CAMILLE PAGLIA, in this piece in Time magazine, once again combines trenchant attacks of feminist ideologues with her trademark cheerleading of feminism. After criticizing the demonization of men and explaining how feminism leads to female unhappiness, all very good, Paglia writes:

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some, such as Hanna Rosin in her book, “The End of Men,” about women’s gains seems startlingly premature, such as when Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

“Ossified social practices.” The traditional work of women was so much drudgery. How can someone be so clueless as to what women do?

But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men.

Perhaps, but it is not possible to direct women’s lives toward competition and achievement without constantly promoting competitiveness and ambition in women because without the constant promotion of competitiveness and ambition, women will naturally prefer what they have always preferred, which is home and hearth. And when a culture relentlessly promotes ambition in women, it must perforce denigrate ambition in men. Men and women are different. Society cannot simultaneously nurture high achievement in both.

Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

This is news. I didn’t know there were “labor-saving devices” that bear and rear children or devices that prepare dinner. Yes, the washing machine cleans clothes, but someone has to put the clothes in the washing machine. No, what labor-saving devices really did was free people from the need for servants, but they did not free them of the need for time-consuming care and maintenance.

This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse.

Paglia, who also extolls pornography as a realm of exhilarating freedom and maintains that, unlike their American and British counterparts, women in Europe have managed to combine sexual allure and newfound power, does not mention what is causing this particular civilization to fall, and that is the abandonment by women of their traditional role of bearing human beings and protecting morals, customs and civilized habits.

— Comments —

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I first encountered Camille Paglia’s commentary when she was a regular columnist at Salon.  So, the usual throat-clearing compliment to Ms. Paglia: Sexual Personae was an impressive, erudite work, all its lunatic Freudianism notwithstanding.  Like everyone else, I appreciate her gifts as a writer, but like you, I find her contradictions too much to tolerate any longer.  Anyway, she’s been on the same shtick for over a decade now, and there’s not much else for her to say.  Her problem can be boiled down to its essence pretty easily, which is this:

She acknowledges basic human realities of sexual difference, and she sincerely revels in the fact that masculinity and femininity are different, complementary spiritual realities.  She likes men, and she likes women, and she likes that they are fundamentally, ineradicably different.  But she nonetheless clings to the idea that society should be organized not around truths about humanity, but around a demonic understanding of Man and his individual desires as the universal summum bonum.  Politically, she describes herself as an old-school Progressive, and openly advocates for a system of human relations that denies or suppresses the very human realities that she elsewhere celebrates.  She believes that human beings can exist harmoniously in a society in which the individual will has been liberated.  Like most any run of the mill feminist, she speaks of the “drudgery” of pre-feminist life for women, pretending that the life of men during those times was composed of nothing but self-actualization and adventure, punctuated by gratified leisure.  She acknowledges that the general absence of female “genius” in the arts and sciences is not an artifact of male oppression, but a consequence of a different essential female nature; but she at the same time advocates a political order that assumes precisely the opposite.

In short, she rejects the ancient Platonic view that a just society is one that conforms and gives fidelity to Truth and to transcendent reality.  She sees much that is real and true, and nonetheless insists that Man should organize his affairs at direct variance with that truth.  Hers is a Satanically willful rejection of God’s order.  This is why it is useless to cherry-pick the good statements that she makes about feminism and the sexes.  Her prescriptions are delusional to the extent that she believes they can be made to work without inflicting misery on humanity (e.g., her belief in a Progressive “reform” movement that somehow does not denigrate the thing it seeks to abolish), and they are at odds with much that she knows to be true.

My patience expired with such selectively celebratory exercises years ago.  For the same reasons that I no longer suffer to try extracting the “good parts” from some obviously profane and degraded work of Hollywood bilge, I no longer try to rescue the flotsam of “truth” from the total package of lies that is the work of feminists like Camille Paglia. Others, such as Father Z., still think it worthwhile, but in time I hope they will come to see they are wasting their time.

Laura writes:

You’ve summed up her Nietzschean quality and contradictions very well. “Her belief in a Progressive “reform” movement that somehow does not denigrate the thing it seeks to abolish” — yes, that’s it.

One of the truly great things about Lawrence Auster was that he saw through people like Paglia right away. Last January, he wrote a VFR entry titled “Paglia the Nihilist:”

In a recent article, Camille Paglia (pronounced PAHL-ya) criticizes Taylor Swift and Katy Perry as too “white bread” and lauds the decadent black-Hispanic eroticism of Rihanna and Beyoncé. On this basis, Mark Richardson observes—though he says he’s not sure because he hasn’t read her earlier work—that Paglia has revealed herself as a vitalist nihilist, meaning that she doesn’t believe in the good but just in excitement. But of course Paglia is a vitalist nihilist who doesn’t believe in the good but just in excitement. That’s been true of her from the start. I wrote her a letter (a real letter) twenty years ago saying pretty much the same, based on my reading of the first chapter and other sections of Sexual Personae. I don’t know that I used the phrase “vitalist nihilism” in that letter, since I’m not sure that I had yet read Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose’s Nihilism in which he coined the concept. But I do remember that I told her that she lacked the Aristotelian idea of the good, in which man attains happiness by fulfilling what is best in his nature. At the time I thought that she would dismiss me as a hopeless square for saying that.

More than 20 years ago, he understood Paglia, when other “conservatives” were gaga about her.

Diana writes:

I don’t have much to add to your and Sage McLaughlin’s brilliant exposure of Paglia’s intellectual and moral deficits except a personal comment.

I began to turn off to Paglia right after Sexual Personae (SP) was published.

In the blizzard of publicity that followed SP’s publication,  Paglia openly extolled porn and bragged constantly of her close relationships with homosexual men, whom she consistently lauded as cultural pioneers. I turned off to her. I am aghast that conservatives like her, but I get the feeling that the thrill is gone.

She was also a big champion of the so-called punk scene. I remember them well: a bunch of junkies, now mostly dead of either OD’s or AIDs.

Talk about nihilism. Mr. Auster called it well.

Laura writes:

One of the problems she has with feminists is that they don’t embrace porn. In this essay, she writes:

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.

It’s her reverence for those “rude but exhilarating force of primitive nature” that makes her a vitalist nihilist.

 Alan Roebuck writes:

Ah, Miss Paglia. I once had a brief fling with her, when I was just beginning to recover from liberalism. But it was very brief, more brief even than my fling with Miss Rand.

She’s like a classical liberal on steroids: she loves and wants the good, even as she approves of the undermining of it. I was attracted to her because at least she appreciates beauty, order and some goodness. And boy, does she sure appreciate the things she appreciates! When you’re surrounded by liberalism, even Miss Paglia can sound like a breath of fresh air.

But the problem with these liberals is that they love the effect while they oppose the cause. They love truth, goodness, beauty and order, but they oppose its Divine cause. And then, like Miss Paglia, they wonder why the things they love are dying.

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