One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet's history. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.
Women can certainly create and consume words.
Still, Shlain's initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I'd say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell's clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form's strengths and weaknesses. He wants a medium that can do what he feels can't be done in boring ol' text narratives.