"Men built all the roads!"

Myth 1 in a series.

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:

1. The history of road building

2. The intersection of class

3. 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:

1. Have YOU built a road?

2. 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.

2. Who builds roads?

The answer to this is multilayered. Because while yes, it’s probably true that the majority of road construction in Australia is undertaken be people of the male persuasion, it doesn’t follow that this is due to democratic decision making for the wellbeing of the collective. It certainly doesn’t mean that the men who do this work are being called to heroic community service. When men say, we built all the roads!, what they’re failing to address is who they built them FOR. And to be clear, it wasn’t so women would have an easier time getting to the mall.

Let’s be real. The construction industry, both now and in ancient times, is reflective of a class system. Ancient civilisations used enslaved people (and yes, that included women and children) to build infrastructure that would benefit the elite. By the same token, road builders today can be loosely separated into two categories: the people in work clothes who put in the hard yakka to actually construct roads, and the people in suits who “oversee” this construction while pocketing many, many times more the salary for doing so.

No one who DESIGNS highways actually builds them. No one who RUNS construction companies at the highest level actually wields tools. Tim Gurner, the billionaire property developer responsible for “building” multiple highrise, high income luxury homes and private social clubs, is not on the crane each day manouvreing iron pilons into place. That’s what the blue collar workers are for! You know, the grunts who’ll never get to live in the luxury homes they’ve built or even visit the private social clubs they’ve laid down marble floor in. (They do get to drive on the roads though, I’ll grant you that - but probably not in a Ferrari or a Lambourghini.)

So when men lay claim to this universal we built everything, especially the roads bullshit, I recommend phase two of your rebuttal (after they reject your rhetorical logic) be to ask them this: who for?

Because this is the real elephant in the room that these men are ignoring. They blame women for ‘not respecting them’, when what they really mean is why won’t you provide us with the domestic, emotional and sexual labour that will help us ignore who really controls us - other, more powerful men? It’s all very homoerotic. They can’t confront their lowly position on the hierarchy of men, because that ‘emasculates’ them. If they acknowledged that capitalism makes it impossible for them to NOT prostrate themselves before richer, more successful, more powerful men in order to simply survive in the world, then they’d be admitting to being (in their words) “some guy’s little bitch”. Misogyny has taught them that only women are little bitches who get ordered around by men - so if they recognise themselves in that category, it doesn’t just mean they’re a little bitch. It means they’re a woman.

Misogynist undertones aside, men very clearly do not become the exploited working class out of a sense of benevolence to women or duty to the common good. They do so because the system has enforced a social and classist hierarchy in which certain jobs are simply not done by the wealthy and vice versa. Perhaps a succinct rebuttal then would be to concede this with sympathy, while reminding them of reality:

“Have you ever considered that you need women to defer to your authority because this helps you to avoid confronting the fact you work your guts out not for the benefit of said women but for the benefit of men who think they’re better than you? I sympathise with how hard your job must be, but your enemy is the one who needs to keep you pinned in the working class in order to maintain his power in the establishment elite.”

Or, in simpler terms: “I reckon your real issue might be with the fact you work bloody hard all day long to make big bucks for a man who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. But that’s too hard to deal with, so you just angry with women who won’t let you pretend you’re doing it for the heroic good. By the way, a woman built you.”

Oh yes. The women! They build things too.

3. Women on the roads

So far, we’ve looked at what you can say if the statement at hand - that being that men built all the roads - is fundamentally and unequivocally true. It’s still easily rejected, even on that basis. The funny thing is that it’s not true. Not even one little bit! Which is good for us, and rather inconvenient for the bloke in the pub getting redder and redder in the face right about now.

Let’s go back to Ancient Rome. Ask yourself the following question: why do we just accept, more than two thousand years later, that everything that was done in order to build one of history’s greatest civilisations (!) was naturally done by men? Most history just refers to “the Romans” in regards to these achievements, which of course we parse in our patriarchal conditioned brains to mean “dudes”.

But Clem! you might say. Women had limited rights in Ancient Rome!

Sure. Noble women had limited rights, that’s true. They were largely confined to the domestic space, expected to keep house and raise children and defer to male authority.

Oh, but they could own enslaved people.

Which takes us back to the class problem of part two. The people responsible for constructing the majority of the world’s ancient infrastructure (and often modern) were not free agents pulling a wage, but enslaved people. The majority of Roman legionnaires (the military) were enslaved, and one of their enforced jobs was to build roads. But women and children in Ancient Rome were also enslaved, and they played a crucial part in this road building venture by transporting and placing the small bits of gravel that formed one of four parts of a Roman road. We don’t know much about them of course, because why would history possibly feel the need to document them as a crucial part of our evolution?

When you think about it, we just take for granted all this mEn DiD eVeRyThInG nonsense without questioning it. We know that male historians have very comfortably erased women from the picture from the very beginning, either simply overlooking our involvement in creating the world (not to mention birthing it) or deliberately concealing it completely. It’s the same mentality that has people saying feminism “won” women the right to work.

No. Women have always worked, always been enslaved, always created, always laboured. What people mean when they say that is *wealthy* women. The ruling class of women. The kind of (largely) white, privileged women today who think the one thing standing between them and true gender equality is 50/50 parity on boards and more female billionaires.

So yes, women were very much involved in ‘road building’ in the ancient world.

But even today, this claim of male authority over highway infrastructure can be so easily discredited. In Australia, more and more women are working in the construction field with this group in particular working on an overpass project. Women in Gambia are also joining construction teams to build roads to connect communities. Same too in South Africa. These are just a handful of countless examples of women doing the work we supposedly have never done and can claim no responsibility for, and are therefore obliged to be endlessly grateful to men for taking on (even if the man in question didn’t actually do any of it himself).

To be clear, I’m not here to rah-rah for women in the construction industry. Good for them! But I don’t think it’s the point.

The point is that these sort of asinine, easily discredited mythologies are thrown out be men (and their patriarchal footsoldiers) in order to discombobulate women and perpetuate the idea that we’re merely guests in a world of men’s creation. And as guests, our job is to never question the host, to smile gratefully at every small snippet of attention given us, and to thank the host with an epic blowjob just to let him know how glad we were to be invited. What a load of bollocks!

So the next time you find yourself in one of these conversations, you can whip out these three rebuttals.

1. If you want to claim collective credit for all the good things you say men have done, you have to claim credit for all the bad things I know they’ve done.

2. Even if it were true that “men built all the roads”, this has nothing to do with benevolence and everything to do with the class system. Women do not owe you sex and attention and deference just to help you ignore your place in the economic hierarchy. If that were true, you would also be required to give the bloke who built your house a blowjob - and don’t forget to smile.

3. Women have participated in every stage of life since the dawn of civilisation. The fact that it isn’t on record, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen - it means men didn’t document it, because women weren’t considered people. Even then, women are doing all these things now with categorical evidence. So what exactly is it you want a medal for?

Then tell him to hit the road.

I hope you enjoyed that and found it helpful! If you’d like to suggest a topic for next week’s Well, Actually, please leave it in the comments here or DM me!