Agree or disagree with the good doctor, Prof Paglia is one fearless lady with a depth and breadth of integrity matched by few. Excerpts from an interview:
Identifying yourself as a “dissident feminist,” you often seem more at home with classical Greek and Roman paganism than with postmodern academia. How has this reality affected your public and professional relationships?
I feel lucky to have taught primarily at art schools, where the faculty are active practitioners of the arts and crafts. I have very little contact with American academics, who are pitifully trapped in a sterile career system that has become paralyzed by political correctness. University faculties nationwide have lost power to an ever-expanding bureaucracy of administrators, whose primary concern is the institution’s contractual relationship with tuition-paying parents. You can cut the demoralized faculty atmosphere with a knife when you step foot on any elite campus. With a few stellar exceptions, the only substantive discourse that I ever have these days is with academics, intellectuals, and journalists abroad.
In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?
After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women’s advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students’ social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today’s young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system “street-smart feminism”: there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility. […]
In your view as a classicist, what can the ancient Romans and Greeks teach us as human beings?
Following my culture-hero, Oscar Wilde, I do not subscribe to the implicitly moralistic assumption that literature or art “teaches” us anything. It simply opens up our vision to a larger world—or allows us to see that world through a different lens. Greco-Roman culture, which is fast receding in American higher education, is one of the two foundational traditions of Western civilization, the other being the Judeo-Christian. These traditions twined about and influenced each other for centuries and produced the titanic complexity of the West, for good and ill. To ignore or minimize the Greco-Roman past is to put intellectual blinders on—but that is exactly what has been happening as colleges are gradually abandoning the big, chronological, two-semester freshman survey courses that once heavily emphasized classical antiquity. The trajectory is toward “presentism,” a myopic concentration on society since the Renaissance—a noble, humanistic term, by the way, that is being ruthlessly discarded for the blobby new Marxist entity, “Early Modern.”
Holy Mary, Mother of God … if we could only clone her throughout our university system …
Please read the whole thing.
In the wayback, when I was receiving what I now refer to a “classic” education in Literature, I had an atheist professor tell a fellow grad student who was criticizing Christianity and the Bible with great vitriol, that there were two things every liberal arts student needed to know: Classical Mythology and the Bible, preferably the King James version. He said in no uncertain terms, that the refusal to learn and understand those meant that the student did not belong pursuing a career in Literature or any of the liberal arts and humanities for that matter.
Can you imagine a professor telling a grad student that these days? S/he be drummed out of the academy like Chuck Connors in the intro to Branded.
[…] Protein Wisdom: The indomitable Camille Paglia [Darleen Click] […]
Best way to do that would be to eliminate the practice of student housing – make them live in the community, with the community.
And if that means that students spend a few years in the real world before going to college, so much the better…
Drummed right out of the corpse, ahyep.
Paglia is also pro-pornography, so maybe not clone her so much as her moxie.
Methinks I spy an implicit moralistic assumption.
OT question: Rush has been going on about a government ban on .223/5.56mm, but I haven’t really been able to pay attention. Is this about the M855/SS109/green tip/ steel core penetrator ammo ban that newrouter et. al. linked to, or is something more going on?
Trying to decide if I need to make some adjustment to the commodities portion of my investment portfolio.
I heard something too, I think Levin. Someone had a story/theory on a one two punch. Lead ammo banned for environmental reasons by EPA and steel ammo banned for being “armor piercing”. IDK how accurate.
Ah. Glenn Reynold’s finally posted a link to the article in question.
Depending on who they choose to define “armor” (e.g. kevlar body “armor”) every rifle bullet is armor piercing.
Yes, I think that is the theory (forget the lead angle for now). Right now it is just the 5.56 but, eventually it could include all rifle rounds. Also depends on what you define as a “pistol”. An AR pistol looks like a bullpup rifle to me.
Right now I would not panic since I know all 5.56 rifles can fire .223, however, president Obama etc. . .
I’m not panicked. I’m pissed off that I didn’t get a chance to buy in at the bottom of a new bullmarket.
And they say Democrats hate the investor class. Hah!
porn is one of the most truly american art forms if you don’t count jazz or cheese curds
all I have is .223 but, I doubt I would sell any 5.56 if I had it.
porn is one of the most truly american art forms
whaaaaaaat?
Nobody tell the Yellow Menace about the Venus of Willendorf…