. For humans to continue existing both men and women are needed and if we could move towards a society that valued traditional female attributes such as empathy, nurturing, communication, relationships, then it would be a better society. Unfortunately the masculine is so over valued that a lot of arguments have been about whether women are 'as good at men' at various things which just plays into the idea that men are the norm and women are the second sex.

Men have been telling themselves and everyone else for millennia that they are more intelligent than women. They invented words like genius to flatter their own ego. They put in place systems and laws to limit the opportunities for women and girls and then pointed to outcomes as proof of their superior intelligence. Delusional.

my DH also has lots of patents and I have none.
But we have precisely equal academic qualifications and both have had inventive, creative STEM careers. The difference is which type of industry we went into - his trad industrial chemistry they were fundamental, mine in scientific software patents are mercifully rare - more of a ‘sunrise’, explosively creative field maybe moving too fast for all that paperwork?
And of course within fields where patenting is common, not everyone involved gets their name on them. The same social factors creating ‘gender’ pay gaps and glass ceilings presumably apply.

Yes I’m sure that exists as well.

Without men, humanity would have starved to death. Men had to do whatever it took, and accept whatever risks involved, to secure the food & resources required for their families to survive and to physically protect them from harm.
Without women, humanity would have become extinct. Women had to do whatever it took to care for, nurture & protect their children and to provide a clean loving secure home for their families. They also had to build & maintain the social bonds required for the community to be maintained for everyone’s benefit.
Both were essential. This is obvious vommon sense. Throughout human history until very recently neither men or women could perform the others’ role.