Tag: Camille Paglia

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Today’s College Students Worship Authority and That’s Destroying American Universities

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Q&A with Camille Paglia

Jim Epstein|May. 22, 2016 9:30 am

“This generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school, high school, and college to be subservient to authority,” Camille Paglia, the noted cultural critic, university professor, and Salon columnist, toldReason’s Nick Gillespie in a recent interview. “[It’s] everything my generation stood against.”

The conversation, which took place in late April at Reason Weekend 2016, also covered Beyonce’s Lemonade, Prince’s career, and why she Paglia prefers early Madonna.

https://reason.com/blog/2016/05/22/camille-paglia-authority-college

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Famous Feminist: While We’re ‘Navel-Gazing’ About Gender Identity, ‘ISIS Is Beheading People’

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James Barrett

In an interview with Spiked Online, radical feminist Camille Paglia unloaded both barrels on the Left’s “self-absoprtion” with gender identity, saying all the “hyper-self-consciousness about ‘Who am I? Where exactly am I on the gender spectrum?’ is mere navel-gazing, while in the Middle East, ISIS is beheading people.”

In the half-hour interview with Spiked’s Ella Whelan, the openly gay, contrarian feminist professor commented on several controversial issues, including the transgender debate, the so-called “campus rape culture,” and the censorship of honest discussions about what causes homosexuality. As usual, Paglia’s take on all of it probably won’t make her fellow feminists and LGBT activists happy.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/5243/famous-feminist-while-were-navel-gazing-about-james-barrett#.VyS-JmtlnJ8.facebook

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Revolutions are messy: I was wrong about Donald Trump: Camille Paglia on the GOP front-runner’s refreshing candor (and his impetuousness, too)

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Yes, he remains thin-skinned and easily riled. But his fearlessness and brash energy also seem necessary and rare

CAMILLE PAGLIA

I’m dying for an update from you on Donald Trump.  Last summer you called him “not a president” and a “carnival barker.” Do you still feel the same? If you loved Trump, would Salon even let you proclaim it? I mean, they’re kind of as liberal as they come, no?

Why can’t there be a party that is basically Republican, but minus the religion, minus the legislating of morality, and that cares about climate change/overpopulation? Could Trump be that guy?

Christie Cooley Randolph
Santa Rosa, CA

Well, Trump may still be a carnival barker, but he’s looking more and more like a president!  Along with most media pundits in the Northeast, I found it improbable if not impossible that Trump could survive his klutz-o-rama cascade of foot-in-mouth flubs, from carelessly categorizing Mexican immigrants as rapists to hallucinating about “thousands’ of Muslims cheering the fall of the twin towers from the mean streets of New Jersey.  Surely he would soon implode and pouf into fairy dust!

But only a few weeks after that interview of mine in Salon, I suddenly realized that Trump’s candidacy had a broad support that few had expected or discerned.  The agent of my revelation was a hilariously scathing, viral Web blog video posted by Diamond and Silk–Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, two African-American sisters and former Democrats in Fayetteville, North Carolina.  They were reacting with indignant outrage to the first GOP debate, broadcast by Fox News from Cleveland on August 6 and hosted by Megyn Kelly, whose loaded questions had impugned Trump as a sexist.

If Trump wins the White House, that no-holds-barred video will go down in history as “the shot heard round the world,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase for the first salvo of the American Revolution by rural insurgents at Concord.  The video signaled a popular uprising and furious pushback against the major media and political elites, who had controlled the national agenda and messaging for far too long.  Diamond and Silk threw zinger after zinger in defending Trump:  “Here’s the damn deal, Megyn Kelly—or Kelly Megyn, whatever your name is!…. Go back and report news onSesame Street!…You hit below the belt, Kelly!…He was the only one up there on that stage with any common sense!… He’s going to be the next president, whether you like it or not.  Get used to it, girl!  Get used to it!”

This fiery endorsement blew me away because it demonstrated how Trump was directly engaging with a diverse coalition in ways that the mainstream media had completely missed.  I felt, and still do, that Trump is far too impetuous and thin-skinned in his amusingly rambling, improvisational style.  The American president, who can spook markets or spark a war with a rash phrase, must be more coolly circumspect.  And aspirants to the presidency shouldn’t care what small fry like bobble-head TV hosts say or do.  A leader must have the long view and show an instinctive capacity to focus and prioritize.

Nevertheless, Trump’s fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air, sweeping the tedious clichés and constant guilt-tripping of political correctness out to sea.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose every word and policy statement on the campaign trail are spoon-fed to her by a giant paid staff and army of shadowy advisors, Trump is his own man, with a steely “damn the torpedoes” attitude.  He has a swaggering retro machismo that will give hives to the Steinem cabal.  He lives large, with the urban flash and bling of a Frank Sinatra.  But Trump is a workaholic who doesn’t drink and who has an interesting penchant for sophisticated, strong-willed European women.  As for a debasement of the presidency by Trump’s slanging matches about penis size, that sorry process was initiated by a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who chatted about his underwear on TV, let Hollywood pals jump up and down on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom, and played lewd cigar games with an intern in the White House offices.

https://www.salon.com/2016/03/10/i_was_wrong_about_donald_trump_camille_paglia_on_the_gop_front_runners_refreshing_candor_and_his_impetuousness_too/

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Camille Paglia: Hillary’s “blame-men-first” feminism may prove costly in 2016

Democratic presidential candidate U

Hillary lags among men, again. Is it misogyny, or her brand of feminism? The story too hot for the New York Times

CAMILLE PAGLIA

During her two presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton has consistently drawn greater support from women than men. Is this gender lag due to retrograde misogyny, or does Hillary project an uneasiness or ambivalence about men that complicates her appeal to a broader electorate?

As a career woman, Hillary is rooted in second-wave feminism, which began with Betty Friedan’s co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1967, while Hillary was in college. Friedan sought to draw men into the women’s movement and to ally with mainstream wives and mothers. But after a series of ideological struggles, she lost her leadership role and was eventually eclipsed in media attention by the more telegenic Gloria Steinem, who famously said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Hillary has unfortunately adopted the Steinem brand of blame-men-first feminism, which defines women as perpetual victims requiring government protections. Hillary’s sometimes impatient or patronizing tone about men, which can perhaps be traced to key aspects of her personal history, may prove costly to her current campaign.

https://www.salon.com/2016/01/27/camille_paglia_hillarys_blame_men_first_feminism_may_prove_costly_in_2016/

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Camille Paglia: How Bill Clinton is like Bill Cosby

Bill Clinton

TUESDAY, JUL 28, 2015 06:00 AM EDT

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

DAVID DALEY

Over the next two days, she’ll hold forth on the GOP presidential field in devastating ways, and offer surprising thoughts on how she thinks Clinton vs Sanders will end. We start today with thoughts on Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, campus political correctness and modern feminism.

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.  And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky–I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind.

https://www.salon.com/2015/07/28/camille_paglia_how_bill_clinton_is_like_bill_cosby/

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The Cultural Critic Discusses Sexuality, Race, Gender, Feminism, and Hillary Clinton

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The Cultural Critic Discusses Sexuality, Race, Gender, Feminism, and Hillary Clinton
Nick Gillespie & Todd Krainin|Mar. 22, 2015 8:30 am

Growing up as “a gender nonconforming entity” during Eisenhower’s America wasn’t easy for cultural critic and best-selling author Camille Paglia. Her adolescence in small-town, upstate New York was marked by rejection, rebellion, and cross-dressing—all in reaction to the stultifying social norms of the 1950s and early ’60s.

So what does Paglia think of contemporary culture, with its openness to a wide variety of ever-proliferating gender, racial, and sexual identities?

Not much.

“I do not feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life,” Paglia tells Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie. “This gender myopia, this gender monomania, has become a disease. It’s become a substitute for religion. It is impossible that the feminist agenda can ever be the total explanation of human life.”

Whether the subject is feminism or the fate of Western civilization, Paglia is no Pollyanna. In this wide-ranging discussion, she says higher education is going to hell, the Fourth Estate is an epic FAIL, millennials are myopic, contemporary criticism has croaked, and Hillary Clinton might singlehandedly destroy the universe. Even Madonna, once Paglia’s ideal of sex-positive feminism, seems to have lost her way.

Does the celebrated author of Sexual Personae and Break Blow Burn have any reason to get out of bed in the morning? Does she have any hope for the universe at all? Watch the video to find out.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/03/22/does-camille-paglia-have-any-hope-for-ou