Things Worth Remembering: The Indispensability of Men

[Valin]

The Free Press

For Father’s Day, a tribute to Camille Paglia’s brilliant, unapologetic defense of masculinity.

Douglas Murray

June 16, 2024

Happy Father’s Day in the United States! I thought that, to celebrate, I would do the obvious thing and highlight a speech by the feminist Camille Paglia.

One of the strangest things that has happened in my lifetime is the emergence of the man as a pathetic figure, or a figure of fun. For the last fifteen years or so, you could see it in every walk of life—nowhere more so than in advertising. 

There are two things you can always predict with 100 percent certainty if a family, any family, is featured in an advertisement. The first is that the family will be biracial. The second is that the man (especially if he is white) will be portrayed as an incompetent or a loser. If the problem is wrestling with the remote control, the children and wife will patiently have to show poor old dad how to work the darn thing. It is a small but significant example of a wider trend, because this is a time in which male role models have been stripped away from the culture. 

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Only an exceptionally brave woman could wade into this sea of male-bashing and help us rethink such institutionalized misandry. Enter: Camille Paglia, the iconoclastic literature scholar and culture critic who teaches at University of the Arts in Philadelphia and, in 2013, took part in a Munk Debate, in Toronto. 

In addition to being an admirer of Paglia’s thinking and writing, I have always been a fan of her verbal skills. She is not the most soothing orator to listen to. Her style often sounds like someone machine-gunning a tin roof. But the sheer dexterity, speed, commitment, and energy of her delivery are something to behold.

In her speech at the Munk Debate, Paglia offers one of the greatest paeans to men I have ever heard. You can hear the relief in the audience at Roy Thomson Hall as she pays tribute to the litany of un-thanked tasks that men uniquely perform.

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“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,” Paglia declares. “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.”

She adds: “Surely modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due.”

Paglia does not limit her praise to men who build things and keep them running. She envisions a day when men will be called upon to do the things they have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. 

“The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal,” Paglia says. “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 [expect] men to scrounge for food and water and defend the home turf.” 

So, on this Father’s Day, it’s worth imagining what could happen if a crisis strikes and men are called upon, once again, to defend their families, their clans, their communities. Who will scrounge for food and water? Who will defend the home turf? 

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Some time Some How in the 60's we were sold (And Bought) into the idea that there was no Real difference between Men And Women. That anything a man Could Do A Woman Could (Ever notice a lack of Female Middle Linebackers in the NFL?). Yes men Are (BROADLY SPEAKING) Bigger, Stronger, Faster  than women. Women have a Super Power that men can never have. You can make a Brand New Human Being!