No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

Paglia’s extremely cispatriarchal conception of “civilization”

Before I address Paglia’s claims about the supposed decline of “western civilization,” I think I should first discuss what she actually thinks “civilization” is, because her ideas about “civilization” are, well, idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.

Paglia’s conception of “civilization” is deeply, deeply cispatriarchal. In her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, published in 1990, she claims that culture, civilization, speech, logic, philosophy, science, art, athletics, and politics are all inherently male things that men invented to defend themselves against women. She writes on page nine:

“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.”

“Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.”

[…]

“All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”

Later, on page thirty-eight, Paglia concludes: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

Not a single one of these assertions is based on any kind of historical evidence. Most of the things Paglia lists here as supposed male inventions originated in prehistoric times, meaning we don’t have any documentation of how they arose. We do, however, know that women have been involved in all of the fields Paglia mentions for as far back as we have written records and we have no good justification to believe that any of the fields in question were really invented solely by men. I’ll give a quick run-down of each of the fields Paglia talks about and how women have been involved in them from the very beginning.

ABOVE: Photograph from 1901 of a grass hut on the American island of Puerto Rico—a hut of the sort Paglia claims we would all still be living in if not for patriarchy

Women and the origins of language

There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that men invented language on their own without the involvement of women. In all likelihood, the development of language occurred simultaneously as an evolutionary development in both men and women, without either gender developing it earlier than the other.

Women and the origins of logic

When it comes to logic, Paglia is at least right in the sense that men are the ones who wrote the definitive texts on the subject in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) outlines the rules and principles of logic in a series of six treatises titled Organon. The treatises that make up the Organon are: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations.

On the other hand, Aristotle only wrote about logic; he did not invent logic itself. People had, of course, been using logic long before Aristotle was even born. Although we don’t have much information about the formal study of logic before Aristotle, we can be certain that people, including women, were capable of making logical arguments before he came along.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Aristotle, based on an earlier Greek original

Women and the origins of philosophy

The word philosophy comes from Greek, but people having been asking fundamental questions about existence ever since prehistoric times. Ever since human beings first began to write, they have written about philosophy. There are surviving collections of ancient Sumerian philosophical proverbs from the third millennium BCE.

There is no evidence to suggest that men started asking philosophical questions before women. On the contrary, all evidence indicates that women have been doing philosophy since the very beginning. According to legend, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BCE) learned his teachings from an oracle named Themistokleia.

This story is probably apocryphal, since there were a lot of unreliable stories about Pythagoras in antiquity and this particular story comes from a biography written in the third century CE by an author named Diogenes Laërtios, who generally isn’t known for being reliable. There are, however, said to have been many important female philosophers in the Pythagorean tradition, including Theano of Kroton, Damo, Arignote, Abrotelia of Taras, Melissa, Phintys, and Aisara.

Somewhat more reliably, the Greek philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) describes in his dialogue The Symposion a female philosopher named Diotima of Mantineia, whom he describes as having been an important teacher to Socrates.

There is dispute among classicists over whether Diotima was a real person, but, regardless of whether she really existed, she certainly represents a class of real female philosophers who did exist in the Greek world at the time. Indeed, Plato himself is reported to have had two major female disciples: Lastheneia of Mantineia and Axiothea of Phleious.

ABOVE: Painting from 1855 of the Polish author Jadwiga Łuszczewska posing as the ancient philosopher Diotima of Mantineia, who is said to have been a teacher of Socrates

Women and the origins of science

The roots of science go all the way back to antiquity. For instance, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, Aristotle conducted extensive research on the behavior and anatomy of animals in the fourth century BCE. He observed animals in nature, performed dissections (and probably also vivisections), and recorded his findings in multiple treatises.

Later, the mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes of Kyrene (lived c. 276 – c. 194 BCE) calculated the circumference of the earth with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. The mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived 287 – c. 212 BCE) applied mathematical concepts that would later become important in modern calculus. The Greco-Egyptian astronomer Klaudios Ptolemaios (lived c. 100 – c. 170 CE) laid out a mathematical model to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies in his Mathematike Syntaxis, or Almagest. Although we now know that this model is incorrect, it did a remarkably good job of explaining the motions of the heavenly bodies as the ancient Greeks and Egyptians perceived them.

All the proto-scientists I’ve mentioned so far have been men, but women were involved in ancient proto-science from very early on. One of the earliest alchemical writers whose works have survived is Maria the Jewess, who probably lived in around the first century CE. The later alchemical writer Zosimos of Panopolis attributes to her the earliest known description of the tribikos, a kind of device used for distilling, which it is possible she may have invented.

Another early alchemical writer was Kleopatra the Alchemist, who probably lived in Egypt in around the third century CE. The Neoplatonic philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (lived c. mid-fourth century – 415 CE) taught astronomy and physics and actually edited the text of Klaudios Ptolemaios’s Almagest to produce the standard text we have today.

ABOVE: Imaginative engraving intended to represent Maria the Jewess, from the 1617 book Symbola Aurea Mensae Duodecim Nationum by Michael Maier

Women and the origins of art

Art is an extremely ancient prehistoric invention. We don’t know exactly when art was first invented, but there is a cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that is believed to date to sometime around 43,900 years ago. The painting depicts hunters that are part human and part animal attacking some kind of large mammal.

ABOVE: Photograph of an Indonesian cave painting dated to around 43,900 years ago

These extremely ancient works of art have no names attached to them and it is impossible to know whether any individual artwork was created by a man or a woman. Nonetheless, we can almost certainly infer that at least some of the many hundreds of thousands of cave paintings around the world must have been created at least in part by women.

One thing we can say for certain is that female artists existed in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) gives mini-biographies of six renowned female artists in his Natural History 35.40. Here is what he says about them, as translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley:

“There have been some female painters also. Timarete, the daughter of Micon, painted a Diana at Ephesus, one of the very oldest panel-paintings known. Irene, daughter and pupil of the artist Cratinus, painted a figure of a girl, now at Eleusis, a Calypso, an Aged Man, the juggler Theodorus, and Alcisthenes the dancer. Aristarete, daughter and pupil of Nearchus, painted an Æsculapius.”

“Iaia of Cyzicus, who always remained single, painted at Rome, in the youth of M. Varro, both with the brush, and with the graver, upon ivory, her subjects being female portraits mostly. At Naples, there is a large picture by her, the portrait of an Old Woman; as also a portrait of herself, taken by the aid of a mirror.”

“There was no painter superior to her for expedition; while at the same time her artistic skill was such, that her works sold at much higher prices than those of the most celebrated portrait-painters of her day, Sopolis namely, and Dionysius, with whose pictures our galleries are filled. One Olympias painted also, but nothing is known relative to her, except that she had Autobulus for a pupil.”

Unfortunately, no works of art made by any of the six female painters mentioned by Pliny are known to have survived. Nonetheless, the fact that these women were able to become painters and the fact that their works were apparently quite revered indicates that it is highly probable that some surviving artworks from ancient Greece and Rome were made by women.

ABOVE: French manuscript illustration dated to c. 1403 depicting the ancient artist Iaia painting her own self-portrait

Women and the origins of athletics

Athletics is another prehistoric invention. We don’t really know how it originated, but, but, like philosophy and art, it most likely arose not as the invention of any particular person, but rather as a natural consequence of our evolutionary development.

We know for certain that women in the ancient world took part in athletics. Our information about ancient Mesopotamian sports is rather limited, but we know that hunting, boxing, and wrestling were popular with men. Dancing—which I think counts as a sport—was popular with both men and women.

In ancient Greece, women were forbidden from being present at Olympia when the Olympic games were taking place, but this does not mean that Greek women did not take part in any kind of sports. Ancient Greek women are known to have partaken in dancing and footraces. A festival known as the Heraia was held at the site of Olympia every four years in which female athletes would compete in a footrace.

In the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, athletics were considered an essential part of the lifestyle for a girl or young woman because it was believed that strong women would bear strong sons who would fight well on the battlefield.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze figurine dated to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCE depicting a young Greek woman taking part in a footrace

Women and the origins of politics

When politics originated depends largely on how a person chooses to define the word “politics.” Prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies undoubtedly had systems of various kinds for allocating responsibilities within the community. Politics as we know it today, though, probably began with the invention of agriculture and the emergence of settled societies, which began sometime around 11,000 years ago in the Near East.

It’s true that, from very early on, politics seems to have been formally centered around men to a large extent. Women, however, have had a significant degree of influence in politics since the very beginning, in both formal and informal ways.

In ancient Sumer, priestesses and female members of the royal family seem to have often had significant political influence. Notably, the Akkadian conqueror Sargon (ruled c. 2334 – c. 2284 BCE) appointed his daughter Enheduanna as priestess of the god Nanna and the goddess Inanna in the city of Ur. She wrote a large number of poems and hymns and she seems to have had important political influence, helping to enforce her father’s reign in the city of Ur.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enheduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enheduanna, the Sumerian priestess and poet

Misogyny and the “greatness” of Athens

In short, Paglia’s whole notion that men invented “culture” and essentially everything else worth having “as a defense against female nature” is a complete fantasy, not rooted in any kind of historical basis. Later, on page 100, Paglia declares that misogyny is what makes civilizations rise to greatness, citing the example of ancient Athens:

“Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.”

Again, she’s just making stuff up here. First of all, correlation does not equal causation. Just because women were, to a large extent, excluded from public life in ancient Athens does not mean this is what made Athens great.

Moreover, the extent to which women were excluded from public life may be exaggerated due to the fact that most of the surviving historical sources were written by men. The playwright Aristophanes makes fun of Aspasia of Miletos (lived c. 470 – c. 400 BCE) for her influence over her partner, the politician Perikles, in his comedy The Acharnians. Similarly, the philosopher Plato claims in his dialogue Menexenos that Aspasia exerted substantial influence over Perikles—even to the extent of writing some of his speeches for him—and that Socrates himself was one of her students.

It’s hard to say whether the claim about Aspasia writing Perikles’s speeches is true, since this may very well be a rumor invented by Perikles’s enemies to discredit him by attributing his famous orations to a woman. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that Aspasia had a surprising degree of influence over Athenian politics during the mid-to-late fifth century BCE.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek herma depicting Aspasia of Miletos, the partner of Perikles who reportedly exerted substantial influence over Athenian politics and was a teacher to Socrates

Paglia on gender-affirming genital surgery and “child abuse”

Now that we’ve discussed Paglia’s notions about civilization more generally, for the rest of this article, I am going to be primarily responding to a viral YouTube video of a question-and-answer session in which she claims that the growing number of people identifying as transgender is a sign that “western civilization” is in a state of decadence and collapse and she attempts to cite ancient history as evidence of this.

The video is titled “Lesson from History: Transgender Mania Is a Sign of Cultural Collapse – Camille Paglia.” It was originally posted on 14 December 2016 and has received over two and a half million views. In the video, Paglia is seen at a table with another woman. The other woman starts complaining about how she thinks it’s “weird” that there are “lots of young women wanting to be young men and lots of young men wanting to be young women” and how she thinks that it’s not “a great step forward” for this to be happening.

Paglia begins to speak and, after some opening remarks, she says this:

“A sex change operation opens one door, but closes many others. I personally believe that, um, anyone who collaborates in an intrusion into a developing child’s body and mind is guilty of child abuse—a crime against humanity, ok, because that child is not prepared to make such a decision, ok, I think that such decisions about sex reassignment surgery must wait until one attains the majority, which would be, it seems to be a minimum of age eighteen.”

It is really rich to hear Camille Paglia talk about what she considers child abuse, considering the fact that she has openly defended pedophilia in the past and repeatedly tried to claim that some of the highest points in western civilization were characterized by their acceptance of men having sexual relations with underage children. In Sexual Personae, she seriously argued that the age of consent should be lowered to fourteen, and that at least some forms of child pornography should be legalized—both claims she reiterated many times over the following years.

In 1993, she signed a manifesto in support of the pro-pedophilia advocacy organization North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). In 1995, she gave an interview with Bill Andriette, a pro-pedophile activist in which she declared, “I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age.” In an article published in Salon in April 1997, she defended pedophilia again, declaring:

“I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In Sexual Personae, I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization.”

I think that every human being with a moral compass will agree with me that Paglia’s blatant advocacy of child molestation is utterly deplorable. All forms of child molestation are objectively heinous and anyone who engages in any of them is a despicable human being.

Paglia has since backed down from her more strident pro-pedophilia positions. In an interview in April 2018, she stated that she no longer believes that the age of consent should be lowered to fourteen. She has not, however, given a full renunciation of all the pro-pedophilic opinions she once held.

In any case, moving on to Paglia’s actual point, I completely agree that underaged children should not be given gender-affirming genital surgeries. This, however, is not a real problem because performing gender-affirming surgeries of any kind on minors is already prohibited by all medical codes of ethics and no one is currently performing any such surgeries.

According to this detailed article from PolitiFact, pre-pubescent children seeking to transition are given no medical or surgical intervention whatsoever. Instead, for them, transitioning is strictly social. They are allowed to change the name they use, change their pronouns, and change how they present themselves (i.e., how they dress, how they wear their hair, etc.). No permanent body modification of any kind is involved or permitted.

When a transgender child reaches pubescence, then, if they want to and they have their parents’ consent, they can choose to go on puberty-blocking medication, which merely delays the onset of puberty. The purpose of puberty-blockers is to give the trans adolescent a choice so they are not forced to go through the puberty associated with the sex they were assigned at birth that they do not identify with and develop the secondary sex characteristics associated with it. These secondary sex characteristics are usually the primary source of body dysphoria for adult trans people.

Puberty-blockers are completely reversible and have been used for decades to delay puberty in cisgender children who, for whatever reason, begin puberty too early. If a trans adolescent is taking puberty blockers and they decide they want to quit taking them, they can quit taking them and go through puberty exactly the way they would if they have never taken them. By contrast, forcing a trans adolescent to go through the puberty associated with the sex they were assigned at birth is irreversible and can cause them immense trauma.

It is only once a child reaches older adolescence and with parental consent that they can request cross-sex hormone replacement therapy. Generally this is only an option for trans adolescents who are at least sixteen or so. Even older trans adolescents, however, are not usually eligible for any gender-affirming surgeries. Standard medical practice holds that they must wait until they are at least eighteen before they can choose to undergo any surgeries.

Thus, as you can see, Paglia is complaining about a problem that does not really exist. Admittedly, there are some pre-pubescent children who are being given unnecessary and involuntary genital modification surgeries; these, however, are not transgender children, but rather intersex children, who are routinely given surgeries without their consent in order to “normalize” their genitalia.

One would think that, if transphobes really cared about preventing underaged children from being forced to undergo unnecessary genital modification surgeries, then they would be speaking out against the involuntary surgeries that intersex children are routinely subjected to, but they are not because they don’t actually care about children. Instead, they work themselves up into a tizzy about things that aren’t really happening because it provides them with an excuse to hate on trans people.

A “fashion” for being transgender?

Paglia continues:

“I’m very concerned with this. I think that, um, it’s become a fashion, ok. That, that, that the transgender definition has become a kind of convenient label for young people who may simply feel alienated, ok, culturally, for many other reasons, ok, so that, in the 1950s, they might have become a beatnik. In the 1960s, they might have become a hippie, and taken, uh, mind-expanding drugs, ok. And so, today, you’re encouraged to think that your alienation is because you are not totally defined, uh, identifying with your particular inherited gender.”

According to a survey conducted in 2015 by the Williams Institute, only around 0.6% of adults in the United States at that time identified as transgender. I don’t know how anyone can call that a “fashion.”

Paglia’s claim that young people are “encouraged” by society to identify as transgender is entirely false and, indeed, an assertion I can hardly believe is being made by a person of sound mind. Transgender people are often bullied, harassed, assaulted, and systematically discriminated against.

The Williams Institute survey I mentioned earlier also found that approximately 40.4% of transgender adults in the United States reported having attempted suicide at least once at some point in their life and that suicide attempts were far more frequent among transgender people who reported having been frequently discriminated against, harassed, or violently assaulted.

It’s frankly despicable that Paglia thinks that young people are just being transgender because it’s some kind of fashion statement.

Paglia on the supposed “assault on masculinity”

Paglia goes on to say:

“I’m very concerned about this. I think that a lot of it, I think that the collaboration of the bureaucratic machinery with it has to do with the assault on masculinity. Ok? Ah! Ok? You see, [according to my opponents] gender doesn’t really exist. It’s not really about polarity. Everything’s all about expanding women’s rights, but also about terminating men, and defining men out of existence. [They say that] masculinity is, by definition, toxic or masculinity doesn’t exist. You see, you see, this is the proof of it!”

Paglia is conflating a whole bunch of different things together here and trying to make it sound like there is some kind of grand conspiracy to destroy men.

First of all, masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs. This does not mean that they don’t “exist,” but it does mean that they are at least primarily based on cultural ideas and attitudes, rather than objective biological causes. This is evidenced by the fact that there are a wide range of radically different conceptions of “masculinity” and “femininity” across cultures.

Strangely, Paglia doesn’t seem to understand what the phrase “toxic masculinity” refers to. Liberal and feminist intellectuals generally are not arguing that all men or all behaviors engaged in by men are inherently “toxic,” but rather arguing that certain attributes and patterns of behavior that our culture traditionally associates with men are toxic—both to other people and to the men in question themselves. The phrase “toxic masculinity” does not mean that all forms of “masculinity” are inherently toxic, but rather that there are particular forms of “masculinity” that are toxic.

A perfect example of how toxic masculinity can be deadly is the case of the famous magician Harry Houdini. On 22 October 1926, Houdini allowed a McGill University medical student named Joselyn Gordon Whitehead to deliver multiple hammer-like punches to his stomach while he was lying down in his dressing room in order to prove how tough and manly he was.

By mid-afternoon, Houdini was experiencing severe stomach pains. Nonetheless, he was so determined to prove how tough he was that he adamantly refused to seek medical attention for two whole days—despite having so much pain in his stomach that he was unable to sleep. Instead, he continued performing.

When his wife finally convinced him to see a doctor, he learned that he had acute appendicitis and a fever of 104°F. The doctor recommended immediate surgery, but Houdini stubbornly refused and insisted on giving another performance. He passed out during the performance and was hospitalized afterwards, but, by that point, it was too late for the doctors to save him. He died on 31 October 1926 at the age of only fifty-two.

Aside from the Houdini case, there is virtually no evidence that blunt force trauma can cause appendicitis, so it is unclear whether the famous dressing room incident actually caused his appendix to rupture. In any case, it is clear that it was Houdini’s stubborn desire to appear tough and manly at all costs that killed him more than anything else. This is exactly the sort of behavior that feminists are talking about when we use the term “toxic masculinity.” If Houdini had just sought medical attention immediately, he could have perhaps lived for forty more years.

ABOVE: Photograph from 1899 of the famous magician Harry Houdini, who was literally killed by his own toxic masculinity

“Late phases of culture”?

Paglia continues:

“But now I began all of my studies, my book Sexual Personae began as a dissertation at Yale at graduate school on androgyny. I’ve always been fascinated, attracted to, you know, the subject of androgyny and that’s what Sexual Personae is. I explore it in history. The more I explored it I realized that, um, historically this, uh, movement toward androgyny occurs in late phases of culture. Ok? As a civilization is starting to, uh, unravel. Ok?”

As I have already noted, Sexual Personae isn’t so much a real history of anything as it is an imaginative projection of Paglia’s own bigoted opinions onto the past, incorporating various cherrypicked examples. The notion that a “movement toward androgyny” naturally occurs in “late phases of culture” is entirely unsupported by historical evidence.

Moreover, the whole notion of “late phases of culture” itself is really meaningless. All cultures are constantly changing. Eventually, a culture changes so much that it no longer closely resembles the culture it once was. Therefore, historians often divide the history of a certain culture into “periods” in order to analyze each of these “periods” individually.

These “periods” of culture, however, are, in many ways, arbitrary constructs. Periods of culture that historians have described as “late” don’t have any universal defining characteristics; they simply happen to come later than periods of the culture that historians think of as “classical.”

Paglia on Hellenistic Greek art and the supposed collapse of Greek civilization

Paglia declares:

“And you can find it again and again and again through history—in the, in the Greek art you can see it happening. All of a sudden there’s a kind of, uh, you know, the sculptures of handsome, nude, young men athletes that used to be very robust, ok, in the Archaic Period, suddenly begin to seem to seem like wet noodles, ok, toward the end.”

It is true that, in earlier Greek art from the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BCE), there are a lot of depictions of nude young men looking very “robust” and that, in later Greek art from the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE), more androgynous-looking figures start to appear in sculpture.

All you have to do to see this is look at portrayals of the Greek god Dionysos. In artistic depictions from the Archaic Period, Dionysos is normally represented as an older man with a long beard, often wearing a himation, a kind of cloak. In these early depictions, he is unmistakably masculine in his appearance.

ABOVE: Image from an Attic black-figure plate dated to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCE, depicting the god Dionysos as a bearded man wearing a himation and holding out a kantharos of wine

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a carved wall protome from the region of Boiotia in central Greece dated to the early fourth century BCE, depicting Dionysos as a bearded man

Starting in the late fifth century BCE and continuing into the fourth century BCE, though, Dionysos starts to appear more androgynous. He begins to be depicted beardless, with long, flowing hair and soft, traditionally feminine features.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek votive relief dated to the fourth century BCE from the site of Karystos. Dionysos is the figure in the middle, who is now shown beardless, with long hair, and a more feminine appearance.

By the time you get into the later Hellenistic Period and eventually the Roman Period, Dionysos appears in statues beardless and fully nude, with long, curly hair hanging in ringlets, often all the way down to his chest. His naked body appears soft and feminine. In one particular Roman statue of him dated to the second century CE that is now on display in the Louvre, he even appears to have breasts and his only identifiably male features at all are the tiny penis and testicles between his legs.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a second-century CE Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic Greek statue of the god Dionysos, depicting him as highly androgynous

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble head of Dionysos dated to the second century CE, depicting him as an androgynous youth

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble statue of the god Dionysos dated to the second century CE, currently on display in the Louvre, depicting him as androgynous, beardless, long-haired, and with apparent breasts

Nonetheless, even in the Hellenistic Period, sculptors were still making tons of statues of extremely buff men whose appearances align well with modern notions of masculinity. In fact, it was actually during the Hellenistic Period that depictions of extremely buff, nude men became more common.

The famous Farnese Herakles, for instance, is a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic Greek statue by the sculptor Lysippos dated to the fourth century BCE. It depicts Herakles as a gigantic, ten-and-a-half-foot-tall muscle-bound hulk with biceps larger than my head and a long, shaggy beard. You won’t see anything like this in art from the earlier Classical Period. In art from the Classical Period, heroes’ muscles are generally very toned down and the focus is more on the figure than on the muscles and their size.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Farnese Herakles, a Roman marble statue based on a Hellenistic Greek original from the fourth century BCE

The Hellenistic Period also produced the famous Boxer of Quirinal, a bronze statue of a muscular Greek boxer resting, still wearing his leather boxing gloves, that is believed to have been created at some point between c. 330 and c. 50 BC. Once again, masculinity is inherently subjective, but I think that most people today would probably consider this a very manly statue.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Boxer of Quirinal, a Greek bronze statue of a boxer dated to sometime between c. 330 and c. 50 BCE

In any case, even if the Hellenistic Period really were dominated by effeminate-looking statues (which it most certainly is not), it would be entirely wrong to think of this as symptomatic of any sort of decline in Greek culture. Indeed, it was during the Hellenistic Period that Greek culture came to dominate the entire eastern Mediterranean in a way that it had never done before in any previous era.

It’s true that the Greeks were conquered by the Romans during the Hellenistic Period, but Greek culture survived and even flourished under the Romans. The Roman poet Horace famously wrote in his Epistles 2.1.156:

“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.”

This, of course, means:

“Having been captured, Greece conquered her fierce victor and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”

Essentially, he’s saying that the Romans may have conquered Greece, but Greek culture prevailed.

The reality is that ancient Greek civilization never really ended. It was never cataclysmically wiped out like the kingdom of Atlantis in Plato’s Timaios. It has gone through various ups and downs and it has changed and mutated significantly over the years, but it has continued until this very day. You can trace a fairly continuous cultural history all from the Hellenistic Period to the modern nation-state of Greece.

Paglia on the supposed “decadence” of cultures that are tolerant of LGBTQ+ people

Paglia continues:

“And the people who live in such periods of late phases of culture—whether its the Hellenistic Era, whether it’s the Roman Empire, whether it’s the Mauve Decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it’s in Weimar Germany—people who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan, ok? Homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what? Anything goes! And so on.”

At this point, she’s just throwing out the names of random time periods that are associated with decadence in modern popular culture. The problem is that none of these periods were really on the brink of collapse. As I have already argued, the Hellenistic Period, far from being a time of Greek decadence, was actually a time when Greek culture was extremely powerful and influential and it remained powerful and influential long after the Hellenistic Period.

The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire has been cemented in the modern popular imagination on account of Edward Gibbon’s seminal book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Non-experts love speculating about things that they believe might have cause the “fall” of the Roman Empire. (I address some of their hypotheses in this article I wrote in July 2020.) What most people don’t realize, though, is that the Roman Empire actually survived as a political entity for nearly two whole millennia.

The Romans first began to expand their empire outside the region of Latium in central Italy in the fourth century BCE. By the end of the first century BCE, they had conquered the entire Mediterranean world. The western part of the empire politically disintegrated in the fifth century CE, but the eastern empire survived for another thousand years until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet II on 29 May 1453 CE. When you think about that, that’s actually quite impressive.

This does make it really hard, though, to figure out which period of time Paglia is thinking of when she says “the Roman Empire.” Is she talking about the early third century CE, when Elagabalus (ruled 218 – 222 CE)—the emperor whom some have interpreted as having been a trans woman—is said to have reigned? If so, how does she explain the fact that the western empire survived for another two centuries after his death and the empire as a whole survived for more than another 1,200 years?

It’s also worth pointing out that homosexuality actually became less acceptable as Roman history progressed. During the early centuries of the Roman Empire, homosexuality was widely regarded acceptable, albeit only under certain social constraints, but, as the Roman Empire converted to Christianity over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, homosexuality became seen as socially taboo and it remained taboo all the way until the end of the empire in the fifteenth century.

If we look at the actual historical evidence, it is clear that the exact opposite of what Paglia is claiming is actually the case; the Roman Empire was at its greatest territorial extent and the height of its military power precisely during the centuries when homosexuality was most socially acceptable.

ABOVE: First-century CE Roman painting from the Suburban Baths of Pompeii depicting a man penetrating another man, who is penetrating a woman

As for Paglia’s mention of Oscar Wilde and the Mauve Decade, does she not realize that a large part of the reason why Wilde’s homosexuality is so famous is because he was convicted of “gross indecency” and therefore thrown in prison for nearly two whole years, during which time he was tortured by being forced to walk on a penal treadmill and pick oakum? Homosexuality was not generally considered acceptable in British society in the 1890s. Indeed, most British people at the time saw it as abomination.

I’m also not sure what sort of societal collapse Paglia thinks followed after the Mauve Decade. Oscar Wilde was born in Ireland, which was ruled by Britain at the time. Ireland is not only still around, but is now an independent nation-state. Meanwhile, Britain is obviously still around. Wilde visited the United States and Canada and he died in France. All of these countries have survived. Is there some other nation Wilde was connected to that has collapsed that I am not aware of?

When it comes to Weimar Germany, I’m not sure where Paglia is getting the idea that people there were super-tolerant of LGBTQ+ people. Same-sex sexuality relations between men were illegal under Paragraph 175 and German society was quite homophobic. There were also, you know, the freaking Nazis, who hated LGBTQ+ people and ruthlessly persecuted them once they came to power.

ABOVE: Photograph of the young Oscar Wilde in 1882

Paglia on “barbarians,” ISIS, and “heroic masculinity”

Paglia goes on to declare:

“But, but, from the perspective of historical distance you can see that it’s a culture that no longer believes in itself, ok. And then, and then, what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity, ok. On the edges—whether they’re the Vandals and the Huns, ok, or the barbarians of ISIS! You see them starting to mass on the outsides of the culture and that’s what we have right now. There is a tremendous—and rather terrifying—disconnect between the infatuation with the transgender movement in our own culture and what’s going on out there, ok, alright. And so I’m concerned. I feel it’s ominous.”

Here Paglia is endorsing a very old paradigm that historians with conservative leanings often use when talking about cultures being conquered by other cultures. Essentially, the paradigm holds that cultures start out strong and masculine, but then they grow weak and effeminate, thereby allowing stronger, more masculine cultures to conquer them. I think this is a very inaccurate and sexist paradigm that tells us a lot more about the historians who use it than about the cultures they seek to describe.

First of all, I think that things like resilient institutions, competent leadership, and a supportive populace are far more important factors in determining the survival or decline of states during times of hardship than mere military strength. I don’t think general “manliness” is a significant factor at all in whether or not civilizations are able to withstand hard times—in no small part because, as I mentioned earlier, ideas about “manliness” are inherently subjective and they vary drastically across cultures, so it is impossible to come up with any kind of universal definition.

Second of all, this paradigm is essentially founded on circular reasoning. When the paradigm is applied, it is generally because the paradigm itself is so ingrained, rather than because there is any kind of evidence to support it. There is an assumption that, if a culture was conquered, then it clearly must have been “weak” and “effeminate.” Then, once people have concluded that the culture must have been “weak” and “effeminate,” this only reinforces the idea that “weak” and “effeminate” cultures are conquered by “stronger,” more “masculine” cultures. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of faulty assumptions.

It’s also highly unlikely that the supposed “barbarians” who overran the western Roman Empire were really as hyper-masculine as they are conventionally portrayed. Early Roman historians like Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 CE) did portray the Germanic peoples living north of the Roman border as extremely “masculine” and “virtuous,” but they were relying more on second-hand reports than on personal experience and they were writing with an explicit political agenda, extolling the virtue and simplicity of the Germans for Romans to imitate.

Later Roman writers and historians chose to portray the invaders from the north as ruthless, warlike savages in order to vilify them and blame them for the destruction of Roman civilization while also generating a convenient explanation for why the Romans were able to be defeated by them.

In reality, by and large, the peoples who sacked Rome in the fifth century CE were not only quite civilized, but also highly Romanized. For instance, the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 CE had been living in Roman territory for over a generation and the Visigothic king Alaric I, who led the Visigothic army, had previously served as a general for the Romans. The Visigoths certainly valued the ideas of military courage and “manliness,” but not really any more so than the Romans themselves.

ABOVE: Attila on a White Horse, painted by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (lived 1798 – 1863), symbolically associating Attila with Conquest, the first of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

More bigotry and silliness

Paglia goes on to say:

“I question whether the transgender, uh, choice is indeed genuine in every single case…”

First of all, being transgender is not a “choice”; it’s a quality of who a person is, resulting from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. It’s true that there are aspects of being transgender that involve making choices—such as the choice of whether to come out, the choice of how to present oneself, the choice of whether to go on hormone replacement therapy, the choice of whether to seek sex-reassignment surgery, and so forth, but being transgender itself is not a choice.

Furthermore, even if it were a “choice,” how could a choice that a person makes about their own identity and their own body not be “genuine”? And, more importantly, what makes Paglia think it’s her place to question the “genuineness” of other people’s choices?

In any case, she continues:

“…but what, again, what concerns me is when well-meaning adults believe that they’re helping people by, by making it easier, some permanent change in the body from which there is no going back.”

As I have already emphasized, in general, people should be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do to their own bodies. I think that there are some exceptions to this. Namely, I think that we as a society should try to prevent people from harming themselves, especially if they are doing so in ignorance.

For instance, if the president of the United States tells people to inject bleach because it will supposedly prevent them from catching COVID-19, then we should go to all lengths to prevent people from actually injecting themselves with bleach, since this will, obviously, be very bad for them and might actually kill them. If people are not harming themselves or others, though, then I see no justification for other people to tell them what they should or should not be doing to their bodies.

It’s worth noting that Paglia only seems to be concerned by one very specific kind of body modification that is actually very rare. The article about sex reassignment surgery in the online Encyclopedia of Surgery states:

“The number of gender reassignment procedures conducted in the United States each year is estimated at between 100 and 500. The number worldwide is estimated to be two to five times larger.”

These numbers are insanely low. Other forms of irreversible body modification are far more common. Dental braces, for instance, are an extremely common form of painful and irreversible body modification that is, in most cases, technically medically unnecessary.

According to the Pennsylvania Dental Association, “Approximately four million people in the United States are wearing braces at any one time.” Most of these people are underaged children, but, for some reason, Paglia does not seem to be concerned about children wearing braces to make their teeth straight.

Meanwhile, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), the number of cosmetic surgeries conducted in the United States in 2018 was more than 17.7 million. That’s an insanely huge number, especially when you consider that the total population of the United States is only around 328.2 million people.

Once again, though, for some reason, Paglia does not seem to be concerned at all by the fact that adults are voluntarily undergoing permanent body modification surgery for solely cosmetic purposes. It’s only when people start talking specifically about sex reassignment surgery that she starts freaking out.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a pair of dental braces, which are widely worn by underaged children in a form of painful and irreversible body modification

Brown University’s student insurance program

Paglia continues:

“Um, you know, for example, Brown University, one of the elite Ivy League schools in the United States put sex reassignment surgery on its student insurance program, ok, so that it becomes so they can, you know, get a sex change in college. And I think, you know, I thought, ‘Oh my Lord!’ Ok, I feel that’s evil! Ok, because what it does to young people today facing an uncertain job market, ok, what it says to people who are questioning their gender while they’re at Brown University, um, suddenly feel, well, it’s, you know, economically better judgement for me to move now on this rather than to wait till I don’t have a job and I’m living in my parents basement. So, actually, the adult community trying to be understanding, ok, I think is involved in possibly making a permanent change in someone’s life that could have tragic consequences.”

This is a dumb argument. First of all, the notion that a young adult who is merely unsure about their gender would decide to get full-on sex reassignment surgery just because it’s economically convenient is silly. College students at Brown University are not babies. They fully realize that sex reassignment surgery is permanent and they aren’t going to try to get it unless they have actually thought about it for a long time and are really sure they want it.

Furthermore, from what I’ve read, it is actually extremely difficult for a person to get sex reassignment surgery, even if they are absolutely sure they really want it. In order to undergo sex reassignment surgery, a person must acquire a prescription from a doctor and, for better or worse, doctors do not just hand out those kinds of prescriptions like candy.

According to the standards of care adopted by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), if a person wants sex reassignment surgery, they must first seek diagnosis and psychotherapy. Then, once they’ve done that, they must obtain a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” or “gender identity disorder” and a letter of recommendation for them to begin hormonal treatment.

Then, once they’ve begun taking hormonal treatment, the person must live publicly as a member of the sex that they wish to transition to for an extended period of time. Then, finally, after all this, they may request surgery to alter their physical body parts. Such requests are often denied, sometimes for really arbitrary reasons.

With all these steps and requirements, it is no surprise that sex reassignment surgery is an extremely rare procedure. It is not possible for someone to just go out and get sex reassignment surgery one afternoon on a whim in the same way that they might get a tattoo. Camille Paglia is freaking out over a problem that clearly does not exist