Ancient Greece, Gender Studies, Social Media – Can One Resist Cultural Marxism to Succeed?

A few days ago, while browsing X, I reshared without much thought a post about the 2026 topic for the French historical teaching certification (agrégation), which read: “Work in ancient Greece according to gender and social status.”

• Written by Hélène de Lausanne*

Having taken this famously demanding exam myself, which combines teaching and research, twenty years ago, I was surprised by the wording, which would have been simply unthinkable twenty years earlier, and saddened by the anachronism of attacking poor ancient Greece using outrageously modern concepts borrowed from gender studies. That’s what I said. As soon as the unfortunate little message of fewer than 140 characters was cast into the virtual Mordor that is Elon Musk’s network, a swarm of locusts descended on my head.

I will spare you the list of charming words with which I was honored within minutes: old hag – which is quite ironic for someone who has just turned forty – stupid, reactionary, bloody aristocrat – and so on.

Here are a few lines summarizing the arguments leveled against me:

I am twenty or forty years behind my time because the concept of gender has existed since the 1950s. I understand nothing about research. I refuse to acknowledge that there are differences between men and women worth examining (which is ironic for anyone who knows me even a little). I ignore the contribution of carbon-14 dating to historical research. History evolves, and we can use tools that do not correspond to the chosen period to study it.

I was accused of looking for problems where none existed. I was accused of wanting to force students to write on papyrus in ancient Greek to be more authentic. The stupidity rivaled the bad faith.

On X, as is typical for this platform, complete idiots coexist with genuine academics (with some overlap between the two categories). Thus, I wasted my time responding patiently and politely – I want to live up to my reputation as reactionary – to both groups, in order to cover most of the spectrum of arguments proposed against me. After that, I turned off my notifications: there is life beyond social media.

But the scale of hatred unleashed by this unfortunate exam question deserved to be addressed in another form.

Yes, I am saddened and would even describe as “frightening” the text proposed to the 2026 students competing in the noble exercise that is the history assessment.

Yes, I compare it to what existed twenty years ago and admit that I “feed the discourse of decline” — as a distinguished medieval history professor accuses me online.

Let us examine it more closely. The agrégation exam is designed to select the best teachers for secondary schools. It is a symbol of excellence that also counts toward obtaining a university position. Every year, students wishing to take the exam must prepare questions from the curriculum covering four periods: ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary history. The questions are always chosen to be very broad, encouraging students to explore a topic in depth and demonstrate a high level of synthesis in mastering the material. However, in recent years, we have observed a worrying trend – I dare say, a decline, for which I am often criticized: the titles of the curriculum questions are becoming increasingly specific and reflect, albeit still quite discreetly, increasingly ideological issues. Political and diplomatic history is giving way more and more to social history – which itself will soon be contaminated by other sciences, such as “gender studies.”

My critics have accused me of being closed to any historiographical development: by criticizing the use of the word “gender” in the title of the question posed to students, I am said to be locked into a fundamental historiographical movement, which some trace back to the 1950s and others even to the 19th century. For others, rejecting the word would signal my narrow-mindedness and refusal to engage with anything related to gender differentiation in antiquity, a reality that obviously existed long before the word “gender” appeared in universities. Finally, others, sometimes the same people, reject the idea of anachronism, arguing that it is legitimate to use a concept invented after a given historical period to talk about that historical period.

There is great confusion in all these arguments. What I criticize is obviously not the fact that we are interested in the way of life of men and women in the Peloponnese in the 7th century BCE. Sorry, before our time. Nor the fact that we use a concept – gender – that postdates the period we study. The very word “work” did not exist as such in ancient Greece, yet it is legitimately used in historical analysis today. What I criticize is the use of a word that is not at all neutral and that today clearly carries a strong ideological charge – something inappropriate for a teaching exam and obviously not the case for the word “work.”

Not long ago, the magic words were “class struggle” and “dictatorship of the proletariat.” We have moved on from the era of pan-Marxism in universities, but the Left has found new obsessions. Today, it seems obvious that a course with the terms “class” or “class struggle” in its title would be considered ideological and unscientific. Yet not long ago, the concept of “class” would have been promoted as an objective analytical framework – as the word “gender” is today.

The word “gender” can mean two things. For those promoting the term, it refers to the “social role with which one identifies” in a self-referential way.

Under these circumstances, and insofar as this concept is based on self-identification and was constructed in opposition to the famous compulsory “assignment” of gender at birth, asking people to discuss the gender of ancient Greeks makes no sense, as this concept was unknown to them and therefore they could not “identify with a gender.”

Another possibility is that “gender” is simply synonymous with “sex” (i.e., biological sex), as in French grammar, where we speak of “masculine gender” and “feminine gender.” In this case, the topic could be phrased as follows: “Work in ancient Greece according to sex, status, and condition.” It is no coincidence that many of my opponents feel the need to rephrase the topic to show its harmlessness: it is “only” a discussion about the differences between men and women in relation to work in ancient Greece. I agree: why not simply put it in these terms?

It is true that the use of the word “gender” has a specific – almost emotional – connotation.

Logically, either we accept the primary meaning of the word “gender,” in which case it is dishonest to deny the ideological assumptions behind the term, which was conceived as a deconstruction of a dominant and oppressive model, that of sexual binarism. We must therefore assume that there is an anachronism, or rather, a desire to apply a modern combative reality of recent construction – 20, 40, or 50 years old, it does not matter – to a past reality. Or we give the word “gender” its second meaning, and it is therefore equally dishonest to criticize me with the argument that I deny the epistemological contribution of gender studies to historical science, which developed based on the first meaning of the word, or that I have not read a decisive dissertation by an American historian from the 1970s about patriarchal oppression in Delphi among vase painters in 497 BCE.

The barrage of insults unleashed on X to hunt down nasty reactionaries like me moves from one meaning of the word “gender” to the other with the greatest ease, without worrying about the contradiction.

As one of my supporters on X humorously pointed out in this crazy dispute, “Based on the responses to this comment, a huge sociological study could be done on ‘Pretending not to understand when I belong to the academic Left.’”

Because it is obvious that many of the commentators who attacked my post know very well what they are saying and play innocent in the name of a scientific ideal that is as unrealistic as butter on a spit: a linear evolution of knowledge toward ever greater intellectual enlightenment, where each era enriches the discussion with new concepts that are perfectly pure in their intention, allowing ever more “refined, problematic, and critical” analyses of human experience.

I wish.

But I do not believe in the myth of pure objectivity in history. Biases are inevitable, but we must admit them and not sugarcoat them with melodious words about intellectual objectivity or scientific rigor. The rather successful takeover of the university by leftist thinkers has established that the standard of truth and objectivity is measured by the speaker’s acceptance of their progressive theories. Consequently, any discourse that deviates from this is not judged as unreliable or disputable with arguments, but as a priori avoidance of the framework of scientific discussion and objectivity.

Under these circumstances, aspiring educators who have doubts about the relevance of gender theory are called upon to resort to the doublethink so beloved by Orwell: for now, it is the only weapon they have if they want to advance in the French national education system.

Source: The European Conservative

* Hélène de Lausanne is a correspondent for The European Conservative in Paris. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She taught French literature and culture at Harvard and earned a doctorate in History from the Sorbonne. She is the author of Histoire de l’Autriche (Perrin, 2021).