Welcome back to Well, Actually, a guide to dismantling the nonsense arguments you’ve probably heard at least 1…000 men make in your lifetime!
This week, we’re looking at an old classic: the myth of men’s road building prowess. In terms of categorisation, this one fits under the broader banner of “men built the world”. But roads tend to be a specialised subset of this particularly bonkers argument, perhaps because the widespread construction of roads themselves began in the Roman Empire - and we all know how men feel about that.
When you’re talking about roads, it turns out there’s a lot of ground to cover. (See what I did there?) I’m going to break it down into three areas. Remember, this just a cheat sheet to help you inform Pub Fuckwit that he’s wrong - but I can guarantee you he’ll be flummoxed enough to be put back in his box.
So! Let’s consider:
The history of road building
The intersection of class
The role of women in modern road building
1. The start of the road
As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Probably because the Roman Empire really threw itself into developing a sophisticated system of paved roads and super highways predominantly as means of transporting its military across the continents it was wielding power over. As this article points out:
The first major Roman road—the famed Appian Way, or “queen of the roads”—was constructed in 312 B.C. to serve as a supply route between republican Rome and its allies in Capua during the Second Samnite War. From then on, road systems often sprang from Roman conquest.
But while the Romans might have made “roads” happen, the first known road ever constructed was in Egypt. As per this article:
The first manufactured road to exist was part of the manufacture of one of the pyramids in Egypt. They had to bring in limestone blocks of about a meter to 2 meters in size from about a hundred kilometers away from the pyramid. And they did it by making a road from the quarry to the Nile and floating the blocks down. And they built another road from the wharf to the pyramids. And that road still exists as the oldest road we have in existence, from about 2,500 B.C. The limestone blocks required a lot of work to move; they probably rolled them on logs.
Gosh, it really does sound like hard work. And, yanno, roads really are things we need! I like roads - that’s why I’m happy for my taxes to go towards maintaining them. And boy do they spend on those things! Between 2020 and 2021, the Australian government spent $31.8 billion on roads. Of course, that may have been part of their plan to keep the construction industry afloat during Covid, but STILL - that’s a lot of dough. And listen, it’s not work I’d necessarily want to do. Respect to the road builders.
But is every man a road builder? Because that’s kind of what’s being implied with the argument men built all the roads. Even if that were true (which it patently isn’t, a fact we’ll get to in a second), it doesn’t follow that ALL men built those roads. So there’s a kind of collective claim being made there: if all of the worlds road’s were built by only men, it means all of the world’s men can claim to have built roads.
Um, no dorkus!
This collective ownership of perceived heroism is something a lot of men looooove to do. Look, a man or men over there (or thousands of years ago) did something we consider beneficial to our lives today, therefore it’s kind of like WE did it too! Like when our sports teams win! Our win!
Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. But at this juncture, you might like to ask the dipshit making that argument two questions:
Have YOU built a road?
If not, do you also want to claim credit for all the murder, rape and violence men have perpetrated? No? Funny that. (A bit like when their sports teams lose. THEIR loss.")
Unfortunately - and having intimate knowledge of this exact genre of fuckhead, I speak from experience - whoever you’re arguing with probably won’t accept that bit of rhetorical logic. Which brings us to stage two: the facts.
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