Camille Paglia: Dud or Dudder ?

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.

if I had to hazard a guess I'd bet she prefers Mussolini to Gramsci (also lol she appears to have been completely silent about Berlusconi)

Does she discuss Italy ever? Prob. not for fear of embarrassment. They have enough traditionalists over there anyway, and the ones they have are prob. less egotistical.

It's like she needs the brawny working class to suffer for her argument. When were they ever a role model for anyone above them?

like, contemporary Italian politics etc.? idk, altho I did find some interview she did about Pope Francis and the Church recently. She is always citing her Italian family and Catholic upbringing tho

Paglia knows politics like Rick Perry knows Montesquieu.

Paglia is 100% CLASSIC

...when discussing what a phony Hillary Rodham Clinton is.

she's seriously just...like...a moron? like in one of her books, she sets up this "I hate Chaucer but I love Spenser! Fairie Queen rules, Canterbury Tales drool!" interminable thing and it's like look. It's one thing to have a sandwich vs. pizza poll on ilx. But Paglia really wants to hang her hat on these moronic oppositions. "Oh, you say people shouldn't rape? Well I say it's a tough world! Did I BLOW YOUR LIBERAL MIND?"

she's like John Lydon at his most embarrassing only with much higher aspirations

eh, i'd take five seconds of metal box over paglia's entire career.

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.

― Mordy, Tuesday, July 28, 2015 5:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is wrong btw

sorry, i disagree in ways that i should probably try harder to articulate than a misfiring zing, but also i feel like the camille paglia thread is probably not the place to get into it, in that people probably want to look at this thread just to clown on camille paglia, mainly

well tbf shakey mo treats every thread as an excuse to demonstrate the superiority of shakey mo to the subject at hand so we can probably do this here. i think theres something cramped and insufficient in the current discourse that paglia is getting at in that quote, although shes expressing it in a way thats sneering and easy to dismiss. but i dont really agree with mordys reformulation

Whee, more hate-reading on Salon this morning:

Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s.

hahahahaha

i wonder how much money she makes off this stuff

she's an egomaniac and a namecaller, and JCLC is right that her standard tactics are v trollish. her main goals are provocation and self-aggrandizement (has there ever been a piece where she does not reference her "bursting on the scene" in the 90s or the "controversy" around Sexual Personae? Her enthusiasm for her own hagiography and self-promotion is boundless), which, you know, might be entertaining or amusing (I gather this is Mordy's reaction) if she didn't regularly come down on the side of political stances that are so repugnant eg classic blaming of rape victims. she is indeed "the Don Rickles of the literati", only not as funny.

yeah, she's entertaining + provocative. so is mencius moldbug. i don't get w/ this the pov that if you disagree w/ someone, or even think they're evil or whatever, that means you shouldn't engage w/ their work at all. on the contrary - i'm primarily interested in reading ppl whose view of the world + politics are diametrically opposed to my own, and it's only a plus when they disagree in an amusing manner so it's fun to read. i'm really not interested in reading another Salon article about the social justice issues of the day. i already know what they all say. they don't contain anything surprising.