"What is most disgusting about current political correctness on campus is that its proponents have managed to convince their students and the media that they are authentic Sixties radicals. The idea is preposterous. Political correctness, with its fascist speech codes and puritanical sexual regulations, is a travesty of Sixties progressive values."(Vamps & Tramps p, 118)
"My message to the media is: Wake up! The silencing of authentic debate among feminists just helps the rise of the far right. When the media get locked in their Northeastern ghetto and become slaves of the feminist establishment and fanatical special interests, the American audience ends up looking to conservative voices for common sense. As a libertarian Democrat, I protest against this self-defeating tyranny of political correctness. (Vamps and Tramps, p. 431)
"White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have been sheltered, coddled, and flattered. Having taught at a wide variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from financially struggling families and who must take a patchwork of menial off-campus jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and have fewer illusions about sex. It is affluent, upper-middle class students who most spout the party line - as if the grisly hyperemotionalism of feminist jargon satisfies their hunger for meaningful experience outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one. (Vamps & Tramps, p. 28)
"Feminist confidence that the whole human race can be "reeducated" to totally eliminate the possibility of rape is pure folly...Wave after wave of boys hit puberty every year. Do feminists, with their multicultural pretensions, really envision a massive export of white bourgeois good manners all around the world? Speak of imperialism!"(Vamps & Tramps, p. 33.)
"It is tremendously difficult to convince feminist professional women of the existence of unconscious or subliminal erotic communication. As my friend Bruce Benderson says, their middle class world has "no subtext."...That men can satisfy their desires on an inert or unconscious object seems intolerable to such women, though it is a fact of life, palatable or not. Male sexual functioning does not depend on female response. And the illicit is always highly charged. (Vamps & Tramps, p.37)
"A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact-as I know full well, from my own mortifying lesbian experience- men are tormented by women's flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women's merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women. Women literally size up men- "What can you show me?"- in bed and out. If middle class feminists think they conduct their love lives perfectly rationally, without any instinctual influences from biology, they are imbeciles. (Vamps & Tramps, p. 35)
"This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?...So, I'm this very powerful weapon, okay, being used not by the right against the left but rather by people who are liberal thinkers who have been enslaved by these poseurs, these racketeers, people who are pretending to be liberal but who are in fact just naive politically. I have been congratulated by women--people rush up to me at the end of my lectures--women of my age, women who are younger, who are so sick of being bullied by these sanctimonious puritans who call themselves feminists. I'm a feminist, but I am liberating current feminism from these false feminists who have a death grip on it right now, who are antiporn and so on. I'm bringing, like Madonna, a sense of beauty and pleasure and sensuality back into feminism. Because, you know, feminism's main problem for the last twenty years has been that it is incapable of appreciating art, okay? There is no aesthetics in feminism. All there is, is a social agenda. Art is made a servant to a prefab social agenda. So what I'm doing is allowing feminism to take aesthetics into it, and also psychology.(Vamps & Tramps p. 246-247)
"(Andrea) Dworkin's blanket condemnation of fellatio as disgusting and violent should make every man furious. (Catharine) MacKinnon and Dworkin are victim-mongers, ambulance chasers, atrocity addicts. MacKinnon begins every argument from big, flawed premises such as "male supremacy" or "misogyny," while Dworkin spouts glib Auschwitz metaphors at the drop of a bra. Here's one of their typical maxims:"The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence." Anyone who could write such a sentence knows nothing about pornography or Nazism....In arguing that a hypothetical physical safety on the streets should take precedence over the democratic principle of free speech, MacKinnon aligns herself with the authoritarian Soviet comissars. She would lobotomize the village in order to save it."
"Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition subordination of women...Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer....What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree where growth and harvest are simultaneous." (Vamps & Tramps, p. 66)
"The gay activist establishment has been stupid and narrow in the way it has conducted its civil rights campaign...Shrilly self-interested and doctrinaire, gay activism is completely lacking in philosophical perspective. Its sorrow became the only sorrow, its disease the only disease." (Vamps & Tramps p.70)
"It is woman's destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean them, or stereotype them as opressors. ...It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal." (Vamps & Tramps, p. 79-80)
"Rape is an act of desperation, a confession of envy and exclusion. All men- even, I have written, Jesus himself- began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes....Women have it. Men want it. What is it? The secret of life..."(Vamps & Tramps p. 32)
"Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with it's bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses. "(Vamps & Tramps, p. 110-110)
(Vamps & Tramps is a collection of different essays and treats various different subjects. These quotes were selected because of their focus on P.C.)
Now there's a look at Dr. Paglia's Sexual Personae.
Who is this 'Camille Paglia'?
Meet the mentors of the P.C.ers: The Deconstructionists.
Some theorists want to eliminate the concept 'boy' and 'girl', claiming that these are part of the power structure's attempt to oppress certain people. They suggest that there is a heirarchic caste system that is perpetuated by language, that facilitates the oppression of women, and that the ideal human state is androgynous.
Language does influence attitudes, and it also evolves over time. Being multi-lingual is best. Inflexibility is unhealthy. Humorless, ham-handed attempts to sanitize men by imposing Orwellian 'Newspeak' are doomed to failure. Bigotry is not ended, it is forced into the closet.
The tension between the genders is essential to our survival as a species. Perhaps in some futuristic sci-fi (Philip K. Dick perhaps?) totalitarian feminist society men would pee sitting down and be unable to screw without viagra, and the women would all take steroids and lift weights. Through the use of the right drugs, nature could be totally subverted. But why bother?
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Subject:
Paglia
Date:
Wed, 01 Jan 1997 14:49:09 -0800
From:
Phoenix Willow
To:
randl@dimensional.com
Camille Paglia says it best-- NOT!
I like it that she points out the fact that sex is a different experience for men than it is for women; people unable to see this are perfect examples of it- locked in their sexuality and unable to imagine any other. Notions of homogenizing the genders and eliminating 'le difference' are horrifying philosophical monstrosities.
Okay, okay, she has some valid points. But she's way off base in a lot of areas. For example:
"Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer....What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree where growth and harvest are simultaneous." (Vamps & Tramps, p. 66)
"Pagan paradise garden?!!!" I wish! What pornography is she talking about? The pornography I'm familiar with is dull, unimaginative, and full of strangely reconfigured breasts. Instead of glorifying an inane industry, why not talk about what what pornography COULD be. (Read some of the sexual poetry in the ancient liturgies of Inanna and Damuzzi--now that's good pornography!) If "Debbie Does Dallas" is Paglia's idea of "the deepest truth about sexuality" I feel sorry for her.
Pornography is all that it needs to be for some people, who could care less about plot subtlety or atmosphere. It serves its purpose. It is correct to celebrate this and not to condemn it as PC does in its myopic denial. Pornography IS the deepest truth about some people's sexuality, and that's just fine. To many people, many men for example, sex is a body function, and female constructions of romance around it are cloying, infantile, and a turn-off. PC finds it easy to condemn men for this, and I love Paglia because she affirms it, points out that it is the way it is, inevitable, and natural. Pornography is NOT violence, and all sex is NOT rape, as some dysfunctional PCers would have us believe. What about women who make $1500 a night teasing men in 'titty bars'- is that any more or less ethical than making a porno movie? Are they the victims? Or are the poor drooling fools throwing away their paychecks? (because their wives are too prissy to have fun...)
And while I realize that she purposefully sets out to offend, I can't help but react when she equates the elimination of rape with the imposition of "white bourgeois good manners." Rape is NOT just bad manners--it is a form of violent assault. (Take it from one who knows.)
I agree totally. Paglia (or me) is not 'pro-rape' as wags have called her, she merely points out that rape is a fact (and a violent, despicable act) and that women as well as men are responsible for combating it. I (and women friends of mine who have kids, men, and careers) find that Paglia is empowering to women; she points out that women HAVE POWER already, and that legislation and 'poor me' attitudes are counter-productive.
Just wondering, are you really going along with what she says here? Or are you (Paglia-like) trying to stir up controversy?
Yes, and Yes.
I do agree with what Paglia says, and I also like to
stir things up. PC is an atrocity; feminist 'holier than thou' condemnation
of maleness is a joke- I have many men friends who are baffled by women who
'know all the answers' and target them in their most vulnerable spot to prove
their (often ridiculous) points. Male opression and violence to women is a disgusting,
cowardly outrage, and the feminist retaliation is inevitable and refreshing;
we shouldn't trade liberation for anything- but it would be nice to avoid making
the same mistakes in the opposite direction, as ardent PC appears to do.
Thanks Again
Here's Another:
Subject:
Pagila Rules!
Date:
Sat, 04 Jan 1997 22:27:45 -0700
From:
DEK
To:
randl@dimensional.com
I totally agree with what Paglia's saying! As a woman, I'm tired of
these so-called feminists, trying to sexually castrate society! Sex,
sexual expression, sexual feelings should be part of feminism! A woman
who expresses herself sexually should be praised! Not scorned!
PC does NOT end bigotry, sexism, or patriarchal attitudes, it only forces them into
the closet; an ironic fact, in the face of all the decloseting going on everywhere
in other directions....
"Absence of war?" Read: Violence against Women in Russia and P.C.
If you like Camille Paglia, you'll also like Irma Kurtz