Paglia: Transgender & Civilization’s Decline

Link to entire video

Camille Paglia discussion at last fall’s Battle Of Ideas festival in the UK, in which the lesbian scholar and provocateur identifies transgenderism as a mark of a civilization deep into decadence, nearing collapse.

Via Instapundit link

Madonna disses early defender Camille Paglia

"During [Madonna's] speech [at the Billboard Women in Music event] on Friday, the 58-year-old recalled wishing for a female peer at the start of career and specifically called out Camille, claiming that the famous writer said she 'set women back' by objectifying herself sexually. However, in 1990 it was Camille who hailed Madonna a 'true feminist'.

...Although Madonna claimed in her speech that Camille opposed her and her music, the writer argued that she was 'Madonna's first major defender, when she was still considered a pop tart and a sham puppet created by shadowy male producers.'

Camille went on to reference her 'ultra-controversial' 1990 New York Times op-ed, 'Finally, a Real Feminist', in which she celebrated Madonna for embracing sex, beauty and Hollywood glamour. 

'I was widely attacked for my finale, which was dismissed as preposterous but which in fact came true: "Madonna is the future of feminism".' 

Camille still cites Madonna as 'one of the most creative and influential women artists of the modern era', but she argued that the singer's 'artistic development has been stalled for 20 years' an she has become a 'prisoner of her own wealth and fame'. 

'It is truly tragic to see Madonna descend into embarrassing displays of maudlin self-pity and irrational accusations against others,' Camille added. 'She is turning into a horrifying combination of delusional, vampiric Norma Desmond and bitter Joan Crawford on the bottle.' 

In her speech, Madonna also spoke about ageism, explaining that for women, 'to age is a sin' and they will be criticized, but Camille stated that the singer's 'number one issue' on her path of self-destruction is her 'embarrassing inability to deal with aging'. 

Camille noted that while Madonna's role model, Marlene Dietrich, retained her class and style until her death, the singer is making a fool of herself 'with vulgar displays while trying to remain youthful. 

...Last May, Madonna wore a breast and buttock-baring Givenchy outfit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala, and while she said the controversial ensemble was a 'political statement' fighting ageism and the notion that women can't be sexy at a certain age, Camille firmly disagreed.  

'She has become a cringe-making pastiche of ratty blonde hair extensions and artificially swollen cheeks, obscuring the magnificent classic bone structure that made her one of the most photogenic celebrities of the 1990s,' Camille said.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4029528/Feminist-Camille-Paglia-hits-Madonna-s-claims-rebuffed-female-peers-start-career.html#ixzz4SpbY81UO

Paglia suspects Hillary goiter

"And what about that persistent cough? “Allergy season,” the hacking Hillary claimed on a New York radio show this week. (“You all right? Any mouth to mouth CPR?” joked a host.) I’m just a Ph.D., not an M.D., but I’ll put my Miss Marple hat on here. Am I the only one who noticed Hillary’s high-wrap collar, pallid, puffy face, and bulging eyes during her choleric New Hampshire primary concession speech in February? (Another unusually high collar followed the next morning.)

My tentative theory is that Hillary may have sporadic flare-ups of goiter, worsened under stress. Coughing is a symptom. High collars mask a swollen throat. In serious cases, an operation may be necessary. Is this chronic thyroid condition disqualifying in a presidential candidate? Certainly not in my view, but I don’t like being lied to—by candidates, campaign staffs, or their media sycophants."

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/21/enough_with_the_hillary_cult_her_admirers_ignore_reality_dream_of_worshipping_a_queen/

Camille Paglia talks...

Feminism, American education, Transgenderism, Censorship, Millennials, Lenna Dunham...

In our era of ‘You Can’t Say That!’, when conformism is preferred over controversy, daring thinkers are in short supply. Which is why Camille Paglia can be so refreshing. Never afraid to say what she thinks, even when it grates against the moral and political consensus, Paglia has carved out a role for herself as one of America’s most provocative thinkers.

Paglia

"‘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. I feel very sorry for women who have been seduced by this hyper-politicised, victim-centered rhetoric, because in clinging to such superficial, inflammatory phrases, they have renounced their own power and agency."

http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/feminist-trouble#.VoAFwNHSlpP

"Camille Paglia: How Bill Clinton is like Bill Cosby"

"In exclusive Salon interview, the cultural critic finds parallels between Cosby and Clinton, takes down modern p.c."

The banner on the Drudge Report this morning is that Kathleen Willey is starting a site to collect harassment claims against Bill Clinton. New York magazine, meanwhile, has the stories of 35 women who say they were raped or assaulted by Bill Cosby. I wonder if you see a connection between the two stories: Would Bill Clinton’s exploits be viewed more like Cosby’s if he was in the White House now, instead of in the 1990s?

Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.

But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas...

I was enraged! My publicly stated opinion at the time was that I don’t care what public figures do in their private life. It’s a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is, they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians have, while the Clinton episode was a disgrace.

You've Got Mail*

To: Camille Paglia
To: Camille Paglia
From: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
Re: Our college Days
CC: Bill Clintion, Ellen Degeneres, Oprah, NOW, Emily's List

Dear Cami,

I have been reading  your latest screed and I must say I am very disappointed. I see where you go after Bill again about that stupid tramp Monica. Get over it already. It is no big feminist issue.  I don't care if he used young girls to service him so I can concentrate on implanting my plans for world domination. Don't you remember all those times in college when we were in the steam room at Lucille Roberts talking about how we were going to topple the patriarchy and take over the world? I mean then you could put your finger on it. I mean you always put your finger on it.

Don't you remember the good times?

By the way I still have those pants. Huma wears them now. She loves to get into my pants.

Please be a dear and donate some of your vast riches to the Clinton foundation or at least use my Amazon portal to show your appreciation for my activities as a model for women. I think I deserve much more than obscure college professors who are drunk and disorderly even if they do write about you on their failing blogs.

Toodles,
Hillary.

_________________
*A guest post from Trooper York

Camille Paglia

Excuse me, Miss Paglia?

That's Pa(g)lia.

Did you order decaffeinated coffee, Miss Paglia?

Yes I did.

Oops.

Oops what? 

Oops there goes my tip.

This video produced by Reason is trending all over my timeline tonight. Nick Gillespie gives us a great interview sticking with Paglia all the way through never letting Paglia wander too far afield and never showing annoyance with her unnecessary urgency that leads directly to stuttering and disjointed associations along her very strange speech pattern that jams emphasis on key words by doubling the volume on one of the word's syllables, and her insane speed. I know a guy with this same cadence and pattern except he is even more annoying because whereas his form of avid conversation is to challenge your every sentence so that conversation advances slowly if at all, continuously redirected down desultory unhelpful avenues, by contrast Paglia's avid conversation is to expand the idea, explain and expatiate by using her own history, splashing it in overlapping daubs crammed in rapid sequence.

To me Paglia is most interesting when talking about history and art history. Her perspective is interesting, in discussing what has become of academic humanities, she answers that canon is not determined by art critics sitting there analyzing art, the canon is determined by other artists. The canon is identified by who influenced the most artists over time. She draws an organization hierarchy chart in the air as she continues, "this is the story of art history, that I believe in, that has been discarded."

I like that.

I cannot find it now, one of the Twitter threads, commenters take issue with Paglia singling out Dianne Feinstein as the type of female leader who fits Paglia's model of female leader that Paglia had been waiting for decades. She is the only one. Some viewers stopped at that point because nothing that follows can balance that inanity and make the trouble of watching further worth the pain. Paglia is looking for character traits that she sees in Feinstein, strength, understanding, compassion. They run an early film clip of a young Feinstein responding to the San Francisco murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by another City Supervisor Dan White and you can see by the film how this demeanor by a woman right there in the next office at the time of the murder, at the time so grabbed  Paglia's interest. Paglia is making a comparative analysis of quality female leaders who confirm to Paglia's preconceived template, over time, then explaining how she got from where she was then, but because of recent events and because of how Feinstein exited so damagingly and with such partisan impetus and with bogus government report constructing, viewers were unable and unwilling to follow.

'It's a Man's World and It Always Will Be'

Writes Camille Paglia in a remarkable essay in Time Magazine.  It isn't remarkable the Paglia wrote write this essay - she is a sometime contrarian on feminist issues - but remarkable that Time would publish it on Time's venerable and progressive pages.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Most men have been required to sit through indoctrination by "ideologue professors", trainers, officers, corporate human resources drones and others who have made dispensing feminist anger into a life's work. 

Paglia continues...

In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

And then Paglia makes her key point, the one that will likely enrage some feminists:

 Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due! 

Strong writing, coming from a university professor, social critic and self-described dissident feminist.  What Paglia wrote needed to be said; let's hope others of her status have the clarity of thinking to agree, and build on the theme Paglia started in her essay.

Full essay linked here.  A very worthwhile read.