“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 we accept that, I’m still not seeing the relevance to the finding of greater male variability across various things (including things that no one sets laws about), not just IQ.

I’m also still not convinced that a more variable spread really is “better” in the overall sense you think it is. A lot of very low-IQ, very impulsive male criminals, for example.

Is your claim that men aren’t actually overrepresented at both intelligence tails, or just that they aren’t overrepresented at the top one?

No idea what that last sentence is about - the distribution is what it is, and the mean is fixed at 100.

Of course the main IQ test applied to people of my age and older was the 11+ and this doesn’t seem to have been designed to favour boys. In fact, never mind a small ‘tail’ - there was sufficient sex difference in the top quartile or so that girls had a higher pass mark applied so that equal numbers of boys could be given grammar school places.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/when-the-u-k-had-a-grammar-sch-hVbeSIVrR.KqypwWTVjTag

You think women will never have the same opportunities as men? That seems a bit pessimistic.
We have at least made huge strides over the last century - why shouldn't there be any more to hope for?

Women often had a major role in feeding the group through non-hunting means, it's a bit much to say only men were feeding the group. And women did usually hunt to some degree too, though as you say it was primarily men.

Do you think only men contribute to IQ test designing, up until the present day?

I can’t see your link I’m afraid.

Re the last sentence: the claim is that civilisation-advancing innovations are very disproportionately made by the extremely high IQ (seems to be true for patents and Nobels), so it’s relevant to our debate whether men or women are overrepresented in that very small bit of the curve.

Interesting about grammar schools. I think in the normal range that school tests are set to measure there isn’t likely to be much or any ‘true’ sex difference. Also, as you say, they can get played about with for other reasons.

Yes, in the hunter-gatherer societies, most of the nutrition is from gathering not hunting. It’s the reliable core of feeding the group.

It’s probably somewhat a result of current male biases that there still seems to be more focus and overemphasis on the importance of hunting rather than gathering in these sorts of discussions. In terms of technology useful for effectively feeding a group I wonder whether overall the most significant advance wasn’t the spear but the container so you could gather better? The invention of the bag must have been quite transformative!

I agree. I think it's linked to the way heroic narratives were traditionally about stuff like war, whereas quieter acts of heroism (more likely to be the ones women were able to perform historically) are less dramatic/violent so disregarded

No, Ada Lovelace did not “invent computing”. She did make a foundational contribution insofar as recognising that computing had applications beyond numbers which is why many call her the first computer programmer.

Yes, she a fascinating person & doesn't need to be exaggerated to be interesting.

I enjoyed this book on her & her mother. If only she hadn't died at 36, she could have contributed more...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Byrons-Wake-Turbulent-Daughter-Annabella/dp/1681778726

If all the horrible ladies were sent off to the north Pole to fight and argue up there. Them the rest of us ladies would make the world a beautiful peaceful place and enjoy a good gossip. Hmmm... Hang on, if all the horrible men were sent up to the north Pole to fight among themselves. I wonder what the rest would do??

I think Sexual Personae is such a great book. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything she’s says in it.

I read that quote as her saying that women prioritise group cohesion and consensus over the kind of conflict-driven style of male innovation. Anecdotally I can see this is true, men like a good fight and to win in a way where women can prioritise equality and fairness.

obviously I’m talking in a general sense, there will be many many examples of women who think and behave in a more stereotypically masculine way, and the reverse.

the point I like most in sexual personae is that men are sexually cowed and intimidated by women and that they spend their entire lives trying to make up for that fact!

The claim that early ‘civilization-advancing innovations’ depended significantly on the types of ‘high IQ’ related to Nobel prizes is very unclesr. The biggest shift was probably the development of agriculture. So… first of all start deliberately cultivating plants. Who is more likely to have done that starting from Hunter-gatherers? Then you need societal more than clever technological shifts to ‘industrialise’. At some point the latter seems to have become horribly male dominated to the detriment of women but that’s likely much more about minds and bodies good at power and control, not advanced mathematics.

Interestingly this was covered in Sandra Newmans book 'The Men'. But in this case men just disappeared one day rather then get sent to the north pole. In the absence of male power structures the female power hierarchical structures that take place are just as prone to abuse, coercive behaviour, lack of competence and flaws as men. Its a flawed but interesting book.

No I didn't mean that although I can see what I wrote could read that way. The hypothetical situation I am referring to is women being in a civilisation without men. I am critiquing the whole premise of Paglia's statement. Since it's never going to happen there's no point speculating about it.

As others have said, this isn't actually true. Without men, women would've managed fine - in fact, they did hunt.

Men are, aside from providing sperm, fairly superfluous to the human species, actually. They cause far more problems than they solve.

I do agree that it's unclear how relevant extreme-high-IQ would be to many (or to early) civilisation-advancing innovations. We are largely guessing.

However, the 'groups with lots of outliers in are more likely to invent/discover new things than ones with few outliers' seems like a much more eternal pattern. It will produce many more 'trial and error' events (maybe 99 out of 100 fail fatally, but we are looking for the 1 that succeeds). Then we remember the 1 and forget the 99. That might not be an outlier in ultra-IQ, but in many different traits. Also from a group-evolution perspective, it seems fairly natural that if groups with greater variability give an advantage, it would be the men (as the more disposable sex reproductively) that express that variability the most.

Great book, perhaps. She has some interesting ideas.

Are you aware of her advocacy for paedophilia?

I agree innovation has to be prioritised above cohesion to succeed, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean conflict or promoting inequality. After all, plenty of innovations , by men and women, have helped to make life easier for people at large.

Ah I see - thank you. I agree.

Sounds like Naomi Alderman's The Power...I must read, sounds good...

My first reactiom "Pignuts!". Though I doubt I could feed many on them and would need precise knowledge to avoid poisoning. Somebody had to do a lot of risk taking with that family of plants.
Darwin noted, and could not explain, that it was customary for men in his society to choose less intelligent women as mothers for their families. This would, of course, lead to a regression among the offspring.
Anecdotally, I can contribute the opinion of a teaching colleague that I might find it easier to find a partner if I pretended not to be intelligent. I am still partnerless. The idea of spending my life oretending to be stupid! I would be, of course.

Have any of you seen the film "Hidden Figures"? I didn't notice first time round, what with the actor normally seen as Sheldon playing bright but socially thick, and rooting for the "computers", but where the hell were white women? These "colored" women were extremely bright. The whites? Playing stupid I suppose. The heiresses of Lovelace learning how to impress their husbands' bosses in their sororities.

For the benefit of those with no access to rural Britain, pignuts are a root swelling about the size of a ground nut, in a plant related to parsley, parsnip, carrot and also hemlock, hogweed and other stuff you don't want contact with. A site on medieval eats cites it but it's small and it doesn't accur in large enough patches to feed one person, let alone a family. It's a satisfying explative though. It's amazing how many food plants also have poisonous relations, and somebody had to find out what were nutritous and which were deadly.

I’ve somehow not yet seen Hidden Figures but in that era there were also white women in the US doing engineering/computing and facing all the sexist barriers though not the massive additional racial ones obviously. And would-be astronauts such as the Mercury 13.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13

Studies of modern hunter gatherer societies show women generally provide about 80% of the food. Men provide 20% and yet eat over 50%. Without women humanity would have starved to death very quickly indeed. Without men, we'd feast.

And are men incapable of building and maintaining social bonds? If so, explain the 'old boys networks' that have proved such a barrier to women's advancement and to social mobility in general.

White women weren't the focus of the film, but films are not reality - they are merely a very small window. There were certainly some women (white and otherwise) in that era playing stupid to get partners, but others were working at MIT and coding for Apollo missions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MargaretHamilton(software_engineer)

There's a scene in the film where Katherine Johnson needs the loo, finds the one by the computers' office is labelled 'whites only' and has to run several buildings away to one she's allowed to use.

That 'whites only' loo was a women's one. So white women weren't in the film but they were certainly in the building. They have their own stories.