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Ivins v. Paglia

I somehow stumbled across this essay from the great Molly Ivins on Camille Paglia. It made me happy.

I first encountered the writing of Paglia in the 1990s — Salon seemed to be infatuated with her — and I remember thinking that she was a frenetic bag of hot air, fond of pronouncements about How Things Ought To Be, and in particular had these cartoonish ideas about feminism that, even in those days of my own nascent awareness, were plainly absurd. And she kept bringing up these caricatures of evolutionary history to support her claims! She was a kind of ur-EvoPsych nitwit.

But wow, Ivins has her pegged.

Bram Dijkstra, author of a much-praised book, Idols of Perversity, which is a sort of mirror image of Sexual Personae, said that Paglia “literally drags the whole nineteenth-century ideological structure back into the late-eighteenth century, really completely unchanged. What’s so amazing is that she takes all that nineteenth-century stuff, Darwinism and social Darwinism, and she re-asserts it and reaffirms it in this incredibly dualistic fashion. In any situation, she establishes the lowest common denominator of a point. She says, `This is the feminist point of view,’ and overturns it by standing it on its head. She doesn’t go outside what she critiques; she simply puts out the opposite of it.”

“For example,” Dijkstra continues, “she claims, `Feminism blames rape on pornography,’ which is truly the reductio ad absurdum of the feminist point of view. Of course, there are very many feminist points of view, but then she blows away this extremely simplified opposite, and we are supposed to consider this erudition. She writes aphorisms and then throws them out, one after the other, so rapid-fire the reader is exhausted.”

Tracing Paglia’s intellectual ancestry is a telling exercise; she’s the lineal descendant of Ayn Rand, who in turn was a student of William Graham Sumner, one of the early American sociologists and an enormously successful popularizer of social Darwinism. Sumner was in turn a disciple of Herbert Spencer, that splendid nineteenth-century kook. Because Paglia reasserts ideas so ingrained in our thinking, she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices.

Ivins is too kind to Spencer, but otherwise, that’s spot on. And that phrase, “she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices”, fits a few others I can think of, too: Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young.

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Comments

  1. says

    Yeah, forget “outrage blogging” or ginning up controversies for clicks – “reaffirming common prejudices” is the REAL way to load up on the clicks, likes, pageviews, comments, TV appearances, etc, etc, etc.

  2. Akira MacKenzie says

    Not to play the “Guilt By Association” card, but I seem to recall Rush Limbaugh giving her work tacit approval back in the early 90s. I think that more or less all we need know of Paglia.

  3. erichoug says

    Wow! Camille Paglia is still around and a public personage? I never could figure out why people had an interest in her.

  4. jijoya says

    Oh boy, Camille Paglia.

    I first encountered her nonsense by proxy, when 10+ years ago an old (male) friend of mine informed me (in the middle of a conversation about feminism) that he totally agrees it’s got some valuable points to make, “but the truth is that if it had been women who’d emerged as the dominant sex, we’d still be living in grass huts”.

    After snorting loud enough to scare 80% of the surrounding pigeons, I asked him where he’s getting this from (I couldn’t believe he’d come up with it on his own because, in short, I was overestimating him a great deal), and after spending at least a minute insisting it was “common sense” in the most faux-rational, pseudo-scientific way you can imagine (he’s a theoretical physicist), he mentioned Camille Paglia. (As in “she’s this amazing intellectual and ACTUALLY a feminist, so…”)

    I was completely unfamiliar with her at the time, so all I managed to say was that I’m having a hard time believing an amazing intellectual would ever try to make feminism about “who is better” (unless they’re doing standup comedy), and that even if I do agree to have this conversation instead of the one I’m trying to have, I’m surprised a scientist (such as himself) could possibly act like a bunch of speculation on “what might have happened if…” weighs as much as a few thousand years’ worth of patriarchy, and what has actually happened to the world and the people in it as a result.

    Needless to say the rest of the evening didn’t go well.

  7. Athywren says

    Ah, I love Camille Paglia. Not so much for who she is or what she says, but what she represents. She is the anti-feminist’s version of the Famous And Intellectual Atheist Religious Convert Of Whom Very Few People Have Actually Heard(TM) (Or ‘faiarcowvfp’ for short.)
    “Look! This feminist agrees with us that feminism is nonsense! Therefore it is and you should just shut up!” And who cares about the reasoning that goes into their comments, what they’re actually addressing, or whether they’re even tangentially aware of what’s actually going on in the movement they’re claiming to represent or have represented?

    I realise that it’s bad reasoning in itself to look at irrationality coming from the opposition and take comfort from the idea that, perhaps, their being irrational makes you less wrong by contrast, but when it adds up in the way that it does in cases like these, I think it’s certainly a useful mental tool. Surely, if we were wrong about the weakness of theistic arguments, there would be a better counter-argument out there? Surely, if we were wrong about the weakness of anti-feminist arguments, there would be a better counter-argument out there? Surely, if we were wrong about the weakness of pro-Bigfoot arguments, there would be a better counter-argument out there?
    It certainly doesn’t prove, in isolation, that we’re right to be feminists, but it’s a huge comfort to know that their arguments against us are so utterly vapid.

  8. Jack-booted Verbalist says

    I just re-read this essay, too. One of the commenters paraphrased Ivins description of Paglia and off I went.

  9. funknjunk says

    Molly Ivins’ style coupled with her intellect was what was always so shocking to me. More the way she intentionally, knowingly used her down-home brand of wit and charm, I think. And the reluctant observer attitude of the piece is wonderful. “Write about this NY intellectual” – “I’m not good those New Yorky intellectual things” – “Do it anyway” – “Well .. ok, if’n you insist” … I love it.

  10. raven says

    She says, `This is the feminist point of view,’ and overturns it by standing it on its head.

    A common tactic of the clueless serial killers. Setting up strawpeople and then torching them.

    And that phrase, “she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices”, fits a few others I can think of, too: Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young.

    Way more than that. It’s the Tea Party, rightwing nuts, the fundie xians, and the GOP. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, D’Souza, Jerry Falwell and his numerous clones, etc..

    All they are doing is reflecting the hate, fear, lies, and hypocrisy of their followers back to them for money and power. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

  11. Slinky's Human says

    That. Was. Awesome. And strangely familiar.

    One of her latest efforts at playing enfant terrible in intellectual circles was a peppy essay for Newsday, claiming that either there is no such thing as date rape or, if there is, it’s women’s fault because we dress so provocatively. Thanks, Camille, I’ve got some Texas fraternity boys I want you to meet.

  13. says

    I salute you, Molly. You are dead and gone but still influencing us in a wholly good way.

    Every time Sarah Palin makes a public pronouncement, I wonder what Molly would have said.

    And those conservatives on the Supreme Court who gutted the voting rights act? Molly would have gleefully shredded them.

  14. skemist says

    I have mixed feelings. I can’t decide if Ivins is (was) just one of the greatest commentators, critics, and humorists of all time, or if she is simply the greatest of all time.

  15. says

    Paglia, ugh.

    I’ll just leave this here, for those who aren’t familiar: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia

    One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.

    Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

    Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.

    My position on date rape is partly based on my study of The Faerie Queen, as detailed in a full chapter in Sexual Personae: in 1590, the poet Edmund Spencer already sees that passive, drippy, naive women constantly get themselves into rape scenarios, while talented, intelligent, alert women, his warrior heroines, spot trouble coming and boldly trounce their male assailants. My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride.


    I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency.

    I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape. I loathe this thing about date rape. Have twelve tequilas at a fraternity party and a guy asks you to go up to his room, and then you’re surprised when he assaults you? Most women want to be seduced or lured. The more you study literature and art, the more you see it. Listen to Don Giovanni. Read The Faerie Queene. Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle. Girls hurl themselves at guitarists, right down to the lowest bar band here. The guys are strutting. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn’t repel them. Women have the right to freely choose and to say yes or no. Everyone should be personally responsible for what happens in life. I see the sexual impulse as egotistical and dominating, and therefore I have no problem understanding rape. Women have to understand this correctly and they’ll protect themselves better. If a real rape occurs, it’s got to go to the police. The business of having a campus grievance committee decide whether or not a rape is committed is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. Today, on an Ivy League campus, if a guy tells a girl she’s got great tits, she can charge him with sexual harassment. Chickenshit stuff. Is this what strong women do?

  18. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    I just want to juxtapose Paglia’s

    Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims.

    with her

    I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure

    So feminism demythologized women, brought us down from our lofty height. That’s why we have these problems today with getting raped and stuff: because we are larger-than-life images of goddesses that overwhelm boys and men.

    Uh, yeah.

  20. peregrinus says

    Perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to anyone here that Professor Paglia is one of the few atheists that Vox Day respects, even admires/loves. “Divine Camille’s” (as he refers to her) magnum opus, Sexual Personae, is one of his favorite books, and he quotes her with approval in numerous posts on his blog:

    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2007/04/la-paglia-divina.html
    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2009/01/true-skeptic.html
    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2013/12/camille-paglia-on-importance-of-men.html
    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2006/10/shhhhla-paglia-sta-parlando.html
    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/03/to-hell-with-secular-society.html

    On an unrelated note, people might be interested to learn of recent revelations about Mr. Day’s heritage:

    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/did-not-see-that-coming.html

    To summarize, he is of English, Irish, Hispanic, and Native American (Amerind) ancestry. Now he refers to himself as a “Person of Color.”

    That he’s sticking to his guns on the vaccination controversy shouldn’t come as a surprise, either:

    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/pz-admits-hes-wrong.html

    No. I have not been wrong about anything he’s addressed here. I am smarter than PZ Myers and one reason he hates me is that I demonstrate this so easily every single time he pushes his godless corpulence up from the ground long enough to get slapped down again. The reason Dr. Hooker’s paper was retracted was not because it was flawed, but because he obtained much more conclusive proof of his claim that the CDC was hiding apparent evidence of a specific vaccination/autism link.

    On the very same day that PZ was erroneously claiming I was wrong about this “final damning straw”, Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, issued a statement through his lawyer proving that I was right to take Dr. Hooker’s assertion about statistical fraud at the CDC seriously.

    Professor Myers, care to comment on any of this?

  22. Peregrinus the Nihilist says

    @ Iyéska, mal omnifarious (#21)

    I’m aware that this thread isn’t about Mr. Beale. Thank you for the tip; I’ll copy/paste my post onto Thunderdome.

  23. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I’m aware that this thread isn’t about Mr. Beale.

    Then why did you do a post about the abject idjit?

  24. Peregrinus the Nihilist says

    Then why did you do a post about the abject idjit?

    Because I thought that it wasn’t entirely irrelevant to the present topic. I thought that people might find the connection between Mr. Beale and Professor Paglia interesting. But I tend to agree that it would’ve been better to post the other info onto the open thread.

  25. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @Iyéska, #19:

    I remember when she was considered a media get. I red some of her work at the time, though not Sexual Personae.

    I didn’t bother to commit any to memory.

    As for loathing talking feminism during her time, well, (we both know) the backlash is as present as ever. Christina Hoff Sommers does an admirable Paglia impression anyway. I may have resented her at the time for the problems that she caused, but now I see her as merely playing a role that anti-feminists with money were going to cast *somebody* in. With the money available to wealthy conservatives that resent feminism, it’s not that hard to get publicity for the next Schlafly.

  27. says

    The ever rude and hilarious Thers wrote a stellar post about Paglia a couple years back.

    Excerpts:

    In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, American society has become increasingly secular, with a media environment drenched in sex.

    It is difficult to calculate the amount of nothing in these two sentences. It’s cliche wrapped up in being smug about not having to bother with conducting research. But I’m sure it has immense value for helping people who are already convinced they understand everything reassure themselves about how right they always were.

    —

    But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.

    Perhaps someone well-versed in the subtle distinctions between the Apollonian and the Dionysian might someday explicate why this particular sentence does not suck sad sorry balls.

  28. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @Atheist:
    1st: thanks for the link – pure awesome.

    2nd: for my money, you missed the best part, which came just before the end:

    American actresses have desexualized themselves, confusing sterile athleticism with female power. Their current Pilates-honed look is taut and tense — a boy’s thin limbs and narrow hips combined with amplified breasts. Contrast that with Latino and African-American taste, which runs toward the healthy silhouette of the bootylicious Beyoncé.

    If I have to look up how long ago Sir Mix-A-Lot said this better, I’ll get depressed.

    A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking popularity of Victoria’s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping malls, which otherwise trend toward the white middle class. Country music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way.

    The lower orders fuck like bunnies because their preferred forms of music are all boy-girl, unlike citydwellers, who don’t buy lacy bras in malls because their music is gay, except for the black and Hispanic people in cities, who go to malls to buy lingerie, where the old-fashioned white people like to buy underpants that make them want to fuck each other, boy-girl-like, in the manner of Shakespeare and the 18th-century novel, and also Hank Williams, and black people really dig that shit, unlike liberals.

    It’s a theory.

    “It’s a theory.” So much apt disdain in 3 little words. I love it.

  29. says

    CD:

    As for loathing talking feminism during her time, well, (we both know) the backlash is as present as ever. Christina Hoff Sommers does an admirable Paglia impression anyway.

    Hoff Sommers is annoying as all hells, but she’s no Paglia, and thank whatever for that. Paglia was pure baffle them with bullshit*, she’d make up shit left and right. At least Hoff Sommers hasn’t gone to the lengthy screeds about those gays that Paglia did.

    It was easier to talk feminism during the popularity peaks of Morgan, Bryant, and Schlafly. The trouble with Paglia was that people thought she was saying seriously profound stuff, and you could almost never get them to pay attention to what she was actually saying.
     
    *I’m sure Paglia felt the peons and proles would be baffled.

  30. says

    Paglia also mouthed off quite a lot about transgender people, Chaz Bono in particular.

    “Transgenderism has taken off like a freight train and has become nearly impossible to discuss with the analytic neutrality that honest and ethical scholarship requires…

    I am concerned about the current climate, inflamed by half-baked post-modernist gender theory, which convinces young people who may have other unresolved personal or family issues that sex-reassignment surgery is a golden road to happiness and true identity.

    How has it happened that so many of today’s most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. As I showed in Sexual Personae, which began as a study of androgyny in literature and art, transgender phenomena multiply and spread in “late” phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline. I will continue to celebrate androgyny, but I am under no illusions about what it may portend for the future.”

    I’m very troubled, very troubled for example Chastity Bono’s announcement, which is going to mainstream obviously the issue of transgender. I mean, Chastity Bono has many many issues in her life and to think that this is the answer – I mean, everyone can see that this is not the reason that Chastity Bono has been unhappy her whole life and now at the age of 40 to make this transition to mutilate the body in effect, I’m concerned about it because when I was young okay, I was convinced I was the wrong sex, convinced of it. If these things were in the air okay, I could see myself going down that road.

    Paglia does agree with Hoff Sommers on one thing, there’s a terrible lack of manliness about.

  31. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @Iyéska, #29:

    Hoff Sommers is annoying as all hells, but she’s no Paglia, and thank whatever for that.[1] Paglia was pure baffle them with bullshit*, she’d make up shit left and right.[2] At least Hoff Sommers hasn’t gone to the lengthy screeds about those gays that Paglia did.

    1. They are different stylistically, that’s for sure, and Paglia really did go for the upper-class intellectual image. Much like Bush and Shrub in the “experienced statesman/member of the elite” v “working man on a ranch/in the pub” images they separately created.

    2. Maybe Paglia makes up more bullshit than Hoff[? I’ll trust you on this, as I know little about her as a person] Sommers, I don’t know. I do know that Hoff Sommers produces more than her fair share of bullshit, most of it to support not just sexist propositions, but specifically anti-feminist ones. In that they seem the same to me: women who give cover to anti-feminist men by making shit up.

    I call them “Anti-feminist Rumpelstiltskins” because they’ve made it their never-ending task to spin straw feminists into gold. And, by the by, take away women’s reproductive freedom.

    It was easier to talk feminism during the popularity peaks of Morgan, Bryant, and Schlafly.[1] The trouble with Paglia was that people thought she was saying seriously profound stuff,[2]

    1. I’ll give you this one, as I wasn’t old enough to have read any serious feminism before 1985 or so, and even then I **didn’t** read any serious feminism til college. When Bryant was doing her schtick, I was barely at the level of cussing out grade school boys for their stupid “girls have cooties, they can’t play with us” games. By the time I was really reading feminism seriously, even Schlafly was largely past…and Paglia was just then (or just about to) hit the media.

    I didn’t really get a pre-Paglia period.

    And that is sad and funny in more than one way.

    2. Again, I’ll concede you’re right about those others, but in my [younger] experience, the anti-feminists have always been certain they’ve had feminism’s intellectual number, even when they are anti-intellectuals. So I guess I’ve just accepted that as the anti-feminist state-of-nature.

  32. says

    @Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden – 25 September 2014 at 5:11 pm

    “It’s a theory.” So much apt disdain in 3 little words. I love it.

    Thers is truly a master of disdain. Glad you liked it!

  33. says

    CD:

    2. Again, I’ll concede you’re right about those others, but in my [younger] experience, the anti-feminists have always been certain they’ve had feminism’s intellectual number, even when they are anti-intellectuals. So I guess I’ve just accepted that as the anti-feminist state-of-nature.

    If one can say that there was a nice thing about Morgan, Bryant, Schlafly, et al., it was nice that they were openly anti-intellectual. They didn’t think higher ed was all that important for girls/women, blah blah blah. It’s one reason they didn’t stay in the spotlight overly long. Paglia doesn’t say much that’s fundamentally different from them, but she wraps it in so much shit and verbiage, that a lot of people can’t parse what she’s actually saying.

  34. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Paglia doesn’t say much that’s fundamentally different from them, but she wraps it in so much shit and verbiage, that a lot of people can’t parse what she’s actually saying.

    Whereas if I can’t parse what somebody is saying, the bullshit radar goes off big-time. With real intellect should come clarity of ideas and the ability to explain them so others can easily understand them. If you are murky and muddy, you are probably hiding something.

  35. says

    Nerd:

    If you are murky and muddy, you are probably hiding something.

    That’s often true. I don’t know if it’s true of Paglia, though. Another hallmark of Paglia is that she states outright that she did all the things she tells others not to do, and that’s fine, because reasons.

  36. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Another hallmark of Paglia is that she states outright that she did all the things she tells others not to do, and that’s fine, because reasons.

    Eau de hypocrisy. Color me unsurprised.

  37. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    Another hallmark of Paglia is that she states outright that she did all the things she tells others not to do, and that’s fine, because reasons.

    Ah, classic. If you have a quote on that point as well, I’d enjoy it. But don’t go to any trouble on my account.

  38. says

    CD @ 37, well, it’s in most everything she’s every written. She claims to be transgender, but is anti-transgender.

    She bemoans that women are no longer glamorous, no longer reveling in the power inherent in their bodies, but she wears androgynous outfits of jackets and slacks. She also points out that she’s ‘outside’ the whole looks arena.

    “Well,” says Paglia, looking a bit surprised, “I just want to look passable.”

    But “passable” surely isn’t the point. It might be for me, or for any number of us, but for the woman who wrote Sexual Personae, and Sex, Art and American Culture, and Vamps and Tramps, the woman, in fact, whose entire body of work suggests that history, culture and the whole of “civilization” is based around the sexual allure of women, “passable” can never be the point. She is, after all, in London to talk about Hitchcock’s “‘dazzling’ women,” and the “agonized complexity” of the response they provoke. So what, I ask, about her looks in relation to the sexual marketplace?

    “I feel,” says Paglia, with a laugh that sounds just a little bit nervous, “completely outside the arena.”

    In that article, Paglia, a lesbian, also states that she can’t stand lesbians.

    Then you have this:

    To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia’s strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess.

    […]

    She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early ’70s, with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved “Under My Thumb,” a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she “barely got through the dinner” with a group of women’s studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. “I left before dessert.”

    And the classic:

    “I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code,” says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

    Last two quotes from here.

  39. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    a group of women’s studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women

    I don’t believe it for a second.

    I’m quite certain that if there was a conversation that resembled this, that the profs Paglia paints so ignorantly were asserting nothing more than that there is no behavior that has ever been proven to be caused by the average hormone differences between male humans and female humans, or perhaps that hormone levels were variable by individual and you can always find some males closer to female median, and vice versa, if you try hard enough.

    I’ve spent quite a bit of time with women’s studies professors, and though it is routine to make some fairly basic mistakes (equating male with man, for instance), I can’t imagine someone making that mistake, much less an entire department making it and sticking to it.

    No way.

  40. Numenaster says

    Much of what Paglia says I’m not competent to speak on, but with the quote below she’s wandered straight into my territory.

    Girls hurl themselves at guitarists, right down to the lowest bar band here. The guys are strutting. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust.

    Nope, not true. Straight up false. My boyfriend is a rock drummer, and almost every friend he has is is involved with music, mostly in those “lowest bar bands.” I have been to dozens of gigs watching my guy or other friends, and NOT ONE SINGLE TIME have I seen women hurling themselves at anybody on stage, or seeking them out after the show. I’ve been there, nursing my soda waiting until it’s time to load out, and this DOES NOT HAPPEN. She is describing the fantasy that gets guys to pick up the guitar, and which leads to them putting it back down again after six months.

    The lowest bar bands get used to playing for their own enjoyment because it’s so rare to have anyone paying attention other than the folks from the next act. The only person I’ve seen on stage being drooled over by the opposite sex was a female bass player. If this is Camille’s understanding of “living in rock and roll”, I have to wonder what color the sky is in her world.