'It's a Man's World and It Always Will Be'

Writes Camille Paglia in a remarkable essay in Time Magazine.  It isn't remarkable the Paglia wrote write this essay - she is a sometime contrarian on feminist issues - but remarkable that Time would publish it on Time's venerable and progressive pages.

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.

Most men have been required to sit through indoctrination by "ideologue professors", trainers, officers, corporate human resources drones and others who have made dispensing feminist anger into a life's work. 

Paglia continues...

In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

And then Paglia makes her key point, the one that will likely enrage some feminists:

 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.

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! 

Strong writing, coming from a university professor, social critic and self-described dissident feminist.  What Paglia wrote needed to be said; let's hope others of her status have the clarity of thinking to agree, and build on the theme Paglia started in her essay.

Full essay linked here.  A very worthwhile read.