Said Camille Paglia in a really interesting interview.
And this is especially important — for men and women, even though it starts out referring only to women:
Women must find a way to develop their full potential in the professional world without also disrupting and draining their private lives. The corporate business model invented in northern Europe after the Industrial Revolution is hyper-efficient but also vampiric. Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs. It’s a bourgeois trap and a distortion of the ultimate meaning of life.IN THE COMMENTS: Mrs Whatsit said"
Oh Camille. She's brilliant and maddening and the older I get, the more I agree with her. But sooner or later she always ends up contradicting herself in spectacular fashion. Here, for instance, first she spends hundreds of impassioned words pleading with young women not to cede their freedom and agency to paternalistic institutional authorities like universities and the government in exchange for the delusion of perfect safety. Then she gets to her ringing conclusion.
"I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class. Finally, I call for the investigation and reform of the current systemic exploitation of working-class women (many of them black or Latina immigrants) who have become the invisible new servant class for affluent white women leaving childcare to others as they pursue their feminist professional dreams."
In which Paglia first calls for protective, paternalistic solutions to women's problems from institutional authorities, and then for taking away the freedom and agency of women who choose to work or hire each other to work as nannies. Investigate them! Reform them! God forbid that women work together to come up with their own market-based solution to a societal problem. Women shouldn't be free to work as nannies if the government didn't hire them! Women shouldn't be free to hire nannies if the government isn't paying them! Only the government should be solving women's problems!
What? Inconsistent? Who, me?
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46 comments:
Too many young feminists want their safety, security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies
The government is their surrogate husband, so it does make some sense.
What is the "Bottom Line" to her proposal(s)?
"I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness . . . in asserting control over their own dating lives." She shouldn't be. It's a perfectly rational political strategy. You get money, power, recognition--and when you make false accusations, you get off scot free. Fragility is a tool, and there's nothing helpless about it. Results show that it works. (Same thing with the identification with jobs. It's not really about the jobs. It's about claiming power, money, and recognition, to boost female identity.) Of course, Paglia is right to hint that rational strategies may have unintended consequences. Small price to pay for feminist true believers though. (So with all this feminine whining, by self-professed feminists, does feminism still stand for the idea/lie/fable that the sexes are and have to be equal?)
Sal: "The government is their surrogate husband, so it does make some sense"
Sal is correct.
Which is precisely what the leftists government-focused "private" life of "Julia" is all about.
Nothing outside the state.
Nothing.
Men and women are equal but complementary.
Also, dating serves a purpose beyond instant physical gratification. Men and women need to stop conflating sex and relationships.
Finally, make life, not abortion. Our perspective has been grotesquely skewed and, in fact, corrupted.
Go forth and reconcile.
You know what happens when you combine the Suffragette idea of women as "The Angels of the Household" with the feminist idea of "The Personal is Political"? You get a bunch of women who think that the political realm should measure up to their angelic dispositions, and when it doesn't it's the fault of the awful, evil patriarchy.
I've complained about this multiple times before in this forum: modern feminism has no notion of feminine evil. Sadly, what feminism has forgotten or more likely never learned, is made clear even in Plato: if one cannot do evil, one cannot do good either. Thus, modern feminism & its understanding of "moral good" as being only the imposition from above of political change.
There was a discussion here several months ago about the sexiness of intelligent women. Paglia is as sexy as a woman can be, and I say that knowing that -- as a man -- I have nothing to offer her.
The Progressive Plutarchs figured out that women are emotional and easily manipulated. If they can turn all women into victims and all men into rapists women have no where else to turn to. They will essentially marry the government.
It is much easier than finding a compatible life partner, but it also is much less rewarding and women who go this route find little happiness. They in turn promulgate unhappiness by moving into the bureaucracy where they spend their time harassing the American people and trying to make them as miserable as they are.
It's always refreshing to hear Paglia call out the feminist nonsense, but is she really "shocked and dismayed" by it?
The Left views itself as the "victims" -- and they've pushing "victim empowerment" since the 60s. Hence, at college, we're all innocent women, and all those Frat boys are rapists!
Now, anyone with half of brain, has read Orwell's Animal Farm -- a tremendous classic -- where they discuss the slogan "Two legs bad, four legs good," but then watch as the four-legged sloganeers slowly, gradually, start walking on their two hind legs.
Or, as the immortal Pete Townshend of The Who put it, "Here comes the New Boss, same as the old Boss."
That's all these college leftist, Mattress-Girl, Sandra Fluke types are doing -- trying to acquire power and prestige, not through any concrete achievement, but through theatrical victim empowerment.
I say never hire any of these women, and don't sleep with them either -- just nod, grin and stay away from them. Don't even engage them. Ignore them, young college lad.
Paglia seems a little slow on the take, but her heart is in the right place.
When I read "bourgeois" I am all in. Was thinking of going home but I believe I'll stick around for a couple of hours to give an example to the underlings. While they toil I will be reading Roger Scruton on Beauty. You can bet I do not "conflate" my business life with my actual life and its "ultimate meaning."
Where do people learn to think and write this crap? Vampiric? Northern Europe as the home of the evil work ethic? WTF.
How about not staying in the employ of anything or anyone who would disrupt and drain your private life? How about quitting and moving to the South of Europe or even Africa? You know, slow down and bore in on the ultimate meaning in a place more authentic than your bourgeois job. Go to the Democratic Republic of the fucking Congo and report back.
"Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future."
Yep. You might also say that of the race oriented complaints and concerns. If young black men and women find the liberal American campus too daunting, how are they going to deal with the rest of life? I'm not saying they should acquiesce in actual racism. It's certainly more of a problem that made up rape culture. But if you decide that everything is racism, you are giving in and finding yourself an excuse.
When it comes to men, providing for the family has been ingrained for a long time and failing to do so normally brings a feeling of shame. I doubt it can be fixed as a lot of women --- not all, mind you --- end up resenting the husband if they end up becoming the bread winner.
I always enjoy reading Paglia, particularly when she calls upon her deep understanding of classical civilization to illuminate her arguments. However, just like another classicist I admire, she can be occasionally inconsistent. Fully aware of being liable the the charge of harboring the hobgoblin of little minds, my curiosity once aroused must pose the question.
"Neither party in any sexual encounter is totally operating in the rational realm, which is why the Greek god Dionysus was the patron of ecstasy, a hallucinatory state of pleasure-pain," writes Paglia in her thorough-going critique of so-called rape-culture. I think her point is well taken and obvious to anyone who considers human sexuality in the light of evolutionary biology. However, in her defense of reproductive rights (which I take to mean unconditional abortion on demand) Paglia justifies her stand "on the grounds that nature gives every individual total control over his or her body". Are not these two claims about human nature contradictory?
Camille Paglia should be College Czar.
Always think what a society would be like if everyone acted a certain way.
If everyone wants to be the victim, then they all will be, probably because someone conquered them and makes it happen for real, or they gave power to some form of authoritarianism that most likely will make their lives worse than they were before but can deflect blame to the "oppressors." It is a poor way to live.
It's Tuesday, time for this week's Camille Paglia post.
I don't see new feminism as puritanical or northern at all. The attitude they have regarding their Holy Lady Parts is very much like the Catholic, and southern European, attitude that made a saint of Maria Goretti, who chose death over deflowerment, according to the hagiography.
I love that Paglia worked in a truth that most on the left refuse to acknowledge--pregnancy is safer when you are younger (and I might add greatly decreases your risk of breast cancer):
"...Stay-at-home moms have been arrogantly disdained by orthodox feminism. This is a primary reason for the lack of respect that a majority of mainstream citizens has for feminism, which is addicted to juvenile male-bashing and has elevated abortion to sacramental status. While I firmly support unrestricted reproductive rights... I think that the near-hysterical obsession with abortion has damaged feminism by making it seem morally obtuse.
I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class. Finally, I call for the investigation and reform of the current systemic exploitation of working-class women (many of them black or Latina immigrants) who have become the invisible new servant class for affluent white women leaving childcare to others as they pursue their feminist professional dreams."
And this commenter on Spike has a great point:
"So-called 'stay at home moms' don't have to stay at home. They can roam in the park, library, museum, zoos, shops, restaurants, and etc. with the children or alone (or with friends) when kids are at school.
They should be called Free Moms.
Why don't they call working moms 'stuck-at-work moms'? Now, working moms are really stuck at work and can do nothing else."
What does Camille Paglia know about a.) sex b.) young women?
I like her. She is interesting and not predictable-rare in these times. Everyone seems to be in their own small ordered box. That is why I like Althouse too!
My job means nice things and status and I need that though.
Easy for a professor to talk about someone in the business world making it while they do "research" and write books.
tits.
"Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs. It’s a bourgeois trap and a distortion of the ultimate meaning of life."
Too many academics have been living large off the taxpayers all their lives, and imagine that the economy is just some giant engine, humming off in a desert somewhere, that produces all the goods they consume without any effort on anyone's part. Camille Paglia should spend a year or two driving a semi 12 hours a day on highways that are deadly boring, except when they are suddenly just deadly. Then she might understand what it takes to put that glass of OJ on the table every morning.
Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure,
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
Oh, Girl.
She can badmouth Taylor Swift all she wants as long as she keeps saying other stuff like this
Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs.
Men pick jobs that actually hold their interest.
Empowered women then pick men's jobs, which don't hold their interest.
"I attacked Dworkin and MacKinnon with all guns blazing."
Way to let us know!
"‘Rape culture’ is a ridiculous term – mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique. Anyone who sees sex so simplistically has very little sense of world history, anthropology or basic psychology."
Isn't that statement omitting the evidence/proof of what Rotterdam has been shown to be, and therefore unscientific dogma afraid of reality on Paglia's dime intellectually? Perhaps conflating rape/rape/rape-death by ISIS and "sex" is the point somehow? To create an industry to prove sex isn't about rape, but power?
Conflating the idiocy of calling American campus' dens of rape culture, an idiocy deserving of critiquing, when there are, if one knows of world history, anthropology, and basic psychology (or just knows a bunch about any combo of the above including the various 1-0-0 sets and is able to use Kepler's Ledge leaps to advance far beyond those with great knowledge of all three but unable to utilize leaps) actual rape cultures denounced as non-existent because of a conflation of imaginary bullshit in America and Mexican gangs child-trafficking for real, really sucks.
At the minimum, you don't talk about "world history, anthropology or basic psychology" after saying the phrase is ridiculous, as if other culture's shit including rape wasn't refuted time and time again by the British, to the world, but most especially, the territories lands, of course the son-of-bitch Cromwell notwithstanding.
"Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future."
Actually, that's how you get ahead these days. Scream about how there aren't enough women in tech, and some dimwit will spend a half a billion dollars hiring you, so you can sit on your dumb cunt and let your betters do the work assigned to you, while you try to figure out how to get them fired so their families can starve on the street.
garage mahal said...
"What does Camille Paglia know about a.) sex b.) young women?"
I'm guessing she knows a good deal more than you do about sex with young women.
" Men and women need to stop conflating sex and relationships."
Boy, do I feel sorry for young women, and young men these days. I was in college in the 50s and we all had the concept that some girls were for fun and some were for marrying. We would not cross a line with any of them unless invited. Today, the guys are in thrall to the same pornographic view of sex that girls have. My sons are married and have children. My daughters are not.
There's nothing I can do but love them as a father and not talk about how life was 60 years ago when it was fun.
garage mahal: "What does Camille Paglia know about a.) sex b.) young women?"
"a.)"
"b.)"
LOL
Like Rush thinks he is The Donald, Camille thinks she is me. We both found lots of freedom in the 1950s and 1960s before white men were demonized.
Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs.
I should comment on this, but I'm in late grading ;)
It would be awesome to sit between Paglia and the Dowager Countess at a Dinner Party.
"I attacked Dworkin and MacKinnon with all guns blazing."
I wonder what this means.
Many movies had characters with two guns, some with three. Around the time Paglia was making her name, Unforgiven, a Great Film up there with The Big Lebowski and Citizen Kane and The Hudsucker Proxy, had a character that talked about having three guns with one arm because he didn't want to be outgunned.
But "all" guns blazing could perhaps be something less than that.
How many of what sort?
OH!
It was all metaphor/illusion. There were no guns so all is infinite. Given the power the words have allowed for Paglia, I wonder what power guns might have beyond her imagination?
Not that I have any military honor nor knowledge, but I suspect the idea of attacking with "all guns blazing" isn't ideal unless in a very desperate situation, and even then what about saving a bullet, and a weapon that will be able to function instead of blazing if a "gun" as it were, so as, if need be, to kill yourself rather than submit to becoming John McCain, Senator AZ?
I would die a thousand deaths rather than kill successfully parts of my country like McCain, and applaud, in 20/20 hindsight, both Althouse's 2008 vote and 2012 for Romney.
Some day you will all finally figure out that the hippies had it right. Free love and free exchange.
American men wanted to shape the world to their will. American women responded by seeing how they could shape American men to their will.
But stubbornness is a two-way street. Stinginess of property and stinginess of sexual access are one and the same. Both require the presumption that nothing is ever good enough.
It helps grow the economy. Infinite demand requires that people are never satisfied. They must either always be on the lookout for a "better deal" or idealize their own lot as the best. Guess which one of those wins out?
The invention of "rape culture" is just sexual stinginess taken to its ultimate conclusion. If no one is ever good enough for the discerning, (economically-minded) female, then all sex must necessarily be rape. Or at least, almost all sex.
Fantasies are ok. After all, they are what feed the mind's capacity for idealization. And all suitors can't always be subpar unless there's always a fictional ideal against whom they will always be deemed insufficient.
The prime-time audience watches the stupid dad archetype and is comforted by his blundering social impotence.
The government has also become their religion. Instead of a congregation and loving brothers and sisters providing support, they need more and more government.
But isn't the whininess of today's feminism and its treatment of women as wilting flowers exactly what one would expect if: (i) feminism is the voice of all women and (ii) women really are as weak as millennia of conventional wisdom have portrayed them? What is Paglia's (and Althouse's) alternative suggestion: that feminism is a deceptive plot by a handful of misguided contemporary activists? Doesn't it seem more plausible that feminism began as a movement by a handful of very unusual, bright, assertive, strong-willed woman like Althouse and Paglia, that it gradually became more representative, and degenerated into what I have described?
" I was in college in the 50s and we all had the concept that some girls were for fun and some were for marrying."
There were quite a few who were for fun and marrying. The problem was figuring out which ones.
""I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness . . . in asserting control over their own dating lives."
I'm certainly dismayed. But am I shocked? Not in the least considering this is what feminists have been espousing for a decade.
With Anita darker sins and her ilk and the crisp occurring on campuses, this is what such feminists do and how they behave. They are Victorians and fascistic.
if you see the par for the course occur in front of you it shouldn't cause shock
More of this Paglia and less of the Taylor swift is a nazi pagluaPaglia. Yes Taylor does appear to be engaged in cliquishness and yes she looks aryan. But that doesn't make you a nazi. When she espouses murdering Jews then I'll the take the argument seriously.
Interestingly, it's not just jobs that are a problem as far as identity conflation goes. Sex is another big element that gets conflated with identity, and I think that plays into the "rape culture" mess. Perhaps women students feel vulnerable because they're having sex on campus they later regret, and especially if they have really bought into sex as a core part of identity, they may very well come to feel the men they slept with violated them in some sense as a means of protecting that identity, even if at the time it was quite consensual of both parties and what happened does not meet any legal definition of rape or assault.
Rhythm and Balls said...
"The invention of "rape culture" is just sexual stinginess taken to its ultimate conclusion. If no one is ever good enough for the discerning, (economically-minded) female, then all sex must necessarily be rape. Or at least, almost all sex.
Fantasies are ok. After all, they are what feed the mind's capacity for idealization. And all suitors can't always be subpar unless there's always a fictional ideal against whom they will always be deemed insufficient."
See 50 shades of gray.
If the man has enough money he can tie any of those women up and she will look forward to it! The feminists are just chasing the fattest wallet again. Right now Daddy Sugar happens to be the government.
It's too bad Paglia doesn't have more of a following among feminists, one would think her point of view is far more empowering than the dystopian world of dependency and pain offered by the "mainstream" feminists.
Oh Camille. She's brilliant and maddening and the older I get, the more I agree with her. But sooner or later she always ends up contradicting herself in spectacular fashion. Here, for instance, first she spends hundreds of impassioned words pleading with young women not to cede their freedom and agency to paternalistic institutional authorities like universities and the government in exchange for the delusion of perfect safety. Then she gets to her ringing conclusion.
"I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class. Finally, I call for the investigation and reform of the current systemic exploitation of working-class women (many of them black or Latina immigrants) who have become the invisible new servant class for affluent white women leaving childcare to others as they pursue their feminist professional dreams."
In which Paglia first calls for protective, paternalistic solutions to women's problems from institutional authorities, and then for taking away the freedom and agency of women who choose to work or hire each other to work as nannies. Investigate them! Reform them! God forbid that women work together to come up with their own market-based solution to a societal problem. Women shouldn't be free to work as nannies if the government didn't hire them! Women shouldn't be free to hire nannies if the government isn't paying them! Only the government should be solving women's problems!
What? Inconsistent? Who, me?
Mrs. Whatsit. On the one hand, I have to applaud you in noting this inconsistency. On the other, I have to say your consistent libertarian rejection of all institutional support for women, or anyone, leaves me every bit as perplexed as you are at Paglia's inconsistencies.
Is ceding one's "freedom and agency to paternalistic institutional authorities" the same as relying on any institutional support at all? That's what it sounds like for you. I think if you want to defend agency and freedom as pure and never qualified principles, you might have trouble telling us how your vision of life differs from a pure out and out law of the jungle, a la a Hobbesian state of nature.
If a woman goes to a college, I can think of institutional supports for her that are not paternalistic and that do not undermine her agency and freedom as I see them (just as I can see how the institutional constraints Paglia complains of do undermine it). Say, in just providing her a place to stay or a decent classroom in which to meet. I'd include some regulation of wages and hours at the bottom end of the labor pyramid or the provision of flexible extended study options in that category and I am not sure why you think these undermine "agency" in any meaningful sense. Or does providing only one single study option constitute freedom for you?
Goodness, Jon Burack, you're reading a lot into a short blog comment. My "consistent libertarian rejection of all institutional support for women" is a product of your imagination. I was criticizing Paglia's inconsistency, not expressing my own ideas or my agreement or disagreement with her various positions.
Also, just to be clear, I'm not expressing any agreement or disagreement with your ideas about institutional supports for women. Whether I agree or disagree, they're irrelevant to my point.
Mrs Whatsit, you charged Paglia with inconsistency. I apologize if I was mistaken to assume that by doing this you did not also mean to express disagreement with Paglia for her inconsistencies. It seems sort of a logical inference to me. If you were not disagreeing with her inconsistencies, what was the point of detailing them? Paglia is inconsistent. So why is that a problem? I hate to quote Emerson because I can't stand the guy mainly, but just to be inconsistent myself there is his nice little bit about "foolish consistencies. . ." 0
I pointed out that some of Paglia's proposed solutions were inconsistent with the problems she'd identified. That was all I meant to do, and I see no point in arguing about whether the point was worth making.
As for the Emerson quote, the adjective "foolish" matters. He was arguing against consistency maintained for no reason except consistency, not defending inconsistency in every case.
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