From a piece in TIME entitled It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be by Camille Paglia (author and professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) comes these two paragraphs which I found incredibly intriguing and thought provoking.
I’m not saying I fully agree with what Paglia asserts here, but I’m not saying that I disagree, either.
I’m not sure. It has the air of truthiness to it, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel quite right.
It also makes use of two unnecessary exclamation points, which doesn’t help her argument at all.
I would love to hear what you think about the paragraphs and perhaps about the entire piece.
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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.
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!
