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Thought Experiment: Man-in-Hole
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” — Camille Paglia
Thus the doyenne of contrarian-libertarian feminism. In my sourer moments, I’d tend to blame her mentor Harold Bloom for this sort of off-the-cuff bombast. But Bloom is dead and, frankly, he was too dyspeptic and diffident to blame for any of Paglia’s fevered rantings. Still, a generous-minded sort, I wonder if Paglia wasn’t on to something. But I wonder more intensely about what Paglia’s conjecture leaves out.
So, here’s a thought experiment for you…
Man-in-Hole, a one-act play
Dramatis Personae: Narrator, Man-in-Hole, Woman
Scene: an open field somewhere in Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic era. There is a lot of tall grass, and a dense forest bordering the field on three sides. There are lots of holes. Occasionally, a male head pokes up from one of them, eyes level with the rims of the hole, scanning the horizon, then dropping back down again.
Voice of Narrator (imagine a mixdown of James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, and Ian McKellen):
Fifty thousand years ago, before the dawn of civilization, non-stick skillets, and Twitter, mankind lived a harsh existence, one that was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It was a man’s…
