https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXOlgDdEvEN/?igsh=b255Y3cyaGthc2Ex
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXWVzWzkgA_/?igsh=MWc4aGN2b3o3d3dwZg==
This is an exciting topic, but I really struggled with wording this, I hope it’s coherent.
She does make a good point that males have a lot more drive than women and that cannot be attributed only to the social barriers. However, in typical feminist fashion, she goes on to spin this female lack as a virtue by pathologizing male drive and diagnosing them with a sort of womb envy 🙄 as usual women can’t resist the urge to romanticise motherhood and hallucinate their own superiority. But I think she’s right that motherhood plays a role.
"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."
I don’t think she’s entirely wrong to question the greatness of the male ambition, but my theories diverge slightly, obviously I don’t think men are driven to pursue genius because they envy the woman’s capacity to create (lol!). But I do think she’s right that it comes from the fact that females have inherent biological value (everything revolves around reproduction) while men don’t, so they don’t have much to sacrifice (men are cheap, expendable) but everything to win. However she seems to imply that unlike women, men don’t feel whole because they can’t get pregnant? I disagree with that…it’s an idealistic framework that projects feelings onto a simpler cost benefit situation which also conveniently redeems women (shocker). I think, to put it simply, men pursue genius because they are incentivised to do it, whereas women aren’t, as well as it aligning with male status seeking behaviour.
A while ago I described mankind as “half the population dragging the other half along history by the hair” aka males forcing women into existence (slavery) through the system of coercion , because unlike women, men have every reason to want to continue the species (it serves them), meanwhile the species has only ever abused and exploited women (they serve it) and I think that might be part of the answer to our question. Women have no skin in the game. That’s not to paint women as innocent victims, because they obviously coauthor this system to some capacity—though there is definitely nuance here, it’s more deterministic—but if we boil it down, they are passive objects within it.
Men have legacy, men have honor, glory, a reward at the end of the rocky road of greatness.
In a man’s world, a woman pursuing genius isn't just working hard, she is liquidating her primary social capital (her youth/fertility) for a speculative gain that society might not even recognize. She will never achieve the same status, her value comes from her ability to give birth and martyr herself, and if she sacrifices her value in order to pursue greatness she is seen as a traitor rather than a genius. Why would a woman stay celibate and give up her usefulness to pursue something a man could do for free? Why spend the effort of pursuing genius when she could spend it being pregnant? (Unironically that meme of the woman saying “i became a dr” vs “i gave birth to 10 drs” perfectly sums up society’s attitude to female genius) Society doesn’t see a woman’s achievements, but rather the price she had to pay, which is her purpose as a broodmare. Why is this object stepping out of line, why is this cattle chasing personhood? Why is the canvas trying to become the artist? If women are the "resource" that history runs on, then a woman seeking genius is effectively a theft of resources from the collective, a wasted incubator. Only men can afford the required ego to chase glory.
And the lack of ego isn’t only socially engineered. Paglia is right, that there aren’t many women geniuses because they are busy being mothers, and as we have seen through countless studies by now, motherhood literally shrinks the brain and reduces one’s capacity and identity, pregnancy hijacks the mother to turn her into the perfect protector and vessel for her child, her own self erased to prioritise continuation. How could such a person (or what’s left of her) climb the already steep mountain towards greatness? It takes twice the effort and produces less than half the results, because as I’ve already established, a woman simply isn’t incentivised to climb that mountain. So no wonder there are less women geniuses.
I could go on about male sadism vs female masochism, “the one that inflicts and the one that is inflicted upon” as the core dynamic, but I’ll save that for another post in which I will go into more detail trying to get to the core of male vs female differences. And that one will require a lot more research.
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