In one respect I might have anticipated such an application, once I knew that one of the bastions of male privilege whom MW assaults is the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Camille Paglia, whose views on gender-creativity I'll soon reference, asserted that Rousseau was the font of Western liberalism. Paglia does not comment on Rousseau's sexism, but claims that he is one of the main sources of the liberal idea that social engineering can "fix" any apparent problem-- an outlook shared by most if not all third-wave feminist authors.
For example, most third-wave feminists would agree that if there is an apparent discrepancy in the creative accomplishments of the two primary genders-- the dominant one being that there are no female playwrights equal to Shakespeare, no female comics-artists equal to Kirby or Tezuka-- then that discrepancy must spring from social inequity, and social inequity alone. It's all about the old boys' club, silencing women's voices, and other forms of ressentiment. The sexual division of labor can have no relevance when one is seeking to prosecute a supposed enemy.
In the first chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE, Paglia asserts that there is a real gap in the accomplishments of feminine creators in comparison to those of masculine ones. Her explanation for this discrepancy is rooted in a complicated synthesis of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, though Paglia freely calls upon various Nietzschean terms, such as the "Apollonian-Dionysian" duality, Freud will be seen to be the dominant influence:
Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the gru¬ elling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forms bob, gasping for life. Dionysus was identified with liquids— blood, sap, milk, wine. The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one being from another. All artifacts are Apollonian. Melting and union are Dio¬ nysian; separation and individuation, Apollonian. Every boy who leaves his mother to become a man is turning the Apollonian against the Dio¬ nysian. Every artist who is compelled toward art, who needs to make words or pictures as others need to breathe, is using the Apollonian to defeat chthonian nature. In sex, men must mediate between Apollo and Dionysus. Sexually, woman can remain oblique, opaque, taking plea¬ sure without tumult or conflict. Woman is a temenos of her own dark mysteries. Genitally, man has a little thing that he must keep dipping in Dionysian dissolution—a risky business! Thing-making, thing- preserving is central to male experience. Man is a fetishist. Without his fetish, woman will just gobble him up again. Hence the male domination of art and science. Man’s focus, directed- ness, concentration, and projection, which I identified with urination and ejaculation, are his tools of sexual survival...
Thus Paglia is firmly in the Freudian camp that claims "biology is destiny." There's even a passage a few pages later in which Paglia seems to be advocating Freud's tendency to view male sexuality as primary and female sexuality as epiphenomenal, as when she claims that "art is [man's] Apollonian response toward and away from woman."
As stimulating as I find Paglia, I can't subscribe to her system, since I regard biology as being at best "partial destiny."
So, even before reading MW, I began to think in terms of sociological explanations that would be rooted not in Rousseauist wishful thinking, but in the sexual division of labor as we understand it today. The statement that "men hunt and women nest" may not be entirely fair to either gender. However, it certainly has broader applicability than the old "damn that boy's club" rant.
As it happens, MW seems to have touched on this problem in her time. VINDICATION continually argues in favor of women receiving a broader education than European culture tended to allow in that time. However, despite taking males to task for the faulty reasoning, MW seems to be a stranger to the circular argument of endless ressentiment seen in third-wave feminism. Rather than simply prating about boys' clubs, MW says:
Let it not be concluded, that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must, therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain, that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.
To be sure, lest this be misinterpreted, Carol Poston, editor of Norton's second edition of VINDICATION, adds this footnote:
Being physically inferior can lead to women's being morally inferior: not just physical size but [man's] worldly pursuits allow men a greater opportunity to make moral choices and thus attain virtue.
MW, in addition to cautioning her readers that she does not "wish to invert the order of things," asserts that men may at a particular time attain greater virtue than women because their "worldly pursuits" give them the chance to make moral choices. This in no way contradicts her advocacy of woman's right to full education, but rather, sees the division of labor as bringing about womankind's inability to attain virtue through informed choice.
MW is not addressing artistic creativity at all, but her concept of "virtue" applies to my concept of creativity as it exists in the temporal world-- as I'll argue further in Part Two.
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