Camille Paglia: Dud or Dudder ?

afghanistan is the grave of empire

and other historical observations by camille paglia

obamacare is creeping totalitarianism and it also doesn't spend enough on new doctors and hospitals

whenever she talks about the 60s she's like a really uncharitable parody of a boomer

what is this weird "I totally complained about that BEFORE IT EVEN HAPPENED" rhetorical tack she seems so fond of

ugh, i can't believe this is the paglia thread that u guys bumped. we have such a better one!

did it include this

http://images.tcj.com/2011/12/Mbooty6-a.jpg

my preferred paglia thread:
sexual personae

"Her book is over 700 pages long!"

ah yes the Vision thread

xp

Hi!

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

She's got to stop reading Momus' old clickopera blog.

i hate to go there (really) but, if you're so twisted up about disappearing masculinity, why did you name your kid 'lucien'

every paragraph is funnier than the last

http://time.com/72546/drinking-age-alcohol-repeal/

both dionysus and PCP are referenced

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/28/camille_paglia_how_bill_clinton_is_like_bill_cosby/

It’s a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is, they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians have,

lol waht

she's such a buffoon

DSK raping a hotel maid, Berlusconi banging underage prostitutes, so sophisticated

otoh "I’m not talking in terms of the men’s rights movement, which got infected by p.c." is pretty A+ zing

I don't even know what that means tbh

MRA guys are generally virulently anti-pc, aren't they?

nah, they are always adopting tumblr pc lingo (which turns out to be very malleable for whatever u need)

you'll forgive me for staring at the URL a little while longer

i find that she's always on the right side of the line between tedious and hilarious

are you serious

yeah, someone mentioned ann coulter in the salon comments but i can't read any coulter. she's just asinine + shrill + stupid. paglia is really trolly but can be provocative. she's like off-beat enough that i find her more of a crank than just some boring ideologue.

paglia is a cruel ideologue

http://www.macleans.ca/authors/emma-teitel/camille-paglia-on-rob-ford-rihanna-and-rape-culture/

Can we teach men not to rape, as some argue?

A: You can try to teach people to make ethical judgments. Telling a rapist not to rape? [Laughs] A liberal ideology is out there that people are basically good. It’s a bourgeois version of reality—this idea that the whole world should be like a bourgeois living room and anyone who doesn’t belong, you can retrain. No you can’t! I was raised in the Italian working-class way, which is “watch out!” The world is a dangerous place. It’s up to you to protect yourself, not just from rape, but from anything. The lack of imagination for criminality amazes me. There are people who are evil. The problem here is the inability of women to project themselves into the minds of men. Feminists say [proper, mocking tone] “women have the right to do whatever they want.” Of course we have the right to do whatever we want–to be jogging with earphones on with our breasts going like this [simulates breasts bouncing]. Yes you have the right to but it’s also stupid! I see with the eyes of the criminal. I must have a criminal mind.

"lack of imagination for criminality," you don't say

But like I think there's truth in what she's saying. I think there is this current in popular culture of "tell your sons not to rape" which ignores that rapists are already violating serious + widespread social taboos and probably are not just confused about the ethics of their behavior. there's a psychopathy to these kinds of violent crimes (i'd include murder too) that means that certain social remedies - like robust legal prosecution of rapists, believing rape victims - can definitely help and others - explain how rape is wrong - are just silly.

Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, “Sexual Personae”–which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind!

bet she insisted on inserting the exclamation point

Paglia is the Great Kat of philosophy.

The one place we should be worried about is India.

Because it's concerning to see a problem with rape in a rapidly developing, pluralistic democracy? Or is she actually implying that India has a larger rape problem than any other country in the world, which seems absurd?

Thanks for that link, 誤訳侮辱!

I'd guess the latter why because she is an idiot

Thanks for that link, 誤訳侮辱!

yep, i'd forgotton about the Great Kat and her website is now the highlight of my day

She is a liberal arts humanities scholar, then? On her Wikipedia page, she is described as an 'academic and social critic' with no mention of her discipline, as far as I can tell. From her University of the Arts page, I can see that she teaches in Humanities and Media Studies but her degrees are listed with no mention of what fields they were granted in. Seems curious.

Were her degrees in art history? I have a bachelor's in art history and there is plenty of scholarship in that field which is more difficult than her magnum opus, which seems to have been written for people who were angry at the difficulty of liberal arts scholarship. It was pandering.

We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull.

do any of these sentences ring true to anyone?

i'd answer but i'm afraid of getting yelled at for contradicting the orthodoxy

there aren't as many freudians around as there were in the 70s, that's true i guess

i'd answer but i'm afraid of getting yelled at for contradicting the orthodoxy

just ask yrself "what would Camille Paglia do?"

Again with the neo-caveman aesthetic rockism. Technology has changed everything. We don't have time for Sistine Chapels anymore - what's more, I don't think we miss them. People are currently more literate in stuff that really matters, like the environment.

"Our art was better in the past" is a fascist sentiment. She has a lot of pompous Nazi aesthetics. We don't need fascist mouthpieces right now in the US.

camille paglia likes being yelled at i think xp

Godwin's Paglia

when it doubt Mordy just say something catty about Gloria Steinem

She keeps doing Ancient Greece, especially the different periods in art, and we should all know what an unhappy society that was. She's, like, stuck there. Why read her when you could read much better works on Greek art and society - written by people who don't think we have to live there.

it is kinda weird how fixated she is on the virtues of her own cultural heritage, Italian manly men and peasant matriarchs, etc.

I'm Italian, too, and she's full of shit and insulting. My Italian great-grandparents were practically socialist, and none of my relatives insulted women. None of the guys in my family were particularly macho, and my own grandfather married a feminist who worked in the steel mills.

She has no business making ignorant comments like this about the industrial working class:

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says.

Right. I'm sure she's a brave class warrior.