Camille Paglia Says: "It's a Man's World!"

If there were no Camille Paglia, we would have to invent her. Speaking truth to the sisterhood, Paglia offered a few choice remarks on Hanna Rosin’s notion that men are obsolete.

As usual, Paglia’s remarks were a rhetorical tour de force. They are worth your attention:

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism.  Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment.  Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

And this:

History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children.  Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

And then, for those who get carried away on the wings of ideology, a reality check:

Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments.  It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.  Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world.  These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role–but women were not its author.  Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

As much as we agree with Paglia, we must note that, teamed with Caitlin Moran, she lost the debate to Hanna Rosin and Maureen Dowd.