All you students of the modern culture and soft or hard science should have Camille on your radar.
She doesn’t pull punches and is erudite to an extreme degree in anthropological/cultural studies of modern society.
By my reckoning Camille is an important contributor to our discussion of what the hell has happened to us as a society–what’s happening to our kids.
Here is a self declared Lesbian that still makes sense, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal article linked below.
And if you JunkScience.com purists say–this isn’t science, consider that social sciences are actually one of our worst areas of junk science or cargo cult science, with all kinds of nonsense and posturing, biases and charlatanism.
Culture/social/psych/gender studies deserve our attention and they do have an impact on some areas of the harder sciences.
Ms. Paglia sticks it to the modern elitist canon of sensibilities.
To try to get you to check this interview from the WSJ, just a few teasers. Whach u got tu luz?
Paglia once Wrote ” If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Yet she is a strident feminist. It’s just that she sees the importance of the male and female and vive la difference.
What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia. This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that’s just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.
But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.
She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.” . . .
The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes. . . .
Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. “Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys,”
And one more tasty morsel, among the many in this interview.
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.”
In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women’s issue.
By denying the role of nature in women’s lives, she argues, leading feminists created a “denatured, antiseptic” movement that “protected their bourgeois lifestyle” and falsely promised that women could “have it all.” And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920
2 points scored, GHOST, a list of the greats, and the point that Ellen de G is an example of a non angry, non resentful lesbian. sho nuff.
And I think you won the match in regards to the question of excessive generalization without specification.
Camille is my exhibit one because she is exceptional and she proves your point that not all lesbians are unreasonable and angry, with some added pluses for Camille’s assertions on culture, insights and assertions that go my direction.
Camille is an independent thinker and I meant to portray her as a dramatic contrast to the group of severe ideologues I was thinking about.
I don’t hold any animus with regards to people’s personal choices, but I do hold the line on recruitment and culture war that intends to take down our assets as a civilization. I like in particular Camille’s respect for family, military service, and the value of both sexes, along with her rejection of things that destroy the civ.
Your points are good ones.
You asked before what a tautology is. Defining the word lesbian by a specific type of behavior and then saying all lesbians exhibit that behavior is a tautological argument.
In closing, Hurray for Camille Paglia. No one here is saying she isn’t great. If you get bored in the future, here’s a list of famous lesbians.
http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/famouslesbians/tp/FamousLesbians.01.htm
If you feel the vast majority of them are “one dimensional and obnoxiously irrational” then I have no further argument. I for one have never known Ellen DeGeneres to be hateful or one dimensional even when I disagreed with a specific political view point.
Thanks for your criticism. I have no intention of misleading anyone. I applauded Camille Paglia for her persona and here efforts. I think Paglia articulates my criticisms too. Your concern about an echo chamber is a good one. I thank you for your interest and your criticisms are understood. I cannot ignore what I see, and what I see and I hope my comments don’t create an echo chamber.
Public Lesbians are angry resentful extreme people who harp on a grievance theme and can’t hold a candle to Camille Paglia in their assessment of public policy and cultural issues.
If you have some sensible lesbian friends, congrats, so do I. They aren’t sticking their thumb in my eye all the time like the public noisy lesbians. They live normal tolerant lives.
Plenty of lesbians who are just leave me alone about things, but the noisy public lesbians are one dimensional and obnoxiously irrational.
You know that you are wrong. Otherwise, you would have addressed my criticism directly rather than hand-wave the majority of lesbians for not being famous and then descend into a seemingly hate-fueled diatribe about a few famous lesbians for having “lots of resentment and rage”. You then change the subject back to fawning over your supposed exception that proves the rule rather than concede that perhaps an exception means your rule is inaccurate. In doing so, you ignore the fact that I never said anything bad about the person you are defending. This bait-and-switch style of debate is a common trope among the very junk scientists you claim to be against.
I assume you wouldn’t judge heterosexual, middle-aged, males by the image the legacy media decides to show you. I’m sure you know that the majority of women don’t adhere to the views espoused by NOW. Why choose to use a label that refers only to sexuality when what you want to address is the political posturing of a vocal few? Of all the junk science foisted upon the uninformed public throughout history, the supposed science put forth to support prejudice is the most damaging and distasteful. I’m sure you wouldn’t fall for their lies. Why use their language?
Whatever issue it is you wish to address, name the people who espouse them, call their beliefs by the appropriate technical terms, and rationally explain why it is your beliefs are superior. That is what I meant by keeping the discussion scientific. Otherwise, you risk turning this once great website into nothing more than an echo chamber where an ever-decreasing number of like-minded people can pat each other on the back and feel good about how smart you all are without the risk of actually having your intellect challenged by alternate viewpoints.
If your goal here is to change the minds of a misinformed public, you cannot succeed by first offending your audience. This is not an issue of political correctness; this is a basic tenant of intelligent debate. In the same way that one “ah shoot” erases a thousand “attaboys”, one unfounded accusation will erase a thousand well-researched facts from the minds of your readers. What’s worse is that you will damage not only your own reputation, but that of reasoned skepticism in general.
For purposes of writing about lesbians, I am talking about “public” lesbians and lesbians whom one could describe as advocates–they are one trick ponies, always pounding on the lesbian drum and working the lesbian canon, lots of resentment and rage. They adhere to a party line. Paglia veers away from the party line or the cant by instinct and attitude. She has some energy and anger, but tempers it with good analysis and rationality. I have been watching her for a long time–she is priceless. She is a year younger than me, but a hundred years older by means of solid thinking and eloquent talent.
There are lesbians in the private life who aren’t wearing their sexual proclivities on their sleeves, and they are the ones you could name–for sure, but the public LESBIANS are monochrome and not nearly as competent and thoughtful or eloquent and bold in their thinking as Paglia–think about the story she told in the interview about sitting down to dinner with the Bennington feminist studies faculty–those women were and are emblematic of why I can say with confidence, Paglia is special, there certainly may be other lesbians just like her, but I am still waiting for you to name any official lesbians, not incidental lesbians who don’t talk about it, as sensible when talking about domestic and family dynamics, pedagogy, male/female dynamics.
Paglia is candid and insightful and not a predictable lesbian with a monochromatic angry grievance narrative mindset. And I get the impression she is incapable of hate, or envy, or resentment–she just plain loves being what she is, a voice for common sense and doing the right thing. No slave to political intellectual posturing.
I could name several, but you wouldn’t know them. They are personal acquaintances. Rail about the loose definition of the term “science” all you want, blatant prejudice still won’t count.
Bad scientific practice is endemic in many aspects of society. That was purportedly a large motivating factor for the creation of this website. Rationally pointing out the failings of methodology or interpretation in those disciplines you mentioned is how this website built its reputation. Every time you use that reputation to promote your personal opinions and prejudices you chip away at the integrity the site used to enjoy.
Tell me that your statement indicating the majority of lesbians are not “candid and insightful” or capable of “erudition and rationality/lucidity on cultural issues” is based on sound evidence with sources cited, and I’ll gladly rescind my criticism. Otherwise it would seem that you are taking your personal experience with a small minority of lesbians and using that limited data set to make a blanket judgment of the remaining majority. What word would you use to describe that process if you spotted it in a research paper you were critiquing?
Most “self declared” noisy lesbians don’t make sense because they are into pushing their grievance political agendas kind of like a variation on crit theory. They have a very narrow prism.
I’ll make that generalization and stand by it–Paglia is uniquely candid and insightful. Name one “self declared” Lesbian that comes close to her erudition and rationality/lucidity on cultural issues.
If you think social sciences are not sciences, you are probably right, but the practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology certainly claim to be scientists with a scientific methodology that they can trot out and expound on.
I would even say that philosophers might claim to be scienctist, and by a stretch, they are at least inquiring minds that posit hypotheses.
Here’s a good one–what are economics and political science? Are they science? If somebody comes up with a whopper of a stupid political or economic proposal would that be junk science?
Methods of inquiry and analysis create disciplines, but are they science? Is it scientific to engage in this inquiry?
“Here is a self declared Lesbian that still makes sense”? Is this meant to insinuate that Lesbians in general don’t “make sense”, or is it just the ones that “self declare”? I do wish you’d make more of an effort to keep this website science based.
I had to quit, I couldn’t stand the crap that was a part of the politically correct leftist view of America.
Howard Zinn, jackass commie, is the author of a history of america that is this way.
he is dead but if he was alive I would wish him suffering and agony in his pathetic life.
Feminism is dead. Someone should arrange an appropriate funeral ceremony.
I thank you for your contribution.
Spengler, among others, had it right–and suicide it is.
In human medicine there are those that say that suicide is the product of anger.
In the case of societal suicide anger, resentment, envy energize the negative vibes.
Aristotle talks about it in his writings on Politics, commenting that the most important job of a political leader is to quell or contain envy in the citizens.
Marxism/collectivism/scientific socialism are built around the illusion of utopian egalitarianism that will eliminate differences that lead to resentment and envy–but they always end up with the same problem, inequality derivative of effort and talent.
The suicideal nature of utopian egalitarianism is, in my book, built on stoking envy and resentment, both very negative mental states–that lead to self destructive and suicidal actions. True believers are self conscious and joined to neutralize their feelings of failure and inadequacy. Men with no chest, as CS Lewis laments.
Arm wrestled with her almost 20 years ago. She’s definitely a piece of work.
Pagila, a high-priestess of the Politically Correct Progressive cult, is on the right track in her observations of the PC-Prog destruction of Normal-American culture.
For the explanation of the origins and goals of PC-Prog anti-Normal-American beliefs, see this 13 minute brainshark video:
http://my.brainshark.com/Willing-Accomplices-Why-do-Progressives-Hate-America-121281394
We can sit around and moan about the current state of our opponents’ destruction of our culture, and their control of the cultural transmission belts, or we can study how they achieved their goals. Only then can we understand our opponents, their beliefs, and their objectives. The knowledge and insight in this video is like having the playbook of your opponents in the Super Bowl.
You’ll hear Paglia’s “suicidal” observation echoed in this video analysis. We are committing “cultural suicide.” The question is why?
Thanks for your note. I take it you had a chance to arm wrestle with her, or were you just in the bar watching–she is a piece of work.
Camille has always been fascinating and a fun person to interview. It’s about time her writings/perspective are revived – there’s a whole new generation to speak to since her famous days in the 1990s. Thanks for this.