Lesbian Feminist: World to Remain Men's Oyster

Iconoclast lesbian feminist Camille Paglia has a wonderful essay on how the gender neutral workplace is a feminist ideal which will never be attained in reality, because simply put, women as a whole don't want to do the jobs that keep our civilization running:
 

It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be

. . .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. . .

I remember some years ago reading where Camille made a statement to the effect that, had it been left up to women, mankind would still be living in caves in Africa; well decorated caves to be sure.  I've never been able to Google that one up, and I'm not going to try today.

. . .But the triumphalism among some — like Hanna Rosin in her book, The End of Men, about women’s gains — seems startlingly premature. For instance, Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

And none of them were run predominantly by women.  When the inevitable clash with another civilization, or worse, the neighbor barbarians occurs, men's superior strength, testosterone driven aggressive instincts, and inventiveness in martial pursuits, it's the culture whose men win the war that prevail.  And it not just war; it's the hard dirty work of building the civilization, too.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. 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.

A point that doesn't get made often enough.  While women are fully capable of running the machines that do all these things in modern society, or even using a hand shovel back in the bad old days, by and large, they don't want to, except in small ways on a part time basis.  To grow flowers...

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!

She may not want to sleep with us, but at least she sees the value in having some well trained, docile monkeys around to do the heavy lifting.

Wombat-Socho's giant weekly Rule 5 masterwork  "Rule 5 Sunday: Transfer Station Blue" is up at The Other McCain.