Lately, have you felt ill, queasy, mysteriously adrip, without clear cause as to why? Do your guts and brains reel about as if you had ingested bad clams and a quart of gin?
Camille Paglia shares her opinions with the world!
Now, it's easy enough to gawk at a Camille Paglia emanation and exclaim at the brazen idiocy, the idiotic brazenity, the vapid megalomania, the megalomaniacal vapidity. It's a lot harder to answer: who the fuck even buys this shit?
Camille Paglia is taken seriously by precisely whom?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
The PJ's Media Lifestyle Section thinks Camille Paglia is an Important Voice.
So, yeah.
All right.
Ahem.
The quality of discourse for women today is poor.
No shit.
Long dumb quote to follow, steady on. PUNCHLINE APPROACHING.
Notable recent examples of unproductive chattering: Naomi Wolf has created a new range of vagina puns with her anecdotal account of her technicolor orgasms in her latest book Vagina. The Life of Julia
is a left-looking faceless cartoon claiming that women need government
to take care of them. (I linked to Iowahawk’s parody because the
original is too depressing.) Hanna Rosin seeks to convince us
that replacing domineering men with domineering women amounts to
positive progress. And a fan fiction author addicted to “shouty
capitals,” E.L. James, captured the imagination of women across the
English-speaking world with a poor specimen of a bondage novel that has
since spun off a line of sex toys with little Fifty Shades of Grey logo tags. (British comment threads are always informative. Why pay for trademarked logo pleasure balls when limes work just as well?)
So we have four books cited as examples of how grossly oversimplified, even glib, is our discourse as to Women, because they are all media-friendly sound bites.... who will save us....
Missing has been someone to show how absurd this all is.
Who is our savior?
Re-enter Camille Paglia, the “pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-art, pro-beauty,
pro-pop” sixties feminist and heavily published art and culture critic,
quiet for the past few years while writing her latest book due out on
October 16
Yes, re-enter Camille Paglia! PUNCHLINE LANDING.
Everything the PJs person quotes directly from Paglia is hilariously wrong.
But it gets, here, awesome:
PUNCHLINE LANDED.
Paglia’s book is about art — all of it, not just the stuff deemed art by
the coastal elites — but the range of issues she covered in that short Salon interview
alone can spawn discussions ranging from the fate of publishing to
protest voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the “formidable
and capable [homeschooling women driving the Tea Party] whom feminism
has foolishly ignored.” In fact, Paglia wrote this book for those
homeschooling moms.
Yeah!
Paglia wrote this book for those
homeschooling moms.
I shit you not.
MAS. This dingaling decides to violate Bill Watterson's copyrights in defense of the thesis that
Much of second- and third-wave Feminism clings either to the notion
that women can and want to be like men or that there is no feminine or
masculine nature. More broadly, much of modern liberalism relies on the
fallacy that humans are essentially good, only corrupted by society.
Paglia thinks this is nonsense on stilts. She believes that Nature
exists, that it “indiscriminately exerts its force” on us.
She is not of the Right, because she disagrees on how to handle our
dark nature — for example, Paglia would have society accept pornography
as a release valve while conservatives typically would have us strive
for self-control but both insist on confronting the darkness; to deny
it, as the Left does, is naive and dangerous.
“Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a
multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its
force.” This is the basis of her cultural criticism. She uses art as
evidence. With Paglia on the interview circuit, women’s debates — and
the rest of our cultural dialogues — should get more interesting again.
They might even become productive.
Nobody gives a shit about this pretend bullshit. BORED NOW.
