“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.

I have really been enjoying this conversation. Some really thoughtful and insightful contributions - this little corner of the interwebs is unparalleled in that regard.

One thing that (I think!) hasn’t come up is the concept of how “importance” of a task or skill is decided on, and who does the deciding. What I’m thinking of is the anthropological research of Margaret Mead (I know she has her detractors, but I think this example works even as a thought experiment). I’m going to quote @MyrtleLion from another thread here, because she describes it well:

[Mead] discovered two villages around 10-20 miles from each other, both of which had knitting cultures. In one village, knitting was women's work and was felt to be necessary for garment making for the villagers. It was disdained by men who refused to have anything to do with it except wearing the garments (and presumably whingeing if there was anything wrong with them).

In the other village, knitting was solely done by men. It was considered almost holy and precious and women were not allowed anywhere near the knitting, particularly if they were menstruating. Possibly they weren't even allowed to wear the garments.

Mead concluded that in both cultures, it wasn't about the knitting, but about the knitters, and male knitters were more revered than female ones.”

In other words, if women do it, it’s disposable and not important, if men do it it’s holy.

I think it’s not only important to look at the erasure of women in the world of innovation, but also to look at who is deciding what counts as innovative.

Oh, right! Sorry. And yes - I think 'feasting' is a little optimistic! I think hunter gatherers, whether men, women, or both, were never feasting. Surviving with occasional, brief gluts was probably as good as it got.

I imagine men were an advantage to have in regards to hunting - stronger, faster over short distances, filled with testosterone, and more expendable to the group as a whole - losing one man would have to be less of an impact than one woman, I'd think.

Would we have mainly eaten large game or small game? If we look at our history then large game hunting was mainly done by the aristocracy but poor people could fish, collect snails and shellfish, catch birds, insects and small mammals. All of which does not require a lot of upper body strength and therefore will not have been exclusively male.

If we look at the animal kingdom species that hunt in groups then both sexes hunt, varying from lions where the bulk of the hunting is done by the females, orca/dogs/wolves/hyenas where hunting is led by the matriarch, to chimps where the bulk of the hunting is done by males.

I'm not sure 'male high IQ = lots of patents' translates to invention. Patents are dependent on money to file a patent and for the invention to be 'patentable', e.g. you can't patent a recipe or clothing design. Male invention is more likely to be valued than female invention in a patriarchal society, e.g. male 'art' vs female 'craft'. Who created the Bayeux tapestry - we don't know any of their names but we know the man who commissioned it.

Also, when looking at the balance of male vs female hunting for chimps it's 80:20 so I bet that is where the figure comes from.

If you removed men and the power structures they dominate then all that would happen is the remaining women would fill that power vacuum with their own hierarchy that would also be based on status, power, control of resources etc and that new structure, like before would utimately be underpinned with intimidation and if needs be violence as well.

We don't actually know that.

But men and women aren't the same - testosterone alone makes a big difference in violent aggression, I think - so while a hierarchy would emerge of course, I'd venture a guess that it wouldn't be anywhere near as violent as our current society.

That's a telling example. Margaret Mead has been unfairly maligned I think. She did make mistakes but big revisionist claims that she got huge things wrong are now being questioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa#The_Mead%E2%80%93Freeman_controversy

https://savageminds.org/2010/10/13/the-trashing-of-margaret-mead/

Those are not tools!

Paglia is a realist. Don't forget that most technology is a result of armed conflict!

Then you haven't read her work!

A tool is anything that helps you to do a particular activity. So they absolutely are tools.

That’s a very questionable proposition.

Women invented computers and the internet and were the first to identify the structure of DNA. The reason why we do not see everything women invented is because men took credit for their inventions.

most technology is a result of armed conflict

[Citation needed]

Even gunpowder wasn't the result of armed conflict. I highly doubt central heating, ice cream machines, or wheels were either. Huge numbers of discoveries and inventions were accidental side effects of the search for eternal life or attempts to make gold. Telescopes, microscopes and other lenses were non-military inventions. I could go on.

oh lets.
Printing, Spinning and weaving, steam engines and everything they powered, electricity ditto, telephony, television & cinema….I could go on…

I've actually read an enormous amount of her work because I love her writing style. A lot of her ideas are nonsense and misogyny

Rosalind Franklin's DNA discoveries were great- re computers and the Internet, which women were you thinking of?

Someone who believes in 'erotic fondling at any age' and defends NAMBLA is certainly a realist...

Im not convinced about risk taking being a male characteristic. Recklessness yes but not risk. The women in my family are less risk averse than the men.

Oh stop with this nonsense. Charles Babbage (conceptual mechanical computer) and Alan Turing (foundations of computation) 'invented' modern computing. However, women did play foundational roles in early computing. Ada Lovelace wrote what is often considered the first computer algorithm anf Grace Hopper helped develop early programming languages and compilers.

The invention of the internet was a largely a collaborative effort with the US defence agency DARPA and people like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn being key to its development. Women like Radia Perlman did invent the Spanning Tree Protocol which was crucial for network stability.

Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction images critical to discovering DNA’s structure which Watson and Crick later did. Franklin’s contribution was crucial, but she did not independently publish the final model first.

but she did not independently publish the final model first

Not having a paper accepted for publication in a very male controlled environment does not mean you did not invent/discover it first! 🤦‍♀️

She provided the experimental evidence of a helical structure. She didn’t put it together with the information on the base pair ratios and then come up with the hydrogen bonded pairs forming the helix. Watson and Crick made that theoretical leap, and were able to postulate a structure which fitted her experimental data. It is the base pairing rather than whether the paired structure is helical or not which was the crucial part of understanding how the structure actually worked as a means of carrying genetic information.

If you want full structure determination - and a long and fruitful career which has inspired generations of women scientists, myself included- then better to cite Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

I’m not a fan of people overhyping the achievements of women in the past rather than applauding what they genuinely did despite the constraints of their times.

She did not publish a paper first because she had not made that final leap of correctly interpreting the structure. She made an essential, foundational contribution and her data made the double helix interpretation possible.

Women have most definitely played critical and sometimes underappreciated roles in computing and scientific research, but these breakthroughs were collaborative achievements, not inventions by one person alone and it is daft when people on here start claiming that a single woman 'invented or discovered' something when it is simply not true.

Actually Franklin and Gosling's seminal paper 'Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate' was published in the same issue of Nature as Crick and Watson's paper 'Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' on 25 April 1953. She was absolutely recognised by everyone as an equal contributor to the determination of the structure of DNA but she died before the Nobel prize was awarded which is why she didn't get a share of it.

I have a very interesting breakdown somewhere, which annoyingly I can't find, of sex-based occupations across cultures. Hunting, if I remember rightly - and maybe I don't! - is one of the few that is pretty much universally exclusive to one sex (males). Most show a lot of variation, e.g. in our culture house-building might be thought of as very much a thing that men do, but in other cultures it's a female task. You certainly wouldn't find that men, cross-culturally, have a monopoly on "civilised" tasks.