Testosterone is a very powerful and sometimes even dangerous substance.
Only a fool denies this....
Or as Camille Paglia says, “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper”
“About this Quote
Paglia’s line lands like a cold splash: it refuses the comforting idea that history’s gender gap is merely a bookkeeping error. By pairing “female Mozart” with “female Jack the Ripper,” she builds a deliberately grotesque symmetry. The provocation is the point. Genius, in her framing, is not a polite merit badge withheld from women; it’s an extreme, high-variance phenomenon that also produces monsters. If you want the outliers at the top, you have to accept the outliers at the bottom.
The subtext is a broadside against a certain kind of cultural progress narrative - the belief that equal opportunity should automatically yield equal distribution of “greatness” across groups. Paglia’s underlying bet is biological and temperamental: that male risk-taking, aggression, and obsessive single-mindedness are statistically more common, and that these traits can metabolize into either sublime art or grotesque violence. Mozart and Ripper become rhetorical bookends for the same engine: transgressive drive.’