sexual personae

Sexual Personae is a fairly rubbish book. She goes through all the "greats" of literature and philsophy going "sex, sex, it's all sex! Look at all this sex!" until she gets to De Sade and then she goes "Sex? No sex here, this is all about politics. Next!"

then i read vamps and tramps.

This is the King Arthur bookshop in Tintagel, right?

Your customer isn't D3bb13 B3ll3w, is she, by any chance?

If so, I want that Fanclub CD back.

someone gave this to me a few years ago and i never got around to reading it. should i?

I'm suspicious of anyone who hates Sontag so much.

no, it is not 1995 anymore (xpost)

everything paglia says has since been disproven by science.

lol

i do enjoy noodle vague's display name, though.

Camille Paglia is brilliant, has incredible verve, knows what she's talking about and has dismissed several fakers and mediocrities in Academia. Sexual Personae is her best book.

yeah, but she's kind of a nut

No she's not, have the decency to at least provide some basis to your slurs.

Camille Paglia is brilliant, has incredible verve, knows what she's talking about and has dismissed several fakers and mediocrities in Academia.

NOTM / x-post

Who's sockpuppet is Vision?

Lesson number one: criticism is only valid when you know what you're talking about, i.e., please take the trouble to actually read the book.

"I know, right" (oh the irony), two questions:
-what's "sock puppet"?
-do you mean perhaps "whose"?

No she's not, have the decency to at least provide some basis to your slurs.

Allow me:
http://privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/burchill.htm

Who's sockpuppet is Vision?

LJ? Tuomas?

http://arts.anu.edu.au/languages/russian/russian_dolls.jpg

lol because those two are responsible for all the idiotic comments/shitty trolling on ilxor.com rite

Everything I've ever read by her is just her harassing you into her "viewpoint". There's never any sense of exploration or discover, just banging the same old nails over the head.

Also, how the fuck is my name supposed to be "ironic"?

Also, why am I arguing with a fucking sockpuppet?

which, by the way, is a fairly self-explanatory term.

Nah, it's the cluelessness. xxpost

If Timi etc, you probably posted that on the off chance nobody would read it thoroughly (which is the way most people go through school and through life, pretending to know what they don't).
Well, I just read everything through those garish colours and I'm glad I did, as it proves my point that Camille Paglia is a destroyer of intellectual mediocrities. This one, btw, calls her a "wop". It was a blunt exchange of faxes where Camille simply exposed the other woman's stupidity. And hey, Camille herself allowed the exchanged to be made published, so it clearly shows how she feels about it. At the end of the day, it's worth repeating: READ!

Lesson number one: criticism is only valid when you know what you're talking about, i.e., please take the trouble to actually read the book.

that seems like a lot of work. also, get off ILX Camile, don't you have a class to teach?

"I know, right", the fact that you can't figure out why your nick is ironic is doubly ironic, is all I can say.

Jesus, this thread has gotten me cranky fast.

Can people stop:

• Stop trolling the shit out of this place

• Stop being assholes

• Just talk about Camille fucking Paglia because that's what this thread is about, well, unless you know a good supplier in the UK.

Hang on, what cluelessness? What's happening? I don't even know anything about this Camile lady.

She's a nut

Can you imagine if you had to work with her, it'd be a fucking nightmare.

Paglia on Palin

Fresh blood for the vampire

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/...lin/index.html

A beady-eyed McCain gets a boost from the charismatic Sarah Palin, a powerful new feminist -- yes, feminist! -- force. Plus: Obama must embrace his dull side.
By Camille Paglia

Sep. 10, 2008 | Rip tide! Is the Obama campaign shooting out to sea like a paper boat?

It's heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain -- that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won't die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.

Oh, the sadomasochistic tedium of McCain's imprisonment in Hanoi being told over and over and over again at the Republican convention. Do McCain's credentials for the White House really consist only of that horrific ordeal? Americans owe every heroic, wounded veteran an incalculable debt of gratitude, but how do McCain's sufferings in a tiny, squalid cell 40 years ago logically translate into presidential aptitude in the 21st century? Cast him a statue or slap his name on a ship, and let's turn the damned page.

We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision -- which is why I support Barack Obama and have contributed to his campaign. My baby-boom generation -- typified by the narcissistic Clintons -- peaked in the 1960s and is seriously past it. But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future? And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about "country above all" coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?

Having said that, I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama's lunch. McCain's weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama's easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren's public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance -- where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness -- began his alarming slide.

As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin' his g's like there's no tomorrow. It's analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes -- be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick -- there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly -- though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into "Star Wars" -- a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars." (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace.") This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker
Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

But what of Palin's pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God's plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We'll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don't believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.

The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.

If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

holy shit that's the worst writing i've ever read in my life i want to rip my eyes out

The authority she believes she has to make this statement is just hysterical:

"...I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development..."

sexual persongae, amirite?

Vision,

For what it's worth you're being accused of sockpuppetry for noisily espousing rather boring opinions. Around here that tends to be taken as an insincere attempt to get a rise out of people.

Best of luck with your ridiculous opinions!

Wow, that's really dense writing. Does she get paid by the word?

So Palin is good because she's gutsy and feisty, and we shouldn't judge her on her political stands because they are completely distorted by the media (I'd love to know where Paglia gets her information, since she can so easily bypass the normal systems of information).

And what's with that paragraph about Philadelphia? That really looks like she's fillin' out the word count.

Now I gotta change my fucking display name AGAIN?

Walmart and MacDonalds and other places were *REAL* Americans hang out, so she doesn't lose her connection with the populace. That's where she gets her information from, punk.

I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse. Her essays and pieces are littered with self consciously abrasive opinions, hastily formed assumptions and barking orders. I suppose she's earned the right to harangue liberals for their "infexible moral absolutes" by being so ridiculously contrarian with her opinions.

But yeah, what Masonic Boom said about Walmart and McDonalds, I think she kind of shows that in the passage where she lives in the apartment above the Farmhouse. She casts this patronisingly anthropological eye on the farm wife, and then gets to identify with her in her "Men!" dismissal, she gets to have her cake and eat it really.

oh hai, sarahel

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/files/2010/01/tommy.jpg

i mean, trolls can be effective or shitty ... but for most of the 90s she made a career out of trolling the Ivy League

I just wouldn't overstate the influence she's had on the Ivy League (or graduate humanities in general). I've never run into her thoughts in a classroom or even in a discussion with a colleague. The first time I heard about her was from a friend who had majored in Lit in undergrad, but never pursued any kind of graduate work and I haven't seen her impact elsewhere. Tho I wasn't in the academe in the 90s, so maybe she was floating around the discourse more then.

I just wouldn't overstate the influence she's had on the Ivy League (or graduate humanities in general).

Agreed. She was more about ridicule and attempts at discrediting it in the court of popular opinion. Her name and ideas didn't really have much traction in the classroom, kinda like canonical rockism on ilx in a way. Maybe?

she owes her entire career to the 90s mania re: "political correctness"

basically, on the rare occasions someone would bring her up, the professor would roll his/her eyes, and say something diplomatic along the lines of, "I'm sorry, we only have a limited amount of time here. If you sincerely feel Camille Paglia merits discussion, you can do so outside of class."

sex viagra, what do you mean?

― Vision, Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:44 PM (1 year ago)

good ol sex viagra

Can someone provide (write/link to) a concise summation of what Camille Paglia/Sexual Personae is all about? She has what I call "Ayn Rand syndrome": I don't know anything about her because I've never read her, and I'll never read her because I know just enough to never actually want to. I only know to hate her, but not why.

The full thing is behind a pay-wall, but if you can hunt it down, I'd read this to start: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/may/31/feminism-and-literature/

Also there's a long response that NYRB published too -- I just realized I have access to both, so if you can't get them, shoot me a webmail and I'll email you a txt.

Iiiiiiiiiiiii like her!

lol, no u don't

http://thisdistractedglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/children-of-men-2006-michael-caine-pic-4.jpg

@EDB, two other pieces to look at are from Kenyan Review; a book review of SP by Sandra Gilbert and a kind of retrospective of Paglia by Allison Booth.

(The super super short synopsis: In Paglia-land, the world+history is men/art/seeing/penises/Apollo/etc V. women/nature/feeling/vaginas/Dionysus/etc. Gender isn't a construction but something real and definitive, and feminist moves to equalize relationships between men + women are doomed to failure because they fail to acknowledge how intrinsically dissimilar men and women are.)

also like earth v. air, paganism v. christianity, other stupid dialectical cliches about how women drive like this and men drive like this

If only academia had a suggest ban function.

Thanks a lot.

yeah Paglia is all about the challops

This could well be a contender for the best first (including thread creator) two posts ever.

i haven't read it yet but i'm sure it's jam-packed full of lulz

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

It's pretty tedious, one-note and pub-bore-y actually. I tried, but couldn't make it through the article. It is terribly written, and has no point that I can see beyond space-filler.

I couldn't make it through more than a few paragraphs. Reads like a parody of that RIPfork site, like, that poorly written. Hardly "demolishing" - more like an angry little person stamping their feet at a new pop phenomenon they just! don't! understand!

Camille's Madonna fandom makes this more poignant in a way.

fuck this generation for letting someone become famous without checking if Camille Paglia fancied them, imo

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltk460YLFZ1r4vn34o1_r1_500.jpg

oops i mean http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltk460YLFZ1r4vn34o1_r1_500.jpg

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-patterson/camille-pagila-interview_b_1842500.html

i am a chump and clicked on that. lols at the title.

she sounds pretty sad

she's sad all right

counting up old grudges and calling herself ugly

i was reading some old paglia essays this week bc they are very easy to read and sometimes provocative - but they're all really terrible! her so-called erudition consists entirely of namedropping writers and directors w/out any close reading.

Academic feminism is lost in a fog of social constructionism. It believes we are totally the product of our environment. This idea was invented by Rousseau. He was wrong. Emboldened by dumb French language theory, academic feminists repeat the same hollow slogans over and over to each other. Their view of sex is naive and prudish. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist's.

that's from an essay on rape in Sex, Art, and American Culture. putting aside the feminism strawmanning, the bizarre metaphor (feminists embalm sex like taxidermists embalm dogs? what does that even mean?) - it is so telling that this is the most critical piece of her essay. "This idea was invented by Rousseau" - oh okay, I guess I'll just take your word for it no quotes or argument or anything. "He was wrong." thanks for setting us straight!

sometimes she can come off like the Ann Coulter of culture, only w/ a somewhat more unpredictable shtick.

rousseau does not think we are totally the product of our environment.

But if there is a state where the soul can find a position solid enough to allow it to remain there entirely and gather together its whole being, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present lasts for ever, albeit imperceptibly and giving no sign of its passing, with no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than simply that of our existence, a feeling that completely fills our soul; as long as this state lasts, the person who is in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness, such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness, which leaves in the soul no void needing to be filled. Such is the state in which I often found myself on the Ile de St Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I was lying in my boat as it drifted wherever the water took it, or sitting on the banks of the choppy lake, or elsewhere beside a beautiful river or a stream gurgling over the stones

What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to the self, nothing but oneself and one's own existence: as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. The feeling of existence stripped of all other affections is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace which alone would be enough to make this existence prized and cherished by anyone who could banish all the sensual and earthly impressions which constantly distract us from it and upset the joy of it in this world. But most men, being constantly stirred by passion, know little of this state, and, having only ever experienced it imperfectly and briefly, they have only a vague and confused idea of it, which gives them no sense of its charm. It would not even be good in the present circumstances for them, avidly desiring these sweet ecstasies, to take a dislike to the active life which their constantly recurring needs impose upon them. But an unfortunate man who has been cut off from human society and who can no longer do anything useful or good in this world either for others or for himself, may find in this state compensation for human joys which neither fortune nor men could take away from him.

peoepl are sexual mosnters!

her BFI book on 'the birds' actually isn't bad, definitely don't bother with anything else though.

she is so terrible. do rapists tend to like her? normally I'd feel a question like that would be unfair, but some of this is just rape apologetics.

"Women have menstruation to tell them they are women. Men must do or risk something to be men. Men become masculine only when other men say they are. Having sex with a woman is one way a boy becomes a man."

"A girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool. A girl who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot. Feminists call this 'blaming the victim.' I call it common sense."

"Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality."

"Feminism, with its solemn Carry Nation repressiveness, does not see what it is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape."

THE FUN ELEMENT IN RAPE. ok, moving on.

"Today's young women don't know what they want."

"The theatrics of public rage over date rape are their way of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation."

"There never was and never will be sexual harmony."

"She must be prudent and cautious about where she goes and with whom. When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences and, through self-criticism, resolve never to make that mistake again. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women. Posting lists of guilty men in the toilet is cowardly, infantile stuff."

"Beware of the deep manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern."

"Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history."

truly one of those rare authors whose bad reputation is not just deserved but maybe not bad enough

holy smokes. did you find all of those quotes in her writings yourself?

yes, this week

tough week. but worthy.

I scanned back through this thread and, boy howdy, if a writer's worth could be judged by the quality of their defenders, Vision's methods of arguing would force me to think that the only people who like Paglia must be smug, pedantic, wannabe intellectuals who lack the breadth to deserve that designation and the sense to recognize their deficiencies.

Looking at Mordy's collection of quotes, I'd pick the final one as the least defensible, no matter what context has been lost. The three characteristics of masculinity she selects are not the salient ones. Unstable? In contrast to what? Femininity?

Then, to name masculinity as "the most creative force in human history" is so baseless a declaration as to defy analysis. Can she have failed to notice that masculinity is massively more abundant than creativity? Or that creativity is not exclusive to the masculine? Among ex cathedra pronouncements, this rates as one of the stupidest I have ever encountered.

i'll cop to not really being aware of paglia in anything other than the vaguest academic sense (i went to college!) but those quotes are amazingly, monumentally, awful

also the opening of this thread is all-time

from that interview i think "crazy old dyke" is dead on. a crazy old dyke in the right place at the right time. i'm not familiar with who it was that bought her horseshit though. confused women and men both? is her stuff on a pua / ayn rand / misogynistic nerd continuum? how did people take it seriously (did they)? xp

yeah those first two posts are basically alpha and omega

xp "dyke" is unfortunate i guess. more like hyper-closeted / repressed.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/camille_paglias_glittering_images/

I haven't read it yet but I'm looking forward to it! (The interview, not the book. I'm done reading Paglia books forever, I think.)

HI I AM THE AMAZING RANDY